Joe

While I find the idea and the conceit of Reality Hunger interesting, it failed to deliver on its promise. It is far too shallow and spends too much time expounding on the idea that all true art is built upon the work that came before . Anyone who would be a candidate to read this book would know that already. The second half is more compelling, but ultimately, I'm not convinced that Fiction is dead and that we crave reality. The discussions about the areas where fiction and non-fiction collide (collage, the lyrical essay, and memoir) was interesting, and I agree that these are currently the areas where a lot of the innovation is happening. But in the end, I don't think Shields made the case for the end of fiction.

There's some good nuggets of information here. I wouldn't call it a great book. There's enough flexibility in the formulas though to allow creativity. I found some use out of it, and I guess that's what is important.

This book makes a nice companion the Strunk & White (AKA The Elements of Style). Where Strunk and White gives you the rules of grammar and usage, Spunk & Bite teaches you how to creatively break the rules. I'd recommend this book to any writer looking to add interest to their locution. As the book says, it is all about “locution, locution, locution”. I found the chapter on writing for Gen-Y a little less than useful, but otherwise, the book was pretty useful.

Rather than teaching you recipes, Ratio teaches you the basis of how food is made. It teaches you the proportions of commonly made items like bread and cookies, and from there you can modify the recipes to produce what you want. Probably the most important cook book on my shelf.

This is a great book. It's an interconnected series of stories about Xiaoda Xiao's experience in one of Mao's Reeducation Labor Camps. His crime was pulling down a poster of Mao while he was drunk. He spent five years in forced labor. The book really simply and artfully describes his experience there and how it affected him.

This is definitely my favorite book of all time. It traces the journey a southern family makes to bury their mother in another town. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, so we move in and out of the heads and viewpoints of all the major characters and a few minor ones. All in all, a great book.

I've read both the hardcover and the iBooks version of The Fifty Year Sword. The iBooks version contains animation, music and sound effects (the kindle version, apparently, does not). Generally, I would consider this a gimmick, but in the case of this particular book, it worked. The music and sound added to the atmosphere immensely, and the animations were interesting.

This is a short read (took me less than an hour), but well worth my time. I won't reveal anything in this review. There's a storyteller and five orphans, and the tale the storyteller spins is frightening and wonderful. Books rarely affect me so deeply on so many levels.

If you can get the iBooks version, I highly recommend it. If not, then the hardcover (with the stitched pages) is the next best thing.

While I found the premise interesting, I found most of the characters inauthentic. There was a lot of unrealized potential in this book. Miller's voice felt particularly unreal. No 10 year old, no matter how precocious, talks like Miller does. I enjoyed the novel, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone.