Rob

I mostly liked this. It was a bit of a slow start, and the writing is fine but not great, but it's got a really solid conceit at the center of it. Nicely self-contained — there's a clear thread leading to the next book, but you don't feel that the story in this one is unfinished.

More than the sum of its parts, but although I enjoyed it, I could not say why it enjoys the sterling reputation it does in the literary world.

Probably the best of the trade paperbacks so far.

Fun, although I saw the reveal coming from pretty far away. If you liked volume 1 this should be up your alley.

Issue #10 seems to get all the love, but as someone who mostly doesn't give a shit about old school superhero comics, it did basically nothing for me. It isn't bad or anything, but it gets a lot of praise that frankly I don't think it deserves. Top marks in this volume for issue #8 from me instead.

Still on this comics kick. This is a Warren Ellis joint, which puts it in the company of Transmetropolitan and The Authority.

Let me put this upfront: I liked this one a lot. I'm going to continue the series.

I think Planetary is a bit tricky to define, at least so far. Is it a superhero series? It's hard to say, although I've heard it described as a modern update of one. It isn't your customary superheroes-in-spandex-fight-crime deal. It isn't a black-and-white, 1950s good-versus-evil series either. The primary character – so far, anyway – seems to be basically an all right guy, but he isn't very friendly or charismatic, and neither are his colleagues. They all definitely have extrahuman abilities and are larger than life.

That primary character is Elijah Snow, who can do some temperature-related things as far as I've seen – that's one thing about at least this volume, there isn't actually all that much superpowering through things. His colleagues are Jakita Wagner, who does I don't know what apart from packing a punch and being very hard to hurt, and a guy known as “The Drummer,” who has some kind of weird electrical... thing going on. I don't know exactly what his deal is but it does seem to be percussion-based. All three are members of an organization called Planetary, who do a sort of clandestine traveling around the world keeping the stuff on the borders of human awareness on the right side of those borders. Motivations are as yet unclear, other than getting paid a bunch of money.

Speaking of Jakita, one gripe, and I know this is kind of a cliché complaint at this point. Elijah Snow typically wears all white: suit, shirt, tie, hair, you get the idea. The Drummer wears casualwear of some description. Jakita wears... close-fitting vinyl. The book doesn't generally feel like T&A, but come on, guys. You're continuing to perpetuate the reputation of the genre and of the community.

Issue #3 was my favorite section writing-wise. A lot of this volume is monster-of-the-week type stuff, but you can see the foundations for bigger stories being laid.

Reading others' reviews, it's clear that a lot of what's going on in Planetary is an examination of the history and tropes of past comics. For someone like me, with only a passing familiarity with the medium, the experience will necessarily be different than for a long-time comics reader who's better equipped to know what themes and references Ellis is playing on.

Once I stopped making the mistake of trying to read it right before going to sleep, I tore through this entire book in one day. Definitely deserving of the praise. Its unique structure works very well, and its take on magic is well-done if not completely novel.

I'm sorry to say I wasn't very impressed by this.

It had such an interesting premise: an island, subject to its own unique brand of natural disaster, the Discharge Clouds that have a strange and inexplicable effect on the residents. Harkaway uses it for a great setup, an island doomed by international consent and useful, therefore, as cover for skulduggery on a grand scale.

Unfortunately, he doesn't do much of interest with it beyond the setup. The writing is lacking, and he damages one of his major characters by trying too hard. The kid talks like a caricature if the Internet: zomg. Full of win. And so on.

I loved Gone-Away World; I'm sorry to say this isn't up to that standard.

Took me forever to finish this but it was very good. Hobb is a huge talent. This is a good return to Fitz's story, and it has some strange aspects but is nowhere near the extreme weirdness of the Soldier Son trilogy. I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to the next book.

Like others have said, I'm glad I read this and I will probably never read it again. It's a fictional account of fictional residents of Nigeria/Biafra before, during, and after the civil war in the late '60s. It's not a war I even knew had occurred for a long time – as you might expect, it's not the war that gets top billing in American textbooks covering that era. As a consequence of my ignorance, I can't speak to its historical accuracy, although a cursory skim of Wikipedia turns up nothing to complain about.

Writing-wise, there are some superb passages, and some that tell too much rather than showing. I noticed the latter less as the book went on.

This is a rough read, not because it's dense (though it is well over 500 pages) but because it's depressing. The war was notorious for the starvation of much of what was then Biafra, and developed in part from the factionalism resultant from the colonially-imposed unification of different people into a single country. I don't pretend to be an expert, and I wouldn't mind learning more about it.

