Becca
Every other Michael Chabon novel that I have read has started out so slow that I've abandoned it for months at a time, but ultimately has been profound and moving and made me feel like I have a place in the universe. Wonder Boys did the opposite. Despite it's easy readability, Wonder Boys made me feel hated, like the world for which it's written or is found funny is a world that is antithetical to people like me.
About a quarter of the way through, I realized that I'd seen and hated the movie. That added to the feel of the novel, to be honest – this is a novel about people using drugs and alcohol to self-medicate the sort of depression that comes not from any sort of psychopathology, but rather the reasonable self-loathing if you're the sort of dick to do idiotic things while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Not surprisingly, this becomes a downward spiral of totally unsympathetic assholes continuing to do idiotic things then self-medicate further, then become more of a self-absorbed asshole who does even more idiotic things. I read the book with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, anticipating how things could possibly get even worse. Knowing the specific form the devolution takes from watching the movie added to the ambiance, so to speak.
So why two stars? The second star comes entirely from a Passover seder scene that is laugh-out-loud funny. Fights over what to put in the second seder plate space for bitter herbs (or even how to pronounce “Chazeret”) are reminiscent to every Jewish home and also to what I love about most Chabon novels. It was like a breath of fresh air (before that, too, became another drug-using, drunk-driving, pet-killing rampage)
To be fair to Bel Canto, it's probably a 4 star book; however, I came into it with 5-star expectations. Having read [b:Truth and Beauty 5083254 Secrets of Truth and Beauty Megan Frazer http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1239242179s/5083254.jpg 5149972] and seeing the combination of grace and brutal honesty with which Patchett depicted herself and [a:Lucy Grealy 57229 Lucy Grealy http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-F-50x66.jpg], I had the highest expectations for her treatment of fictional characters. And, in some cases, she lives up to expectations.The highlight of the book is clearly Gen, the peon translator, turned by his captivity into essential personnel. The topic of language - who owns which language and what they can do with it - as the supreme power is fascinating and unique and the character is well suited by his theme. His foil, the slightly less multilingual Rubuen - Vice President turned into housekeeper by his captivity is nicely set up and the many conversations between the two really showcase the artificiality of status. Hosokawa's story is also well done. The trope of important business-person stunned by once in a lifetime event into realizing that there's more to life than work and deciding to live like it counts once it may be too late is a little overdone, but that distracts little from how well Patchett does it. The terrorists developing rapport with their hostages portion of the plot is by fair the most lauded and perhaps fell a little flat as a result of that. The developing of relationships didn't really feel organic and the terrorists were depicted as relatively sympathetic from the beginning.However, where the books really falls flat is its female characters. The reader is constantly informed how both Carmen and Roxanne are the most beautiful, smartest, most talented women to ever exist. Every scene staring either of them is filled with male characters perseverating on their beauty. Neither of them have any flaws at all (except maybe an endearing stubbornness.) Roxanne is so beautiful as to sway terrorist organizations. Both of them feel extremely one-dimensional as a result. Music is treated the same way – it's beautiful and uplifting and world changing. We're never really told why, but instead subjected to the same refrain in every musical scene. As someone who could take or leave music as a whole, and definitely opera in specific, it was teeth-gratingly annoying.
I will try to find the words to fully capture the love that I have for “Cutting for Stone.” I have kept Verghese on my list of clinical superheroes ever since I read his memoir, “In My Own Country;” however, I had been hesitant to read “Cutting for Stone” because, in my experience, physician penned memoirs lead only to disappointment. Verghese; however, is as much a master writer as he is a master clinician. Although “Cutting for Stone” is a medical story (highlights include attribution to his characters the first living donor liver transplant, the discovery of caffeine for apnea of prematurity and others), it is not foremost a story about medicine. Instead it is an semi-coming of age epic about how people form connections to each other, push others away in the pursuit of perfection and ultimately about self-actualization through realization of human bond.
Despite such lofty ambitions, Verghese never lets idealism or heavy-handedness overpower the fact that “Cutting for Stone” is indeed a novel. His characters shine - each individuals, each with amazing strengths - the cunning Ghosh, the brilliant, fierce Hema, the sharp, quick-witted Genet and the genius but alien Shiva and the loyal, logical Marion - his language is evocative and beautiful and his settings are picture-perfectly described.
