Bronwyn Knox

I chose to read a bunch of these one after the other as a part of a digital collection.

I'm not sure that was the best way to do it. It feels like eating a gallon of chocolate pudding in one sitting. I like the pudding, but a snack pack is a better serving size.

This, like all the books in the collection (7-12) had some high and low points. These books remind me of a fantasy adventure television show with each chapter edited to end on a cliffhanger/commercial break.

I don't have strong feelings of love for this series, but I'm not tired of it either. I like Harry, like the humor, like some of the supporting characters. They have enough stakes and tension to keep the pages turning. In this particular book, the scene with the “Eebs” was especially memorable. I also enjoyed the bit with Donar Vadderung and hope he comes back.

True to the title, there are a lot of “changes” in the book as Harry's life as we've come to know it is turned inside out and upside down. That's good as it means the future of the series may be less predictable (I hope).

On the downside, they throw a lot of plot at you, without rhyme or reason, and with twists that are often banal. How many other unknown family members is Harry going to pick up before we're done? If he finds out Karin is his sister, I'm outta here. The action sequences are frequently the most boring chapters of any given book. Ideally, I should be on the edge of my seat for these scenes.

There is far too much similarity between one plot and another from book to book. Every plot is a scheme within a scheme within a scheme, instigated by some supernatural power player. There's always a traitor of some kind or other. The Red Court's internal power struggles in Changes are almost exactly like the White Court's from White Night. It is never as noir as I had thought it would be/hoped for. Most of the characters are quite glamorous in one way or another. City problems are mentioned but most of the cast are too far above/outside of them.

Nearly every woman's hotness is described in detail. Harry's consistent horniness is tiresome. At this point I can just assume it's there, right? I don't need to be reminded.

I guess that brings up another point, because I'm reading them straight through like this, I'm aware of the abundance of exposition, which is skippable the way Butcher writes it. If I'd read them back when they first came out and had to wait for each new book, I'd have a different experience and would maybe appreciate the refresh.

I can never decide if I'm going to go on with the series when I get to the end of a book. Certainly, I won't binge them ever again as this intensifies the things that bug me about the series.

The premise of this story, that mapmakers could create these “phantom settlements,” had fascinating implications for humanity and our relationship to the nature of reality. This becomes more of a plot device than a story in The Cartographers.

Shepherd decided to take the focus another way and make the story about interpersonal conflicts, romantic, family, friendships etc. That might have been entertaining if the characters had been better defined. As it was, each character had the same voice when telling their part of the narration and none of them stood out as especially interesting or likable. Or even fun enough to hate. Characteristics were told rather than shown. (For instance, the college-age version of Daniel Young is described as fun and energetic; when did we ever see those traits?)

Additionally, I would have liked more focus on the Haberson map and how the antagonist planned to use it for his plot. It wasn't clear and was simply brushed aside once some of the family drama was resolved.

A book with potential that feels underdeveloped.

Not an easy read. Priest puts together a group of stories about many islands that are part of an archipelago. The book appears to be set up as a sort of travel guide/history but it strays from that to tell connecting short stories with various recurring characters.

The reader has to put together a narrative from the bits that happened at each island and it's not chronological. There's action, science fiction, romance, and mystery involved in the stories.

If you're bored of the standard narrative structure, this one is interesting and worth a try.

Fun if you like Waters, his films, and his sense of humor. The most interesting part of the book was the real life hitchhiking trip and seeing how it was a) hard to get a ride and b) most people were quite nice and decent to him once he did finally get a ride. He even made a good friend! Someone he probably wouldn't necessarily have met otherwise.

That is only one-third or less of the book though. Most of it is Water's fantasy's/nightmares about what might happen to him on this trip. Of course, they are extreme and frequently gross/raunchy. They start out almost believable and then amp up to utterly absurd. Some chapters are quite funny. Some are a bit much.

I am a fan of Waters and like the way he writes. It's hard to imagine who to recommend this to outside of other fans though.

