Ben Saufley
Finally finished this. Always found it intriguing but for some reason was never getting any momentum with actually reading it. Switched to audiobook, which reduces some of that friction (usually the friction is that I'm trying to read and my body is trying to go to sleep), and blew through the remaining stuff. Lots of fun. I liked the characters; I liked that the author doesn't particularly talk down to the (presumably YA) reader, even regarding some pretty fun (if mostly bogus) science stuff; I liked the plot. I think there are more, and I'm definitely gonna have to pick up at least the next one.
3.5 - 4, but they don't allow half stars. Pretty fun. I feel like it kind of fizzled at the end and honestly, SpoilerI didn't go much for the whole Sadie saga, which became the focal point as the book went on. But it was still mostly very interesting, moderately smart, and a fun time-travel adventure.
Very quick read. Kind of a strange approach to telling the story, but definitely interesting, communicative, informative. Surprisingly sympathetic (without of course condoning some terrible acts). The art is well-crafted and a also relatively unusual style in the medium – you see a lot of faux-amateur indie comics; a few photorealistic; plenty that mimic the mainstream. You don't see a ton with this sort of Wall Street Journal portrait crosshatching/stippling style. Or, at least, I don't.
I did find it interesting how the author anglicized not just names and nicknames (somewhat reasonable, though I realized I kind of expect at least some foreign words thrown into conversation between foreigners in media) but also the conversational style. I had to remind myself that these conversations were (presumably, though never explicitly stated) taking place in Serbo-Croatian. Even a few place names got anglicized: Niš became “Nish,” for example. But Dejan wasn't “Deyan.” This won't be a thing for most people, but as someone who spends a lot of time around Serbs (girlfriend and family), I actually found it kind of distracting.
Really enjoyable. I guess I wasn't entirely aware what the plan was for future books, so I was a little caught off guard by the very, very unresolved ending. But I get it – it feels less unresolved with the understanding that it's part of a series. It's just that I had certain expectations, certain theories about prophecies etc that I thought would be resolved at a certain point, but weren't.
The universe is unique and exciting and the two character's voices are genuine and compelling. Good book. Will eagerly await the next.
I am a little confused about whether this is YA or not? It mostly reads like YA, and that's how it was presented to me, but there's a lot of discussion of/threat of rape. It'd be one thing if this were a book discussing actual history, but as “flavoring” in a fantasy novel, I don't tend to like that in adult books, let alone YA. I dunno. Unresolved feelings about that.
Better than Dan Brown. A bit of a strange anticlimax though. The last third of the book was a bit of, “is this the big secret? no, is this the big secret? No... is this? ...oh, it's over?”
That's probably an exaggeration. But there was at least some of that confusion about what the whole thing was about, as the end approached. Anyway, it's still better than Dan Brown. I enjoyed it. I'd probably read something else by this guy.
Pretty fun. Listened to most of it on audio. Something about the cover, and the way it had been presented, had led me to believe that this book was as bit more, I don't know, literary? It's not. It's a fun science fiction adventure, and that's about it. The language is plain, the characters are secondary to the adventure. It's a nerd fantasy in the extreme, and sometimes that sort of takes you out of it a bit. But I am still a pretty big nerd. So I mostly enjoyed it, and now I'm moving on with my day.
I remember liking [b:Over Sea, Under Stone 11312 Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark is Rising, #1) Susan Cooper https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166468889s/11312.jpg 742] a lot more than this one, but I finished that one years ago.This felt a lot less like an adventure and a lot more like ...a kid who had a bunch of stuff happen to him. And it wasn't even, like, “kid gets swept up in major adventure.” More like “kid goes about his day, but every now and then weird stuff happens that he's somehow an important part of... without his actually making any decisions about those things.”That's my major takeaway from the story. My impression, and my objection.Really wanted to love this series. Not sure I want to invest more time in it, after this one. Maybe I will in a while.
Picked it up because a movie's coming out and I figured I'd read it before I (potentially) watched it. Having read it, I'll say it looks like the movie won't even be vaguely similar to the book.
Anyway: it was fine. The antagonists were not characters for the most part - more just abstract bad guys. But I did like some of the spookier writing. Not really a genre I care about, but it did give me the creeps a few times. Pretty formulaic; not a ton of world building at all - by which I mean I know next to nothing about the world they lived in. But not bad. Very quick. May pick up a sequel at some point.
It's between 3 and 4 stars. I enjoyed it pretty thoroughly. In the end, it was more of a fun experience than a great book, so I went with three. It's kind of how I felt about the movie Gravity: the actual plot, and anything they tried to do with it, wasn't great. But the way they made you experience it was still really fun. Maybe I'm trying to describe hollow fun? But I don't think this was quite hollow. Just ... it leaned toward glib, when its subject matter could've been a lot more thrilling. It favored procedure over storytelling (“here's how I'll construct this tool” rather than any of the potential fear/introspection/character work that could've happened). The glibness made it entertaining – I laughed a lot as I read it – but maybe detracted from the end product.
I don't know, mixed feelings: I really did enjoy it, start-to-finish, and I'd recommend anyone read it. But once it was over it felt a little shallow for what it could have been.
