Timo
I'm really torn between 4 and 5 stars.
This was a terrifying book. Terrifying in the most primal way. The fear it builds does not come from a wicked beast or something paranormal, it comes from something that's all to real and can't be fought: a virus inside you.
The writing style really felt like a Stephen King book, with its background character development and interviews and case file parts (which was on purpose, as the author acknowledges). That said I really loved it.
The transition from innocent childhood where the adults handle everything, to the sad truth that adults are sometimes as lost as children, was really well done. Every kid had its own fleshed out character and took a reasonable part in the story.
The gory and disgusting “action” parts were evenly spaced out and believable.
But it's also a sad book. There's nothing good happening to any of the characters. All they got left are memories of better times, on which they cling on while going through hell. It doesn't have a happy ending, which I really like. Life isn't like the fairy tales.
So why not 5 stars? Because all the animal cruelty left a bitter taste in my mouth. I know that it WAS there to do just that, and for a few characters those scenes were crucial, but it was a bit too fleshed out for my tastes. Like the author really had fun writing sites full of those stuff.
Yes yes, I know that drawing the line on animal cruelty in a book where kids slaughter themselves is weird, but that's just how I roll. I can't help it.
Groundhog Day meets war and scifi. What sounds like a real awesome story left me bored.
Although the story is fresh, and the small scifi elements really catched my interest, something about the execution bored me.
Somewhere after the middle I just didn't care anymore, and only pushed through to the end because it isn't very big.
You had me there for the first half Mr. King, but really lost me during the second.
Because I loved many other King books so far, I felt right at home at the beginning. The story throws you right into the action from the first sentence. There are no explanations right away, which creates a really intriguing setting. You want to know where and why this is happening.
There's a part modern, fantasy and dystopian world waiting to get explored. And the first half of the book does this really good. The Gunslinger meets interesting chracters and creatures along the way. There's a old western town ready to be explored and destroyed. There's death, a worshiping cult and a huge shootout.
Then he meets this weird out of place boy in the middle of the desert, and everything started to fall apart for me. This boy joins the Gunslinger and I think we're supposed to care for him. Hell, the Gunslinger himself starts loving him. But for me it just felt out of place. I didn't care for him at all. At this point we get glimpses of the story behind the Gunslinger and the former world state, and it's pretty boring.
Then King started to write more and more gibberish. Don't get me wrong, King is one of my favorite authors and I really enjoyed most of his work I've read so far, but The Gunslinger really fell apart. He throws in really unnecessary long and convoluted similes every few sentences, and I stopped counting how many chapters ended with the characters sleeping in.
I powered through to see if King fell into his curse of bad endings, but it was pretty neutral. Nothing bad, nothing good. I just didn't care for it at all.
Freaking fantastic!!
I guess there's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said about this masterpiece.
The only epic fantasy I knew about -but never read- was Lord Of The Rings. This was the first time I tried one. And damn, this is what reading is all about. The world that Sanderson has build here is just fantastic. He introduces a breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre, with the exclusion of typical magic. Sanderson gives birth to “Allomancy”, a power that let people “burn” metals after swallowing them. I won't go in detail here, just know that it's really fresh and awesome.
This first book is so big, complex and rounded in itself, that just the thought of it being just the beginning of a trilogy is stunning. You've been introduced to the world and its state, and been giving enough of open questions to peak the interest in reading it all.
I may be a bit biased because I've listened to the Graphic Audio audiobook version of this for the most part (which was really really awesome), but for me this book had it all.
As my second dive into comics I got Book 1 & 2 for christmas.
And oh yes this is a grand opening. I already have way more fun with this than with my first dive “American Vampire”.
Y is very fast paced (at least Book 1 so far - could be because the overall state of the world and the first main characters get introduced on such few pages). There were a lot of jumps to other locations all around the world, and nearly every few pages or at least every chapter ended on some cliffhanger, or with a panel that just left me dying to read on. So I naturally really burnt through this quick. It was a really fun page turner and I start to realize that this is what I want in comics.
My only complaints are that really all the main characters (and even most all of the side characters) are pure cliche. Everyone fulfills their cliche roles and even says everything that fills this role. Also apparently everyone is seriously good looking in this “dystopian” world. There's not one unattractive character. I really hope these things will tone down a bit as the story progresses.
So for now...off to Book 2!
This was my first choice while trying to get into comic books. As a Stephen King fan I was really interested to see a story of his in comic format. And yes, the story is fresh and filled with emotions, character depth and of course, gore and blood.
As a humble novice with comic books I can't compare or make an in depth look at the artwork so I won't try. But I found it fittingly gritty and detailed. The colors are kept pretty dark.
Turns out though, even if this story is fresh and outside of the mainstream, Vampires still aren't my thing. I'm not interested enough to see what else awaits.