Fun, light, and fast-moving story about an institution, known as St. Mary's, that has harnessed time travel and used it to observe history directly. I liked the idea of combining science fiction, history, and humor. These are a few of my favorite things.

I wish there had been a bit more of the sci-fi and history; at times these took a backseat to the more soapy aspects of the plot, such as romance and jealousy, other interpersonal drama.

Because the plot moved so fast, there was a lot of superficial character development. Most of the staff of St. Mary's blend together and some of them fill a role rather than have life of their own. There's the Boss (mentor), the Chief (love interest), and Isabella (nemesis) for example. Everyone is a satellite around the sun—protagonist and narrator Max.

I like Max, don't get me wrong, but she's the only one with enough substance for me to like. She's clever, she's plucky, and she has all the brilliant ideas for St. Mary's success. Max gets all the funny lines and is the only one with the nerve to rescue her colleagues, and so on. Oh, and she's attractive, but not unrealistically attractive.

I don't want to use the M-word but I do think Max is a fantasy of Taylor's, and she was more concerned that the readers should love Max rather than writing a few more well-rounded, interesting characters to balance things out.

This creates a lot of jarring moments where supporting characters do things to move the plot along/create drama instead of as an inevitable part of where their character development was headed. For instances, the Chief's sudden, raging emotional outburst and Sussman's out-of-nowhere rape attempt. I'd say these moments were “out of character” but I don't get enough personality out of them to say it's that, exactly.

I did have a good time reading this, but I'm not racing for the rest of the series. I'd be mildly curious to see if the character development ever improves in the sequels.

The writing style is engaging and witty. I was engrossed from the start.

Jacob Finch Bonner is not the greatest guy but easy to understand. He's a struggling writer who has had some modest success but can't get publishers interested in his subsequent work. He's working as a creative writing teacher to get by. He teaches students of varying levels of talent and ambitions but at this point he's pessimistic about the process and it affects his attitude as an instructor.

Then he meets the student who tells him “the plot.” At first it's not life changing for him; he just keeps a casual eye out to see if the arrogant kid will ever get around to publishing the book based on this brilliant idea. It gets complicated when the student dies without publishing and Bonner decides to take the plot and run with it.

We get glimpses of the book Bonner wrote based on this so-called, can't-miss plot. There could have been some potential in the idea that we never knew what the plot actually was. While what we see of Bonner's book is not bad, it can't live up to the hype created by Parker's brag and the runaway success of Bonner's book.

(I was half expecting the writer to employ a device like Monty Python's “Funniest Joke in the World” sketch, which features a joke so funny it kills anyone who hears it. Naturally the audience never finds out what that joke actually is. I'm making this analogy because there is no way the joke could live up to the myth.)

Bonner goes from enjoying life as a successful writer to frantically searching for the source of a series of anonymous threats to expose him. Once this part of the story gets under way, it slowly devolves into an average thriller. It is an important plot point that the book Bonner wrote reflects the discoveries in the investigation Bonner embarks upon when he starts getting harassed.
The final twist is predictable, made more disappointing by the fact that the premise of the entire book is about the idea of an “original plot.” Or maybe that's the point, that there's no way to be surprising and original with just a plot as your weapon. Either way, I wasn't really blown away by the revelation. Also, we get the fallacy of the talking killer.

Maybe this book was a lot funnier than I thought and the final joke on the reader was just too subtle for me. My view is the ending falls into the cheesy category.

I'm a bit ambivalent after finishing. A good one for book clubs though, as it can lead to discussion about plots, intellectual property, writers, and so on. I did enjoy the writing style and would read something else by Korelitz.

This is a very clever book, one that I'll remember for structure and style, rather than one of those that got under my skin and made an emotional impact.

Tremblay knows his stuff, he alludes to classic horror novels in a winking way to build up the story for A Head Full of Ghosts.

The blog posts were a nice meta touch, well integrated, and showing a breakdown and criticism of the very story we are reading. The media focus reconciles nicely with the reality-tv exposure plot. The story is more about a television show exploiting a teenage girl and her family and less of an actual story of a disturbed teenage girl. You can just imagine every cheesy graphic and piece of cheap dramatic music that the network put into this fictional documentary.

