Travis West
A Faustian bargain AND a supernatural carnival? Should be a can't miss combination... but it's not.
One of the weirdest, best-written books I've experienced. In text form, the combination of high vocabulary and low slang was too opaque for me, but the excellent audiobook narrator brought to life the music of Mieville's language. Be warned though, it's very wierd, like a cocktail of Gaiman, Lovecraft, and Carroll.
This should be titled THE SURGICAL CHECKLIST MANIFESTO. I get that the author is a surgeon, but about the only other example of checklist usage is from the early days of aviation. He seems to regard construction project management Gantt chart as being a great example of a checklist process, but that's a stretch. There is no attempt to show transference to other areas or regularly recurring processes. I know that an entire book could be written on checklists just in technology jobs. This may be a good book for the right audience, but it has been mis-marketed to business readers in general.
The story itself was pretty good. I like the idea of transplanting the fae and woodland creatures to America and incorporating Celtic legends via the the diaspora of Europe. Feist seems to fancy himself in the vein of John Fowles, who he even name checks at one point, but he comes up short.
There's a good, maybe great, book in here somewhere, but an editor would need to carve out 100+ pages of it first. The whole Gabbie/Jack romance was superfluous. In fact, Gabbie, the hot rich single daughter from the first marriage could be completely removed. She seems to exist only for one scene of SA, then she fades into the background. I get that it was written in the 1980s, but that's my country of origin. It would have been nonsense even back then.
There's a lot of good information here, but it's mostly buried in dry, academic description of their statistical methodology. A good editor could improve this book immensely.
IDIOT AMERICA shares much of the same premise as Kurt Andersen's FANTASYLAND, but documents the insanity is in a more organized, less frenzied way. Sadly, it concludes in 2009. I'd really like to hear Pierce's thoughts on how things have gotten so much worse since then.
No one should be allowed to publish essays about fatherhood until their children are grown.
Kindred gets lumped into SF because of its quantum leap/time travel premise, but this novel belongs in the canon of great African-American literature... no, great American literature. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a deeper understanding of America's shameful history of slavery.
I should have abandoned as soon as I realized it was a convenient amnesia plot. Huge sections of info dump world building. Not much else.
Take ASSASSINATION VACATION, remove the interesting parts and add pathetic navel-gazing.
If you want to become a person who doesn't get anything done despite constantly being busy organizing your “system,” have I got a book for you.
Wow! I'm so glad I've met the Pegottys, the Micawbers, Betsey Trotwood, Mr. Dick... There are so many great characters. I have always had the misconception that David Copperfield was going to be a dry read. Not so at all! I absolutely love this book.
This book is worthless if you aren't already a fan of their podcast. There's some interesting information, but it's not worth slogging through their personal anecdotes to get to. Learning who wore which football jersey to a meet-up is not as compelling as they think it is.
I've never seen most of the movies Tarantino references, but I enjoy the way he talks about them.
Rambling, though mostly interesting, history of New Orleans as told through the origins of its street names.
Imagine Circe by Madeline Miller crossed with Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. This is the best retelling of the Norse myths I've ever read.
Ostensibly this memoir is about the author building a a cedar-strip canoe to deal with the grief of his father's death, but it's really about the psychic damage caused by “you'll never be man enough” masculinity and dogmatic religion.
Few people can write witty dialogue as well as Wilde. Unfortunately, there were some really slow parts that were basically just lists of books, relatives, or people that Dorian encountered. I'd like to read more of Oscar Wilde's writing, though.
If you stumbled across this book in the 99-cent self-published section of the Kindle store, you'd say, “Hey, that wasn't bad.” BUT... if Lovecraft Country and Sewer, Gas, & Electric are among your favorite books, you'd say, “C'mon Ruff! You are so much better that this.” My current theory is that he wrote this in order to make his Oculus, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC tax-deductible. You know. Research.
War from the perspective of the elderly? Sounds interesting! Nope. As soon as they are put into young bodies, they might as well be the idiots in Starship Troopers.