Fascinating book that made me sad, which is part of why it took me so long to get through it after my initial fast start – it's hard to want to pick up an upsetting book once you've put it down.

Very mixed feelings about this one.

It took me four months to the day to get through this. It was never bad, per se; I got to 70% complete fairly quickly, and then stalled out for a good long time. I have a rule for myself that I'm allowed to quit a book partway through if I find I'm not going back to read it and I'm just not feeling any drive to, but I did want to finish this. Just not enough to, you know, do it.

This is something of a Southern Gothic classic, the debut novel by the author of Sophie's Choice, and concerns itself with the gradual, tragic implosion of a southern Virginia family. It starts out readable enough, but as the family becomes increasingly in disarray, so did the prose. Dialogue especially often felt unnatural to me.

There are precious few sympathetic characters, which probably accounts for the difficulty I had getting through. I found myself increasingly misanthropic as I progressed through, but mostly just felt bad for the whole family.

The highlight of the book, so to speak, is the section at nearly the very end, told from Peyton's perspective. That is, it's the best written passage in the book, not that it's a pleasant experience. It's so crushingly depressing it was hard to get through – heartbreaking, brilliantly awful stuff.

I don't know that I can say I recommend this one. It's at its best when it's at its worst.

I have mixed feelings about this book, which seems to be a common theme for me and Gilman: some fascinating ideas, somewhat flawed in execution. It's a period piece set at the end of the 19th century in England, in a world where real magic is hidden behind a veneer of fakery and cheap charlatanism. Not wanting to recap the plot, I'll just say that the book intermingles that magic and science fiction with each other.

Looking back on the story now I quite like it. But as a reading experience it started to drag around the halfway mark. Not always – in fact, the last sections were gripping. I tend to think Gilman's pacing suffers from this problem generally. Some people seem to feel similarly but about different parts; I've seen more than one person complain that it was great once it got going but took too long to do so.

I found the ending more than a bit disappointing. Appropriate, perhaps, but disappointing.

I don't want to say too much about the plot of this one, lest I spoil the experience. It's both culturally referential and brutal.

I enjoyed this a lot. This volume is set mainly on the Farm; three episodes into the Telltale adaptation it's only gotten a couple of mentions, so it was nice to get such a big piece on it this early. It's not what I expected at all.

Diane Ravitch's fiery assault on the so-called “school reform” movement. The book can be broadly divided into two primary sections. The first section addresses, individually, various myths about public education, and attempts to debunk them one at a time. The second lays out her proposed solutions.

The approach is sound, but the execution is not without problems. One of them resolves itself – I often found myself thinking that Ravitch had been making an assertion for quite a while with no evidence to support it. Typically the evidence did come a bit later, so if you find yourself unconvinced, you might give her a bit longer to make her case. She's also frequently repetitive.

One consistently discouraging observation is that her proposed solutions are vanishingly unlikely to be enacted, as things stand now. Pipe dreams are unsatisfying. But Ravitch is an education researcher, not a political strategist, and can hardly be faulted for that.


Nota bene: This book seems longer than it is, so much so that I got antsy wondering how it could possibly be padded out so long with the remaining material to be covered. As it turns out, it isn't – the back 30% is appendices and footnotes.

This book will inevitably be showered in five star ratings from readers of Brosh's blog, who will fill their reviews with the memes it generated. I don't feel it's earned all of those stars. But I think it's solid anyway.

For those unfamiliar with the author's work, Brosh writes the “Hyperbole and a Half” blog, which became famous quickly after she wrote a piece on depression that touched a nerve for a lot of people. That piece appears in this book, and I think the others were also featured on the blog, but I'm not sure about that as I'm only an occasional reader there. (The famous “Alot” piece is not present.)

You can think of this as something of an essay collection, but the prose is interspersed with Brosh's trademark drawings. For Kindle readers, I thought they were quite readable even on a tiny iPhone screen. Mostly they work well; once or twice they feel shoehorned in and don't really add anything.

The individual pieces range in theme from the heavy (depression, self-perception) to the light (a letter to her dogs). Topically, it's as scattered as the book's title, which I find is a common problem in humor books, especially those written by comedians with little writing experience. The piece on self-perfection, which closes out the book, was probably my favorite. Mostly it's a light read, but not always.

