Rob

Liked this quite a bit, and was surprised by how well it held up.

Rendezvous With Rama is a 1972 science fiction classic, about a future human society exploring an extraterrestrial... I guess I'd call it an artificially-made planetoid. It's light on what you or I might consider plot, preferring to cover the exploration and the challenges such explorers might encounter.

What strikes me about Rendezvous is how well thought out everything is. There are virtually no silly plot twists borne of a desire to artificially inject drama – no one acting irrationally, no decisions being made on the basis of barely-plausible emotion, no one incompetent. That is so rare it's striking when it happens.

This is one of the early sci-fi novels, so don't expect it to be different from what it is. It's a relatively self-contained work, content to explore within its boundaries. It does that beautifully.

Vonnegut's ninth novel. I enjoyed it – I've never met a Vonnegut book I didn't like – but this is somewhat different from the style I've noticed in his others I've read.

There is nothing fantastical here – no Ice-9, no aliens, no time travel. Hardly a requirement for a Vonnegut novel, of course. I didn't realize this until after, but there's another common Vonnegut motif absent here, the description of common objects in accurate-yet-alien terms.

This is, instead, a fairly straightforward morality play, a biting satire about charity, loving thy neighbor, and how people ought to act. Eliot Rosewater, drunk and heir to the Rosewater fortune, suddenly reverses course from most of his family, and begins using his fortune – as well as the rest of himself – to set up shop in his nominal hometown in Rosewater County and begin helping everyone there. With anything.

I don't sound enthusiastic about this, but I did like it a lot, and I consider it a thoughtful, clever, worthy addition to Vonnegut's catalog.

This is the fifteenth Dresden book. By now you should know what to expect: a fun urban fantasy read, pretty formulaic, heavy on the deus ex machina, one of the better examples of this sub-sub-genre. As an exemplar of type it's pretty solid, but it remains B-movie material. A friend felt this was a substantial improvement on the last several outings; I don't know that I agree. But it's fun.

Pretty solid start to a sci-fi series under the name S.A. Corey, which is a pseudonym for collaboration between Daniel Abraham (The Long Price Quartet, Dagger and Coin) and Ty Jenks (George R.R. Martin's assistant). If you require “hard” sci-fi in the sense that the science is accurate, look elsewhere – that's not what they're aiming for. Personally I don't care about that.

Enjoyed this a good bit. A little slow to get started – at 50 pages it takes off.

A perfectly adequate book that nonetheless didn't do much for me.

This is a 1970s era military SF book, in the spaceships-lasers-and-aliens mold. It deals with a conflict between humans and an alien race called the Taurans, about whom we never learn all that much. The plot revolves around the centuries-long conflict, narrated by drafted soldier Mandella; via relativity, he remains part of the war for much longer than a normal human lifespan. Which is where the other side of the story lies: constant culture shock, as for Mandella only a few years pass – relativistically speaking – while his home goes through decades and decades.

I suspect this was a stronger work in the '70s, when some of these ideas were more novel; these days it's all rather more pedestrian. Mandella's cynicism, likely a reflection of the post-Vietnam era in which the book was written, still plays well.

Bit disappointed with an ending that didn't feel brave enough, both for Mandella and the eminently predictable state of the war.

A middling fun airships-and-piracy story, as written by a four year old with a box of crayons.

The broad outlines of the story are fine if utterly unremarkable. The details are handled with the finesse of a drunk Parkinson's patient – backstory is presented over 90% of the way through the book just in time to become critically important, which is about the level of craftsmanship you can expect from Wooding. People don't say things, they grin them, or bellow them, or some other verb picked from Bartlett's Familiar Fantasy Tropes. Everyone acts exactly as you'd expect them to, according to the designs on the cardboard from which they're cut.

Not the worst thing around. I've certainly read worse. But not particularly worth your time, attention, or money.

Probably the best of the trade paperbacks so far.

I don't want to say too much about the plot of this one, lest I spoil the experience. It's both culturally referential and brutal.

I enjoyed this a lot. This volume is set mainly on the Farm; three episodes into the Telltale adaptation it's only gotten a couple of mentions, so it was nice to get such a big piece on it this early. It's not what I expected at all.

I really liked this. I don't want to get too deep into the plot; I was advised to go in blind and I make the same recommendation to you. I'll just say that it's a modern-day thriller premised on the idea that persuasion on the level of magic is a skill that can be taught.

Occasionally heavy-handed, mostly a great read. I generally like it when books explore the mechanics of the systems they create; I got a lot of that here, and it was great, but I would have liked even more of it. The ending hurts the book for a few reasons.

