Christine

While it's not perfect, I have to give it 5 stars for quickly igniting the Gaiman Theory of Great Stories: “... and then what happened?”

If you like weird fiction, definitely check this out. Its mysteries are often more mysterious to the characters than the savvy reader, but glimpsing where things were going didn't dull my enjoyment at all. In fact, it had me marveling, “If we know all this at 30% in, what's going to happen NEXT?”

I'm definitely going to check out more of Bennett's work after this. He created some amazing characters and a lot of engaging ideas. At its heart, this is an emotional story, despite sci-fi trappings and action sequences, and he absolutely nailed it.

The experience of reading this story can be summarized as, “Wait, what?”

I have to give Partridge points for sheer ridiculous audacity. He takes an unexpected point of view and unapologetically plunges ahead with it. The story is distinctive and intriguing in many ways.

However, it's also highly variable in quality. I guess this has the merit of being the least-horrible use of second-person narration I've encountered? The writing throughout had me similarly ambivalent: just as I was musing on an inventive plot point, a howlingly bad simile would yank me out of the story. Just as I was getting interested in a character, a cardboard cutout would caper into frame and ruin the mood. Worst of all, just as I was getting invested in the lore behind the tale, it petered out. Horror benefits when an author avoids overexplaining, but this suffers from a clear case of underexplaining. For me, this needed an eventual reveal that would give us a picture (however fuzzy) of how this cycle got started and what was at stake.

This is short and economical, so if it sounds intriguing, definitely give it a shot. It was imperfect but entertaining.

Compulsively readable, suspenseful, disturbing, ultimately touching, and on a couple memorable occasions, absolutely disgusting. So, great horror novel!

I'm not sure if this will resonate with everyone as much as it did with me. It was pretty much a bulls-eye as far as my nostalgia target goes - girl friendship set against high school in the late '80s. But the characters are drawn so well, and the relationship set up so poignantly and believably, I think anyone could get invested in this story.

If the supernatural story doesn't quite hang together for me, I have to say the allegory remains rock-solid: when you're friends in grade school, sometimes the changes that hit during middle and high school can seem like your friend is suddenly possessed. The exaggerated and fictionalized story of actual demon possession cleverly mines the more mundane realities of teen friendships and their challenges.

And as far as the face-value story, Hendrix kept me guessing throughout the climax. I really couldn't imagine how he was going to wrap things up, and ultimately I like how he handled it.

I'll have to let the nonfiction Paperbacks from Hell satisfy my craving for more Hendrix for now, but the next novel he publishes will be at the top of my reading list for sure!

I really loved this. I do believe I'll be reading the whole City Watch series, before sampling any other Discworld threads again. Somehow the other stories never please me like Vimes & company.

I guess the heart of it is the characters. I can't decide on my favorite - of course I love Carrot (as everyone does), but Angua is awesome, Cuddy and Detritus as enemies turned buddy cops are a lot of fun, Gaspode is a delight, and Colon and Vetinari are highly entertaining. And of course Vimes is Vimes (this story includes his famous theory on how the rich stay rich by their ability to spend less money, among other cynical and poignantly true observations). The only person who gets short shrift is Sybil - hopefully she'll play a bigger part in future tales.

In its way, this winds up being surprisingly political and topical, for all the silly puns and slapstick jokes. I'll say no more to avoid spoilers, but it cemented Pratchett as an author I admire.

I listened to the audio book, and its quality was very uneven. Nigel Planer is a brilliantly talented reader, and invents gorgeous voices and accents for each distinctive character. He conveys Carrot's earnest goodness particularly artfully. But it escapes me why he styled the female lead with a voice lower and more gormless than the trolls! Also, the sound quality varies from “acceptable” to “awful,” sadly.

Finally accepting that this goes in my DNF pile.

If you want a spooky, nostalgic adventure by a pack of generic white tween boys on their bikes, just go read some Bradbury. He does it way better, and while poetic is infinitely more concise.

If you want a non-supernatural nostalgic adventure by a pack of distinctive white tween boys, just go read “The Body” or watch Stand by Me.

If you want a spooky, nostalgic adventure by a pack of tween misfits (including a girl and an African American boy) who are all well-drawn and distinctive characters, just go read IT. Try to ignore the SUPER WEIRD and uncomfortable event at the, uh, climax that I still don't understand King getting away with. The rest of the story is pure gold.