I really like the bound book with it's embedded cover and the original scripts at the end were very interesting.
“Hello, I'm Bear Grylls and for todays special episode...we're going to Mars” or “Well...shit”.
One of those two would be enough to describe The Martian. As someone who loves scifi and everything space this really tickled all my spots. It's a really thoroughly researched story FULL of science and survival. It's really interesting to see how Watney finds ways to overcome everything that Mars throws at him.
I don't nearly know enough about chemistry, physics or botany to understand everything that he comes up with, but that's the point. If Andy Weir would let some average person get stranded on Mars, the story would be over after 10 pages. I'm really impressed with what's possible in the face of death, if you have some scientific and mechanical expertise.
To not get the reader too overwhelmed or bored, the story is mixed up with the viewpoint from earth, where the whole world and especially NASA works hard to contact and rescue Watney. There could have been more emphasis on the human connections but that's okay. The story focuses on physical survival. But it helps that Watney doesn't loose his sense of humor and throws around some funny jokes here and there.
Especially the ending had some “Gravity” like action which was the icing on the cake for me.
I currently wanted to try and get into comics. Not really the superhero stuff, but ones with great and interesting stories. I chose “Blankets” as my first try because it's been getting high praise.
Aaaand..I just read this twice in a row. It's beautiful. The fact that it's autobiographical makes it so real. It's a really touching coming of age story that deals with finding faith and first love, and loosing them again.
It illustrates with lovely pictures that it's necessary to experience the highest highs, the lowest lows and the extremes of life to gain context and form your own opinions and help you find your place.
“How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement...no matter how temporary.”
I will definitely read this again on some snowy day. And I'm definitely on the lookout for my next graphic novel.
I finally came around to read this. And it was good.
Part of me wants to think this story is about growing up and leaving your innocent and orderly life as a child behind, to face the gruesome reality of adulthood. But another part of me just takes the story as it presents itself. A scifi”ish” dystopia where manhood altered nature and feelings, because we destroyed the world with our behavior. Because those are stories that I like.
I like frightening future predictions, because it's fun to weight them for their possibility of coming true. And this one really could come true, or is already if we look at North Korea.
And this is where my problem with the book emerges. Lowry created a world that feels really claustrophobic and intense, but it leaves me with a desire to learn more about it. There's not much depth in everything, be it the world building or the characters.
I settled with the thought that this is on purpose, because that's how the characters in this world live. That's all they know. There isn't much depth in everything. Everything is superficial.
This way I could really enjoy the book, because it throws you right into this community.
Am I wrong? Probably. Could one interpret much or even less deeper than this? Sure, but with this mindset, paired with the really awesome ending that leaves you like you want it to leave you, I really enjoyed The Giver. I think it's a book that you can form like you wish.
How much can you endure before you have to become the devil?
This one hit me hard. What started as a fun ride into the mind of strangers, quickly got dark with the look back into childhood. Relations between characters felt so real it really hurt.The breakup between Ig and Merrin hit me especially hard, because it felt so goddamm real. As someone in exact the same relationship as theirs, I knew those thoughts and would've said the same things... I rarely read books, in which I hate a character that much and in which conversations feel so real.
We slowly learn what happens to Ig, before there's no other way than to become the devil. And trust me, those are bad things.
Horns spoke to me on a personal level many times, and for this it deserves five stars.
Can you fix something that was already broken to begin with?
A nice little book about terrible and narcissistic people who parade and bath in their money on their small private island. Status is all that counts.
A nice little book about those terrible peoples kids, who doesn't want to be a part of all those intrigues. They want to grow to be better people than their parents and want to make a change.
But how? How to save them from themselves? Sometimes it needs a tragedy to bring people back together and start caring again.
One of my favorite things in media (be it in movies, tv shows, video games or books) is when I get pleasantly surprised. When I go into something with a specific expectation, and get blown away by something I did not see coming. “In the Woods” did this for me.
I was in the mood for a classic murder mystery. Even if the market is flooded with them, and after seeing that this is the first book in a series called “Dublin Murder Squad” -which kinda sounded like some off the shelf shovelware stuff- I chose this.
What I really love about murder stories is the investigation progress. I find something cozy in around the clock working detectives huddled into some small room, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee out of cups while digging themselves through mountains of paperwork and photographs. Bonus points for rain that pours down the windows.
And I got all that with “In the Woods”. The writing is really visually and atmospheric, and the coziness kicked in alright. But around the middle of the book the pleasant surprises started to seep through. The plot and characters got way more complex than I expected. I couldn't stop reading. I felt like a detective myself learning all the tiny bits of the characters, and learned to love and/or hate them. All the way to the solutions I couldn't predict the outcome. And Tana French threw one or two small twists in.