A review of “Cutting for Stone” would be incomplete without at least a glancing mention of it's treatment of medical education. What struck me the most was Verghese's characterization of the martyrdom that residency entails as being a defense mechanism. His depiction of the selflessness with which residents treat patients as being a form of indulgence was a little uncomfortably honest. That being said, what “Cutting for Stone” will be exalted for in years to come is the decency with which it treats international medicine graduates. The treatment of such graduates by American medical students is borderline racist, with training programs being judged harshly on the number of such trainees enrolled. It is common for IMGs to be treated with disdain, and Verghese's candor in describing the differences that they experience when they train compared to the training environment faced by American graduates will not soon be forgotten.
I'm not sure how I feel about finishing this. Dr. Martin and her friends really smart. From the gender essentialism (we learn women are more thorough and detail-oriented, which is why they shouldn't be in study groups with men) to the pity poker that Dr. Martin is sure she's winning against modern women doctors (because we have it so easy), everything in this book rankles me.
Maybe it's that I read Dr. Martin's “poor me” stories on the walk to and from my 30 hour shifts, because that's the only time during my 80 hour weeks that I have time to read and that makes it hard for me to feel bad for her 60 hour work weeks as a med student (I worked up to 120 one memorable week during my third year, and averaged over 90) and her “We only got summers off” (nowadays, medical school and residencies are competitive enough that the “summers off” end up being research time.) I scoff at her “dilemmas” such as whether to take her bra off when she sleeps on call (I have nights where taking my SHOES off seems like a bad idea.) But what really bothers me the most is the trivial work choices that she and her friends face. All of them work part time, most in private practice. Many have taken years off (a luxury the licensing boards in most states now frowns upon) and they complain about only having a month paid maternity leave plus 2 unpaid months. It's really hard to feel sorry for a women who states that she first learned “that I couldn't have it all,” when she had to move to SoCal, to marry a rich dentist, and where she rapidly joined an affluent private practice. Poor thing.
Over and over again, I think that far from being exemplars of female physicians, these women would be eaten alive in today's training world. And don't even get me started on her chapters on what clothes to wear in the hospital, her trivialization of reproductive health debates, or the easy way that the “study group” abandons the “politically correct” movement
I don't have much to say about this – nothing novel. If you've gone to medical school in the last 10-20 years or read ANYTHING on the practice of clinical medicine in the same time frame, you probably know all of this already. Lots of peds isn't supported by science, but when there are is science we should follow it, rather than doing what saves us time or money. Duh.
Most notable for being the first ebook that I've read using the kindle app (on a combination of on my laptop and on my phone.) I'd prefer a physical copy, but it hasn't been physically published. Didn't love the ereader, but I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would have.
Dr. Gawande's reputation proceeded him, meaning that much of the medical community had already read the NEJM article on the same topic, considered how it applied to subfields of medicine, personal practices, etc. and the reforms espoused had largely been adopted, at least by the American medical community by the time of publication.
Nonetheless, Dr. Gawande's journey to discover why checklists matter, the subtle ways in which they matter and the fields that have instituted them was an interesting, if slightly shallow read.
I tend not to rest my estimation of the quality of a book on unsavory elements included, understanding that violence is sometimes necessary for realism, plot, theme or character development. However, in this case, Fergus abandoned realism and character integrity early on, stretching his historic setting with unrealistic and misplaced values (which I hesitate to call feminism, for reasons that I'll get to.) Therefore, there is little excuse for the repeated sexual assault scenes, especially given that Fergus seemed to expect the reader to casually forgive the assailants as easily as his protagonists did. (So easily that the narrator, who was expected to be a reliable, sympathetic narrator, refers to the rape of another character as “nonconsensual” in scare quotes.)
Similarly, there is little excuse for Fergus' rampant use of the N-word. It's supposed to be a historic piece? Thanks, I got that without the casual slurs. I don't agree with censoring (or self-censoring) literature, but if you're going to be throwing around loaded words/scenarios, do it for a reason.
Fantastic idea. Execution lacking.