My recommendation is not to bother with this one. Why?

- The characters are dull and largely interchangeable. The closest it comes to painting unique characters is designating The Smart Kid, The Dumb Oaf, The Little Brother, The Catholic One, and so on. Even though the Smart Kid was the most interesting, I found myself constantly confusing him with the main character (who has no discernible personality traits) because they have similar names.

- It's not scary. The story meanders a lot, with long stretches of gee-whiz nostalgia punctuated with sudden interpolations of horror cliche set pieces. Things that should have had me squirming were dulled because they're secondary to the lengthy naturalistic backstory. They pop up and then are forgotten in favor of something ludicrously mundane. Moreover, the horror is neither left mysterious enough to be scary nor explained well enough to be satisfying. We're left in the completely bland place between, where one starts to ask questions like, “Are the ghouls just trying to gaslight these kids?” “Why do these supernatural creatures attack in broad daylight but then hide when a grownup comes around?” “Seriously? It's an evil . . . bell?”

- It's annoyingly sexist. The female characters are present enough around the fringes of the story to create a misogynistic undertone absent from the Bradbury and King stories where the main characters simply don't have girls on their radar. When one boy mentally reviles his mother for being an irresponsible slut of a bad mom, it's not super clear if the author means to show the boy in a bad light, or agrees with his assessment. The Bev-analog has no point of view and serves only as a sex object on the bare periphery of the story. It's made more frustrating by a tantalizing aside painting Mike's grandmother as a badass, complex character whom I'd much rather read about. But within the current story, she's literally mute and paralyzed.

This was disappointing. I really, really tried to like it. But now I just get more annoyed the more I read, so better to stop.

I'm giving this two stars instead of one, since I actually do want to run through it once more (on 2x speed playback) to jot down some of the more interesting quotes and ideas. However, overall this thing is a mess.

The author promises an intriguing concept: a non-linear approach to time management. What exactly he means by this gets lost in his poorly structured, stream-of-consciousness writing. I gather that he means one should focus on the current moment, rather than fretting about the future.

Generally, he's trying to meld zen mindfulness concepts with some cognitive behavioral therapy approaches, with an (un)healthy dose of self help pop-psych guru BS. His devotion to the execrable Byron Katie (who is infamous for stating that an 8-year-old can be partially to blame for his own molestation) is a huge red flag.

If you want to learn about mindfulness practice, check out Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabat-Zinn. For a very practical walk-through of cognitive behavioral therapy, read Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by Stanford professor of psychiatry David Burns.

If you like, you could check Time Warrior out of the library and flip through it for some inspirational quotes and a few intriguing ideas, but I would definitely recommend this for skimming, rather than actually reading!

Madeline Miller has such a way with language. She makes epic legends both true to their roots, and completely accessible for a modern audience. Part of that is due to the intensely personal connections she draws within these stories. Coming to care about a character, then watching him grow up and fall deeply in love, then seeing the horrible challenges the world sends against that love - it connects much more viscerally than Homer does.

Ultimately this didn't reach 5 stars from me because I wasn't always keen to see what happens next. I guess that's due to a prophecy that comes out about halfway through, and on a meta level because I know the story of the fall of Troy. When I read Circe, I knew the beats from the Odyssey, but there was still a lot of mystery about where the story would go from there. Here, we all know pretty much what's going to happen.

I will say though, that Miller uses a pitch-perfect technique to tie the story together at the end, and I can't deny getting a little weepy (in a good way) at the very end.

This was surprisingly fresh and modern, considering it was published in 1912! It was delightful seeing the world through Judy's eyes, and she often made me laugh out loud. Her musings are also chock full of quotable lines.

I didn't love the ending - there's definitely a problematic element from a modern point of view - but I can take it in the context of the time & place. Still, I prefer my headcanon, where Daddy Long Legs is actually a fictional person made up by a time-traveling future Judy, who has to do some Back to the Future-style manipulation to wind up as an educated, working author who's married to the love of her life.

I can't recommend this book, but it does get a second star for a few beautifully creepy scenes.

In fact, a smart and merciless editor could probably make this into a very memorable and well-crafted novella. Unfortunately, these germs of a good, short story are drowning in two whole additional books' worth of boring garbage. TWO!