My interpretation is on the cynical side; the father and the priest were motivated by money/attention to the church respectively. Whether Marjorie is or isn't possessed is clearly not the most important thing given how quickly the psychiatric treatment possibility is blown aside from the family's lack of finances. It's a Breaking Bad sort of situation where a desperate man turns to desperate means to get control of his life and family–in this case a televised exorcism.

Is the book scary? For me, not especially. It is more of an intellectual than emotional ride. I had a lot of fun but I didn't get worked up enough to feel the “chill.” Having the kid, Merry, be at the center did make some disturbing moments though. I felt that vulnerability and helplessness at the idea of something happening to a child.

Part of my emotional distance came from not quite buying into Merry as a character at either stage in her life. Merry as a little girl reads as someone's idea of a “whimsical child” stereotype. Merry as a 23-year old suffers from arrested development. Rather than suggest Tremblay doesn't know how to write girls, I can make sense of this in my head on both counts: Merry is an unreliable narrator and we're seeing her memory of a traumatic childhood experience and of course these are incidents that might have stunted her emotional development. She's an homage to We Have Always Lived in The Castle's Merricat so this presentation makes sense and stays true to the theme of the book.

The twist ending also works well with the theme of uncertainty. What's real and what isn't? What really happened and what is manipulated for the sake of entertainment?

One of those books that makes me realize that sometimes it's harder to talk about a book you love than a book that didn't do much for you. Objectively anyway.

Something this book does well is the first-person narration of Ricky Rice. The feeling is that he's right in the room with you, talking to you personally about his story. He's also amusing. It's not a hilarious book, but Ricky's way of looking at the world includes seeing the absurd and the humor even in the darkest situation.

When trying to categorize, I initially put this book into “horror” because there are references to cosmic horror/Lovecraft. Reading again, I'm thinking perhaps magical realism as the supernatural stuff is there to draw out Ricky's character development and not as the main focus of the story. We see Ricky go through two traumatic, near-death experiences and how they affected his life. The supernatural elements guide him towards believing in something outside of himself.

There are a lot of different themes here: faith vs. doubt, survivor guilt, fatherhood and parenting issues, revolution, and economic disparity are just a few.

I found this by chance at the library one day; the unusual cover attracted me (the red line that wraps around), and the blurb on the back sold me on reading it. I'm glad I did. It's a quirky, offbeat novel that's worth a shot. My enjoyment of The Big Machine inspired me to track down everything LaValle had available.

The Boatman's Daughter revolves around an interconnected group of people living near the Arkansas bayou and their secrets, lies, revenge, and so on. It's a bayou soap opera with elements of the supernatural.

Davidson's writing style strikes me as self-consciously stylized. He's trying so hard to create an atmosphere but the metaphors and complicated sentence structure get in the way of the storytelling.

He puts effort into the tone but neglects to impart his characters with engaging personalities.

Miranda, the title character, is “brave and strong”, typical of how young women characters are written these days, without any traits that might make them vulnerable or human. Zero sense of humor. Her allies have uncommon physical traits but no charisma. No depth for to the villains either–just brooding, abusing, raping, and murdering. The writer doesn't take any risks on this front.

As for the horror or supernatural aspects, the demons/psychic phenomenon seemed like an afterthought. If you removed it or made it far more subtle, it would not have affected the story.

I love gothic and creepy stories but I couldn't get involved in this. All the grittiness and underdogs to root for, yet the final effect was lifeless.

It's Ray Bradbury's short stories so of course, they're going to be good. One of my favorite short story writers, no question.

In this collection, I see a theme of characters who become obsessed or deeply neurotic about events/things that lead them into situations they may (or may not) have avoided. A few examples of this are “The Next in Line,” “The Crowd,” and “The Wind.”

The description calls these “macabre” stories and perhaps they are, but I found humor in some of them too, “Skeleton,” “There Was an Old Woman,” and “Homecoming” in particular. It could just be me; it has occurred to me that I have a weird sense of humor.