I can see that some people will hate this book just because of the fact that one of the biggest mystery doesn't get solved. But I didn't mind. It really fits into the circumstances and left me with something to think about.
Although there are sequels I will probably never read them. For me this was a perfect story in itself and I would like to remember the characters as they are at the end of this book.
Ready Player One is fun. That's the one simple word I could find after finishing this. If you have the slightest interest in video games and/or nostalgic pop culture you will probably have fun too. Yes, sometimes the references are a bit too much, but not enough to put me off.
The book paints a dark future that felt eerily real. Nearly all of what's left of humanity is immersed into the most complex virtual world you can imagine. And I can easily see myself among them. The possibilitys are endless.
You did it again Mr. Gaiman. It seems like I can only enjoy the shorter books from you. But that's not a bad thing, because those are awesome. After loving “The Ocean At The End Of The Lane”, this one transported me once again right back into a magic fairy tale.
It's really fast paced and many of the adventures are just hinted at, so you need to form them in your head. But this really blends perfectly with the style. It feels like reading a more awesome Grimm tale.
The main protagonists are lovable and all the other people, creatures and animals are full of fantasy.
I really didn't want this to end. But the ending was once again fairy tale style, which left me happy.
This is a book full of magic. Magic and stories. Magic and stories that could only take those forms in the head of a Boy's Life.
This book transported me right into the world of Cory. It's so perfectly written that I could really smell the air of Zephyr and could imagine what it would like to be a boy in this town. I laughed, cried and felt happiness with the characters.
It's really big and there are many side stories. But it isn't too much. A few of the magic things didn't get really explained, but that's perfectly fine. It's part of a boy's mind to see magic in ordinary things.
I'm torn between feeling happy and empty after finishing this. Empty because I'll really miss all those characters, but happy because the ending was beautiful.
Life goes on, but we'll never loose parts of the magic that surrounded us as we were kids. If we allow it.
5 stars. Perfect.
Well well Franco...For me you come around as a cool person. I enjoy your movies and even your art. But it really isn't necessary to try out ALL forms of art. I don't really know what you're trying to say with these short stories, and I stopped trying to find deeper meaning really fast. All stories are pretty much the same with no outcome. This is easily the worst part. Some start pretty decent and left me thinking “hey this could be something”, but they all end abruptly with no real outcome or closure whatsoever. Although the weird writing style gets slightly better half way through, it still doesn't safe it. I would have tossed this if it wasn't so short. Save your time.
Finally done. This was a really tough read. I had to use my Kindle dictionary more than ever, haha!
But nevertheless the story held my interest enough to not give up. Blindsight was hands down the most hardcore sci-fi I've read so far. You have never heard something like this ever before. Most first contact books or movies are getting their ideas from something we humans can relate to. The aliens are looking and behaving like something we know, be it human or animal. But Peter Watts, boy does he fabricate something. Those aliens are really alien. Add this to a dark and hopeless picture of the future and toss some scientifically backed up vampires in the mix and your're set.
It was really interesting but in the end it was just a bit to difficult and tedious to read for me.
Fantastic. This book had it all. Humor, feelings, a little bit of action, life lessons, science, poetry...
I couldn't stop reading. The writing is easy and the chapters small. It flows perfectly.
I laughed out loud more than a few times and felt strongly connected with the main characters feelings.
What makes us human? What's the point of living? Can we love even in the darkest moments? This book has thought provoking opinions on all of this.
This was my second book by Zusak. Although not as powerful as The Book Thief, I still really enjoyed it. Zusak does some things with words that really touches me. Even the shortest sentences are beautiful.
The Story was fresh and entertaining. I loved the mass of different characters with different lives. It all felt real.
What a heavy book. Heavy in so many ways. For once it felt pretty long. Especially the first half. Don't get me wrong, I've read and enjoyed longer books, but with this I felt like I've read so much, when in hindsight not very much happened story wise. But what happens is character development. And it's so good in it's own dirty way. Which brings me to the second heaviness: the setting. My god is this setting dark and depressing. There is not one(!) main or side character with a happy background. Nobody's experiencing something good for them. It's just a endless down spiral right to the end. And it fits perfectly. There should be nothing happy in all those topics.
The book keeps you on the edge and guessing. And the ending is so perfectly written, that I totally forgot the slower pace in the first half.
Goodreads recommended this for me. So I had no idea what to expect, other than a YA series. And boy what an effin adventure. At first I really disliked the writing style and the narrative voice. But the more I read, the more it grew on me. I really appreciated it later, because it gives you that last grain of salt that makes the world much more alive. As soon as Ness included a bit of scifi I was hooked. The characters grew so well that my heart nearly broke at some twists. The story stays interesting and tense until the heartbreaking and crazy abrupt ending. And after seeing that the other two books are even better rated, I can't wait to continue the adventure!