John Kelly
Terrific, technical overview of the inner workings of a Steven Spielberg movie. Worth it for the chapter on Poltergeist alone.
There's a lot to dislike about this book. The unnecessary, unbelievable characters, muddying everything up. The last-minute flurry of exposition. Not to mention Mosse's irritating narrative tics (how many characters can we reasonably believe can/should be knocked out over the course of a 600-something page novel? Do French people actually say everything twice, once in French and again in English?). Certainly, it's more literary than Dan Brown, but this sometimes works against the novel. Mosse is clearly aiming for a fast-paced thriller at certain points, but then gets bogged down in description, parading the amount of research she clearly did. On the one hand, I really do feel like this would have been a better, more exciting book if she'd toned down the literary aspirations. On the other hand, it's perfectly satisfactory holiday reading.
I think this might be a “you had to be there” book because reading it for the first time in 2021 is very, very jarring.
Slow to start, and ends with a bit of a fizzle rather than a pop. But in between? Beauty.
This has been on my “currently reading” list since December 2012. I've given up and restarted it on and off since then. It was such a struggle to get through. I think the problem is that it irritates the same parts of my brain as The Big Bang Theory - it's supposed to appeal to nerds like me, but it's such a shitshow that I find myself getting annoyed. In place of any character development or story, we're treated to a never-ending string of “like that thing in $nerd_reference”. Right up until the last chapter. “It was a hedge maze. With the same layout as the one in Labyrinth”. This is cheap, lazy writing at its worst. Dan Brown, all is forgiven.
A great introduction to zen concepts from a western point of view. Archery is just used as the jumping off point - one of the things I love about this book is how its lessons can be applied to pretty much any physical endeavour.
Occasionally falls victim to the common science fiction problem of writing every character with the same voice, since they're all just empty vessels for the author to express the BIG GRAND IDEAS and THEMES they're OH SO PROUD of. Despite this minor problem (and really, when it's so common as to almost be a genre trope, it is really a ‘problem'?), Spin is a really interesting book and, more importantly, one that remains interesting throughout.
The real horror in this book is the abuse of clauses. Each paragraph is turned into a twisting, winding pile of word-molasses which, for me, killed any sort of atmosphere and tension the author had intended to create. A real shame.
Terrific story, second only to G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday in the scope and viciousness of its satire. I loved the pace and dynamism of the writing, and I really do think that it's time for a resurgence in these kinds of - as Christopher Hitchens calls them - ‘whiskey novels'. Post-colonial, but still very British, stiff upper lip kinds of stories. They're right up my alley. But, my goodness, Greene was never a great comedy writer. The self-consciously ‘funny' lines were just painful to read.
It's a tough sell. The author has to make his book accessible enough for non-gamers, but still interesting enough for gamers of all levels. As a result, this book veers erratically between a genuinely entertaining ‘experiential' account of the author's video gaming habits, and a boring, dime-a-dozen primer on video games. For example, the blow-by-blow recounting of the opening minutes of Resident Evil might be interesting to someone who has never played the game before, but as someone who has played that game (and especially that section of that game) more times than he cares to admit, I found that there were very few actual insights in this chapter.
I recently listened to an interview with the author on the Brainy Gamer podcast. The pre-defined audience of this podcast allowed him to go into a lot of detail regarding his thoughts on the relationship between cocaine and GTA IV, and I was left wondering why he couldn't have included these thoughts in the actual book he was promoting? It would have made the book a lot more enjoyable.
In the end, I feel as if the author failed to show us ‘why video games matter', but rather told us why video games matter to him - and even then only weakly. For a more engaging and coherent argument on why video games matter, check out [b:Everything Bad is Good for You].
First time reading a Clive Cussler book and it was unspeakably awful. Full of passages like
“‘Buon giorno,' she said. ‘Signor Capriani?'
‘Si.'
‘Parla inglese?'
Cipriani smiled broadly. ‘I speak English, yes. But your Italian is very good.'“
?!!?
Never again.
Reading this so I can practice my giant voice and to get to grips with the nonsense-words in preparation for reading this to my daughter. Can't wait.