This was just sort of quietly heartbreaking. I can say it was a good read; I don't know if I can say I enjoyed it.

It's the story of Stevens: master butler and relic of a bygone era, who served an English lord through two World Wars before the house, and what staff remain, transferred to a new American owner. He's a consummate professional, suborning all personal matters to the demands and dignities of his role.

On a rare – possibly only – vacation, Stevens finally has the leisure to reflect on his life. At first concerned wholly with his profession, his thoughts wander and he begins to peel back the years of his life, and layer upon layer of self- deception.

Often, Stevens' thoughts reveal to us as readers facts that he does not yet and might never realize himself. Front and center is his former master of the house, Lord Darlington. Stevens idolizes Darlington: as a butler he considers it his highest calling to serve a man so central to the halls of power in England. He considers Darlington above reproach, and as Darlington does foolish or even reprehensible things, he either makes excuses for the man, or else denies that it's even his place to judge. The most obvious is Darlington's hand in international politics. We slowly discover that Darlington is a Nazi sympathizer with fascist leanings; rather than acknowledge these failings, Stevens decides that Darlington knows better than his detractors. After all, Darlington is a great man.

This is hardly Darlington's only misstep. Darlington orders Stevens to dismiss the Jewish members of staff; the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, objects strenuously, and demands that Stevens recognize the immorality of the order, but Stevens resolves the cognitive dissonance by recusing himself from considering the matter. It is not his to reason: Darlington has made his wishes clear, and there's nothing more to say.

Miss Kenton, of course, is the other central figure in Stevens' life. She is representative of all that Stevens has failed to do: directly, as a potential romantic interest clearly interested in him as he is in her, and indirectly, as the conscience Stevens will not permit himself.

The motoring trip, as Stevens' first real extended time away from Darlington Hall, is a horrorshow of these revelations for Stevens. He slowly realizes that he's wasted his life: he pegged the entire value thereof to his service to a great man, only to discover in his twilight years – when his professional capabilities are beginning to desert him, as his father's did – that that man wasn't so great after all. There's still so much he hasn't come to grips with when the story draws to a close: his feelings for Mrs Benn (neé Kenton), the fundamental insufficiency of his world view – after all, he still has the same slavish devotion to his profession, he merely regrets the decisions of his previous employer.

By the end Stevens has grasped some of the inadequacies of the actors in his worldview, but come precious little closer to grasping the inadequacy of the worldview itself. Crushing.

I enjoyed this a lot but it is a very, very strange book. It's based conceptually on a novel that Vonnegut started and didn't like, but that story is mixed in with an introspective sort-of memoir. It's a rambling sort of book, and you should not go in expecting a tightly plotted story.

Read this to see a bunch of Vonnegut's disjointed thoughts on life and hear his anecdotes and perspectives.

Like others have said, I'm glad I read this and I will probably never read it again. It's a fictional account of fictional residents of Nigeria/Biafra before, during, and after the civil war in the late '60s. It's not a war I even knew had occurred for a long time – as you might expect, it's not the war that gets top billing in American textbooks covering that era. As a consequence of my ignorance, I can't speak to its historical accuracy, although a cursory skim of Wikipedia turns up nothing to complain about.

Writing-wise, there are some superb passages, and some that tell too much rather than showing. I noticed the latter less as the book went on.

This is a rough read, not because it's dense (though it is well over 500 pages) but because it's depressing. The war was notorious for the starvation of much of what was then Biafra, and developed in part from the factionalism resultant from the colonially-imposed unification of different people into a single country. I don't pretend to be an expert, and I wouldn't mind learning more about it.

Fascinating book that made me sad, which is part of why it took me so long to get through it after my initial fast start – it's hard to want to pick up an upsetting book once you've put it down.

Some books are so powerfully affective that they instantly catapult themselves into one's list of favorites. This is one of those.

I've never read Irving before, so I don't know how typical this book is for him. (Now that I've corrected that oversight, I will be continuing to read him.) This is not a book with a complex, labyrinthine plot; it's principally about its characters, especially Owen itself, and it's difficult to write anything approaching a synopsis. Let me say instead that it deals with themes like faith, loss, war, and death, and hope that's enough. It's set largely in hindsight, of the late 1960s, from the perspective of the late 1980s.

The major events are few in number but great in impact. As a character study, it's an incredible one. Irving builds characters so vividly that they feel like real people.

I really liked this book, but it's hard to know what to say about it. There's little point in a plot summary, and I wouldn't want to cheapen it by revealing too much. Know going in that it's dense and reasonably lengthy, and that it's a serious work even if I laughed out loud on occasion while reading it. It handles itself well, avoiding cheapness that it could easily have wallowed in. Definitely worth reading.

