Tyler Kieft

So I was pretty excited to read this. I first came across it in The Atlantic magazine; there was an article with glowing praise for this fantasy novel set in Africa which wove in African mythological traditions. Now, looking back at that review, I think the author was glowing more about the symbolism of this novel being written, write now, than the actual book itself.

For this was an insufferable, intolerable read. At the beginning, I was willing to overlook the awful writing, because the plot seemed to be going somewhere. By the way, I don't automatically give YA novels a pass on writing. There are plenty of writers for young adults who can write at least quite good, if not great. As the book dragged on, though, it became clear that there just wasn't much here. It feels like it might have been rushed out? It almost seemed to get worse, more repetitive and haphazard the further you got.

The biggest problem with the book is the characterization - none of the characters were remotely interesting, and often their actions didn't make sense. None of the groundwork was put in to make us care about these people. In the first 50 pages of the novel, something tragic happens to one of the main characters, which becomes a rallying cry for her for the rest of the book. But it evokes no emotion in the reader, simply because we never got to know her before this. The novel rarely visits the past, rarely shows us why these characters became who they are now - it just drops us in the middle. And the way they are described is so damn repetitive! “The sea salt scent of her soul” must have shown up 100 times - what does that even mean?!? Using these lines so frequently, each character became reductive to a single thing - For Zelie - it's her home by the sea, for Amari, her friend Binta.

Don't even get me started on Inan. That boy does not make sense.

Now for the plot - it's boring, and unevenly paced. The three main characters are on a quest, one which they manage to fulfill surprisingly easy. There are very few twists and turns on the way to the end of the book - creating a reading experience where the stakes are minimal and, by the end of the book, you don't even care what happens.

Many reviewers have mentioned the magic - that's boring too, somehow! There are no rules, no explanation, no mystery. Any time we need something to move the plot along, magic does it. The young adults in this book don't even need training to use their powers!

I'm dropping this book in the nearest little free library I find and hoping to never encounter it again. Already I can barely remember what happened.

“Trust Me” is an exposé of the inner workings of the fast-paced, always-on, pageview-driven journalism that is practiced today by both blogs and the “mainstream” media. Holiday paints a picture of how news can be easily manipulated and outright fabricated by PR people or really just anyone looking to advance their view of the world. After representing many clients, most notably American Apparel and Tucker Max, he shares some of the unscrupulous methods he used to make sure he controlled what was written about them.

I enjoyed the book - it confirmed for me why I feel like I'm wasting time when I am reading blogs like Gawker or TechCrunch, and it gave a logical, temporal narrative to how media has arrived at the state it is in today. He paints a scary picture of a world where the accountability has been taken out of journalism entirely – bloggers report rumors, and the larger publications report what bloggers have written - without making any serious attempt to write a balanced piece or get both sides of the story. Definitely a book worth reading.

Especially interesting was his discussion of the evolution of today's newspapers, and his comparison of the journalistic environment today with the “yellow press” of the early 20th century.

But the book was not without its flaws. The most glaring is that the author was part of this deception for many years, even creating many of these tactics he shares. In a book that teaches you to question every source of news, his motivations for writing it are unclear. Is he really disgusted with the environment he has helped to create, as he says many times in the book? Or is he just looking to turn an exclusive, inside story into a quick buck? He disparages many bloggers and people he's met inside the book, leading me to wonder if he just got bit by the media monster one too many times and just wanted to lash out.

The book also feels like it was written very quickly. There are typos and editing errors, and it feels as if he's saying the same thing over and over with slightly different words. I think it could have been about half as long and made for a much tighter work.

The book also takes many of the tactics that it disparages in blogs. Holiday doesn't cover the other side of the story - there are some (few) blogs and news outlets on the web that are doing great work. He spends a bit of time discussing the New York Times and other reputable papers, but he doesn't really talk about any blogs that are working, only the worst offenders of the pageview-driven journalism. He also breaks his narrative up into short, digestible segments of a page to a page and a half, giving him more opportunity to repeat himself and less opportunity to develop truly deep thoughts.

Even with the flaws though, this is definitely a worthwhile read. Ryan is clearly a very smart guy and I believe his description is accurate. This book will open up your eyes to the fact that the economic model of online media is totally at odds with the purpose of journalism.

Surprised at how much I enjoyed this, I couldn't put it down. Although slightly predictable, with a few plot holes, overall it's well-written. I really connected with the main character, Michael, and the impossible position he was trapped in. The rest of the family is not quite as intricately rendered - it would have been interesting to understand more of the mother's back story, for instance. I loved how the horrifying truth was slowly revealed. And although I guessed part of it, I didn't get the whole thing, and the reveal was no less satisfying. Definitely looking forward to reading Seed!

