Kilcannon

Things were a little too stripped down and simplified in this one to be a fully satisfying ending.

Still fun.

I'm going to go ahead and give this one four stars, if only for the moral complexity in some of the situations and the protagonist's decisions. Sure, things get more outlandish here, but the sci-fi concepts are sound and a whole lot of fun in very British way.

This is sci-fi literature (like, real literature) for younger readers. Again, I wish I'd been aware of these around the time I was reading A Wrinkle in Time.

Written for a younger audience than I was expecting, this is a good introduction to a range of dystopian and sci-fi concepts, with a pleasantly anti-authoritarian bent. I wish I'd known about these when I was younger.

The protagonist is a bit of a whiny brat, but many kids are, and I'm sure it'll be a coming of age story in which he stops being so useless by the end of the third book.

It is a little light on incident, and I could see how some would find it boring, but it's a charming little adventure so far.

Country music doesn't do much for me, but the cheerful bleakness of this style of humor does. Or bleak cheerfulness. One of the two.

Yes, there's humor here that won't fly with modern sensibilities. The racism of the characters (not the work itself) is going to be too much for some readers, who expect all character flaws to be punished or at least explicitly condemned by the narrative.

Folksy and funny.

Devoid of wit or charm, or even a consistent narrative voice. By turning her narrator into Mr. Allusion, the author has saved herself the hard work of characterization, and by being compulsively meta, she has saved herself the hard work of originality. But the book has the word “ontology” several times, so it must be intellectual.

“I think communication is so firsbern.” - Steve Martin

It's nice to see a book that balances craft with life, and for the life not to have a single trip to rehab in it.

We've replaced the zombie tactics of the first two books with more explicit right wing tendencies and a mishmash of government/alien/other (spoilers!) conspiracies and half-baked concepts.

I found it entertaining, heh, despite objectively being a step down from the previous two, which were good enough, with the help of their narrative gimmick, to be worthwhile.

Despite the sheer repetitiveness of much of it, and the brain-hurting language that made it tough to follow on occasion, it was still good in a Philosophy 101 kind of way.

I think this might, however, be the first time I've given less than four stars to a work by a Nobel Prize winner.

Somehow simultaneously interesting and boring, I gave it one extra star for its well-meaning likeability. Light on details, it left me wondering about how exactly it was he found spirituality, or if he just went to it as a new addiction without much reflection. While I can understand why he'd shy away from gory details of his dark days, it almost gave the impression that they weren't as dire as he let on. His ego and sense of martyrdom have been preserved throughout the recovery process. But, hey, whatever works, and he's genuine and sincere even as he misses having any real insight. As an artifact of a mostly decent but deeply flawed human being, it was interesting.

Plus he cited Joseph Heller's “Something Awful” as his favorite novel, and told a kick ass “Jackie Gleason was a bastard” story and that's worth a star in itself.

I liked the part where it just barely made sense. No, really. I liked it.

Heh, it was as entertaining as one of the lesser episodes of the series. But I found it three-stars worth of pleasant for some reason.

Nothing too revolutionary in here, but a good statement of principle.

It is a little redundant and padded at times, and the self-promotion reaches occasional laughable levels. And, sorry dude, but nobody is going to use your phrase that you felt the need to put a TM next to seven times a page.

I ought to deduct a star just for that.

It's very derivative of Michael Moorcock. But it was mildly amusing in parts. At least there was a giant killer elephant.

I don't understand why neither of the Grant Naylor duo can just write an original novel. Apparently I was supposed to subject myself to Backwards first, but I read that it has even less original content.

So I'll give his one extra star, because some of the original stuff was decent despite the vast problems with the writing.

A lesser collection than “Look at the Birdie,” but a few really nice stories. And a few uncharacteristic stylistic flourishes. My favorite was when a character was described as “cowring on hot copper under a boulder sky,” which makes more sense in context.

The book is deceptively simple, reminiscent of the sort of books assigned to honors English student in 8th grade and not read by anyone else, but it is also really effective.

Most authors these days start where this book ends, saturating the reader with angst and brutality on every page, wallowing in desensitized “realism” and achieving nothing.

This is the most depressing book I've read in a long time. It's anti-cathartic and masterful in its tension. I do, however, find myself wondering how it would read if the marketing hadn't let me know that something awful was coming ...

I'm not sure why, but I found this pretty entertaining. Maybe because Lobo is such a smart character. He put a space grenade in a guy's bottom and it went boom.

I liked these much more than I expected, given the quality of so much of his later work. Or maybe it just hit me at the right time. I'd say at least one star is purely for nostalgia's sake.

At the very least, Ed Luby's Key Club is amazing and defiant. Like “First Blood” without the violence and “realism.”

Voice is not the same as character. While there were occasional moments of insight, the voice was too cartoonish (and the constant sex scenes too porny) to for the indictments to ring true.

That, and there's an overall sloppiness to the book that undercuts the whole. If you're going to include gamer and Internet culture, you need to get it right. Published in 2007, the book has protagonist who engages in Internet behaviors from the early 2000s at the latest, and he plays Halo 2 on his XBOX 360. The average American male knows better.

I was going to give it three stars only because the other Torchwood book I read was so terrible that anything would look good next to it, but it really only warrants two. Harmless and not actively annoying, as “Pack Animals” was.

Also the little Victorian-era adventure was kind of neat.

I enjoyed the part in the Author's Note where he said that the people he collaborates with are incompetent.

A clear layout of most of the ideas, but written at about a sixth grade level. And he shied away from the issue of the day: health care.

I had to deduct one full star for misuse of “literally” and a few other basic writing problems. I know it was just a quickie book for the election cycle, but hire a proofreader, dude.

Dull, dated, pointless ... with bonus homophobia thrown in for no reason.

I deducted a star for one embarrassing sentence in which the author revealed that she has no idea what “id” and “ego” actually mean.

Also for being dismissive of “Weird Science” and “Uncle Buck,” especially the former, since it was during the key period. I think the author must be the only person in the world to like “The Great Outdoors” more than the latter, however.

Plus she's so enamored of Andrew McCarthy that she actually had something good to say about “Weekend at Bernie's.” I'll give her a pass for liking “Mannequin,” even if she does it for the wrong reasons (The right ones are Kim Catrall's hawtness and James Spader/G.W. Bailey's team up).

And it seems as if “Lucas” should've been mentioned at some point in this book. And “Timecop” should've been mentioned when talking about Mia Sara.

And there should've been less endless repetition and long-form transcribing of IMDB entries.

So Sam McPheeters is apparently some music guy that I would care about if I didn't only listen to totally brootal metal. So I'm ignoring the few little glitches that should really bump this down to four stars, because he's a musician and he gets a bonus star just for being able to read and write.

This book needs to be adapted into a TV series yesterday. It's a modern, personal, egoistic, petty version of Dr. Strangelove, and it gave me a wicked Armageddogasm.