I really enjoyed this. I spent a lot of the book trying to figure out where it was going, and what its political motivation is – dystopian futures rarely lack some political motivation. So far, the only messages I can tell are basic, moral, principles, not political ideologies. Which I like. I think there were hints dropped earlier on that in retrospect were intentional red herrings as far as the intent/plot of the book. I was trying to turn it into The Giver, or something along those lines, and trying to determine the moral lessons I should be learning from all of the factions, which ones were good and bad, etc, and while it shared some themes with overt allegories like The Giver and 1984, it's definitely its own thing and a lot more than it initially appears to be.
I also found the love interest plotline seemed to be a much more convincing version of Twilight's. I only read the first Twilight, because it was a garbage book, but it seems to me (as a straight man, obviously not the main target here) that this book did a much better job of a similar thing: the characters are obviously drawn to each other. There's a lot of noticing of clavicles, and tensing of muscles, etc etc, but the characters are a lot more fleshed out and even the attraction feels a lot more convincing. I enjoyed it, and I also enjoyed that (like many other YA/children's series with love stories) it wasn't all about that. It played a part, and did a good job, but it didn't detract from (or attempt to distract from) the larger plot.
I'm really looking forward to picking up the next one.
== Spoilers ==
Spoiler
The ending felt like it didn't live up to what the book had put together – it felt like I, Robot (the movie) or any number of other sci-fi plots, when the book had developed a pretty interesting world and a unique economy and political system. Not only did the whole mind control thing feel like Will Smith battling robots, but the themes were echoed in the lead Erudite doing it all seemingly in the name of logic, and a number of other things. I hate to keep using a Will Smith mis-adaptation of Asimov as an example, especially since I know I've seen this storyline before, but it's all I'm coming up with right now. I'm fine with that plot, mostly - I enjoyed the movie, too, mostly – I just felt like the book set it up for more.
Beyond that, the book seemed to fall apart a little for other reasons here: you have trouble controlling divergents, and you decide the thing to do is send one you're probably controlling to be like the only guy in charge of your quest for Chicago domination? I don't know. I still liked it, and I'm excited to see what happens next, but I do think there was a lot of smarter stuff in the book before Roth had to conclude the first story arc.
I didn't read all of Coraline (I don't own it - I picked it up at my parents' house and never finished it), but this had a lot of the same feel as the film (which I do own). I like both a lot, and the way he plays with what happens to a child's world when adults aren't on the child's side echoes government conspiracy plots in a unique and more personal way, but I do feel like there were a lot of the same sort of things going on in each book. Ursula felt a lot like the Other Mother. So while I did enjoy it, I just think I might've enjoyed it a bit more if it were a bit more its own thing.
You should definitely read it though if you haven't. It's short and it's worth spending the time on.
Really enjoyed it. I think the claims of sexism were unfounded. But I am a man, so, who knows. The main female character, Julia, does go through a lot (a lot), but if anything that serves to highlight some of the worst of what women can experience in a male-dominated world. I think the same goes for some of Quentin's naïve misogyny – that's part of the story. Just because it's there doesn't mean it's being endorsed. Quentin is kind of a dick, we know this.
Anyway. Great adventure, great personality, great imagination, I really enjoyed this. Very readable as well.
A thought about the end contains vague spoilers:
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I guess I should've expected that sinking feeling as I read the ending – it'd been foreshadowed the whole time, and the last book was almost as bad, but the last book wasn't quite as bad (he still got to have a lot of what he wanted; really, the sacrifice was on Alice, not him) and I found myself swept up in the heroic adventure so when the ending came, I was disappointed. At the very least, I wanted (still want) to know what happens next. And (probably like Quentin) I'm still trying to figure out if there are any loopholes or ways to get to Fillory or the new world.
Decent book. Found that it was more anecdotes about the world surrounding soccer than any sort of explanation of the soccer world, let alone the world as a whole. Interesting stories, though. Mostly compelling - frequently saddening, with all the useless, irrational hate and violence, and not a ton said in favor of a sport the author clearly cherishes.
Enjoyed the hell out of this one, like the last. Ate it right up. That said, a few concerns:
• First, if one more person's mouth makes a line (grim or otherwise) I'm going to lose it.
• Second, Kvothe is what, 17 now? Maybe 18? By the end of the book? Two books in and like two years have passed? It's a trilogy. I'm enjoying this long adventure but I'm wondering what's going to happen to get everything into the third book. It sounds like, maybe, there will be another trilogy after this, that's ... maybe AFTER the story is told? I'm alright with that. But I'm still kind of wondering how we get there.
• And yeah, I'm still a little let down by the fact that neither book has had an arc, really. It's all leading to something, hopefully in book three (book six?), which is cool, but I'd like a sub-arc. Something to tie the book together, while the overarching narrative continues on its long, long way.
• There isn't even a release date for book 3 yet? When you've got a story like this that is really one big book in three parts, not three books, you've got to get it out there!