So let me save you the time...this is basically a terrible, curse-laden, poorly-written version of Ender's Game. As is usual with these kinds of books, it moves along at a brisk pace, and the writing draws you in - I read most of the book in a single day. I was caught up in the story and wanted to find out what happened, but I got nothing else from the writing.

The book just starts - WHAM - and throws you into the action. This would be a great tactic, except the author failed to actually make me care about the situation or the characters, and so it just felt abrupt and jarring. The timing was off, the pace accelerated too fast.

Interestingly enough, the most poorly-written scenes in the book were the battle scenes. They were short, lifeless, and much more ‘tell' than ‘show'. You could almost feel the author's boredom coming through the writing - I wouldn't be surprised if they were his least favorite scenes to write.

Read this book if you like: - As many smart-aleck wink wink references to 80's pop culture as possible, no matter how tangential the storyline - Characters that didn't feel like real people. Emotional depth on the level of Hallmark Channel movies. Stilted dialogue - Plot holes Why couldn't they shut the drone launch tunnel security door and just destroy Zack's drone and the enemy ship? It would have resulted in the loss of a single unmanned drone.... - Amateur writing. It was repetitive: characters kept describing the situation they were in over and over, perhaps for dramatic effect. It was also not as tight as a book like, say, Ender's Game. Zack is described as having a temper, and we see him get in a fight at the beginning of the book, similar to Ender. However, Ender's anger is revealed to be something profound - he has just enough of it, in combination with deep care and love, which makes him the only possible candidate to fight the aliens. Zack's temper just makes him a dick to his dad and makes him want to shoot as many aliens as possible. Yuck - Unbridled, over the top cursing.

One thing I liked about this book: The ending was seriously cool. I'm not sure if it was original (probably not) but it was the only part of the book that really made me think.

Tough book to read - very dense, lots of characters. I only got into this once I started allotting much more time to my reading sessions. I liked it by the end, but didn't love it. The writing style was problematic for me, I never really got used to Cromwell being “He” and would constantly need to re-read passages realizing I had interpreted them as coming from the wrong character. I also wish I had been a little bit more familiar with this period of British history before reading. I've heard that the next book in the series is better; I guess the fact that I want to read it is a sign that this captured my interest somewhat.

Great book, I doubt I'll ever look at the world the same way again after reading it. I learned so much about the different regions of the world, poverty, prosperity, economics, politics, and history, and more importantly, a framework for thinking about and evaluating governments and nations.

There are flaws, though. The book is too long, and fairly dry. The authors stick single-mindedly to their hypothesis, rather than giving credence to other factors (is history ever determined by a single facet of life?)

Still, definitely worth reading and I have no doubt that my worldview is very much better informed for it.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to review this one right after I read it, so it's a bit cloudy at this point.

I really liked this book. The pacing is slow and deliberate, which didn't put me off. I was a little annoyed by the medieval-style language, particularly the main character's use of the word “princess” to address his wife over...and over...and over.

But otherwise, I have a lot of praise. The ending was haunting: a slow, emotional climax of melancholy rather than action.

I suspect I'll remember the meditations in here for a while: the meaning and usefulness of memory, of forgetting, and the possible futility of both in the face of certain death for us all.

First Ann Patchett book I've ever read. I picked this up after she came to my university and spoke about the book for alumni weekend last fall. Her prose is good but not remarkable, not quite up there with the titans of the English language. It's an easy, engrossing read, though, for which I was appreciative. The structure reminded me a lot of John Irving, an older narrator looking back on his life, like Owen Meany. At first I thought the sections where he was a young boy sounded unrealistic, but if you understand that he's an old man writing, looking back, they are more forgivable.

I generally liked the book. The strength was the characters, they are all quite complex and it's interesting to try to judge them, to see if their motives and actions hold up. One of the most interesting things was realizing, as the book went on, that the narrator is not necessarily a great person, even though we're hearing the story from his point of view. And trying to unravel him and judge him through his words is interesting. Of course, this is just one more demonstration of the outcome of the pain his family inflicted upon them.

I thought the third act felt more tedious than the other two, almost directionless. Would have been 4 stars otherwise. Definitely worth a read!

This may be the most intimate, the most personal novel I've ever read in my life. Emotional intimacy, literary intimacy. I cannot begin to describe how much I connect with this book, this story, these characters, the writing - almost everything here feels like it was drawn straight from the tapestry of my deepest memories, feelings, desires. Things I didn't even think it was possible to write in words.

