Sean

I read the Hamartigenia mainly for theological reasons, and I was not impressed. However, I am glad I read it for the prestige it brings me when I go to the grocery store and tell the produce guy about it. He is so intimidated by the breadth of my reading that he has asked me not to return to his department, to buy my bananas elsewhere henceforth.

Actually, the essay which accompanies the poem in this volume is worth reading if one wants to know a lot about the intellectual and literary context of the poem, and the academese is not as thick as in some critical essays. If I were more interested in the poem itself, I would give this edition five stars, but since it was theologically irrelevant to me, I gave it only three.

I read this book for work, a thing that is not regularly a part of my job. I read the first few pages as soon as it arrived for me, just to have a look, and then I did something I have never done before and will likely never do again. I spent the next who-knows-how-many hours of work time reading. I just dumped all the things I needed to finish up before the weekend and just read. After work, I went out to eat and read. I sat in my car in the parking lot and read. I came home and read. I finished the book an hour after bed time and am now feeling a little bit bereft.

Here is all the review I can manage right now: I am glad I was shut away alone in an empty office, or later in my car or at home alone, when the tears flowed. A beautiful book. (And that is saying a lot, since there are some elements I rather don't like; but I can't help loving it anyway.)

There should be more books like this one. I don't remember much at all of the fluffy sweetness-and-light junk I read as a child, but the dark, and the darkly funny, has stayed with me for years.

Even though this is not a book I would generally pick to read (I don't handle extreme suspense in books or movies very well), I agreed to read it because a friend handed it to me and told me she wanted someone to read it so she could talk bout it. I am so glad I agreed! I had to put it down a few times and come back later, but once the horror was fully revealed, I found it smooth sailing. Paris wrote this so well that even I, who just can't handle when things get just too aweful, had to keep coming back for more. I will definitely put her next book on my list to read.

Excellent selection of readings. Of course, there is much room to quibble with the selection, but honestly, the editors had to make choices, and mine would not have been better, just different. I liked it, and I appreciated the various translations.

Utterly beautiful and heartbreaking, this book had an odd effect on me: I spent more than a week just sad for the poor German people. A book that opens my heart this wide is a good book.

Exquisitely beautiful art that will take you away to mythic lands, in the service of a worthy tale. I love everything: the sense of mystery coupled with the outright bizarre (which never ceases to be beautiful); the fun and humor which does not distract from the serious story; and the delightful environment in which to discover, perhaps, what it means to be human.

Excellent. Although she continues to romanticize the pagan past–which is, by definition, unrealistic–I love these books. Walton retells the stories of the Mabinogion with grace, respect, and great beauty. Although she is definitely a modern writer, with a modern writer's concern for psychology and detail, her books never make me feel like I am reading a modern attempt at retelling an older story. Rather, they have such integrity that they read seamlessly with the air of authenticity. The only thing I do not like is her tendency to expand the meaning of a sentence with a sentence fragment after the sentence. Which she does fairly often.

This is very much not my type of fantasy. I like my fantasy a bit higher, thank you. So if I judged it strictly by what I normally like, I would give it maybe two or three stars. But I really did enjoy reading this story, and I believe that if I were more into the sub-genre I would have found it to be a four-star effort, so that's what I'm giving it: four stars for what I think it deserves in its own context, not for what I like.

This book was very hard to enjoy, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Handler writing as Snickett wrote some of my favorite books of all times (really, the Series of Unfortunate events just may have made me a slightly better person), but I was somewhat disappointed with a few other of his books I ventured into. I was not sure what to think, but I won a copy of Pirates and a request for a review, so I decided to work through it no matter what. I am glad I did.

We are pirates begins with deliberate attempts to confuse the reader and to create a surreal and bleak world, both physically and psychologically. Handler succeeds in disorienting us from the first chapter, and this disorientation continues to the end. He also succeeds in creating a cast of utterly unlikable characters–the world he presents here, if it were the real one, I think I might become an advocate of suicide.

The basic plot – disaffected and unattached people run away to become pirates – could be the foundation for a rollicking good time book, full of fun and adventure. I thought perhaps that was where the book was heading. Handler quickly pulled that rug out from under my feet, which at this point in history is a phrase that means he took me by surprise and suddenly removed support for my misguided idea. Well, I shan't tell what happens, but when our pirates raid their first ship, it was a tough read.

I'm glad I finished. For all the book's difficulties and Handler's refusal to make the fun book I was hoping for, at the end I believed that I had read about real people, who really changed because of their encounter with the same real life I meet every day. I did not enjoy it so much as respect it. Handler played with my emotions and he won.

Dinesen is my new favorite author. Of the stories herein included, “The Ring” has captivated me the most, with its subtle yet fierce eroticism in one sentence. With one sentence, one little image (the knife in the sheep-thief's hand pointing at her neck), Dinesen disturbed me, thrilled me, and immediately let me know exactly what was going on in the mind of an up-till-then naive girl. Just amazing what she did in so few words.

I have not read any Hemingway since The Old Man and the Sea in high school, and that made hardly any impression on me at all; so we may as well say that this is my first exposure to him.

