Megan

The first story was fantastic. The holiday letter was pretty good, though the end felt a little like Sedaris was trying to be shocking. The rest were either okay, bad, trying too hard, or I've already forgotten them. I felt like the word choice at times was problematic, and some of the attempts at dark humor seriously missed the mark. It's clear it was published in the 90s.

A modern classic that is 100% worth your time

Some cheesy dialogue and scenes (I seriously had visions of Threat Level Midnight), but it kept me entertained enough on a long car ride. Some of the jokes were a bit repetitive and weak, but a couple made me laugh.

Going forward, the only acceptable way to consume this story is via audiobook narrated by Andy Serkis.

I'll be honest. I didn't get it at first. I was so bored the first time I read this story. I barely would've given it 3 stars. My second reread was better, but not by much. Solid three star. I didn't love how Tolkien addresses the reader. It pulled me out of the story and stopped me from connecting with the characters. Then I tried the audiobook narrated by Rob Inglis, and that was a flop for me (though I enjoyed him for LotR for some reason). But eventually I came to love the story for how it set up the world in LotR, and The Hobbit was officially a four star read for me. My humor also developed over the years, which helped me with Tolkien's writing a lot.

Then the disaster that is 2020 came along and Andy Serkis bestowed upon us the most wonderful gift to ease our suffering: Hobbitathon. He read the whole book straight through, live on YouTube. I woke up at 3 AM and watched/listened to the whole thing. He brought this story to life for me in a way I had never experienced, as cheesy as that sounds. Seriously, he made me absolutely LOVE The Hobbit. Teenage me would never believe it. Anyway, I love the journey, the characters, the writing, and I still can't get over ‘Gollum' reading Riddles in the Dark.

This is the best example of shock porn I've come across while reading books for a book club. It's like Laymon sat down and deliberately included the most disturbing things he could think of just to be edgy.

As another reviewer said, this book is somehow both utterly boring and completely disgusting. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot (if you can call it that) is contrived, and the whole thing is beyond stupid, predictable, and full of clichés.

When I say this book is disgusting, I'm not referring to the general gore, which doesn't bother me at all. It's disgusting because of the author's insistence on providing graphic detail of the bodies and sexual desires/arousal/etc. of the 12- and 16-year-old heroes both from their point-of-view and the point-of-view of a pedophile. I returned my typo-ridden Kindle e-book and got my 99¢ back, but I'll never get back the time I wasted reading this trash.

I struggled trying to rate this. It was hard to get into at first, but it was a quick read. I figured out the ending on page 67 and felt like I was trudging through a lot of unnecessary and repetitive descriptions of the people and history of Wind Gap just to get to the end. The main character is incredibly flawed, understandably so, and - though I love a flawed character - I'm so bored with the “unreliable alcoholic” trope. The sexualizing of 13-year-old girls was just uncomfortable too. The pacing at the very end was rushed, and it seemed like Flynn didn't know how to put the ending she wanted on the page. The reveal of the twist was a textbook example of telling instead of showing. I can still enjoy a book if I figure out the end as long as it is done well, but the emotionless telling led to a very anticlimactic reveal that didn't pack the punch the author was aiming for.

I never thought I'd say this about a kid's book, but I really don't know if I understood anything that happened here. But I had a good time.

I think the writing style and perspective works really well for this kind of story. I was thoroughly icked out the whole time. Joe is a disturbed human being.

Talk about a boring book. I'm not even sure what the point was. Tell us everything but somehow don't say anything.

This book is so gross, completely lacking in substance, and utilizes time travel in the laziest way (not to mention it introduces a few glaring plot holes). I can't get on board with the outrageous level of accepted misogyny, manipulation, controlling behavior, and rape that happens. The author attempts to set Lessa apart and show that she's “not like other girls” by showing that every other woman in the world is ugly, smelly, stupid, incompetent, etc. in some way. It's lazy and horrible. Other than that, the world building really isn't there, and most of the book is sitting in meetings or in a cavern talking about what's going to happen without anything happening.

This book was just okay. The cover art is literally the best part. Seriously, 5 stars to the artist. I do not recommend the audiobook at all - the sad attempt at an Asian accent is horrendous.