This would probably be amazing if you were a 15 year old girl in 1973. As a 34 year old man in 2013, it's total gash.
When I was in my 20s, I had a healthy social life AND social anxiety which is a hell of a cocktail. Every night I'd come home full of beer and emotions and I'd have real difficulty in shutting my brain off so I could go to sleep. Nothing worked. I'd just lie in my bed going over everything I'd said or did trying to think about things I could have said or did differently. For hours. And then I bought a DVD box set of The Prisoner. I'd put on an episode and it would pummel my brain into submission. Everything about it is so strange and confusing that my mind would give up trying to figure out what was happening and just shut down after 10 minutes.
Piranesi brought back this feeling so hard. I don't just mean thematically (although there are plenty of similarities between the book and The Prisoner -- similarities I'm sure someone with a medium dot com account and a pathological inability to allow a take go un-taken will happily point out). I really struggled with the opening of this book because every night I would feel my mind saying "fuuuuucccck this book I can't figure out what's going on" and shutting down. Every single time. It wasn't until page 100 or so where something finally clicked for me and the story started to make sense and I blasted through the second half.
Loved it. It's a perfect perfect autumn story.
If you've ever seen Alex Cox's Moviedrome introductions, you'll know he's an intelligent, erudite speaker with a passion for films and this really comes across in this book. Occasionally, you (the reader) are prompted to put the book down and watch a specific film or a specific part of a film. Other similar books would just assume you're already familiar with the early works of Abbas Kiarostami and if not well see you in the chapter where we talk about Star Wars I guess. Being told what to look at and why means the whole thing feels less like a lecture and more like a conversation.
A good blast through the history of influencer culture on the internet, from early blogs to TikTok hype houses. I just feel like anyone could have written this, you know? It's a couple of steps up a really well-written Wikipedia article. Taylor Lorenz is a fantastic writer and her voice was largely wasted on this dry-ass content.
This is basically just a collection of inspiration quotes around the subject of just getting shit done even though life is hard and society is a total garbage fire.
And that's exactly what I needed right now. A lovely little hug for the soul.
Usually, when I'm writing a review of a book or a film, I try to be a bit lenient and say “well, this person wrote a book and I haven't, so they're clearly doing something better than me!” Except I can't feel this way about this book. I'd be ashamed to put my name to this thing.
The story is about a bunch of one-dimensional stand-ins for various aspects of teenage lives. There's the clever, bookish one. There's the violent misanthrope. There's the boring generic one. And they all go around Dublin, doing drugs and being surly. The few female characters are just as one-dimensional as the male characters - they're there to have sex with and to make the boys feel bad.
The entire book is dreadfully dull and badly written. And then suddenly, it takes a last-act swing into American Psycho territory. Like the author read over his manuscript up until that point and said “fuuuuuuck, nothing actually happens in this book!” and tried to make up for it with a completely unbelievable ‘shock' conclusion.
This book was all over the Irish/Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago, and having now finished it, I'm feeling a definite case of the emperor's new clothes here. God-awful. Avoid.
Throughout the book, I felt like the author was showing a certain amount of sympathy for the alt-right. It unironically did that thing of describing people like Richard Spencer as being the “dapper” face of fascism. Okay, I thought, maybe I'm just imagining things. It's a good overview of what's happened in the last few years and certainly gives a great insight into a lot of the nastier subcultures.
But then you reach the conclusion and realise – holy shit, my feeling was totally correct and this lady is fully sympathetic to people like Milo and Richard Spencer. Or maybe she's so completely disappointed with the left, it just seems that way. But she talks about how the left is either incapable of arguing with Milo or chooses not to because they come from the “intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr”. But then in the next sentence, talks about David French criticizing Milo and being “attacked by ... the alt-right attack dogs”. She talks about Stavvers and how “the embarrassing and toxic online politics represented by this version of the left, which has been so destructive and inhumane, has made the left a laughing stock for a whole new generation”, but (and I'm in serious danger of whataboutism here) doesn't address how the similarly destructive and inhumane behaviour of the alt-right hasn't made them a laughing stock?
Like I said, it's a pretty good overview of where we're at, culturally, and how we got here. I just completely disagree with her conclusions.