j wren pennington
so it has more depth than ya books and that is good.
if very accurately describes being in grad school, that good I guess.
I think my own “meh” feeling about it and others outright dislike stems from a kind of disparity between the subject matter and the style. they don't seem to be well paired. they are both interesting on their own but distracting from each other. a better editor would have caught that.
you could certainly do worse in the realm of fiction books about witches.
i have a vague feeling that there is something to this, but largely i am not willing to spend a lot of time carving it, or the specific lack of it, out. there are several points, lines/events that seem to come very close to something really good and compelling, but just kind of wane away, leaving their potential to slowly melt in a pool of mild unease and disappointment somewhere in the back of your mind.
having said that, it's a decent book. it has value. i hope andersen prunty keeps writing.
a new breed of apocalyptic novel...a refreshing, even if a bit melancholy, story about the end of the world that does not include zombies. yay!
well crafted prose, flavored with a perfect mix of bittersweet coming of age loss of innocence brought into a greater relief by a destabilizing prolonged catastrophe.
quick read, would be good for high school kids.
pretty amazing stuff...it has the potential to to shift one's understanding of human history.
don't be intimidated by the equations, you can understand the basic concepts that gleick is describing without getting the actual the algorithms. it is a bit dry at times, he's no bill bryson, but the information itself is worth the effort; even if you have to reread certain parts multiple times :)
i think some people grow up knowing exactly where they fit into the scale of introvert and extrovert; i am not one of those people, so much of the new work being published about introversion is nothing short of revelatory.
so, it breaks down like this: writing gets 3/4. it's good, but stylistically it is not gripping. maybe that's because it's about introverts; more likely it is because i want all nonfiction to be written by bill bryson, stephen pinker, or shirley jackson. i am aware that i have unrealistic expectations.
the subject matter, no matter how it is presented, gets a 5 because this is one of a few books that have truly and irrevocably altered my perspective regarding myself and/or everything else.
more reflection is required, but still, neat-o.
STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND READS THIS.
seriously, it's good stuff. human beings think they are such hot shot's. they think they know everything, but science is here to show them what irrational, emotional, neurotic monkey's they really are.
they will eventually be ruled by robots because they are too stupid to recognize their own shortcomings, this book illustrates that very well.
it's not middlesex, but it's pretty good. i enjoyed it four stars worth, but i really, really like eugenides' writing; objectively, i felt i should give it three.
although there are many things in this story that speak to me directly, i didn't feel like i connected with it totally. it's possible you will find yourself in the same boat unless you are really primed in the fields of literary/critical theory and the victorian/regency periods of literature. if you miss the lit. crit. stuff, you will probably notice it. there is a lot of name and theory dropping. go ahead and google derrida, barthes, lacan, and their contemporaries before reading. my theory is that if you miss the victorian lit. stuff, you probably won't know exactly what you missed, but you will have a sense of not quite connecting with the book. i have not had a chance to question my own personal dickensian victorianist, and regency austenite, friends who have read it to find out if that genius that i suspect is happening, is actually happening. that's kind of cheating, i suppose i could read the pickwick papers, vanity fair, daniel deronda, the luck of barry lyndon, mansfield park....
great read if you like music and girls, or being a girl. sometimes maybe a little more detailed than entirely necessary, but you can't say marcus isn't thorough. i think this quote kind of sums up a lot this book:
“More to the point: When you're a teenage girl who's trying with all your might not to hate yourself, trying not to get harassed or raped, trying not to let bikini blondes in beer ads crush your self-image, trying not to be discouraged from joining a sports team or math club or shop class or the school newspaper, trying not to let your family's crippling dysfunction (and the confounding irony of enduring domestic cruelty in an age of Family Values) make you want to fucking die, a feminist movement that's mostly about electing new senators might not be all that compelling to you.”
one more:
“The thrill! It could happen! It didn't even have to be hard! The universe was full of songs, just waiting for you to get some friends together and write them. And then you weren't just a fan anymore; you were a member of the fellowship of people who made things.”
go get it.
the solitude of prime numbers is a story of two young people who spend their lives trying not to exist in effort to appease the trauma's of their respective childhoods. separately, they create inhospitable spaces for themselves that no matter how much affinity they feel for each other, cannot exist in close proximity.
the writing is well executed and engaging but what i like most about this story is the updating of a once commonplace idea that we do not see much anymore: the idea that you do not have to be in close physical or emotional contact with people to still recognize them as valuable to you. it is still too common for writers to be unimaginative in this respect. they either give the reader what they want in the form of a fairy book ending or they eschew that for the opposite ending, whatever that may be, which is equally hackneyed for being he desired ending's opposite. this book displays a nice bit of creative realism in that sense.
though the subject matter of the solitude of prime numbers is the untenable relationships of broken people, i can still honestly say that i found it mostly delightful. i'm not sure if that is a reflection of me or of giordano's book; most likely it is a mingled puddle of both, but then again, aren't most things?
there aren't really any stunning revelations here but this book is still awesome. it really drives home the difference in thinking between the right and the righter.
we live in such a complex and confounding country, riddled with so many divisions; and spirits are running so high and violent, it's amazing we are able to do anything at all.
this was published before the tea party really got off the ground, i'll be looking up frank to see what else he has to say. also, there are some great quotes that i will add later when i have the book in front of me.
i'm excited about this one...
ok, done. so i'm left with an overall feeling of “meh,” but when i think about specific bits of writing and/or story devices i am impressed by them individually. the whole just doesn't seem to represent the sum of the parts potentials.
