j wren pennington
ok, so this is a book that everyone should read solely based on the fact that it is the first hand experience of someone who experienced the separation of the hemispheres of her brain and can tell you about from the perspective of a neuroanatomist.
so it has more depth than ya books and that is good.
if very accurately describes being in grad school, that good I guess.
I think my own “meh” feeling about it and others outright dislike stems from a kind of disparity between the subject matter and the style. they don't seem to be well paired. they are both interesting on their own but distracting from each other. a better editor would have caught that.
you could certainly do worse in the realm of fiction books about witches.
as i said for volume 1, “wonderfully imaginative, compelling, and beautiful. hooray for comics for smart people!”
wonderfully imaginative, compelling, and beautiful. hooray for comics for smart people!
i love these books. they are perfect for teaching empathy and boundaries and basically everything we need to model to our children to help them understand their own emotional lives and how to express that to others. seriously, all the love.
pretty amazing stuff...it has the potential to to shift one's understanding of human history.
don't be intimidated by the equations, you can understand the basic concepts that gleick is describing without getting the actual the algorithms. it is a bit dry at times, he's no bill bryson, but the information itself is worth the effort; even if you have to reread certain parts multiple times :)
Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a slow burner in every way. The narrative is almost that of a memoir, and a very British one in that the action is slow, calculated and utterly repressed. In some ways it is very frustrating because he creates a science fiction story that is almost secondary to the childhood dramas of the three main characters. I often found myself wanting to skip the detail rich descriptions from their childhoods to get to the more compelling tid bits (which he spells tit bits) that informs the why's and what's of the tale. Of course, this is intentional. It is the richness of the microcosm of these particular lives that answers the novel's concluding questions.
Though sometimes slow, it is nonetheless compelling. Once you have been introduced to the mystery, however simple it is to predict, there exists a real need put all of the pieces in place before walking away from it.
The emotional experience of reading this book is very similar to that of Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. While I can say that it is a masterful creation and definitely worth the read, it is utterly depressing, and I am left with a mild, but unmistakable sense of horror.
this was supposed to be about awesome ladies adventuring, turns out is a romance, and not between the ladies :(
still reasonably enjoyable, though the number of issues unresolved with 10 pages left was a real bummer. 500 freaking pages with no resolution blows.
if you like compelling scary books, this is a fun one. the story line given to you to throw you off track is a little ham handed, but it was still fun.
Okay. These are fantasy-tastic, but very well written. the only issue i have is the ending...i will not spoil it for you, but it is very literary. it is so common for many of these YA books to perform exactly as the student's want them to...happy endings all around and everyone gets their just desert. it is refreshing to see a series that defies this paradigm.
it isn't book theif, but it is a more productive read than most of the schlock.
a new breed of apocalyptic novel...a refreshing, even if a bit melancholy, story about the end of the world that does not include zombies. yay!
well crafted prose, flavored with a perfect mix of bittersweet coming of age loss of innocence brought into a greater relief by a destabilizing prolonged catastrophe.
quick read, would be good for high school kids.
i can't say i agree with the low reviewers here, but i'm also not in with the 5 star reviewers.
it's a good book.
there are certainly a fair number of truly unique ideas on display. there are also a fair number of cultural differences that i think are maybe a little distracting to non-chinese readers. i think if your an american or european without something like the cultural revolution woven into the fabric of your society, it would be hard to experience a true flow. “wooden characters” have been blamed on translation but i feel sure it is a cultural difference instead. beauty and complexity are there when describing the environment, there just isn't a lot of what (especially) americans would expect in terms of description of people's inner lives.
i'm not a physicist, so i cannot really speak to the veracity of the sci in the sci fi, but it seemed pretty sturdy, and i dare say i learned some things. i did stop to look several things up, and i appreciate being challenged by difficult or unfamiliar concepts.
i cannot exactly pinpoint why this isn't a better book. it's a good book, but it took me two months to read, which is entirely unheard of. the story was original and compelling, but also kind of anti-climactic. the writing was well done, but not un-put-downable. i will undoubtedly come back to it, maybe i'll change my mind.
holy crap, it's dead poets society, only with real magic rather than the magic created by poetry.
that's very irritating.
also, i think this is why i have not been reading YA: the characters are stupid because they are teenagers. they do stupid things that i cannot at all relate to. they are melodramatic and simple minded and it's painful to read. that isn't necessarily the fault of the author, she knows her audience and they probably do relate quite a bit. i am not them.
the writing, though prone to teenager-y flights of over indulgence, is good. there are some masterful bits that are worth remembering.
the solitude of prime numbers is a story of two young people who spend their lives trying not to exist in effort to appease the trauma's of their respective childhoods. separately, they create inhospitable spaces for themselves that no matter how much affinity they feel for each other, cannot exist in close proximity.
the writing is well executed and engaging but what i like most about this story is the updating of a once commonplace idea that we do not see much anymore: the idea that you do not have to be in close physical or emotional contact with people to still recognize them as valuable to you. it is still too common for writers to be unimaginative in this respect. they either give the reader what they want in the form of a fairy book ending or they eschew that for the opposite ending, whatever that may be, which is equally hackneyed for being he desired ending's opposite. this book displays a nice bit of creative realism in that sense.
though the subject matter of the solitude of prime numbers is the untenable relationships of broken people, i can still honestly say that i found it mostly delightful. i'm not sure if that is a reflection of me or of giordano's book; most likely it is a mingled puddle of both, but then again, aren't most things?
i don't often give books really high ratings, but this is a really good book.
perfect mixture of gravity and levity. especially attractive to people like me, literary science nerds with a penchant for history and current events.
i am smitten.
not great....had a lot of potential at the beginning, but the story kind of wonders around the protagonist and seems to have too much to say without ever really making a statement about anything.
also, i wanted the zombies to just kill her already.
this is a super fun story. while vampires are totally over done there was enough freshness with the whole Amish thing to lure me in.
more importantly, it is surprisingly well written. i don't say that to be snotty, i have just grown to resent YA writers and their editors for not holding a high enough standard, but Bickle really puts the bar where I think it should be for young readers. I am very appreciative of that.
a bit irritated that it's a series, but I suppose no one will by a well written one off story anymore. sigh
very much like fforde's other books, and by that I mean good, solid, stories that are totally delightful. this book specifically would be a great way to introduce middle schoolers to fforde's work so they can enjoy shades of gray and the Thursday Next series when the be to high school/college.
i wish i could undo having read this.
you can't really say that it isn't good because all of the things i didn't like about it were exactly the point. it's supposed to creep you the fuck out, and it is very successful in that endeavor. though, i feel like i would be a creep to recommend it.
this would have garnered a 4 if we could revisit a bit of our protagonists ingrained views on gender. it's harder to ignore in future fiction. that said, excellent book. i will read it again.