This probably won't change your life, but I enjoyed it. Definitely did laugh out loud more than once.

Tremendous.

This was a reread, sort of. It was assigned reading in high school courtesy of a teacher I appreciated a good deal at the time and have come to appreciate more as I've grown older. (The same teacher also introduced me to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.) I didn't appreciate Canticle at the time, though, and I didn't really understand it at all. I decided to give it a reread again when it was featured in the Something Awful Book Club, and I'm glad I did. It has been considered a classic for years, published in the early '60s and honored with a Hugo award, and is one of that rare breed of at least nominally science fiction novels that Serious People deign to deem “literature.”

It's hard to know what to write about Canticle to convey useful information without impinging on the reader's experience. I don't want to talk too much about themes, because in this case I think it's important for new readers to draw them out themselves. It concerns three ages, all of them well after what the characters know as the “Flame Deluge”: nuclear apocalypse. Knowledge itself is widely reviled in most corners of the world, blamed for the destruction of the world, and anarchy is widespread. Those bringing order are more concerned with force and power. In a few corners, however, knowledge – or more commonly, data, understood poorly or not at all – is kept alive by monks who study it diligently and seek to keep it safe.

Canticle is a marvel. Eloquently and passionately written, thought-provoking and disquieting, to me at least it offered more questions than answers. I'm glad to have this one on my shelf.

I really liked this. I don't want to get too deep into the plot; I was advised to go in blind and I make the same recommendation to you. I'll just say that it's a modern-day thriller premised on the idea that persuasion on the level of magic is a skill that can be taught.

Occasionally heavy-handed, mostly a great read. I generally like it when books explore the mechanics of the systems they create; I got a lot of that here, and it was great, but I would have liked even more of it. The ending hurts the book for a few reasons.

Wasn't sure about this one at first, but it grabbed me twice over before it began in earnest. A friend's review called it “predictable,” and I can't disagree, but I thought the setup was worth it. Ended up really enjoying it, and am looking forward to the rest of the series.

20th century set piece about the title creatures coping with adjustment to human society. It's... fine?

I often say that David Sedaris is hit-or-miss for me, and it's true, though anytime someone says that about anything they generally mean that it's mostly miss, and I'm no exception. I liked this one, though. Though Sedaris is often described as a humorist, I frequently find him depressing. There's a bit of that on display here too, but it was light as Sedaris goes and I laughed a fair bit while reading. If you ever like reading Sedaris, this is a good one.

I wish this were better.

It has a brilliant concept. Gladstone imagines magic as a matter of contracts and legality. I love unusual magic systems, and I particularly like ones with well-defined rules. Unfortunately, it's not well-explored. There's some discussion of contracts, but actually working magic remains largely a matter of waving one's hands. Gladstone sometimes makes use of ritual objects like candles or daggers, but it's essentially the same handwaving, just tool-assisted.

The disappointing systems are accompanied by mediocre writing. It's not R.A. Salvatore bad, but it's fairly standard genre prose, which is to say it isn't great. Characterization is thin, and Gladstone has an irritating habit of doing things that have explanations, but not giving the explanations until later. Characters don't object to the irregularities, presumably because Gladstone has a reason for them in mind, but the characters don't know the reason and therefore really should be noticing the problem. It happens more than once and it's beyond irritating.

There are two courtroom scenes, in theory, but only one is a “normal” one in front of a judge. Both the judge and the proceedings are disappointingly magical; I would have preferred Gladstone stick to his ideas about magic being a dry, technical practice. Over and over the wonderful premise of the series is betrayed by hocus pocus. The climax is poorly handled, and Gladstone later destroys its underpinnings for no reason.

A great idea but delivered poorly by a writer not up to the challenge and lacking the courage of his convictions. Look elsewhere.

Marvelous.

Gaiman is hit or miss for me; this was a hit, and provoked a stronger and more varied emotional response from me than I expected. I have no idea how to describe it; it's brief, but to even begin to explain the plot would require more exposition than belongs in a review like this. (And would, frankly, ruin the experience of reading it, so go in blind.) You will need an appreciation for the fantastic; those who read only nonfiction or who avoid speculative fiction entirely need not apply. A rare treat for the rest of us.

Everything Fever Pitch wasn't to me.

