Jason
An over the top thriller that reads like a Michael Bay action movie, which is fine because sometimes you just need a popcorn read/listen. I found the narrator to be fine. According to Reddit and Google, Kyle McCarley is a voice actor for animes and it shows in how he read Station Breaker. It was fine for the most part, but during the intense action scenes, he'd make the main character sound like an anime character and I found that distracting.
My only chief complaint with the book overall was the ending in that there isn't one and instead Station Breaker is set up so that it leads directly into the second book in the series, Orbital. Not giving this book a proper ending for the sake of trying to get readers to jump to the next book is the reason why Station Breaker only gets three stars from me.
I don't even know where or how to review this. The photo of Czesława Kwoka on the cover breaks my heart every time I see it. She looks so tiny. The fact that her and so many other children were denied the right to grow up and grow old because of unfathomable evil and cruelty fills me with so much anger despair. If Hell exists, a brand new circle surely had to be added to it just for the Nazis.
Fuck fascism. Fuck Nazis.
The story and artwork both elevate this to five stars for me. The former was enjoyable, but not outstanding. It's a short story so I wasn't expecting like Tolstoy or anything. I loved the latter, though. The illustrations are very nice and I love how they were incorporated with the text and the layout of each page.
This makes me want to read Piranesi today.
It was fine, but it didn't live to the hype if I'm being honest. I feel like the hype and it's status as a touchstone within the geek/nerd/whatever subculture far outstrips the actual quality of the book itself.
The characters felt flat. Arthur had no personality, Ford was just annoying, and Trillian was practically a non-entity that seemed to only exist whenever Douglas Adams remembered her. Zaphod became interesting once we find out about his brains, but he was still somewhat flat.
What a book. I should point out that from the start I was going to give Knife five stars for no other reason that it takes courage and strength of character to write a memoir about your own attempted murder, then to narrate the audiobook yourself. Revisiting the trauma of the event twice - by writer, then by narration) would have simply been too much for me, so hats off to Salman Rushdie.
I'm honestly surprised that the rescue boats could even stay afloat, whatwith the giant balls the Coast Guarders were lugging around. Seriously, these guys were just built different from me because I can assure you that there's no way in hell you'd ever catch me out on the water during a storm. Hat's off to all the brave men and women of the Coast Guard.
My first Elizabeth Strout book, but definitely not my last. I wasn't sure what to expect going into this because I'm not much of a literary fiction read (mainly SF, fantasy, and mysteries for me), but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed My Name Is Lucy Barton.
I liked that the prose wasn't complicated, but without being too basic. No purple or overwrought prose with this book, which allowed me to breeze through chunks of it at a time but without feeling like I was missing out on anything.
As for the plot, I could relate or at the very least understand what Lucy was talking about. I fortunately never had the rough upbringing she had, but I know people who have.
In all honesty, I didn't think I would like this book at all. Indeed, I went in expecting to DNF it pretty quickly.
I was wrong and I ended up liking it a lot. It was interesting seeing how the role and status of women in society changed throughout the years from the point of view of a group of women who lived through it.