Timo

You got me there Mr. King. I haven't expected the last and shortest story of “Different Seasons”, to have such an ending. It's really different than the other 3.

I really enjoyed the feeling of this story. It gave me some kind of coziness. A library with a huge chimney, a cold and snowy city...awesome. It leaves me with the longing to visit the club again. To hear more stories.

Jesus. What was that?

I appreciate darker stories centering around social backgrounds that I don't have experience with. I like to be thrown into lives that are so different than mine, and into places that I will probably never visit. It helps me broaden my horizon and appreciate the live I'm able to live.

Jesus Saves gave me exactly this. Taking place in the outskirts of U.S cities, where poverty, drugs and hopelessness rules the day, it really showed me a way of living I've never really thought about before. The descriptions of trash filled parking lots and run down mall strips is really graphic and helps you to be drawn into the world.

The characters though, didn't made me feel for them. Yes their lives are hard, but nothing that happened really made me hope for or suffer with them.

I must admit, the first few chapters from the viewpoint of the young kidnapped girl were brilliant. Her way of trying to deal with the circumstances by fleeing into fantasy worlds and imagining the smallest details outside of the room she's kept in, were very very well written. But instead of limiting those scenes to a few chapters, the author did it over and over again. It really got old for me, and hindered my sympathy.

I also really appreciate short, abrupt and non happy endings. But this was just...what? There was no real connection between everything, and it all felt out of place.

All in all, a partly well written book with graphic descriptions of it's world ,but sadly for the most part a tedious and confusing mess of stories with no beginning and no end.

Ready Player One is fun. That's the one simple word I could find after finishing this. If you have the slightest interest in video games and/or nostalgic pop culture you will probably have fun too. Yes, sometimes the references are a bit too much, but not enough to put me off.

The book paints a dark future that felt eerily real. Nearly all of what's left of humanity is immersed into the most complex virtual world you can imagine. And I can easily see myself among them. The possibilitys are endless.

This was a really interesting book. The development of the characters (especially the main character) is awesome. How fast the mindset can change from happy and excited to pure horror is really relatable. That's what makes this book so scary. You can almost feel the physical pain that they are going through.

It's starts pretty slow and gets a bit dull in the middle though.

A Monster Calls is a short book filled with clever elements that will make you turn page after page in no time. I really enjoyed the pacing of the story, with its short chapters and beautifully subtle chapter names.

The whole book feels kind of subtle, because no one ever speaks openly about what is happening until the very end. And that ending comes so abruptly and with full force, that I needed a few minutes to comprehend it all. Of course I, and everybody in the book knew what was going to happen, but I felt just like Conor, still hoping and not accepting till the end.

Although the story is centered around a young boy, there is still enough to take away at an older age.

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”

Thankfully I never had to go through something like this in my life, but everything still felt eerily real. The clinging on ones childish naivety, the fear and hate of getting ignored for something you have no control over and the sheer heaviness of it all at such a young age.

All of this combined helped A Monster Calls to be remembered.

Well well Franco...For me you come around as a cool person. I enjoy your movies and even your art. But it really isn't necessary to try out ALL forms of art. I don't really know what you're trying to say with these short stories, and I stopped trying to find deeper meaning really fast. All stories are pretty much the same with no outcome. This is easily the worst part. Some start pretty decent and left me thinking “hey this could be something”, but they all end abruptly with no real outcome or closure whatsoever. Although the weird writing style gets slightly better half way through, it still doesn't safe it. I would have tossed this if it wasn't so short. Save your time.

I wish I could give this more stars. What a powerful and terrifying book. Terrifying because it was real. Terrifying because stuff like this is still happening around the world to some point. It shows how evil and bad mankind was in the course of history and still is today. But it also never stops to show the different side. Love and care within people, even in the darkest of all hours. An important story.

This was my first choice while trying to get into comic books. As a Stephen King fan I was really interested to see a story of his in comic format. And yes, the story is fresh and filled with emotions, character depth and of course, gore and blood.

As a humble novice with comic books I can't compare or make an in depth look at the artwork so I won't try. But I found it fittingly gritty and detailed. The colors are kept pretty dark.

Turns out though, even if this story is fresh and outside of the mainstream, Vampires still aren't my thing. I'm not interested enough to see what else awaits.

I really like the bound book with it's embedded cover and the original scripts at the end were very interesting.

Brandon Sanderson managed to hook me once again. The Well of Ascension has the perk of being the second book in a trilogy. Which means that we're already introduced to the characters, the state of the world, the magic system and everything else we need to know. So instead of using the pages to introduce us to those things, the 2nd book can jump straight into the action. And Sanderson doesn't use this perk very well.

Yes, this one has way more action than the 1st and there is even a huge battle for the city, but it could've been so much more. Sanderson likes to fill pages after pages with conversations, when you just want action.

I also thought that there was way too much hand holding. Often there are hints about interesting things lore wise, and just as you finished to piece together the pieces and getting that nice AHA! effect, Sanderson destroys it by explaining every little detail. I think he fears we will miss something, or thinks we cannot form thoughts on our own.

But all this is bitching on a high standard, because despite of those small things that bugged me, The Well of Ascension -just like The Final Empire- is one hell of a ride. Most of the long conversations are adding depth to the characters, the magic system is still fresh and fast paced and the world with it's lore is full of interesting cultures and species.