At times, this was a truly moving narrative. I found the alternation of narrative between Henry Day and the changeling Aniday one of the most compelling portions of the book. Henry and Aniday made great foils, speaking to what makes the human experience truly important and how social relationships, creativity and introspection each have integral roles. On the other hand, the book feels underdeveloped. Plot threads, characters, even themes are dropped completely, without a backward glance. At times the plot overwhelms any thematic development and inversely, especially at the end of the book, the reader is asked to endure some extremely contrived plots in servitude to hammered imagery.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it is a beautifully written, moving (if depressing) and thorough account of three generations surviving in the face of death, infidelity and alienation. On the other hand, after 300 pages, a reader gets bored of every female character getting pregnant, running away from home and/or marrying an emotionally distance if not frankly abusive husband and regretting her life. It ends up feeling flat at best and at worst, a little misogynistic that even the smartest female characters get entangled in such things.
On a practical level, the intertwined narratives of many generations playing through the same script are very hard to keep straight, and I ended up needing a diagram to remember if Frank was Nell's husband or Alice's and how exactly Edmund was related to Bunty and who exactly Betty was, again? I get the parallels Atkinson is trying to draw, but they work better when she gives the characters enough individuality that the reader can keep them straight.
The true redeeming aspect of the novel is Ruby – the protagonist. Her thoughts are vivid, full of metaphor and symbolism and yet relatable. The book truly shines in Ruby's nightmares – inchoate end of the world fantasies, in which the familiar twists with a certainty of catastrophe – and the way in which they mature with Ruby. These nightmares reflect the heart of Atkinson's narrative – the way in which the families are both familiar and yet ill-meaning, self-involved and chaotic, which she does equally skillfully.
I was totally and completely spoiled about this book (stupid movie previews), but that didn't prevent it from being one of the best books I've ever read.
At first, I wasn't sure how I felt about the narrative voice. Kath, the narrator, relays her story in a roughly chronological order, with many tangents and anecdotes. But over time, it builds on itself and becomes the poignant reflections of someone who is facing her own mortality and has also lost everyone and every place that meant anything to her living through her memories. There are several times that Kath reflects on situations that, despite the sadness or finality, took on a closeness and levity that is only possible in the types of friendships where you can simply have wandering conversations about anything. It is clear that Kath is speaking to a reader who is that kind of friend.
The larger plot is fascinating – Ishiguro has several things to say about mortality, what we are willing to compromise (ethically) to further ourselves, the difference between faith and curiousity, and what it means to be a person and to be a part of the human condition. That, in and of itself was worth reading, but the book truly shines by being about a sincere depiction of one woman's life and personality within this larger world. You end up caring at least as much about Kath, Ruth and Tommy and their arguments, cassette tapes and classes as the big picture.
It is on the relationship level that Ishiguro shines. The friendships are intricate, completely necessary for the characters and extremely complex. Each character has their own flaws and deals (and doesn't deal) with them in various ways as they come of age.
I'm not a giant fan of the Dexter franchise, but it's always sparked my curiosity. I've watched a couple of episodes of the first season of the TV show and flipped through the first couple pages of some of the books. So, I wasn't sure how I would feel about this book, as most of the readers seem to be long term fans.
In short, this was a fun romp. The story was much more imaginative than your run-of-the-mill mystery series. The writing was mostly pedestrian, but with some entertaining turns of phrase (mostly alliteration).
The theme of family and the contrasts between families of choice and families of biology was not particularly subtle, but was interesting.
I've read a lot of reviews about the mysticism with which Lindsay imbues the “dark passenger,” but I felt kind of ambivalent to the idea that there was a separate entity in Dexter that wanted to kill. It worked as a metaphor. I would have disliked it as more than a metaphor, but Lindsay never really pushed that point.
All in all, this was an entertaining, quick read. It would be a top notch airport or beach book and was good enough that I wasn't embarrassed to be reading it during my commute. It's better than the vast majority of serial mystery books out there, but it doesn't reach the ranks of Great Literature of Our Times (nor does it strive to.)