Diane Ravitch's fiery assault on the so-called “school reform” movement. The book can be broadly divided into two primary sections. The first section addresses, individually, various myths about public education, and attempts to debunk them one at a time. The second lays out her proposed solutions.

The approach is sound, but the execution is not without problems. One of them resolves itself – I often found myself thinking that Ravitch had been making an assertion for quite a while with no evidence to support it. Typically the evidence did come a bit later, so if you find yourself unconvinced, you might give her a bit longer to make her case. She's also frequently repetitive.

One consistently discouraging observation is that her proposed solutions are vanishingly unlikely to be enacted, as things stand now. Pipe dreams are unsatisfying. But Ravitch is an education researcher, not a political strategist, and can hardly be faulted for that.


Nota bene: This book seems longer than it is, so much so that I got antsy wondering how it could possibly be padded out so long with the remaining material to be covered. As it turns out, it isn't – the back 30% is appendices and footnotes.

This was a book club pick. I quite enjoyed it. It's set in the '50s, and the premise, as the Goodreads blurb notes, involves desecration of dead bodies in a small Southern town, but most of it is about a protagonist's desperate flight to report it to someone who will listen before he's caught and killed. Not too much more I can say plotwise without venturing into spoiler territory.

Since I didn't care for the last book club pick, I was pretty stoked to have enjoyed this one. The writing is strong; the first sentence is pretty flowery, and while I enjoyed it, I was initially worried it would make the novel too hard to read, but Gay doesn't spend the entire novel dropping descriptors on you by the shovelful and it's perfectly readable.

Enjoyed this one a fair bit after impulse buying it after seeing it... I don't even remember where. It's a memoir and an exercise in cultural anthropology about, mostly, throwing oneself headlong into the subcultures of the communities built around musical acts Phish and Insane Clown Posse.

By way of disclosure, I was really into Phish in high school, although I was that rare Phish kid who didn't use any drugs, even pot. I stopped paying much attention to them when they went in hiatus, although I still throw on an album once in a while. I have no particular prior exposure to Insane Clown Posse, with the exceptions of hearing a song once and watching what I still consider to be a tremendously unfortunate guest appearance on Adam Corolla and Drew Pinsky's call-in show Loveline, both years ago.

The author is the head writer for the Onion AV Club, and writes well. The book's a quick read; it bounces back and forth between its two subject scene. The Phish chapters mostly filled me with fond memories from my late teens, and it made me happy to see that so much of what I liked about the scene has survived intact despite the numerous obstacles on the way; I'm glad as well that Rabin doesn't shy away from mentioning the less savory aspects that have cropped up over the years, like the hard drugs that have become more common, or the toll that years of following a band around while using them takes on many people. In case you are wondering whether an accurate assessment of the Phish scene can be made without doing a lot of drugs, never fear. Rabin did a SHITLOAD of drugs. That's made his experience fundamentally different from mine, but it was still very recognizable for me.

The Insane Clown Posse chapters are a wholly different experience for me, in a way that both subjects will be different for most readers: I was never into this band. Rabin's developed an affection for the band and for its fans, and has some idea of what draws people to the band and to its scene. Frankly I still find a lot about the Gathering of the Juggalos kind of horrifying. But I feel like I understand them a little better, and I've lost some of my Juggalophobic tendencies, so to speak.

Solid book, easy read.

Superb.

This is a short story collection by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk, most famous for his seminal novel Neuromancer. To read Gibson is to realize just how completely every other work in the genre has cribbed from him, right down to the slang he invented.

Not all of Gibson's work is up to the standard of Neuromancer. I'm happy to say that this one is. Burning Chrome collects ten short stories of varying lengths. I would prefer not to describe the stories; I believe a critical part of the experience is going in blind, allowing oneself to construct a mental image of the settings Gibson creates from the context he provides. Extrapolating his world from the little corner he renders is part of the journey. Instead, here's a list of the stories:

1. Johnny Mnemonic2. The Gernsback Continuum3. Fragments of a Hologram Rose4. The Belonging Kind5. Hinterlands6. Red Star, Winter Orbit7. New Rose Hotel
8. The Winter Market9. Dogfight10. Burning Chrome

I enjoyed all ten of them, but the starred stories were my favorites. As is Gibson's style, the stories are grimy and gritty as you'd expect a cyberpunk setting to be.

I love Gibson for his ideas and his settings, but several passages made me wish for a Kindle edition just so I could highlight. A lot of good turns of phrase in here.