The mystery is extremely weak, the entire plot was predictable, the confrontation with the murderer is laughable (the dialogue made me roll my eyes so hard), and the end romance was so cliché I can't believe more people don't find it lazy. The entire end of the book felt lazy to me. It wrapped everything up in a nice little package within maybe, I don't know, 5 pages or so. The pacing of it was just way off.

It's basically Sookie Stackhouse with zombies, but with fewer distinct characters and a less intelligent main character. Seriously, down to the best friend of someone the main character cares about being the bad guy.

I loved how a secondary female character talked to Angel about rape, both making sure Angel didn't blame herself and talking about how there are different ways to be violated. I thought it was extremely well done and made me feel all sorts of emotional.

If you like chick lit or the Sookie Stackhouse series, you'll probably like this enough. I didn't hate it by any means. It's just okay which is what the Goodreads rating says 2 stars is supposed to mean, so that's what I'm going with. Don't @ me.

Reread #394, forever 5 stars.

I didn't cry, but this was very gutwrenching. It's an excellent exploration of grief and loss.

100% a palette cleanser that can be useful to read in between epic fantasy or hard-hitting contemporaries. There's not much literary merit here, and Sookie is incredibly annoying.

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book as much as this one. Flavia is now one of my new favorite heroines. She's so smart and sassy, and I couldn't get enough of her. I thoroughly enjoyed every second of this book. I found myself smiling more often than not while reading, probably because Flavia's inner narrative is so fantastically funny (as is what comes out of her mouth). If you're looking for a thrilling and terrifying whodunit with surprising twists and turns, this isn't it. Though the mystery is good, you'll probably figure it out long before Flavia does. Some negative reviews say Flavia is too intelligent to be believable, and I yet I found many instances in the story where it was clear how young and naive she really is, despite having a good vocabulary and being a chemistry whiz. This story is more about who Flavia is, what she thinks she knows about people, and how she navigates her small world. It's done so well.

At first I thought it wouldn't be fair (ha) to rate this based on how good of a true crime book I thought it was, being that it is more heavily weighted toward a historical fictiony non-fiction account of the World's Fair. But then I remembered the title, The Devil in the White City, which suggests more time would be spent following H. H. Holmes than the architects of the World's Fair. The writing jumps back and forth between these two things, with a little extra here and there, and never brings them together. Larson is a fairly (ha again) skilled writer and would have done better to separate these into two books. Apart from that, I could've done without the heavy foreshading at the end of every chapter. I found the architect talk incredibly boring, but that was simply due to finding architecture boring and not Larson's writing about it.

Reread #394, forever 5 stars.

Overall this hit me right in the 80s nostalgia and made me feel like I was playing all these old games right alongside my brother in our childhood game room. It's by no means a groundbreaking story or anything along those lines. Honestly though, I had a lot of fun reading it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to read something easy.

This book is seriously so silly and clever. Talk about quotable in day-to-day life too. Highly recommend if you'd like a laugh and enjoy British humor, or if you like sci-fi and want to read something that sort of pokes fun at some of the classics in a clever way.

I think this book is an excellent crash course in the elephant and rhino poaching crisis. It's a tiny bit dated now, unfortunately, just 5 years after being published. So much has happened in that short period of time, and it's important to look up more recent information as you go. For example, the last male Northern White Rhino passed away not long ago, so the section that discusses problems with inbreeding for the remaining seven NWRs is, sadly, irrelevant now.

All this book is about is the law of inverse fertility. There you go, no need to read it. I don't remember any of the characters or which one was which because they all read the exact same. Also, I'm so bored with alcoholic main characters. There are other ways to make a main character unlikable and/or unreliable. Like their characters, authors need to stop using alcohol as a crutch.

Don't Shoot the Dog! is a fantastic crash course in operant conditioning and training. A lot of people will be surprised at the variety of ways to apply it to your daily life, not just with your pets.

Reread #394, forever 5 stars.

I absolutely hated this stupid, stupid book. It's partially my own fault for going into it knowing nothing about it other than it being immensely popular. I never would have read it if I had done a very quick Google search. Zero stars, and I think I'll be throwing the book into a fire pit the next time I go camping so I can get some sort of use out of it.

There is a lot packed into these 100ish pages. Just goes to show you don't need to write a tome to say a lot. Definitely worth a read.