Well, that was a disappointment. The mystery, such as it is, is boring and trivially resolved in the last two pages, after numerous red herrings, none of which are really ever resolved.The characters are boring – Isabel Dalhousie is an elderly, rich Scottish woman who, despite frequently judging everyone else for being layabouts, seems to do nothing to occupy her time except judge others, nose into other people's business and obsess about the sex life of people half her age.The schtick of the book is ostensibly the philosophy, but this is no [b:Sophie's World 10959 Sophie's World (Paperback) Jostein Gaarder http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21A6T5PH7YL.SL75.jpg 4432325]. Philosophy is mentioned in passing, over-simplified and only in the most trite way. There's very little redeemable here.
In the future, when an author thinks that his book isn't worth reading, I'm going to take his word for it. The Big U is too over the top to be an enjoyable, subtle satire of the large university life, although it had that potential in the beginning. On the other hand, the melodrama and large scale events are too trivial for the novel to be epic. The overall effect is pretty “meh.”
The detail and fact finding that Stephenson is known for is all but absent in this book. The only signature Stephenson move that the Big U contains is the litany of story lines and multiple character narratives, but with uncharacteristic brevity and lack of details, the constant storyline switching is irritating and makes the novel shallower rather than deeper.
Also, Stephenson should know that his fans are the physics majors, hackers and LARPers of the universe and be a little more careful with the negative stereotyping
This book creeped up on me. It started slow and I kept dropping it to read something else. Then it gradually became mind-blowingly terrific. Chabon uses language in a way that is approachable, witty and literate. It's rare to find a book that is both fun and as full of imagery and symbolism as Kavalier and Clay. The 630 pages are filled with Chabon's unique voice on reality, escapism, narrative, imagination and family.
Of course, my typical Chabon comments still stand – after reading a Chabon novel, I always feel as if it was written just for me to address things uniquely about my life. And I feel like Chabon is one of my closest friends, whom I know better than anyone else in the world. The universal popularity of Kavalier and Clay should disabuse me of these notions, but this is truly Chabon's unique gift.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an unparalleled work.
I haven't read an anthology in several years, so I wasn't sure what to expect in terms on consistency of theme and quality.
Overall, for an anthology that is looking to branch out beyond genre categories, the stories mesh relatively nicely with each other; although many fail to achieve the intended theme of “and then what happened?” The editing was well done, with the collection laid out in a way the flows, with stories with similar themes placed near each other, but not such that they blur with one another. There's a nice mix of long and short stories that makes the collection readable for long stretches of time. I found most of my favorite stories bunched at the back end, so keep reading if you don't like the beginning too well.
In terms of quality, I felt that most of the stories were well-written, although several were not to my liking.
The introduction by Neil Gaiman is probably the best part of the book. I loved the description of why people read and write fantasy and where fantasy as a genre can let us down. The desire to defy genres is ambitious and motivating.
Blood is a great opening story. It's evocative and plays directly to the “and then what happened” theme.
Fossil Figures was not to my liking. It's a kind of generic twin story with some nice turns of phrase, but not much substance.
Wildfire in Manhattan on the one hand, Gods are real and they live in cities has been done before and better (by two authors included in this collection, no less.) That being said, if not particularly original, this was still fun. I enjoyed the writing style and the characterizations. There was plenty of really nice imagery.
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains Gaiman's contribution to the collection was probably the closest to the intended theme. A very well-written play on the traditional fairy tale of Aladdin's cave of gold. Written in a very traditional folk tale style, but with new takes on the typical folk tale themes.
Unbelief A story of an assassin sent to kill a mysterious figure. Went straight in one ear and out the other. This has been done before and done better. I would have lost nothing had this story been excluded completely.
The Stars are Falling I hated this one, too. This is the typical story of a WWI veteran who comes home and tries to reconcile with his old life. It was so cliche in plot, tone and writing style and every piece of the plot was telegraphed from the beginning. Instead of “and then what happened?” I felt like “oh, that happened, really? I'm so totally unsurprised.”
Juvenal Nyx Sometimes, when you read fantasy, the setting is so complex that once author takes so long to set it up, you still don't understand it and you don't care. This story is how to do a complex setting correctly. Very little set up was ever done, but by the end you got the feeling that his world was so complicated and so rich. I wish I could have read whole series in this setting.