There are far too many cycles of “The group makes a bad decision, we read in painful detail about them slogging through the woods, Luke has internal monologue about how he is or isn't an emotionally arrested loser, Luke thinks derisively about how fat his companions are and/or how awful their wives are, the group confronts the reality that they are in much greater danger than they realized, but they have to keep going and stay together.” And most of the time, the danger in question is from them being lost, injured, and running out of supplies, not from the monster. It's extremely tedious. A.'s review does a great job of calling out the sexism and fat-phobia, but mostly it failed to make an impression on me because I was just so bored.

And then suddenly the book shifts to a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Swedish Death Metal Edition. Which quickly becomes an endless, dull cycle of its own, with pointless, repetitive conversations between Luke and his captors. Why are we even here, never mind going over the same ground again and again?

The good stuff here was good enough that I almost want to try more of Nevill's work, but I'm really worried that it'll be more bloated text and too peppered with faux-philosophical musings that are really just wrappers for prejudice and justification of violent sociopathy. Hopefully he was just trying to paint Luke's character with all that, but you do get the sense that Nevill himself is either a financially unsuccessful loner who's trying to justify that to himself with this book, or a traditionally successful suburban doughy guy who fantasizes about being a superfit single guy without a family tying him down, who can win fistfights and sleep with many ladies.

A little bit of really important, helpful content, padded out with a ton of biblical references.

I think my husband received this from a work colleague, and it was floating around our house so I thought I'd check it out. So I grant that this is a book directly intended for heavy-duty conservative Christians and I'm not the target audience.

But even taking that into account, this would be better as a brief blog post than a book. Here's the key content:
1. No one has time to do everything they would like to or that others want them to.
2. You will probably never be “done” at work - there's always some additional task calling for attention.
3. All working people with families decide whom to “cheat” (i.e., draw a line where your commitment and investment stop - on a daily basis or overall).
4. We tend to unthinkingly commit to work while leaning heavily on our families' willingness to be patient, when our priorities really ought to be reversed.
5. Feelings of loyalty and love are meaningless if we don't reflect them in our actions and our schedule.
6. If you want to make changes in this work-family balance, you have to make specific commitments (be home by 5 every day, work no more than x hours per week, etc.) rather than vague efforts to “be home more” or “spend more time with the kids.”
7. It feels scary to draw a line with work, because they don't love and care for you and might not cut you slack the way your family does, but if you have confidence in yourself and have room to be a little daring you can set boundaries and carve out a work life that doesn't cheat your family.
8. When approaching this with your boss, he suggests asking, listening to the boss's concerns, and offering a trial period with the new boundary.

One thing that really bothered me was the repeated statement that if you make the “correct” decisions, Yahweh will reward you with success. The dark side of this sentiment is that someone who tries to dial back work and suffers serious economic problems or any other burden as a result is just doing it wrong and is to blame for their own suffering. The truth is most people may have more flexibility with their work life than they think, but there's no guarantee that you can tell your boss 6 days a week doesn't work, walk out the door, and miraculously build a successful business of your own.

I rated this “amazing,” even though I think the end is kind of a mess, just because everything leading up to that is so entrancing. Plus, there are a few nested short stories that are absolutely dynamite.

I'm constantly on the lookout for more books in this vein. I'd say similar novels include The Thirteenth Tale and The Historian. I just love the combination of gothic styling, investigation of murky family secrets, ghost stories and bibliophile protagonists.

A really excellent book for anyone who needs to make charts and graphs on a regular basis. Even if “dataviz” isn't really what you do, this has amazing advice on how charts work and how to communicate and present effectively.

The writing is less formal than you might expect for this subject. It's very engaging and down-to-earth. And each chapter ends with a summary that steps you through the actions they've taught you about - this makes the book an invaluable reference. It's going to live in my laptop case so I always have it nearby when I need a reminder to talk and sketch first, or to assess what can be removed from a chart to improve it.

I enjoyed this so much and found it so valuable, I'm now looking for a similar book on PowerPoint presentations - something you see used poorly all the time, but for which really great skill can seem elusive.

Definitely worth reading for many of the stories, notably “Who Looks Back,” “Old Wave,” “Snack Time,” “Last Things Last,” (my first experience of Delta Green) “One Small, Valuable Thing,” & “And I Feel Fine.”

