Kilcannon

Simpler and pulpier than later, “real” Tim Powers books, this was still a lot of well-written fun. I'll be adding a line from it to my quotations page, so that's something.

This is the first light novel I've read, and it was more entertaining than I was expecting. The translation was, I suspect, a little loose, but good overall. The hefty amount of nostalgia I have for the show helped, of course.

Quaint and quirky.

I was expecting some supernatural tomfoolery, but instead I got what was mostly a YA teen romance. Could've been written by Paul Zindel.

Reading matches I remember from the 1990s dramatized as fiction was a trip, although trying to cram a year's worth of matches into a dozen pages hurt the end of the book a bit.

Still, it was mostly a hoot, and the writing was more than adequate.

Hitchens is always so darn readable, and his wit is well-suited to the subject matter here.

Stunningly awful. McKiernan writes battle scenes with all the flair of Kent Brockman describing a futbol game. He pads the novel by having characters recount to each other scenes we just read. And he still couldn't finish it, so he added some totally unnecessary appendices. It is hard to believe this was put out by a major publisher.

Maybe I was supposed to read it more like The Silmarillion than Lord of the Rings, but I don't think that would have helped.

Slightly better than the first one, even as it's even more a rip off of LotR.

So formulaic that it makes David Eddings look experimental.

Like Flashman written by Tom Stoppard, about the Middle East. I quite appreciated the Candide references.

It's half a book. Ends abruptly and anticlimactically. Oh well.

That was a hell of a thing. It's like dirty Rushdie cranked up to 11.

The language is terrific, and the novel makes all sorts of scenes in books future and past redundant and irrelevant.

There's a story early in the book (more interesting than many of he stories), describing her encounter with William Hurt. She comes off vapid, anti-intellectual, petty and materialistic. This attitude colors the whole book, even though she seems to be mostly a pleasant and decent person.

She takes snotty shots at people on occasion, though, including one at Cloris Leachman. Compare their accounts of being on “Dancing with the Stars” and judge for yourself who the better person is. MJH seems to approach her career, and the acting craft, with all the joy and creative vigor of a middle-upper manager in a cubicle farm.

Somehow the parts where nothing happened were better than the parts where things did.

The book was desperately in need of some professional editing. For example, there was a five page, pseudo-action sequence toward the end that was not only completely irrelevant to the story, but wasn't even logically coherent.

But the book had a kind of charm that made it hard to hate. And there was actually a little bit of complexity toward the end, mixed in with the spiritual mumbo jumbo.

Logical problems almost ruin this book. Somehow I still liked it.

I'll give Don Delillo $50 if he writes something that's not about a writer, professor, or otherwise creative person.

I can't say I've ever read a biography like this. Cloris is some sort of magically impervious and permanently cheerful force of nature. La la la ... Daddy just beat me ... La la la ... I kinda got raped ...

But somehow it comes off as insane only in a perfectly charming and decent way. It gives you perspective in a way unlike anything I've ever read.

I'm not sure that it really deserves three stars, what with the questionable moralizing and the over-broad brushstrokes of the story and world. But I'm giving it that anyway.

Casually stroll through something like a dozen different genres with the cynical slacker protagonist of the “Damned Lies” series, and you might learn something. But I doubt it.

Mostly you'll encounter a whirlwind of weird, with all enough violence, reality-bending and mind-f*cking for any rabid genre fiction fan. I especially enjoyed the tangent into Carlos Castaneda territory. Oh, and there jokes and references and riffs on tropes. It's a road trip into a meta-mash of beyond-the-fourth-wall, post-irony adventure.

All that, and our hero's madcap memoirs are housed in a frame story that I expect will pay off in future volumes. So it's got that going for it.

The writing has problems. It's clunky at times, the moments where the characters think they're being funny usually fall flat, and it was a bit of a slog at times. When the author goes off on a tangent, it is only occasionally rewarding.

But as an outline for a better movie, it was three stars all the way.

I feel vaguely guilty giving this a bad review, since the publisher's social media people encouraged me (and about a dozen others on Goodreads) to read it, and they were really helpful when I asked them questions.

As much as I've liked some of L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi, this just didn't click with me at all. Written in a simplistic style, Fear has a broad, but promising, premise. But, alas, only pays off in a series of disjointed non-events, only some of which are interesting. It's “and then . . .” storytelling, and it frustrates.


There was a twist near the end that got me excited for the closure of the book, but it was a red herring, and the actual end was much less satisfying and very abrupt.

Less episodic than the first one. Also better written. Better character moments, better all around.

Sure, you miss the variety of the first one a little, but it's worth it.

This book is an outline for a better book in which the characters are interesting, the gags well-written, and the narrative voice more skillfully wrought.

I enjoyed several of the story elements, and the amusing way that the characters are put through the wringer, but there's an amateurish feel to the whole thing.

I could almost give it three stars just for the cartoonish, over the top violence and willful messiness of events, but ... nah.

I didn't connect with this one the way so many people seem to have, but the last sixty pages or so made up for it to a large extent.

It could be one of those things where something was so influential that once you go back and read it, it seems derivative and uninspired . . . and even though you logically know that you've got it backwards, that doesn't change the experience of reading it.

Not a bad light read. Harry Dresden is going to have to become a bit of a more interesting character, his quips (and the writing in general) a little better and the stories a little more carefully plotted to keep me interested in the series, though.

My favorite part was the author's note, in which Piers Anthony says he tried to honor a suicidal fan by naming a character in her honor . . . the character being a half-animalized sex slave who is casually discarded toward the end of the book.

I also enjoyed the totally lazy and haphazard magic and world building, the implied homophobia and the anticlimax of an ending.