The Knife This story reminded me a lot of “Blood.” More a story-let, it felt like a nice palate cleanser after two relatively long stories; however, it's not something I would reread on its own.
Weights and Measures as a sad story about a couple that had lost their daughter, this worked. Picoult excels at writing emotion and this was a very sad, very moving story. As a magical realism piece, this didn't work. The conceit of the magic didn't make sense to me, and it distracted me from the emotions and themes of the piece rather than adding to it.
Goblin Lake A beautifully written piece of meta-fiction that nicely explores the relationship between fiction and reality. I found this very insightful on the topics of why we read and why we write.
Mallon the Guru The writing in this was so evocative and full of gorgeous imagery. The feeling of mysticism and growing feeling of dread worked their way into every sentence. The story left me more with feelings than with a concrete understanding of the plot (such that I immediately reread the story to make sure I hadn't missed anything.)
Catch and Release Another nice twist on a genre – a story told from the point of view of a reformed serial killer. I found the narrative chilling and fascinating. The analogy of fishing really carried the story.
Polka Dots and Moonbeams one part 1920's gangsters, one part...something else. The writing is outstanding; the setting is established impeccably from the first sentence. Although as the reader you never quite figure out what's happening, the feelings of needing to escape, of love and of desperation all come through so clearly that it doesn't really matter.
Loser Chuck Palahniuk always writes in the same Chuck Palahniuk genre and this is no exception. Take something banal, such as the Price is Right, and add grit. This was a fun, but superficial, read.
Samantha's Diary I was so disappointed by this that I almost don't want to review it. I love Jones. I've read every book she's ever written. I bought this collection because it advertised a new Diana Wynne Jones story. But there's no two ways about it: this story sucked. There was no intrigue, none of the plot twists Jones fans live for and no depth of characterization. It was the saddest thing ever.
Land of the Lost Maybe I could have handled this story better had I not been still grieving from Samantha's Diary. As was, this was a trite story about a woman who will find the grave of a serial killer's victim, even though the police have given up. Sound like something you've read about a million times before? Well, that's exactly what it was like.
Lief in the Wind On the other hand, this was so fantastic. A completely original science fiction story about a team exploring a new planet and contacting the alien life there. Sound like something you've read a million times before? Well, this was absolutely nothing like all of those others. This started with the beautiful imagery of the “birds that get smaller as they get closer” and built open that with so much metaphor and so much detail of language. The story was also about how to recollect yourself when loved ones die and hope is lost and was gorgeous on that front as well.
Unwell This story gets you totally lost in the mind of a toxic woman and you realize too late that although she's toxic there might be something else to the story. I adore stories with untrustworthy narrators and this was done perfectly.
A Life in Fictions One of the few stories that felt completely new. Not a twist on a genre, or an old tale with a new spin, but just something new. It's a story about a woman who disappears into her boyfriend's novels when he writes characters based on her and how this affects her life. At a larger level it's about the many facets of self and what we do to integrate them. I really loved this piece.
Let the Past Begin A lot of fluff surrounding a middle segment of a beautifully told folk legend. The meat of the story was haunting and so well-described that I could close my eyes and see the fortune teller. But the rest of it was chaff.
The Therapist I loved this work. Very soft science fiction about what causes people to lose their tempers mixed with court fiction. I loved the idea of a neme (a contagious feeling of rage). I felt the first part could stand on its own and then loved the twist brought by the second part.
Parallel Lines Now this was the twin story that I've been waiting for. At first glance, this is a boring Ouiji board twin-twin communication story. But it's actually so much more. The relationship between the twins and the characterization of each is done beautifully and the exploration of what we do and don't owe other people is unique.
The Cult of the Nose This read along the same lines as the Therapist. What of the narrative should the reader choose to believe? The narrative itself was spooky with the sinister members of the Cult of the Nose inevitably showing up amid chaos and destruction.
Human Intelligence about an alien spy on earth and the women who finds him out, but also about loneliness and goals and what one should do to achieve them.
Stories A fictionalized autobiography of Moorcock. The first half reads like propaganda for the breaking down of genre barriers, which Gaiman had already given us (and better) in the introduction. The remainder, once he gets down to it, is a character-driven piece about love, loss and betrayal that is well done.