“Homecoming” was one of my particular favorites, like The Munsters if Marylin had been less well-adjusted.

Fun collection and my favorite Halloween read this year.

This was an interesting idea, a tribute to Frankenstein combined with a story about kids trying to solve a mystery at a mental institution where their beloved grandmother works as a doctor. It was unfortunately combined with a less compelling story about two of the kids as adults, one as a podcaster/monster hunter and the other as a “monster.”

I did like the bit with the kids at first; I love stories where young people have to be self-reliant and get themselves into and out of trouble. That part did feel like a YA novel though, and that's not how this is marketed.

A big problem is that most of the story is built on twists—entirely predictable twists—and melodrama. Dear lord, the melodrama. Showing people having temper tantrums and crying fits leaves the reader out of the emotional moment; it doesn't pull them into it.

There are way too many things packed into the book and none of them are done well. There's a missing persons mystery, evils of eugenics, feminist empowerment, romantic attraction (out of nowhere I might add), memory and identity issues, the entire who's-your-Monster theme, and so on. All of this in a loosely strung, gimmicky plot. I would have liked a little more storytelling, a little less concept.

A genuinely scary horror story, set in rural Alaska which gave it an even more unsettling edge. There was a bit of a psychological component with the “twins” subplot.

It could have moved a little faster. There were many scenes where the author has the protagonist think he sees something and it turns out to be...nothing!

Once or twice can add a creepy vibe but repeating the trick decreases the effect.

Still, it's worth a try if you're in the mood for a scary book.

Chick-lit but with a Tim Burton atmosphere.

There is a touching, sweet friendship between the two women. I also enjoyed the very Muppet-y spider.

This is a fast read, nothing very complex or anything that you have to think about too hard.

It's not a horror novel, as people have said. I'm looking for spooky books t0 read this October and am striking out all over the place.

I will take the good reads genre nominees with a big grain of salt in the future.

Cute book though.

From her bio, we can see that Miller really knows her stuff when it comes to Greek mythology. The writing for Song of Achilles is grounded, a focused, realistic story about the heroes as people. The chapters with Achilles and Patroclus as children through the beginning of their romance were compelling.

After that, I have to admit I lost interest. The Characters and their relationship don't evolve much from childhood. Any tension in the story is not between them. Briseis offering to bear Patroclus children doesn't make a conflict, especially since it's blown off. Generally, both men seem defanged from the Iliad.

I like Greek mythology, and that might be part of my problem with trying to love this book but not being able to do so; I have a strong idea in mind of what the characterizations should be and Song of Achilles doesn't fit that. The pair are gentle, misunderstood victims of fate. Patroclus is the most passive, and feels more like Achilles' pet. (One of the Greek warriors even refers to him as a “pet rabbit.” He exists for Achilles alone, no other purpose or drives. His inner monologue that he intends to die when Achilles does tells me that this is Miller's intention.

I'm guessing by how popular and highly-rated this book is, that it's just me. I didn't have the awesome, heart-rending experience that others had reading this book. Maybe I'm not into retellings of classics. Or I'm the wrong demographic. To quote Odysseus, “What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another.”

Big, glorious coffee-table book full of color pictures of the book covers from a bygone era. I was just an impressionable kid in the 70s-80s, but I remember looking up at the shiny, weird book covers that I wasn't old enough to read and wondering about the dark mysteries contained within. Hendrix gives the full scoop on these books with humor, sarcasm, criticism, admiration and affection. He also gives details about a lot of the artists responsible for creating these flashy, fun, and cheesy covers.

Hendrix breaks down the history of the 70s-80s boom, beginning in the 60s when horror was considered a kids genre. Adult spooky stories were marketed as “weird” or eerie but not horror. Three books from the late sixties/early seventies changed all this because they were marketed to and popular with adults. According to Hendrix, these are: Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin), The Other (Thomas Tryon), and The Exorcist (William Blatty).

