Adam

These are the ideal female role models, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Dang. Not as good as I remembered.

The series does get better; I remember that. But the challenge here is that Mull is trying to convey his mental movie of the story, but can't quite land the words to make it flow naturally on the page. Seth, while not the best character at this point, is not the absolute moron most of the non-positive reviews claim. The man is young, and developing character. He is a little ambitiously reckless, but I know enough ten-year-old siblings of my friends to inform those kind reviewers that they need more experience with children. Seth is slightly annoying, but checks out.

What lands now is the sheer... absurdity of the world building. Not that it's bad, simply absurd. Things happen, or are world rules, for reasons that Mull capitalizes on in later entries, leaving their mystifying roots here. If this were standalone, I would not rank it so highly.

This... does not need to be a book. Ryder Carroll has a great idea, but this work did not answer my questions. Instead, I was treated to excessive backstory, numerous testimonies, and near-religious speech on the “meaning that mindfulness practices could bring” to my life. It felt as if I was being told that I could determine my life's purpose if I only bought the magic potion.

In all fairness, I tried a bullet journal. My issue is with the content of this content-inflated book, not the system. The system is actually pretty good. But the book is much longer than it needs to be.

See, Simon, I told you that audiobooks counted.

This is where the series actually gets going. We've spent the last two books slogging through necessary setup, and here's where things finally pick up.

Ronodin is well done, but he's a bad replacement for the Sphinx. While the Sphinx had an excellent motivation that led to nuanced decision-making, Ronodin is a goofy anarchist with the depth of a kiddie pool. Sure, he gets the job done, but he's just not cutting it. He also doesn't even try to manipulate Seth, which is what Book 2 did such a good job setting up. Nowhere does he try to convince Seth that he's his brother, as he tried to do in the scant end scene of Book 2. Neither does he try and convince Seth that reality supports his (Ronodin's) side. Instead, he just sends him on quests and is careless enough to let Seth develop on his own. The Sphinx does in this book what Ronodin should've, which is embarrassing given the gross lack of respect the author shows the Sphinx. Why does the Sphinx want in on the dragon plot? Who knows. What's his motivation, now that his goal from the last book has been foiled? No idea. It's sloppy. Which is highly unfortunate, given the potential elsewhere. However, while I do like 4 and 5, this book is still in the awkward transition period of still being overburdened with fetch quests and exposition. Sure, it makes sense plot-wise, but there's an absurd amount of magical items, rules, and missions that feel as if they bloat the focus. Seriously, get to 75% of this book, and then stop and consider what each character is doing. None have a clear 1 or 2 step process to get to their goal. Instead, this book fills its time with buried treasure, merfolk, octopus people, cyclopses, a magical macguffin pearl, a volcano flower, and a hypothetically imposing villain who is promptly overpowered by what should be an equal power (this is later explained, though) and then never heard from for the rest of the series.

This book has more action than the last two combined. It's going places. But it still suffers from not having a clear direction or motivation for most of the characters.

Maybe this book isn't for me, given my lack of social media usage. If my only issue with it were it's inability to be relevant to me, I'd put it higher and assume I'm the issue. However, as with a few other of Mr. Newport's works, I'm driven away by the unnecessary length. I'm guilty to have skimmed the last 40% of this work, primarily because there are only so many times I can hear that humans have social needs that can be entertained in other ways before I'm ready to quit. I do have an attention span, I promise XD I'm just not particularly interested in pushing through a excessively lengthy work on a subject I'm only slightly interested in. So, I suppose, if I were pathologically addicted to my phone, and desperate for a way out, this book might get a higher ranking. For a generally disconnected college guy, this just didn't need to be a book. If it were a series of articles, or a video, or half as long, I'd think highly of it. In its current form, I simply can't recommend it to anyone addicted to their phone. Their attention span probably won't be that long, either.

This book still confuses me, but I'm so happy to be confused.

Fish.

This renews my faith that the world is capable of exposing frauds and corruption.

If only they had the same willingness to investigate politicians...

This book is just a feel-good story of growing up for about 85% of it, and then it goes 0-60 in the span of two chapters to cover death and friendship in a way that blew my mind when I was 10 and still does today. Perhaps those final chapters are short and quick in their covering of events, but to me they paint a very clear picture of their idea, and I find it quite a compelling outlook. There's an argument to be made that summarizing them into 2 chapters counteracts what could've been a more extended piece on either, but I think that giving the reader time to understand the characters means that the death of one or reconciliation of two others has all of the necessary groundwork to convey emotional weight. Ms. Montgomery could've spent chapters dissecting the grief or joy of her characters, but the simplicity of description, and what words it brings out in characters we are very familiar with by this point does more work and delivers more of an impact than almost any other book I've read.