The Maiden Flight of BellerophonI really enjoyed this while I was reading it for the well-drawn characters and the attention to detail (probably one highlight was a character who was obsessed with the flying machine Bellerophon having written the overly laudatory wikipedia article thereon.) However the plot never really came together for me.
The Devil Staircase First of all, the layout (like stairs) is so distracting and not set up correctly with the page breaks. But once I got past that, I found that the central part of the story – about a man who finds the devil's son, who offers him tempting gifts and who ends up taking a bird who sings when he lies – interesting and creative. However, the beginning of the story really drags.
Overall, I would say that if, like me, you're picking up this book because you're a Diana Wynne Jones fan, do not do it!
Otherwise, this book is totally worth reading for the contributions from Gaiman, Mosley, Swanwick, Ford, Wolfe, Howard, Deaver and Powers, particularly and several other solid entries.
Rocannon's World is interesting. LeGuin maintains a fairy tale quality of sorts while setting the story in a high science-fiction world, complete with FTL ships and ansibles. The combination is almost dream-like and provocative, but unfortunately falls into LeGuin's most common flaw – a slowness that makes the book hard to want to pick up and difficult to concentrate once you have.
This was fun. Most of his points were interesting and by and large well-researched, albeit some better than others. The main positive characteristic of Freakonomics is the way that he goes through his methodology. By and large, it is really a book about encouraging the lay public to question and to think quantitatively and that's a really, really positive characteristic.
The next most positive thing to say about Freakonomics is that it's well written. Having a co-author that is a writer was a major boon. Although each chapter was adapted from work published in peer-reviewed journals, the chapters have similar voices and lengths and flow into the next chapter.
The detractors are the unevenness of evidence for some claims versus others (for instance, the entire chapter on names, while interesting, lacks the evidence to reach any sort of conclusion.) The other major problem with Freakonomics is the excerpts of the article on Levitt that preface each chapter. These laudatory pieces are very off-putting in a book that is co-authored by Levitt – toot your horn somewhere else!
The most laudable thing that can be said about Crashers is that it's fun. And it definitely is that – lazy brain candy on a Saturday afternoon/Law and Order marathon sort of fun. It's fast-paced romp, with lots of action, a plot-twist or two and lots of beautiful, charismatic characters.
And that's where the praise ends. This reads like a script for a summer movie or a CSI “Special Episode.” It is filled with an appropriately diverse cast (for some, unknown, reason the ethnic background of even the most trivial of characters is given. While the supporting cast contains a Korean man, three African Americans, a Brit, an Israeli, a handful of Irish men, an Arab American and an Asian American, the main cast is white – very TV.) More time is spent describing how beautiful, handsome, rugged and sexy each character is than really giving any personality, which makes it difficult to tell who's talking without dialogue tags.
The action is really designed to be cinematic. I had a lot of fun picturing in my head how the scenes would look, but there aren't really any twists to engage the imagination of the reader.
But, where the Crashers really falls down is the writing. As I said, the plot is fun, the characters are pretty, there's lots of action, overall it would be about as enjoyable as a weak Dan Brown novel, if not for the terrible writing. To be fair, I received an advance copy, which I assume (from the number of typos) is still undergoing some editing. That being said, the dangling participles, heavy handed dialogue-tagging and awkward exposition and narration were so distracting that finishing the book was a chore that I completed because I got the book from First Reads. Had I bought the book, I probably would have given up on it.
The most notable thing about this book is that it clearly is built from a series of articles strung together into a central hypothesis. There isn't terrific flow between the chapters – the voice, style, and the goal of each chapter is highly variable and it really undermines the idea that the book is supposed to be an expose of a central social thesis.
That being said, the book is enjoyable – there are many funny parts (although non quite as funny as Brooks seem to think) and many insightful parts. I particularly enjoyed the introduction about education, and the sections on vacations and spirituality. In contrast, the parts on business and academia were dull, repetitive and highly exaggerated.
