Joshua Tree

Not the best of the Fargo books. Seems like several of their actions were un-Fargo like. Starting with going to Cuba, noticing a tail and thinking "we must have been sold out by a one of our staff" utterly discounting the bureaucratic trail the left just entering Cuba, not to mention the communist gov't just being suspicious of Americans, let alone treasure hunters that are American. Then, following that up with breaking into a gov't military museum, thinking all they need to do if caught is get into international water and they are worry free. Kinda short sighted since I'm sure there is at least one country that the Fargos would want to someday visit would be willing to extradite them back to Cuba--Russia and Venezuela come to mind

The overall story was entertaining, but their judgement lapse kept briefly taking me out of it.

Pretty good read. Not light hearted and funny obviously, but it caught and held my attention. Not sure how it would have been to actually read it (I had the audio version from Audible), but listening to it in 30 to 45 min segments too and from work was good. I really liked the weaving of actual cancer patient stories into the narrative of the history. The most interesting part, for me, was the relationship between cancer treatment and treatment of HIV/AIDS in 1980's and how that fed back into the cancer treatments in the 1990's.

The story itself was pretty good. However, what really bothered me was the constant speaking directly to the reader and explaining something about the people from Maine, or his dog. For example, the following is typical, and it always pulled me out of it.

???Plan on staying for supper,??? I said. ???Unless, of course, you have other plans.??? In Maine we still use the term supper for the evening meal.

Stanley, Stephen E. (2009). A Midcoast Murder (Kindle Locations 1084-1085). Stonefield Publishing Co. Kindle Edition.

This is a great character driven story with characters you can identify with immediately and that you want to learn more about. They inspire empathy and are engaging so that I spent a couple nights with very little sleep because I didn???t want to put my Kindle down. I can???t wait for the next book from this Author .

It is a fairly interesting story of falling in love for the first time. The story starts out by Jordan (the author) coming out via a poem in his Senior English class, but judging by his description of himself, everyone probably already knew or guessed , and he ends up finding love and friendships via a mistaken identity on the internet. Had I only judged this book on the story alone, I probably would have given it 2.5-3 stars. Unfortunately, this book suffers from a lack of a proof reader and a strong editor. It contains numerous layout, spelling, grammar and fact errors, which I find especially disappointing considering the price from Amazon for my Kindle version compared to other better quality writing from independent authors. In the end I didn???t care enough about the author or his friends through most of the story to give it a higher rating.

I enjoyed the book. I waffle between 3 & 4 stars. I try to rate based on the context of the work; not evaluating it in a vacuume. As I've disclosed before, I'm probably not in the target demographic for this book (high school age), so thinking back to how I was back then (despite the huge changes to everything since those days ;) it would have been close to spot-on.

The ending was one of the best and worst parts for me. I liked and understand why it ended that way, but I'm also enough of a romantic to want a "and they lived happily every after" ending too.

It was pretty good-very movie like in its presentation. It is somewhat riding the coat tails of Dan Brown's [b:The Da Vinci Code 968 The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2) Dan Brown http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1303252999s/968.jpg 2982101] but written better, and it's enough of its own story. One thing I will say about the Kindle version of this book: the publisher did a bad job–whole streches of the book are improperly formatted like a block quote instead of normal text making the paragraphs hard to distinguish, and as a result conversations not as easy to follow.

It was a fun read overall. I was a little dubious about reading a John Green novel assuming that he was at least partially overhyped due to his YouTube followers, but the idea of running into your ???name doppelganger??? trumped my hesitation. I was surprised at how much I liked it; the characters were believable and the plot was interesting.

An interesting book, but not that well written. The author has some very annoying tendencies in her writing that just ended up grating on my nerves by the end.

For one, she latches on to something she doesn't like an harps on it far longer than she should. For example, the tendency in the United States for us to measure dry ingredients in cups instead of weight clearly annoyed her and she let us know it; She just needs to get over it, that a slight improvement in accuracy does not make up for the convenience of “scooping” over weighing.


Another annoying tendency she has is to make statements about how until a very recent date, every invention of a specific type was just crap, until this widget came along, when in fact the “new invention” isn't new, just modified. For example, on the she states that there were no good ways to peel vegetables (for the home cook) before the 1990's, and that the ones that were invented in the early 20th century worked well enough (the traditional swivel and rex models) but would hurt your hands and give you blisters if you had to use them for very long. The answer to this was just the “OXO Good Grip” version that had a chunky plastic handle. I've used a vegetable peeler since I was a child in the 70's and never hurt my hand with one. That said, the OXO one is an improvement, and evolution to consider ergonomics in the design, but to claim that it has revolutionized the peeling of vegetables for the general public is not only inaccurate, but detracts from the book as a whole.

Overall, the subject matter was interesting, but I wish the writing was more polished.

Finally done with the entire series. I started reading, well listening to, it very late in–I think around the time vol. 9 or 10 was the latest. Overall, the story is good, but the characters, esp. early on, were always only 2 1/2 dimensional, always falling back on gender stereotypes of men and women thinking the other is stupid and can't do a thing for themselves, etc. even though they grew up together and know that it isn't the case.

The 14 audio books combined are over 18 days long–I hope Peter Jackson doesn't make this a future series–it will probably be about 3 dozen 3.5 hour installments...I don't think I could take that :)