Sure, it's not packed with fascinating philosophical concepts. But what it does have is a beautiful illustration of the way simple people live and die and love. I think that's valuable.

A solid introduction. I'm still no more sure how much I believe the theories of evolution and the Big Bang, which were both relied on at certain points. Overall, though, it is what it's titled, and I appreciated it.

Dog Book was not the first thing I should've read. Dog Book didn't really feel good.

Dog Book had way too much cursing for my liking. Dog Book had a non-0, non-1 number of sex scenes. Why did Dog Book need these? I don't know, and Dog Book didn't seem too intent on showing me their usefulness.

Dog Book was also very focused on lots of driving analogies, which felt more like the author flexing than anything else. Dog Book did not convince me that any of the things about the Man driving were believable. Dog Book seemed to use foul language and adult scenes to seem more realistic, but still was not realistic in the plot.

Needless to say, while there were some rather deep-sounding sentences, Dog Book was not something I particularly enjoyed reading. Dog Book didn't feel unique or significant, although it at least was memorable.

English poetry slaps, as the kids would say. Pearl was an unexpected gem of Biblical Apocalypse interpretation, and Sir Orfeo completes the trilogy in a feel-good short story.

Would rhyme again. Pearl woman. 4/5.

Is there a better feel-good story? Barring further entries in the series, probably not.

I liked the part when goodreads crashed and deleted my 3 paragraph dissertation on why this book is bad.

I loved the first series. This book is basically a setup plot for the next series. It decides that Seth's character development is going to get undone and then redone over the course of several days, and it illustrates this by having Seth (who, again, is an experienced individual when it comes to all things magical) use his cousin for a heist of some treasure. Why does Seth, who's several years older by this point, still want treasure so much? Dunno, he's a dumb boy haha don't you get it? He's dumb. Why does he decide to bring along his cousin, who will probably spill the beans to his grandfather even if everything went perfectly? Dunno, he's a wittle bit stuwpid. Why is Seth's cousin a jerk? Dunno, mean cousin haha.

I'm not impressed with how all of the nuance of Fablehaven got drained out of this book. It's almost there in the end, but this one in particular feels like Mull just setting up a lot of events to happen so that he can write more books. Here's a little dude who solved the maze for you. Now you're stuck being a dragon caretaker, because this series deals with dragons. Bracken is gone because of course he needs to be. And there's two family members who, as of yet, do nothing aside from be there at the beginning and end.

This book was ok. The dialogue was clunky at places. If I didn't have some hopes for the rest of the series, it would be even lower. All in all, it'd better pick up from here, because this doesn't even respect the source material that's made by the same author.

This is a book which provides anecdotes as to why focusing is good. It then explains how to focus. This is cool, but not worth the time it takes to read it. It's a snack masquerading as a three-course meal, and while the snack isn't a half bad snack, it's simply not the same as the meal you expected.

Good message, bad page count. Like most Newport books, the content to page ratio is frustratingly low.

Eh.

I felt like my ~2 hours reading this could've been better spent. Maybe once I'm actually in college I'll think better of it.

I love how anti-India this book is.

I... really liked this more the first time I read it. I can't place it - it's a great book. But it's not excellent like it once was.

I love how much of a man's book this is. It's just a work of epic bro-ship in exploration and tribal warfare. While I picked it up for the dinosaurs, I now return to it for the humor and nuance of the life lessons that are sometimes left to the discretion of the reader.

This is where this series gets cool.

American Psycho, but an actual nuanced take, and a book. An interesting observation that needs to steep before I can pass judgement.

Not the Billy Joel song. Everyone knew his name. Not much stranger. 3/5

This would be the ideal comfort food of reading. I remember it being longer, but that was probably an aspect of its audiobook rendition.

This book perfectly illustrates what I love about math. It also makes me want to rank A Mathematician's Lament worse, since this is basically the same thing sans rampant complaining, and with a fascinating concept every chapter. Lament gave me some ideas, but Joy of X actually illustrated how amazing they could really be.

This is precisely my kind of fiction. There's no consistent characters, which makes me more interested in each one as they come up, and more fascinated by their respective scenes and ideas. Not everything makes sense, but this is the kind of book where I'm rather ok with that. This is supposed to be cautionary and unsettling, and it does a good job of being all of that. I'm not sure if this is old enough to be considered a classic, but if it is, it has become one of my favorite works of classic literature.