Above all, this is a book about time and how precious it is, how you will never get it back and it should never be squandered. And time's non-linearity: a few months, a week, or just one moment can define and capture a life. In that sense, it is universal.

I wonder what it would have been like to read this before watching the movie. I'm not sad I experienced the movie first, just curious. I was worried the book would ruin the movie for me, but they complement each other. I've never seen a movie capture the essence of a book so well. The acting was tremendous - in that looks and facial expressions were able to communicate the rich inner monologue of the novel. If anything, I actually think the movie was stronger than the book. They diverge at the end; and the movie is a tighter story. The only part of the novel I didn't love was the Rome scene, but I appreciated the epilogue that wasn't in the movie.

Many things became more apparent, but the most meaningful to me is the title “Call Me By Your Name”, becomes so much deeper when you read the book. It's not just about a name, Elio describes himself and Oliver becoming so close, sharing everything, that they literally became each other.

The ending is so cutting - the pain, the regret, that never really went away. Regret that life that is not endless and that decisions matter. “If not later, when?”

Wow. Honestly, I'm not that familiar with the genre, but I loved this book. Tore through it in under a week. Epic storyline, beautifully drawn, moments that made me literally gasp or laugh out loud, it was great start to finish. Maybe I should start reading more comics / graphic novels? They are such a full experience for the senses.

A friend recommended this to me, and I found it very helpful. It's probably not the last word on the subject, but it's a great overview of romantic attachment theory. A few friends have talked to me about the basics of the theory over the past few years, but it was good to finally read the book. I feel much better-equipped now to understand my own way of relating to others, and also to not assume fault when interacting with people who may not be capable of developing intimacy. Anyway - would definitely recommend to all singles out there, lol

It was good, especially the first part of the book. If I hadn't worked at Facebook, I'd probably have rated it four or five stars, but so much of this I've already learned. And what I was hoping to get out of the book, which was the sections about senior management, she didn't really cover the layers of positions in upper management at large companies (because she's writing about smaller companies and she doesn't have the experience). It went from managing managers straight to CTO. Also, some parts of the book felt like a collection of experiences, rather than a coherent narrative, it kinda jumped around.

Reading this was ... insane. 1000 pages, a follow up to one of the most exciting books I ever read, and it was .... deflating. Patrick Rothfuss is an incredible storyteller, he can make any scene sing. However it's pretty clear at this point he has no plan for where he's headed with this trilogy. This installment did not move the larger plot along at all. The second half was quite ... overweight, it needed editing badly, I had to push through. No wonder the third book is a ghost so far, I bet he has no clue how to wrap this up. It's incredible that I could read 1000 pages and like it a lot, even given the larger construction flaws. It's just nice to read his stories within the bigger story. But the next book has a huge weight to carry now.

This was quite a long slog. Parts were very interesting, other parts were more outdated. I was hoping to get more out of this book than I actually did.

That being said, this is an incredible book given the time at which it was written. Parts are perfectly applicable to our modern world, even after more than 700 years. I had no idea that some of these scholarly disciplines were so advanced in the 1300's.

Hrm, this was good, another really quick read (blasted through all 500 pages while on my vacation in Norway). But, having just finished “The Silkworm”, I would rate this slightly lower, maybe 3.5 stars. Whereas the last book focused mostly on the case, this one focused mostly on Robin and Strike, their back stories and their relationship. I'm not sure if that was a good thing or not. While I liked learning more about them, I thought it came at the expense of the interestingness of the case. Plus, the writing felt really forced. The characters kept alluding to their supposed feelings for each other as asides, which didn't fit in with the rest of the storyline, it felt abrupt like it was shoved in there after the fact.

Also, I felt the “case” (if you can call it that) was less interesting in this novel. We didn't get to meet any of the suspects in person until halfway through the book or more, which really weakened the impact. Also, because of the nature of the case and the plot, all three of the suspects were similar in build and personality, which made it hard to keep them apart in my mind.

The novel ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, excited to see where the next one heads! It's been a while since I've read two books of a series back to back, it felt good!

For how gripping and fast-paced “Devil in the White City” was, this book was a struggle to get through. Such an interesting time in history - the rise of Hitler, Nazism, and the Third Reich - seen through an incredibly boring lens. I applaud Erik Larson for his ambition in writing this book - it is obviously exhaustingly researched, and the perspective is unique - but at the end it kind of fell flat for me.

The main reason for the book's failure is that he tried to base it too much on his protagonists - the American ambassador in Germany in the early 1930's, and his daughter. He did this, presumably, because he had a ton of source material from them - they both kept a journal, and in addition he had the ambassador's personal and government communication. We learn almost nothing about the ambassador's wife or son, since they did not keep detailed records of their time in Germany.