Suddenly, it became a marketable adult genre. Hendrix organized the book into chapters by topics like satanic/demonic, creepy kids, haunted houses, gothic and romantic, scary animals, weird science, and so on.

This shows the development of the genre as well as how the authors and publishers latched onto various trends. These books were transparently put out to make money. Authors didn't pretend to write “literature,” but all were writing sensational, and most importantly, entertaining stories.

Some of Hendrix' descriptions of the plots are absolutely hilarious. Just knowing books like this were written and read is a mind-blower. Just open nearly any page in this book and find something like:

“In Barney Parrish's The Closed Circle thinly veiled versions of Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ann-Margaret, and Jackie Gleason pick up hitchhikers and murder them to praise Satan and stay famous. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if not for a darn psychic pursuing a “university-level” course in weaving who can tune into their telepathic wavelength.”

The haunted house trend also covered “urban nightmares” and “country paranoia,” as he put it. These reflect fear of crime in the city and people who had enough money to move out into the country to get away from it. ( Fort Privilege by Kit Reed) The country paranoia stories were about a living hell for the city folk who dared to invade. (Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon.)

Also keeping with the times were the stories about technology from the 1980s. Lots of stuff with computers possessing people or taking over their lives. (Little Brother by John McNeil) Exploiting the fear that technology controls the people who invented it, in this case by melding with some supernatural element.

The books I personally remember best were the gothic books, VC Andrews and Anne Rice. I especially remember the shiny foil Andrews covers with dye cuts that opened to another picture underneath. I also have a fond memory of the kids line of Dark Forces horror books.

According to Hendrix, the 70s-80s boom of horror ended in the early 90s with Silence of the Lambs and thrillers becoming the hot item instead. Suddenly horror books had to be literary and blended with true crime instead of the supernatural.

A few remnants of the time were horror marketed to kids and short story anthologies still sold well. He also mentioned the Abyss line of horror books that sprung up in the 90s with new writers who wrote psychological horror and horror that crossed genres with Sci-Fi.

As a horror fan, this book brings home the message that the genre is dead. The books covered here had the freedom to use lots of imagination, too much gore, and prioritize telling a scary story over social and political messaging, even while they exploited concerns and trends of the times.

I was looking for some new spooky books to launch the Halloween season. This didn't end up fitting the criteria, though it had some fun moments. I'm a former theater kid so a book about the theater is always a treat.

Horror should have some spookiness, tap into primal fears in some way. All's Well is more about vanity, self-involvement, and the general disappointment of reaching middle age and realizing your life didn't work out how you wanted. Nothing too exotic, nothing from beyond or beneath or even deep within. Certainly relatable though.

No matter how much we should feel for someone suffering chronic pain, Miranda's first person narration is tedious at the start. Clearly, Awad wants us to be annoyed with Miranda, mirroring her friends', ex's, and colleagues' experience in dealing with her. This setup takes up much of the first quarter of the book. I wasn't sure I would make it through.

When the supernatural element of the plot kicks in, All's Well starts to really cook. Her neurosis and paranoia (everyone is suspicious of her, thinking about her all the time, right?) ratchet up several notches. It's a real page-turner at this point as her theater production, the smiting of her enemies, and her love life all go her way. Her life improves at the expense of other people and yet she's experiencing a protracted nervous breakdown. All we need now is a surprising but inevitable conclusion, right?

Just when you're expecting this to build into something spectacular, some darkly humorous climax, all the conflicts are gently washed away. Awad decides to back off what was set up early on, which is a shame because it had some genuine tension and absurd moments that were almost funny in their extremity.

Historical Thriller with The Alienist and The Devil in the White City influences.

The story hinges on Pin, a fourteen-year-old girl who disguises herself as a boy for greater safety and freedom as she runs around Chicago's Riverview amusement park in 1915.

Hand creates a gritty, big city vibe for her historical Chicago. Pin is in a world of sexual predators, including a fictional version of Charlie Chaplin (who liked to marry ‘em young in real life.) The stage is set for a serial killer who preys on girls around Pin's age.