Final Exam is a beautiful, moving piece of non-fiction. Both scholarly and intensely personal, Dr. Chen's first book is a concise but thorough description of her own experiences with death and dying throughout her medical training and the effect it has had on her professional and personal relationships with the dying. Her experiences are largely universal – her descriptions of her first patient whose death she felt responsible for echoed – and she backs them up with citations from the medial literature about the exposures trainees have to death and their reactions.
Despite the fact that I am well-versed in the palliative literature and had read many of the articles Dr. Chen cited her personal experiences lend a depth and character to the discussion that is priceless. Dr. Chen's strength is that she is brutally honest. She describes unflinchingly her avoidance of patients that were dying and her regret of being too terse at times. She discusses events that other medical non-fiction would gloss over.
My only grievances with the book is the end-notes. The book is rife with them (at one point there are three end notes corresponding to a single sentence) and they are not marked at all in the main text, although they are designed to refer to particular sentences in the main text. The end notes are written in a different style than the main narrative, and detract from the flow. By and large they fall into three categories: those that are essential to the text and directly related to the main text; those that are essential to the text, but not directly related to the main text and those that are not essential. The first two categories should have been integrated into the narrative and the third should have been eliminated.
I was really excited about Blackout: a new Connie Willis novel set in the Doomsday Book/To Say Nothing of the Dog world, focused on Willis' favorite period in history: the Blitz.
And Blackout is good. It focuses on the stories of three main historians as they travel to different parts of England during 1940 and encounter time travel hitches. Along the way, there are typical Willis flares – cute, yet annoying children; lovable & brave young women with lots of pluck; comedies of errors and confused details; despair redeemed only by having friends to cling to. Her characters are lovable, her comedy is gold, her prose is affecting. It is pure Willis.
And yet. It feels sacrilegious, and maybe I'll go back and revise the three stars once All Clear comes out, but I just didn't love Blackout. The pacing felt a little slow, like I was reading the same day in the life over and over. I resent having to buy two books to get one story and Blackout ended just as it was getting to the point in the plot that I wanted to read. The whole thing feels like a historical set up for a great scifi story, rather than the story itself.
The Magicians is frequently billed as Harry Potter meets Narnia. What is left out is the heavy helping that Grossman borrows from a series of unfortunate events, which is, truly, unfortunate. The Magicians is really quite clever, when Grossman forgets to make all of his characters (and as a result, his reader) maximally miserable.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about why I didn't enjoy this book. I like urban fantasy. I like gritty literature. I loved the way the Grossman treated being a magician in a mundane world as something that would mess you up and remove your chances of having a normal life or normal interactions. I loved how academic and technical magic was. And, when Grossman concentrated on his own plot and his own ideas, the results were amazing.
To me, the problem arose in the set of totally unsympathetic disaffected 20-somethings that comprise that main cast. Although we're supposed to believe that they are the most brilliant youths in America, it seems to be a law of physics in Grossman's universe that whenever a character is confronted with two choices, they will chose the worse one. Perhaps it helps that his characters drink copious amounts of alcohol roughly every other page. As the reader, it becomes tedious to anticipate how Grossman will turn the latest plot arc into misery all around. Additionally, Grossman seems to intentionally write unrelated, usually pointless plot arcs that remain without conclusion at the end. Perhaps this is to loan the reader the despair the characters feel at living in a world where nothing means everything. If so, it worked – I spent most of my time reading this book despairing.
This is one of my favorite books of my childhood. I reread it nearly every time I'm at my parent's house.
I was always intimidated by this book, because I was intimidated to meet Jean Little. She was billed to us in second grade as an inspiration; a partially blind author as evidence that we could do whatever we set our hearts to. I was nervous to meet her less because she was an inspiration and more because it was the first time that I'd ever met an author. But then I was nervous to read her books because I was scared that they would be books about being an inspiration over and over.
However, her books stand completely on their own merit. Kate in particular is my favorite. It is the most honest narrative I've ever read about friendship and the perils of being friends as middle schoolers, who are constantly changing, but trying to be the best self that they can. It also deals with being the product of an inter-faith marriage and about finding an identity separate from that of your parents while still being a part of the family.
More than any other childhood book, Kate still speaks to me when I read it. It's rare to find a book about middle school that's this faithful, especially one like Kate, which deals with the parts of middle school that apply to everyoneover and over throughout life