John
I'm not a morning person and I found myself getting up every day at 6 am - in the middle of December - so that I could read as much of this book as possible before leaving for work at 8. I can't recommend this book highly enough. I'm trying to figure out who specifically I would recommend it for and I'm pretty sure that the only people I wouldn't recommend it to are the kinds of people who never enjoy fiction in any form and even they might find something to love here.
a really interesting encapsulation of scientific / medical progress from medieval times to the 1930s
Interesting, but slow. I definitely wouldn't have picked it up if I wasn't fascinated with the Manhattan waterfront to start with, and the memoir-y parts don't interest me at all.
maybe less fun if you haven't read bone clocks but I think it would probably stand alone
I feel like everything gets four stars lately - but I haven't read a short story anthology as gripping as this one in a while. It took the easiest routes to my heart: crime, variety, and a New Jersey backdrop.
It's a little frustrating not knowing who to root for (I think the right answer is no one) but similar to The Sound and the Fury, there were scenes that evoked painfully realistic desperation and hopelessness and characters who I wanted to reach into the pages and throttle. I've only read this, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, and I would place this one somewhere in the middle in terms of quality.
i read this 1.5 times, because i approached it for the first 50 pages as a standard self-help book and was looking for bolded phrases and Action Items and end-of-chapter exercises. it isn't that, but if you read it slowly and thoughtfully (it's only 100 pages) and, if you're like me, with a pen and paper in hand, there are some really valuable insights in here.
2.75 average? I loved this story! I thought Jonathan Lethem wrote with an impressive grasp of independent alternative rock and (some overlap) the more pretentious niches of conceptual art. I also like that the protagonists occasionally made themselves difficult to like and that some of the initially repellent characters wound up sympathetic and near-endearing. Read this!
Excellent except that the ending underwhelmed me. It's possible that there was something to get that I just missed, but it seemed like he had hit some sort of predefined page limit and was like “Well, time to wrap it up.”
the gigantic, confrontational appendix turns the entire thing into a bizarre libertarian polemic.
The story is short but dense (in the best possible way). Distressing how well Magdalena Tulli writes. Read with a pen in hand.
I made the mistake of opening this book on a Friday evening while waiting for someone else to get out of work. I was two hours late and left the party early to go home and finish it. Very funny but never glib.
If you're a creator feeling defeated or fatalistic about receiving any sort of financial compensation for your work, this is a great book to read. It doesn't paint too rosy a picture, but it effectively deflates a lot of the easy arguments for piracy, proposes a reasonable framework for copyright/anti-piracy efforts going forward, and offers promising evidence for a brighter future. My only complaint was the 50-60% of the book written in tiny italics - I like to read in dimly-lit restaurants.
The history is fascinating and exhaustive and the author has done a ton of research, but some of the first-person asides dragged the book down and some of the historical details felt like they were one or two edits shy of being publishable (e.g. redundant sentences next to each other, some paragraphs that were chock full of good info but meandered.).
if you're interested in the history of the area this is a great book to own and have on your shelf for reference. it does not particularly reward a start-to-finish read.
this book isn't easily laid out for reference purposes but it's a very interesting read - the chapters focus on historical anecdotes, stories, and reports surrounding Edinburgh's missing lochs.
also, oddly, the crown jewel is the appendix, which makes up half the book and spends A TON of time talking about the (to me) fascinating history of waterways, lochs, and wells in Edinburgh.
this book reads like it was written pretty fast (the lack of copyediting actually interferes w/ readability at some points). it is as much elliott smith biography as i (a decently-familiar listener) needed to read, but i imagine its ambiguity, haste, lack of key interviewees, and tendency to hand over entire chapters to a single ‘friend''s verbatim recollections would enrage a more devoted fan.