Pin becomes involved in the hunt for this killer in multiple ways. First, she has an unresolved backstory of a missing sister. Next, she is the first to find a body of one of the victims and inadvertently points the finger at the wrong person.

In her investigations to find the killer, she runs across a disturbed young man named Henry (based on real-life artist Henry Darger) who claims to be a protector of young women, also trying to find the killer. Hand does a good job of creating distrust and tension between these two eventual allies. Unfortunately, when they begin to work together, the reader never gets a sense of why their initial wariness blossoms into supposed friendship.

The viewpoint changes often during the book, including the killer's thought process as he goes around the city and back to his rooms where he performs an unusual ritual with the items he takes from the victims. Including this view actually makes him less menacing and it didn't add any insight.

The mystery aspect revolves around a very compact cast of characters, which seems unlikely to me in a city the size of Chicago. There's a lot of coincidence to move the plot and up the stakes which is not my favorite tactic and tends to break the immersion for me.

This was a pretty decent read, but not as spectacular as I was expecting. The premise had more promise that it delivered.

Uses humor and a well-paced, well-structured plot to explore identity, tribalism, and race in America. Mixed-race Warren Duffy, the narrator, grew up with strong views about his identity as a black man. His teenage daughter comes back into his life after the death of her mother and Warren is responsible for her education. Helping her figure out who she is throws him into a complicated internal and external struggle about what it means to have mixed heritage.

Duffy has a list of other problems besides these, recently divorced, no career prospects and in debt to his ex-wife, and saddled with a large house that is roofless and crumbling. A lot of the humor comes from Duffy's narration in the form of self-deprecating humor and his ability to see the absurdity in the situations he gets into. All the characters in Loving Day are well done but Duffy in particular is relatable, even though he is frequently a jackass.

There's plenty of dramatic plot points and the story ratchets up nicely to a climax that is satisfying and makes good use of all that came before.

I especially appreciated the ability of the writer to show characters' conflicting viewpoints, both internal and with each other, in a way that felt genuine to them. No once did he fall into the trap of preaching or telling readers how to think.

It's a book full of quirky, magical realism short stories. Link is working with a similar palette as Neil Gaiman or Angela Carter, with shades of fairy tales, mythology, and the supernatural.

Link has a lot of cleverness and imagination but her stories never grabbed me on an emotional or intellectual level. Quirky and whimsical are not enough to make great or even good stories. Take “Shoe and Marriage” for instance. This is a short story made of four short stories, each on the subject of shoes and marriage. The part about the honeymoon couple watching the increasingly weirder beauty contestants made me laugh a bit but where was she going with this? There needs to be some point, either saying something about the characters and marriage or humanity in general or a plot of some kind. It's just some weird stuff thrown together.

Other reviewers mentioned the lack of endings to most of these. I don't mind an open ending, one that leaves things open to interpretation. However with these stories, I could see the “twist” a mile away and yet she would never get down to it. For example, the best story in the collection for me was “Survivor's Ball or The Donner Party.” You can guess from the title what might be about to happen but Link never goes in for the kill. (So to speak.) Maybe I just don't appreciate subtlety when I see it, but the stories just never get that interesting.

There is also a lack of variety in the collection. Everything is written with the same kind of voice, regardless of what the story is about or who is telling it. It doesn't show much versatility.

Even more entertaining than the first book, probably because I already have some background of the world and how it works.

Further develops the idea of characters entering and leaving books, including introducing an organization responsible for the training of characters and humans who have this knack. (I am in love with Miss Havisham.)

The humor is going strong and there's a little bit of goofy, self-awareness.

“Anything is possible right now. We're in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement”
“We're in a what?”
“We're in a pseudo-scientific technobabble.”

There are a lot of plot lines, all converging on Thursday at once. It makes for an exciting pace, although at times I wondered if it wasn't a bit much.

A fast-moving science-fiction thriller with some interesting ideas behind it. It was all go-go-go! Never a dull moment. I could have used a little introspection occasionally. But things moved so fast the narrator had to spell it out for us:

“We're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”

And so on.