I certainly understand why the parodies of his writing are as they are, why he is considered so easy to imitate for humorous effect, but My word! how far superior to him imitators is Mr. Hemingway. His writing captures, with the fewest words possible, exactly each place and person and feeling. Without any obvious attempt, Hemingway depicts bleakness and self-pre-ocupied love and war-torn scenery so clearly that it quite took me away from home to Italy of a century ago.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Farewell to Arms and intend to read at least For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I laughed absurdly hard in several spots, which is a little odd, I know, when I'm working at the reference desk. (By the way, the glow-in-the-dark crayon... well, turn off the light.) Fun and charming and very funny.

Walton's writing is as stunning in this as in its predecessor. She is amazingly adept at expanding the original text, adding a modern concern with psychology, while never giving the feeling that she is doing violence to the feel of the ancient text.

Her neo-pagan and anti-Christian intrusions are annoying at time (does it simply never occur to her that my Celtic pagan ancestors gave up their old gods so easily and willingly for a reason?), but that annoyance is easily forgiven for the sake of the beauty of her writing and the majesterial authority of her vision. (Yes, I just wrote “the majesterial authority of her vision” and I mean it.) Her insights into the inner thoughts and feelings of the people she writes about make me willing to cut her some slack for her comment about the old gods' supposed “charity.” “Charity” is precisely the last word that would come to mind for me.

I love Walton's retelling of the Mabinogion and recommend it for anybody who loves old stories, human psychology, the real ancient Celts as well as the misty and mystical “Celtic twilight,” beauty, the Matter of Britain, or a haunting and engaging tale.

I didn't love it perhaps quite as much as its predecessor, but I read Space Merchants long ago enough, at an early enough age, that it has sunk into the nooks and crannies of my hidden brain, and so maybe I love it out of proportion. But this was very good, well worth reading, and it reinforces the same message quite well. I think it would be monotonous if read immediately after Space Merchants, but after several years, it was really enjoyable and a little bit inspiring.

Although it is clear that Goodwin has a clear end-point in mind, and therefore an agenda he wants to pursue, it is also clear that he has authored a really worthwhile book. I kind of resent being led too obviously to a conclusion, but his conclusion is difficult to avoid, I think. And I appreciate that he seems to say, although without making it quite this clear, “No one school of economic thought is entirely sufficient in itself.”

I liked the illustrations, but I am glad to have read other reviews which make it obvious that I am not the only one who was a bit confused by the story.

Were Ferdowsi to come back to life and come to my home town, I would drive to see him and then park my car 100 yards away and get out. I would run to him and kiss the ground before his feet. I would pour a bushel basket of $100 bills over his head. I would spray him with Clive Christian No.1 Pure Perfume for Men (more than $1400 a bottle). I would hire the best local band to play for him, and I would feast him with the unbelievably delicious clams, oysters, and salmon the local waters are known for, prepared by the best local chef. I would laud him like a lion. And I would thank him for having written an epic poem which brought me so much pleasure.

I'm surprised at how much I loved the Shahnameh. Davis's translation is clear, understandable, and at time quite lovely. The mix of poetry and prose worked for me really well. I tend to resent prose translations of poems, but to tell the truth I often find verse translations to be tedious. Davis gave me the best of both without the worst of either.

A few surprises. I was intrigued by how very similar the religious sentiment (and especially the pre-Zaroastrian period of the poem) is to that which is found in the Old Testament. And I was amazed at how similar it felt to medieval European stories. In particular I was gratified at how violent and frightening –how similar to the European model– the dragons are. None of these “Chinese dragons in their serene heights holding the pearl of wisdom” nonsense. These Persian dragons want to kill you, just like in real life.

Having read it, I love the Shahnameh, and I love Davis's translation.

Well, although I really do get tired of all the four-letter words (does anybody ever say that anymore?), and would enjoy the books more without so many of them, I do enjoy the Saga story quite a bit. This volume did not disappoint.

Beautiful. I recommend it for adults who love poetry and lovely pictures, and for their children, who will then grow up to love poetry and lovely pictures.

Unwritten has ended, and I am sad. But also happy, because they did not drag it on. It ended as it should have ended, correctly, with no easy resolution and only a small hint of slight sentimentality.

A fun adventure story, but no great literary merit that I could find. I liked Jason in a “Oh, he's cute, but wow is he ever useless” sort of way. I was impressed with Medea's sense of helplessness, begging for her own safety over and over. She obviously trusts nobody and assumes that no one has her best interest at heart. That may account for why she becomes so wicked later in life.

Even though I do not much care for Fables, I really enjoyed this Unwritten volume. The end left me speechless.

I really liked this book. It is a very good way to explain things that many people do not understand. I have long enjoyed his funny things on the computer. The writer has done something very hard–using only small simple words to explain things is not easy at all–and we should shake his hand and say “Good job, sir!” His book is better than anything I could write were I to try the same thing. Right now I am discovering how hard it is to do what he did–I am using only simple words and it is very hard! So, “Good job, Sir!”