This book is currently available only in physical format, and is not currently being printed, but copies are plentiful at the moment and are not hard to get hold of. My paperback edition features a preface by Bruce Sterling in defense of science fiction as a genre, which I enjoyed very much as well. I am sorry to say that the genre does seem to need sticking up for.

Very much worth reading.

Interesting and ambitious ideas betrayed by lazy, sloppy writing and execution.

There's a lot I want to like about this book. I am usually a sucker for what I think of as “Alice In Wonderland” type books – ones where a protagonist is thrust into a world the rules of which they don't comprehend. You know the type – Gaiman's Neverwhere is the one that springs to mind, but there are scores of examples across all kinds of media. That's what this is. Unfortunately, it's a big letdown.

The Crooked Letter is the first entry in Sean Williams' series and concerns itself with Hadrian and Seth, a pair of “mirror twins,” or twins who are reflections of each other, right down to one of them having his heart on the wrong side of his chest. They are, of course, special and distinct from other twins, because blah blah blah plot device. (I have never heard of “mirror twins” and I assume the author made up the concept but I haven't bothered to check.) The book splits time between their perspectives as they attempt to stop the world from being completely destroyed.

Almost immediately, although I don't think it was intended, we learn to hate the protagonists, because both of them are irritating, whiny, immature babies. Along the way we meet a wide cast of otherworldly characters, whose primary functions are generally either to attempt to kill one of the protagonists or to keep other characters from doing so.

In classic bad book trope fashion, our would-be heroes “just know” things with alarming frequency. Sometimes events transpire the apparent importance of which is underscored via repeated references, yet are then not explored. Entire characters are introduced to no apparent purpose beyond cryptic mutterings. The climax contains a deus ex machina most notable for its blatancy. All of this is packaged in uninspired prose.

I really can't recommend this and don't intend to continue the series. Two stars for the strength of the ideas that do work.

This book will inevitably be showered in five star ratings from readers of Brosh's blog, who will fill their reviews with the memes it generated. I don't feel it's earned all of those stars. But I think it's solid anyway.

For those unfamiliar with the author's work, Brosh writes the “Hyperbole and a Half” blog, which became famous quickly after she wrote a piece on depression that touched a nerve for a lot of people. That piece appears in this book, and I think the others were also featured on the blog, but I'm not sure about that as I'm only an occasional reader there. (The famous “Alot” piece is not present.)

You can think of this as something of an essay collection, but the prose is interspersed with Brosh's trademark drawings. For Kindle readers, I thought they were quite readable even on a tiny iPhone screen. Mostly they work well; once or twice they feel shoehorned in and don't really add anything.

The individual pieces range in theme from the heavy (depression, self-perception) to the light (a letter to her dogs). Topically, it's as scattered as the book's title, which I find is a common problem in humor books, especially those written by comedians with little writing experience. The piece on self-perfection, which closes out the book, was probably my favorite. Mostly it's a light read, but not always.

This probably won't change your life, but I enjoyed it. Definitely did laugh out loud more than once.

Like everyone else, I've waited for this book for a long time, as Lynch has had a number of personal life issues to work through. It pains me to say I am unhappy with the eventual result.

I was pretty excited when I picked it up on release day, but it didn't last. It jumps back and forth between a flashback and present-day; it's been so long since I read the first two books that I don't recall it, but I'm reliably informed that the first two did this as well. Regardless, I found neither especially compelling. Characters' actions are sometimes inexplicable because their motivations aren't reasonable. The will-they-won't-they relationship between Locke and Sabetha is more irritating than anything else. I felt like Sabetha sometimes said and did the things she did not because they made any sense, but because she had to to get her character where Lynch wanted her to go.

Sad to say this did not live up to my expectations.

Fore beginning, I should note that this book doesn't really offer the sort of unified theory that its title suggests. That's okay by me – I knew what I was going to get when I started it, and it's what I wanted. It would be more accurate to say that it's an examination of soccer culture from around the world, broken up into discrete chapters by region. I worry a little that that description gives it short shrift. It's not strictly about soccer, nor is it confined to the inside of soccer grounds. Rather, it investigates the bidirectional flow of local culture to and from its soccer teams.

Topics include right-wing Serbian nationalism with respect to Red Star Belgrade; Scottish sectarianism and the Old Firm, in Rangers and Celtic; Italian corruption in Juventus and AC Milan; cultural divisions in US soccer and American sport in general; and several others.