Both the ambassador and his daughter are weak characters. He's just not that interesting - a “quiet scholar” type, ridiculed within the foreign service establishment, and she is quite naive, interested in mostly keeping up romantic liasons in the city. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to detailing these romantic exploits, which gets tedious to read after a while. Yes - she was involved with prominent political and government figures, but these sections of the book read like a childish diary. Also, the combination of writing about both at the same time doesn't make too much sense - at times it felt like I was reading two different novels. (But this is a tactic Larson likes to use, as you would know if you read “Devil in the White City”).

The tedium of reading this book was also due to the overabundance of minor characters mentioned as part of the story. Couldn't Larson have edited some of these people out? Surely it doesn't make sense to mention - every - single - person - the family came in contact with.

There were parts of the book that were very interesting, and it was definitely a perspective on Nazi Germany that I had never encountered, but ultimately the book was crushed by its own weight.

We as humans have a short attention span, and an even shorter memory for the past. We tend to view our current state as inevitable, and have trouble remembering that things weren't always the way they are now. In fact, as recently as 200 years ago, people lived markedly different lives supported by different social structures, to say nothing of 1000, 2000, or 10000 years ago. Harari shows us the long arc of the species, from its emergence as hunter gatherers in Africa, winning out over other Homo- species, through the development of shared consciousness “The Cognitive Revolution”, the beginnings of sedentary lifestyle via agriculture, and the past 500 years of scientific, economic and technological progress. He refuses to use conventional tropes to describe Homo Sapiens and its societies, forcing the reader to look at humans' place in the world with fresh eyes. What has our species accomplished in the past 70,000 years? Is the world better off? Are we better off? These are the questions Harari strives to answer. The book is not without its flaws; much of it is uncited and it's sometimes difficult to tell fact from opinion. But I can think of few books I've read in the last five years that have changed my view of the world as much as this one.

Read the last 80% of this book in a single afternoon. It was overall a quick, compelling read, but I only award it 4 stars because it felt rough at times, like it had been unedited.

This book is being promoted and reviewed as one explanation for Trump's popularity this election cycle. It is not that, at least not directly. It is a simply-narrated memoir of Vance's 30 years growing up and ultimately “escaping” his Appalachian hillbilly origins. I say escaping in quotes because one never really can escape one's past - and Vance touches on this fact (reminding me of the biography of Robert Peace I read earlier this year). Along with the very real presence of a drug-addict mother who is still in his life, the constant disruptions in his childhood left him with very real emotional trauma and overdeveloped stress reactions to situations that other people would handle calmly.

Again, this is not a book about the presidential race or Donald Trump, but rather a depiction of the cultural, social, and economic problems facing a certain group of working-class whites in our country today, which might help us understand the current political landscape. Vance weaves in statistics gleaned from social science research throughout his writing, but the book succeeds on the strength of its narrative. He writes about his family members in a very nuanced way that shows maturity - no one is either completely a hero or a villain.

Surprisingly, the best parts of the book are his grandparents - his Mamaw and Papaw. It's not the stories of the craziness and chaos of the world he grew up in that will stick with me, but rather the efforts of two far-from-perfect individuals to provide a safe space for his life and set him on a track to rise above the situation of his family.

The lessons in the book resist easy government policy fixes. Vance himself doesn't spend many pages trying to offer solutions, and he admits that he doesn't have many ideas. He skewers liberals for wanting to provide more welfare, more social support, saying that many of the people he met had plenty of opportunity to participate in the economy but chose instead to quit their jobs and blame Obama. One anecdote that really stuck with me is a young Vance, looking at the line-item on his taxes remarking that he was forced by the government to buy his neighbor T-Bone steaks via welfare when he himself would never have spent money on that. He also rips the right for not encouraging people to engage with society - for stirring up broad cultural anger without directing attention at anything positive. He laments the lack of an American role model in society for his kind of people - Barack Obama is too much a product of the elite to connect with these people in the way that Bill Clinton or George Bush did, and there are no astronauts or military leaders like in decades past. Our society now worships “elites”, and this has left the working class feeling like the communal fabric is coming apart. (This is the setup for Trump - a charismatic, strong leader preaching old-school values)

The book could have been tightened up a bit. There were a number times Vance introduced an idea and never followed up on it, dropping themes and threads that seemed like they would be interesting. I wish there had been a more consistent direction to the book - it felt like the only thing tying the whole memoir together was the linear passage of time. Still, a great read and a great reminder of how insulating it can be to grow up a member of the coastal elite and how easy it is to dismiss whole classes of people whom you don't even know.