Travis West
I wanted to love this book. The author is a friend of a friend. It started off so strong, but faded in the second third, and rushed an unsatisfying ending. He writes so well, but needs an editor keeping him on track.
Find things you love, get rid of the things you don't, edit and rearrange.
No big revelations there.
Interspersed with the bunkum there are some interesting factual tidbits of Tulsa's history.
Couldn't make it past the introduction. Baby boomers cannot seem to ever stop congratulating themselves for being born in a specific date range.
I shouldn't read short stories back to back to back. It's like making a meal of too rich appetizers.
What a charming book! I can't believe I made it this far without having ever read it. Belongs in the pantheon of absurdist children's literature alongside the books of Lewis Carroll, L Frank Baum, Edward Gorey, and A A Milne. The humor is very sophisticated and the author never talks down to his young reader (or this old one).
Pretty obvious advice wrapped in a hokey made-up conversations format. I'll save you a couple of hours: “Don't get in a rut.”
Yes, we understand that style guides are inconsistent, but you aren't helping things.
Picked it up at the used book store mainly as a Halloween decoration. The book itself is a shovelware history of vampires in myth, movies, books, and TV.
A very well-written book on a subject that I was only marginally interested in. It seems that if you want something to flourish, the US government should declare war on it: poverty, drugs, terror, and unexpectedly, coyotes.
I resent this book (and its author) for wasting my time. I should have abandoned it much, much earlier. Absolutely horrendous.
Frustrating. Flashes of brilliance, but mainly actions with no consistent motivation.
So over the top with lusty monks, cruel nuns, poison plots, debauchery, rape, murder, torch carrying mobs, Inquisition torture, deals with the Devil. It is hard to believe that this book was written in 1796. Like nothing I've read before. It outdoes Frankenstein in its use of Gothic elements. It would have been 5 stars but there are quite a few long passages that drag on before returning us to the exquisite depravity.
Plenty of twists to this one. Nick and Amy are not the kind of people you want to be friends with, but you'll definitely enjoy getting to know them.
Typical Business 1.0 good-old-boy network “what can you do for me?” advice. If this guy asked me to lunch, I'd be immediately suspicious of his motives.
Sequels never live up to the original. “Jabberwocky” and “The Walrus and the Carpenter” are the best bits. Looking Glass has twice the manic nervousness and half the charm of Wonderland.
Interesting look at how great artists intuit the functions of the brain, frequently before scientists discover them.
At times the theme seems to be about the futility of fighting your true nature, but then, no. Haig chickens out. What's more lame than glittery vampires? Suburban, middle-class vampires fighting to maintain the status quo.
Way too many coincidences, and a conspiracy that is too far reaching. I think I'm already finished with all of the Reacher books I'm going to read.
This book is not aging well. Shirky takes a starry-eyed optimistic view of the “cognitive surplus.” He fails to even try to anticipate the downsides, such as online hate groups or /r/_the_donald.
I had a hard time getting into this book because each chapter felt like a short story involving new characters that only obliquely reference previous characters. By the time I was halfway through drawing a diagram of the characters' interconnectedness, I was in love with this book. By the end,I'd have happily had it continue to introduce and connect many others' stories. I've never read anything like it.
On the surface, this is supposed to be a humorous memoir. This book is instead a veiled, but still horrifying account of the sexual harassment and abuse she's encountered. And it was written EIGHT YEARS AGO! I wish she'd named names (but totally understand why she didn't at that time). Turns out Brett Ratner is the masturbatory shrimp eater. Google it. In light of the #metoo movement, I hope she feels empowered to say more.
Grann is a talented investigative journalist, and Killers of the Flower Moon was my favorite nonfiction book of 2017, but this collection of his magazine writing is disjointed. The topics range from the titular Sherlock Holmes obsessive to 9/11 firefighters to corrupt Ohio politicians to CIA sponsored terrorists.
Plus, the stories are dated now. It's a bit like listening to a podcast series that's over a decade old.