Foer is a devoted soccer fan, as am I. He's a huge Barcelona fan and I think he gets a little heavy in his praise for them. I should note that I also have strong biases – I pay little attention to Spanish football, but for example, I support Celtic and am going to have particular preexisting views on the Old Firm regardless of what Foer writes.

All this by way of saying that I think Foer mostly plays it straight, but you should consider your sources, both him and me. In his writeup of the Old Firm rivalry, for example, Celtic supporters come out looking far better than Rangers supporters, but not completely innocent. I personally think this is utterly fair, although the bulk of his time by far in that chapter is spent in the company of the Rangers-affiliated. If I were someone else, I wouldn't take my word for it either – but I'd take Foer's, as he doesn't seem to have a horse in that race. Similarly, I'd suggest taking his thoughts on Barcelona vs. Real Madrid with a grain of salt. Past his tendency to view Barca through rose-colored glasses, though, he's got his facts straight there as well – for example, I believe it's beyond question that Real were Franco's team of choice, but he doesn't attempt to claim that the club was complicit, which I've seen suggested before by others.

As an American soccer fan, while the chapter on American soccer wasn't my favorite to read, Foer's got his head on straight there as well. He's correctly identified soccer as a boutique sport in the US, versus its solidly working-class roots elsewhere in the world, and he doesn't attempt to let the pro-soccer side – that's both his side and mine, for those keeping track at home – off the hook for its cultural snobbery, even as he eviscerates know-nothing morons like Jim Rome on the other side.

This doesn't get all that much play in the book, but Foer mixes with some genuinely nasty characters in his research for the book. I'd note for posterity that he put himself in harm's way for the opportunity to talk to old-school hooligans and paramilitary types – Belgrade comes to mind.

Very much a worthwhile read for a soccer fan interested in cultural background, educational and entertaining. Note that this is an impressionistic, cultural whirlwind tour, not a by-the-numbers analysis.

Still a bit of fun pulp, but with more problems.

Problem 1: Authors have always liked to dot their work with references to things they like. Jim Butcher likes aikido, for example, so he made a secondary character an expert. Good, fine. Aaronovitch lacks self-restraint, however, and he's not so much dotted his work as upended the entire bucket on it. His preference is jazz, and its role is both more prominent and more ridiculous. It's a central part of the plot in ways it has no business being. Jazz featured a bit in the previous installment, and if a bit heavy-handed was fine as character background. He's gone far overboard this time, though. He also likes to show off – not just his knowledge of jazz standards, but of particular versions of them. It's downright masturbatory and it takes me out of the story.

Problem 2: Sex scenes. There are quite a lot, and they're simultaneously overly explicit and profoundly unsexy. If you must have them, you should probably avoid taking the worst of all worlds. Every time he started one, I'd think “oh god, he's trying this again.” It also appears to be important to Aaronovitch that his protagonist be a sexual Superman. It reeks of insecurity and, again, takes me out of the story.

Problem 3: Implausibility. At least once I was utterly unable to suspend my disbelief that characters would act as they did, and – you guessed it – boom, out of the story again.

It's fun enough if you're willing to overlook all these issues, but a literary award winner this is not. I've not decided whether to continue with the series.

Pulp, but really fun pulp. Aaronovitch will inevitably draw comparisons to Butcher's Dresden Files series, and for good reason as their premises and style are pretty similar. This is set in London instead of Chicago and things are both less structured and less established, as Aaronovitch's protagonist is a neophyte and an actual cop, rather than an experienced wizard with a history. Definitely doesn't go the trashier route a la Kim Harrison, but is not an especially brave or groundbreaking work.

I've wanted to read David Foster Wallace for a while now, ever since I read a course syllabus he wrote in a set of famous authors' essays posted in... Slate? The Atlantic? Something like that. He's most famous for Infinite Jest, of course, but I'm a little intimidated by that. I finally found someone who's actually read him and asked how to get started. They recommended either Infinite Jest (if I wanted fiction) or this (if I didn't).

This is a collection of seven essays, widely varied in topic and tone. Included, among others, are some experiential travelogues, musings on David Lynch's film career, and literary metacriticism. The travelogues remind me a bit of a better-written David Sedaris not written by a fuckup; the others have more to do with exploring the point of other creative expressions. Consistent throughout is DFW's smart writing.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. DFW has a couple other essay collections, and I will probably seek them out. Nota bene: DFW has a penchant for, shall we say, uncommon word choices. I enjoyed it because (a) I rarely encounter words with which I'm not acquainted, and kind of like it when I do, because I am a dork; and (b) I was reading an ebook version and thus had a dictionary a highlight away. Not everyone will share both of these traits. Favorite new word: “otiose.”

Interesting start. Very bleak.