The ending sure is twisted and open enough, to have peaked my interest to read the 3rd and last installment. But I guess I would have done it either way, just to see where those likable characters end up.

Freaking fantastic!!

I guess there's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said about this masterpiece.

The only epic fantasy I knew about -but never read- was Lord Of The Rings. This was the first time I tried one. And damn, this is what reading is all about. The world that Sanderson has build here is just fantastic. He introduces a breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre, with the exclusion of typical magic. Sanderson gives birth to “Allomancy”, a power that let people “burn” metals after swallowing them. I won't go in detail here, just know that it's really fresh and awesome.

This first book is so big, complex and rounded in itself, that just the thought of it being just the beginning of a trilogy is stunning. You've been introduced to the world and its state, and been giving enough of open questions to peak the interest in reading it all.

I may be a bit biased because I've listened to the Graphic Audio audiobook version of this for the most part (which was really really awesome), but for me this book had it all.

A psychologically troubled women returns to her dysfunctional small hometown, where she tries to uncover the story behind the abduction and brutal killing of two girls. And it's as bad as it sounds.

After reading and loving “Gone Girl”, this is my second novel of Gillian Flynn I started. And one thing's for sure: This women is a master in creating really really messed up characters. I don't know what she must have been through to come up with such terrible people, but I love it.

Sharp Objects it's a downward spiral of terrible people doing terrible things in a terrible town. Spending the few weeks alongside Camille in her hometown was no holiday. The overall atmosphere is intense and oppressive. There's wealth, poverty, broken families, broken feelings, alcohol, really messed up little kids, unhealthy sex as a coping mechanism and a lot of failure. It's a dissection of small towns that are somewhat been halted in time.

I really enjoyed my time with Sharp Objects (as much as you can enjoy such depressive books), but sometimes I just couldn't understand the reason behind stuff that Camille did and didn't do. I wanted to shout at her more than a few times to grow up. Yes, you had a troubled life, but that doesn't mean you have to take this shit from a 12 year old Lolita.

A scary and depressive book. If you're sick of books full of unrealistic love and happiness, go on, Sharp objects is for you. I for one, need something full of unrealistic love and happiness now.

How much can you endure before you have to become the devil?

This one hit me hard. What started as a fun ride into the mind of strangers, quickly got dark with the look back into childhood. Relations between characters felt so real it really hurt.The breakup between Ig and Merrin hit me especially hard, because it felt so goddamm real. As someone in exact the same relationship as theirs, I knew those thoughts and would've said the same things... I rarely read books, in which I hate a character that much and in which conversations feel so real.

We slowly learn what happens to Ig, before there's no other way than to become the devil. And trust me, those are bad things.

Horns spoke to me on a personal level many times, and for this it deserves five stars.

Groundhog Day meets war and scifi. What sounds like a real awesome story left me bored.

Although the story is fresh, and the small scifi elements really catched my interest, something about the execution bored me.

Somewhere after the middle I just didn't care anymore, and only pushed through to the end because it isn't very big.

All in all a bit weaker than the first. I liked the first half the most. All the consequences they have to face after what they did, and the first signs of the uprisings were good written. Although the games were much more interesting setting wise this time, I felt a bit bored during them. The characters evolved pretty good, and the ending was good enough for me to want to know how this all ends.

After reading and loving “The Knife Of Never Letting Go”, and letting this trilogy rest for a year, I wanted to return to New World to see what's happening next.

The book starts right after the abrupt but awesome ending of the first. Everything seems lost and without hope. Good premise, right? Yeah, but it still left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Everything that I loved about the first book -the interesting narrative, the powerful characters, the scifi elements...- is falling flat here.

“The Ask And The Answer” in its whole, is a book about dictatorship, and all the problems that come with it. Still very good written (I'm beginning to love Patrick Ness's writing style), but nothing new and interesting. There's the dictator with his brainwashed army, the few citizens that rise against him and all the fighting and cruelty that naturally comes with this constellation.

The “Noise” that made the first book so interesting in the first place, is just a byproduct. The only interesting change was the mayors ability to use it as a weapon. But even that fell short. I hope this gets more fleshed out in the final book.

But then again, I'm not really sure if I'll read the last one.
The ending felt way too forced. Like Ness wanted to create the most interesting cliffhanger that he could, and ruined it. There's just so much happening at once all of a sudden, that even a fictional story like this feels unbelievable.

Though mostly good written and with a nice pace, I just didn't care for the characters anymore. Not as I did in the first book.

Poorly written thriller in the „The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window“ subgenre, about a woman on the run after she kills her husband.

It's full of clichés, boring characters and uninteresting twists. It's a quick read, but I still forced myself to finish the last 40%. But not without a lot of eye rolling.

„Sea of Tranquility“ is a relatively short book that touches on such topics as time travel, or the theory that life is just a simulation.

Because it is so short it needs to move pretty fast to cover those ideas, and this is where it fell flat for me. There are too many characters being introduced too fast for any real character development, which in turn kept me from having any connection with those characters.

There was also a lot of talk about a pandemic, which felt kind of forced in just so that the author can write down her thoughts during COVID-19.

It was a easy and fast read and the writing style is pretty, but all in all the story didn't hold my interest.