There were some real clunkers as well, so I'd recommend picking this up and grazing on stories that appeal without feeling a need to plow through the whole thing. The whole proposition of the anthology is action-oriented Lovecraftian tales, which is a challenging task, after all.

This seems to be a case of a clever writer in desperate need of a professional editor. I liked the main character and enjoyed a lot of the humor, but the story needed to be quicker and more tightly plotted, and the editorial quirks (particularly the complete lack of contractions) started to grate too much. This goes on the DNF pile.

This juuuust eked out a third star from me, due to a few funny nerd in-jokes.

It was OK, but really failed to keep my interest. In a lot of ways it read more like a treatment for a movie that will be billed as “the next Hunger Games!” than a novel. A lot of ink was invested in describing settings, action sequences, and clothing rather than advancing the plot.

Said plot is fine - I was curious how things would play out, and the solution to the mystery was reasonably satisfying, if a tad predictable. The romance was probably at the normal level for YA - there was definitely some heat generated, but nothing gets too horizontal.

I won't be reading any possible sequels, but I'm game to take my kids to see it if it's rendered on the big screen in all its neon, CGI, Big Badass Battle Sequence glory.

We've all seen the movie, right? Well, the novel lends some interesting background to Norman's story. (Actually, the backstory is used in Psycho IV: The Beginning - cut me some slack, I watched in the Olden Days when you had to make due with what was on TBS to while away a Saturday afternoon!), and made much clearer to me Mary/Marion's motivations. It's also just a fun, quick guilty pleasure of a read.

Bloch's story is a weird collision of pop psych freakshow, character study, and Columbo-style murder mystery, with a soupcon of salacious material that probably had many boys hiding this under their mattresses in the '60s. But mostly it works, driven largely by Norman and Lila's characters. Like the film, the book wraps up with the odd doc-splaining of Norman's history and condition, which falls pretty flat, but being in Norman's head for much of the story is equal parts intriguing and repellent - but always interesting.

Definitely recommended, and the audio book was very well done - the reader does a great job at presenting the characters and accentuating the tension in the story.

Very entertaining - I wish I could have read it without knowing the spoilers, since it's basically presented as a creepy mystery story, with us only getting Dr. Jekyll's point of view at the end.

In reading this, I unlearned a lot of things I thought I knew. I discovered:

- Jekyll rhymes with treacle. This is the normal Scottish pronunciation, and probably ties into the punnish names (Hyde-hide; Jekyll-seek all).

- Dr. Jekyll isn't the good and pure half of the duo. He's just the normal guy, with both good and bad characteristics. But actually he's pretty evil when you think about it, since he decides it's no fun indulging in baser instincts when you have that pesky conscience, and thus creates an utterly selfish version of himself so he can be a bastard without feeling bad or tarnishing his reputation. So weirdly, of all my pop culture brushes with the story, the time when Ren is split into Evil Ren and Indifferent Ren may actually be the most faithful to the source material!

- Hyde isn't a giant Hulk-style monster. He's short and little, and appears younger than Jekyll. He's also not physically ugly or deformed in any way - he just gives an impression that something Is Very Wrong with him in an indescribable way.

Anyway, I was impressed by Stevenson's artful depiction of evil, from its most banal to full-on murderous violence. I'm sure Hyde is salacious too, but his evil is represented in a much more effective way.

When we first hear a story of him, it's about him bumping into a little girl on the street. She's thrown to the ground and he calmly walks on, stepping on her without a thought. With the difference in mores between Stevenson's culture and ours, he might have chosen a vice that seems quite silly and tame to us, but this account is still chilling, even in 2018.

In fact, I couldn't help draw a connection between Stevenson's idea of anonymous indulgence in baser instincts, and the modern-day internet troll. This story is absolutely fresh and applicable in an age when we have “normal” good citizens going to work, hanging out with friends, parenting their children, volunteering for charities, and then sitting down at the computer and sending people messages like “You deserve to be raped to death, but you're too ugly” behind the safe concealment of their Internet avatars.

All in all, this was a great story - a quick read that retains its creepiness even when you know what's going on from page one. It also provokes thought about what it means to be a good person, how addiction can destroy people, and the usefulness of societal restrictions like reputation and criminal punishment.