Surprisingly futuristic for something written in 1909. Its themes have been heard before, time and time again - humankind versus a machine of their own creation, I guess - but 100+ years later the details remain fascinating. I also love the constant talk of “ideas” without any real ideas in sight. “Oh stop this talk, it gives me no ideas.”
Doesn't feel like a full book – feels like the first book of a book. Not so much of a climax, denouement in this one. Just setting the groundwork for future books. Lots of questions that were set up, I hoped, to be answered, are still unanswered. I think of multi-book plots as still having individual subplots in each book, which this one didn't really. It was just Day One of the story, as I suppose was promised. Which has me a little annoyed and impatient. That said, I enjoyed it cover-to-cover, and I've started the second (which is even longer, at 1000 pages) already. I think, though, if he doesn't give me something to hold onto in this one, I'm not going to get the third (when it comes out? is it out?).
I don't have much to say about this other than that I really enjoyed it. At times Grossman's style of writing and especially the way he discusses magic, its effects, and the various denizens of the magical world reminded me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is (in my eyes) a very positive comparison.
It was a lot of fun to read, but also... I'm not an expert on books or literature, but it wasn't beach reading. It wasn't a challenge to get through like so much esteemed “literature,” but it is all the same very well-written and thought-provoking. I'm pretty excited to pick up The Magician King.
Solid. Second half much more interesting than the first half. A lot of tangential information seemed to slow the book down at times. And I hate, hate, hate, reading, seeing, thinking about crimes of the sort that were committed in this book. So... I'm glad I'm done with it.
That said, I'm going to have to see the movie. I can probably get through the awful parts. And if so, I bet the rest will be a hell of a lot of fun. The book at least lays the groundwork for that.
Having looked through some of the other Amulet books, I feel like this series gets much better. I like this one, but it's clearly just a start, just getting its footing. It seems a little simple right now. It starts out beautifully (and tragically), but then moves to the pretty clichéd, “We have to move into this broken-down house in the middle of nowhere, kids,” thing (à la Spiderwick, Coraline, um ... lots of horror movies), and then just as it starts to pick up again, it ends.
I was also disappointed because I love Kibuishi's environments - his cities and backgrounds and such - and this book was almost entirely devoid of them. I felt like the characters were interacting in a vacuum too often.
The house robot at the end, though, is just more proof that my faith in Kibuishi is justified, and I'm going to buy book 2 very, very soon.
Not a bad book, but it's got a lot of problems. I'm not an economist (/econometrician) or anything, but I would be reading and see a flaw in the logic that, sure, it was probably fine to overlook, but it would make me wonder more and more what other flaws the book had, that I had missed. I took it all with a grain of salt: many of its analyses declare positively that such-and-such a country is the best, or worst, or biggest overachiever, but the methods getting there take small liberties at every step, which seems like it would produce cascading inaccuracies (remember the movie Multiplicity?).
The reason I kept reading, after a certain point, was that it offered me a lot of interesting historical information - about soccer, and sometimes just about the progress of smaller nations that you don't hear much about in American high school history classes.
So it's absolutely worth reading, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.
I guess there are no real spoilers in this but it certainly could give one expectations so I'm marking this as having spoilers.
I was hesitant after the second book, which I enjoyed but which seemed to lean a bit heavily on the conventions of the first. Also, the second and the third books are far more dark and violent than the first. As I approached the ending of Mockingjay, I became more and more curious (not just as an invested reader, but as a creative person, someone who is interested in telling stories ... wow, that all sounds silly) about how Collins was going to end the trilogy. With everything that had happened, it would take a lot to justify the whole thing.
She very, very much did it.
I'm very fascinated by this whole series being aimed at young adults, but I think there was a lot that happened in this series, a lot was said, and it ended exactly how it had to. With everything that had happened, it couldn't be a happy ending, but it would be far too easy to end the series with a simple, tragic ending. I thought she might go for a meaningless end, by simply killing Katniss and maybe everybody else. Just because of all of the preceding events. It might have been interesting, and I was preparing myself for something like that. I was not prepared for what actually happened and I'm glad, because it was perfect and not obvious.
The way Collins wrapped up this series validated everything that happened in it without trivializing any of it, and it proved that she knew what she was doing. I love Harry Potter (and yes, I know they're very different things), and I liked how Rowling ended that series but she left a lot of things that didn't set quite right. This ending seemed to fit together perfectly, partially because it had little to tie up. There was some deus ex machina, some stuff that might have seemed contrived, if there weren't precedent for it throughout the series. And all of this has elevated this series to one of my favorites of all time. We'll see if I'm just coming down from the experience of the series, or if this opinion endures. But I loved it.
Even books I'm enjoying don't often pull me in as much as I'd like these days - I find myself setting them down and not picking them up for weeks, even. But I found this in paperback recently and remembered being curious about it when I saw it in hardcover so I bought it. There are so many ways this book could have failed, building on the clichés it uses, but it didn't. I found myself engaged constantly, wondering what happened next, worrying about characters, and desperately needing to pick the book up again when I'd put it down.
I don't know. I don't really feel like analyzing it much beyond that, but I really enjoyed it. I'm going to find the second book as soon as I possibly can. And the third just came out! The final book! That's exciting