I can imagine this adapted to film, seems ready for it. (It is being adapted for a series) I liked it a bit more than Recursion, which lacked interesting characterizations/dialogue. This was similar in that it centers around technology that humanity is not prepared to handle. It was better focused here with the narrator taking us through his journey and struggle.

Exploration of John Self's relationship with money and how it defines his behavior and his relationships. As promised in the description, John Self is excessive and self-destructive. It's written in the first person; Self has a sense of humor and there's a lot of dark comedy in the situations he's involved in.

Self made money in the advertising business and comes to America to direct a Hollywood film and perhaps rise even higher in money, success, and so on. He runs on the “heavy fuel” of alcohol, fast food, drugs, porn, and hookers. Money interests him for what it can buy rather than accumulating it for security. Takes place at the end of the 70s/start of the 80s when there was an energy crisis, recession, stagflation, etc.

His personal relationships are based on money. His Girlfriend Selina is a kept woman and their sex life is creepily based on financial transactions until she finds a bigger fish. He has a friend who uses him as a money loan source and a father who gives him a bill for his care and upbringing and he actually pays it. Only his college friend, Martina, doesn't need money from him. Instead, she tries to get him to be a better person. Less drinking, reading important books, better food. Her relationship with money is different as she's an heiress and perfectly comfortable. She lives quietly, not to impress anyone. He looks up to her without acknowledging that she can have that relationship when she's free of the money worries that plague the rest of us.

Once the crisis point hits, Self is not transformed. He would do it all again the same way if he had a chance. Tragic-comedy with a warning about the pitfalls of money.

Cute, fast, and fun urban fantasy. It's low in deep thought but high in entertainment. The protagonist/narrator never faced enough challenges/obstacles for my taste. He's very slick, of the Moist Von Lipwig ([b:Going Postal 64222 Going Postal (Discworld, #33; Moist von Lipwig, #1) Terry Pratchett https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388236899l/64222.SY75.jpg 1636617]) family of characters, but he seems to know everything. You have to push that type to the brink of disaster to make a satisfying read. I did like the supporting characters. They were sufficiently weird and had interesting backstories.

Very complicated, dense, and challenging. If that's what you're looking for in a science fiction book, you'll enjoy this a bunch. There are stories within stories, characters within characters, plots within plots, and so on.

It reminded me of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson in theme and concept, only they never really made me work so hard for it.

The big picture is the dangers of giving up freedom and privacy for safety and security. In Gnomon, a Big Brother-type security system provides protection, appearing more benevolent than good old Big Brother. I view this as trading adulthood for permanent childhood.

There were bits I liked; the individual character stories were compelling. Seeing how they tied together was clever and made me feel smart, which is always fun.

Harkaway loves to use a lot of detail. I enjoyed this in his previous books as it added a lot of color and humor, as well as an emotional payoff as backstory and character developed. Here, it weighed down an already heavy book. Gnomon was more of an intellectual exercise, and even at that, not the most dynamic one.

Of all the books in the Hitchhiker's series, this one seems the darkest. There is a weird cynicism presented throughout which says, yes terrible things are happening in the universe and only the main characters seem to care. In this particular case, it's the wild and crazy Ford Prefect.

I might have forgotten about this book deliberately and pretended the series ended with Life, the Universe, and Everything if only because that would wrap up things for Arthur nicely, taking him from passive tourist to active participant in saving the galaxy.

Still, I like this book. Adams can't really write a bad one; all the humor and bizarre story stuff is there. The bits with Arthur and his daughter are interesting, though I have a lot of questions about the character motivation on Trillian's part that never get resolved. Selfishly having a daughter with Arthur's DNA and without his permission, then sticking the responsibility on him seems out of character, but then we never learned much about her anyway. We get more here, with the story of her life in an alternate reality where she does not go off with Zaphod.

If you're a die hard fan, it's an entertaining book to read. If you're casually interested in the old Hitchhiker's phenomenon, this one's skippable.