Kilcannon
It was fun, but boy was it sloppy. I'm pretty sure one minor incident accidentally happened twice at the end. Things happen rapidly and often without logic or transition. A few bits were rote cliches, and occasionally the dialogue was, as well.
But, hey, it was full of neat stuff and amusing characters. Good enough.
There is a hint of snobbishness in this book, but it is almost all secondary to the subject at hand. For the booze, Wilson approaches the upper reaches of obscurity with a sense of adventure and openness that is hard to impugn, and his stories all have a simple, earnest character to them that may not be memorable, but connect deeply with someone interested in spirits as a lifestyle.
Something about this book just didn't work for me. Some combination of unlikable main character, who doesn't seem to need actual motivations because she's just a child, and the author's preference for telling over showing made this a bit of a slog.
That said, the metaphysical system being explored here is interesting, and I'll probably read the next one.
Taking Drizzt above ground might've been necessary, but it wasn't as interesting as the previous two books. This one felt like the book where Salvatore had to dump in everything to catch up to how Drizzt was described in Icewind Dale, even if that means giving him new powers for no reason and having him do things with no real motivation.
I'm sure I would've liked it more when I was younger.
OK, so there's not a lot of real, actionable intelligence in here. There's a lot of stuff about streaks, and mood, and playing hunches, and sure, why not? It's gambling. As the author states, there are no systems. There's just you.
So his take about confidence and control is actually kind of nice. The specific tips on money management make sense.
And the old-school, hugely outdated look at Vegas is charming. If credit still works the way he describes, it's only for high rollers. The warnings about criminality, etc., are quaint. The stories he tells, about Sinatra, Nick the Greek, Howard Hughes, etc., are gold.
As for specific games, the focus is on craps (which I know a little about) and baccarat (which mystifies me).
I suspect that I will still be a sucker next time I hit the tables, but then, so are most people.
R.A. Salvatore reminds me a bit of Piers Anthony at his best. The monsters that don't quit fit, especially, although maybe these were determined by the bosses at DnD and Salvatore's not responsible for them at all.
There's less horrible punning and embarrassing lechery in Salvatore, though, so that's too bad.
A fun alternative to the standard approach to conventional fantasy. I could see myself having really liked this when I was younger and reading Dragonlance for the first time.
I never thought I'd read another Forgotten Realms book, since the Ed Greenwood novel I read was so embarrassingly horrible, but this was fairly fun.
This is a pleasant bit of new age nonsense, like a sci-fi Carlos Castaneda. I particularly enjoyed the bit about the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is pretty much straight out of Philip K. Dick.
What I didn't enjoy was the extremely poor work of Amy Demmon, credited as copy editor for this book. Her incompetence cannot be overstated. There are significant typos on almost every page, occasionally bad enough to confuse meaning. The book has two chapter fours. I once found a comma in the middle of a word. Maybe this is what copyediting on entheogenics looks like.
I hope Ronin Books didn't pay her for her services.
Yeah, there are some duds in here. Quite a few, really. In many of his columns, “guest” as they always were,” Groucho'd fall back on the ol' “LOL I'm writing a column” style of metahumor, and it rarely worked. Some of the pieces were too logged with dated references to really work.
But the sincere pieces were moving, the biographical pieces fascinating, and the pure chaotic humor pieces hilarious. And many of these were five-star caliber . . . so four stars overall.
I thought it felt like “Catcher in the Rye” for girls, and it turns out that contemporary reviewer Robert Taubman of New Statesman agreed with me.
I liked it about as much as I liked Catcher.
My biggest complaint would probably be that Esther's repeated failures to commit suicide started to seem comical after awhile. And she started to bang the drum of her title symbol a little too repetitively and loudly toward the end.
A decent, high-level look at negotiation. Examples were sometimes too lofty and/or legendary to be easy for the common folk to identify with. The book is aimed, it felt, at middle managers rather than entry-level people, but for someone who wants a sense of what to expect when trying to get ideas across in the corporate world, this is a good primer. It's a practical and amoral (but not immoral, and also very ethical) look at getting your goals accomplished in corporate America.
This is a weird little romance book (and also the first romance book I've ever read). I bought it because a character in a movie I watched recently was reading it. Yeah, so what?
It's clear that the ending is a rewrite. Everything was leading to one thing ... a fairly dark secret ... but then it's resolved with a whole bunch of nothing.
It's also really very British. Like, the Britishest thing ever.
But there are a couple of good turns of phrase in here. And a few clever little stories told by characters. Also there's neglected children, a still birth, an abortion, some cancer, and veruccas and boils galore.
Oh, and no sex.
If the whole series had been like this ...
The book probably only deserves three stars, if only because it still has many of the problems that plague the series and has a totally useless epilogue (although it was labelled “Appendix, so I guess its uselessness was known).
Still ... a very satisfying ending to a very hit-or-miss series.
This series has bounced between terrible and really fun, usually several times within each volume, but it seems to have finally bottomed out. Action was dull and often incoherent, story nonexistent, and the climax was a major let down.
I still enjoy the character, but this entire novel felt like filler.
I hate to be so hard on it, but it really wore thin.