The 2012-13 English football season has recently wrapped up. This is a brief musing on the season before that. It was an important season to me in many ways; I'd been nominally a West Ham supporter for a few years prior, but this was the first year I really made an effort, watching any matches I could – not many, for reasons I'll get to in a moment – reading soccer news, discussing it seriously with other fans, and so on. Ironically, my increased interest in the English game was spurred by my decision to start seriously following Major League Soccer (MLS), the current top flight of American soccer. I pay attention to a couple others as well, including the Scottish leagues.

So the 2011-12 season is, unlike the 1991 Fever Pitch, not ancient history to me. It's also the year after my West Ham were relegated to the Championship, the level of the English system below the Premiership and also the level where people not invested in a team there tend to stop paying attention. Sam Allardyce brought my side back to the Premiership in a playoff final, having played quite well relative to the standards of the league but not well enough to qualify for automatic promotion after stellar seasons from Reading (who are back down again after this year) and Southampton (who are still up). I attended a viewing of the match at one of my city's downtown soccer bars, at 10am, with about four other Hammers fans and my friend and former roommate, for whom this was the introduction to the game. As you can imagine, I paid quite a lot of attention to soccer that year. And even when your side isn't in the Premier League, it's a big deal and you don't not follow it if you're invested in the English game at all.

Pray, while certainly written through the eyes of an Arsenal supporter, doesn't have the self-pity of Hornby's earlier book, and captures a lot of what, to me, was really on everyone's mind last season. Fabrice Muamba, the increasingly powerful effect of wealthy owners, and more. Fever Pitch was a history lesson that overstayed its welcome; at a slender 41 pages (and correspondingly lower price, don't worry), Pray is a great, quick romp through recent memories. If you're a fan of English football, this is definitely worth your time. If you aren't, probably there's less here for you than in Fever Pitch, since that was a better look at what it means to be obsessed. For my part, I'd pay my $3 for a Nick Hornby writeup of every season, going forward.

I could have done without his dig at American sports fans' love of playoffs, but I have to concede that many of my countrymen do feel exactly that way. But please, a bit less broad a brush next time, Nick.

Mixed feelings. The story, which is about one of several earthbound angels trudging through his daily grind in his post-life job when the usual order is upset, isn't bad. And as he figures out what's going on, it becomes pretty intricate. But the writing is mediocre, the protagonist is pretty two-dimensional, and the few unnecessary sex scenes aren't just bad, they are extended. The ending is pretty unsatisfying, too – not much is really wrapped up. First in a series, we'll see about reading more.

EDIT: We have seen about reading more, and the answer is no. Dropped a star to better reflect my feelings about the book.

This is a re-read for me, inspired by the attempts to ban it in parts of the country, but this is my first time revisiting it since junior high. I'm well-educated on the Holocaust, but even on a re-read, parts of it are shocking. As a book, it's very personal and a bit unfocused, partly because of Spiegelman's approach; it's as much or more about his relationship with his rambling father as it is about the Holocaust, and largely assumes that you already know at least the broad historical outlines. 100% worth a read – I think highly enough of it to read it again – but not exactly where you'd want to start as your first history. Except, I guess, that for many it may be more accessible, due to the brief length and the graphic novel format.

Obviously I don't remember my first read in all that much detail; I was surprised that Vladek's story doesn't get to Auschwitz until the end, so there isn't much about it. I think the sequel dealt with it. It would have to, given where the first book ends, I just don't remember. I'll probably re-read that soon as well.

Let's get this out of the way upfront: this book isn't going to be to everyone's taste, and that's okay. Prodigal Summer is three intertwining stories in one, with three primary characters. Chapters are told from each of their perspectives, more or less alternately; they all take place in the same area and sometimes affect each other, but interactions between stories are strictly on the fringes.

This is not a book with a complex narrative. It concerns rural Zebulon County, which according to Wikipedia doesn't actually exist – that's okay, it's a stand-in for rural farming counties all over – and families who live in it, and their relationships with nature and with each other. The three perspectives belong to Deanna, a wildlife-loving park steward; Lusa, a city girl who married into a farming family before the narrative opens; and Garnett, a cantankerous old man in an ongoing row with his neighbor. My favorite was Lusa, my least favorite Deanna; I'm sorry to say my interest in Deanna never did grow much. The others I enjoyed steadily.

It's so difficult to know where to begin describing Prodigal Summer. It's about families, writ small, and ecology, writ large. The stories are simple, but affecting. The prose is thoroughly Kingsolver, richly written; one earlier reviewer described it as “a book to feel,” and I think that's a perfect description. The cover art is perfectly suited: this is a novel about abundant, exuberant life.