so the book is a sci-fi noir detective dystopia, which has happened very successfully in the past. i think part of it is the weakness of the mystery, it's pretty easy to pick out the what really happened in the first 50 pages. also, some of the plot serves to put ticks in the sci-fi column and in the dystopia column, but does little else. there is nothing to sew the things together and as a result the story feels very shallow and disconnected.
the writing on the other hand is really nicely done. this guy has got a way with words, i wonder if he's written anything else...
good, solid ya novel.
original in comparison to many. decent amount of challenging vocabulary and not too much dumbing down of complex ideas. good for 9-11 i'd say.
there are holes of course, but the author poses some interesting questions about free will, human perception of time, and even maybe a little metaphorical demonstration of some history theory. or maybe not, but i think i could make a decent case for it.
anywho, it was totally worth a couple of hours.
amendment: there's fun little bit self-referential cake here. there is a part in the book where the protag. researchers “returners,” and when you search for it on goodreads you get many of the same topics that he gets in the book. it's silly easy, and yet kinda delightful.
i was hoping for a technical manual but it's really more like a long magazine article. if you have seen the documentary, you don't really need to see the book, unless you are interested in the recipes, which i am, so i'm only a little disappointed.
having said the above, i will say this; like any other book/movie/program about health and what we eat, there is something of a belief system involved. the fact is that very few “foods” are going to kill you on the spot and the evidence for the danger of our american diet that seems most compelling (meta analysis of other cultures) are too confounded by other cultural factors to be considered causal. couple that with the knowledge that a significant minority of people react badly to certain statistically healthy diets and you are left in the same boat in which you began. soooo....there is a certain amount of this that i think is very likely true and there is some of it that is probably pushing truth a bit. but, as it not harmful in any way and it fits nicely with my other beliefs re: not eating animals and humanity's evolutionarily derived talent for digesting whole foods efficiently, i'm into it.
i should not have read this book. it wasn't written for me.
to be fair, the author pretty blatantly states that this book is written for “dudes.” i would contract that criteria to, “dudes that are into mixed martial arts and more specifically are forrest griffin fan boys.” because really, it's just a vehicle for a fairly intelligent but probably a little brain damaged guy, and his friends, to share things he thinks, not at all limited to the apocalypse. and that's ok. i just should have listened to him on the first couple of pages instead plowing through 450,000 euphemisms for sex. (seriously, if you wanted to make a venn diagram of subjects in this book, it would have to be 10 ft. in diameter to even see the tiny sliver that represents “not a euphemism for sex or sexual organs.”)
so yeah....sometimes i make poor choices.
okay, i get it.
many of my favorite british comedians site wodehouse as an influence, i understand why now. i'm pretty sure this is the invention of the sit-com, which i kind of hate in it's modern context of formulaic commercialism, but i see how revolutionary it's birth must have been.
it's probably not something most people would really enjoy, but reading a little bit of wodehouse will help you better understand our culture of humor and how it developed, so maybe download a free story or two.
this is a nice little book about a doctor's experience of bipolar disorder/schizphrenia. it stands on it's own as good piece of writing.
but...(i am sorry mark vonnegut, i know this sucks man) it was impossible for me to read this without being in “reading kurt vonnegut” mode. it's no surprise that the unique trick of words and paragraph like installments are present and used in exactly the same way. the poignancy is just as poignant and poetry is just as beautiful in it's practicality. there is less artistry and more description of a life, but here and there...
also, i had not read eden express before reading this. it is hard to think of kurt vonnegut as a good day/bad day person. it's hard to think of him as someone's father. it's even more jarring to think of him as someone's father who is difficult and hard and not what he wants to be. it's a good lesson, i'm glad i read it.
story alone would have been a 3, but there are some really adept observations that push it into the 4 star range. (i changed my mind it's a 3.)
what's wrong with the story: nothing really. it's just one of those anti-hero plot lines like “big lebowski” where the protagonist fumbles around in a drunk stupor and judges everyone else. in this case, as in lebowski, the protagonists drunken stupor leads him to the inevitable mystery of what did he do while drunk.*
what's so awesome about neilan's observations: they are seriously dead on. the protagonists descriptions of cubicle land and what it means and the phoniness of it's artifices is kind of priceless.
*at first these stories seem funny and people root for the anti-hero because, well, they also like to get drunk and win; and a lot of times this is what happens in these kinds of stories. i find them sad, and i find people rooting for the self-obsessed, lazy a holes even more sad. these characters are built to mirror the times, they are intelligent capable people who choose to be self-obsessed lazy a-holes who judge themselves superior to people who put themselves out there by trying or buying ideas. granted some of those people are a little delusional and/or absurd and poking a little fun or recognizing that delusion is not the evil, it's the judging from a position of apathy and inaction.^ and people idolize them for that. this does not speak well for our collective future.
^of course this is the entire point. the book is called apathy and other small victories. so the story is doing what is supposed to do, and i don't think the author intends for you to root for the sorry ass protagonist, but people do and that's distracting. to me at least.
i agree that the below are all valid criticisms, but they are followed by the mitgating factor for me personally:
yes.....it's like reading boing boing in book form, but i like boing boing.
yes.....it is proselytizing, but i'm a member of that church.
yes.....it's speculative fiction with only minor amounts of technical detail. if i wanted technical details, i would read a manual or a technical journal, not a novel.
what i liked: the same things i like about doctorow's other books. economics and tech.
what i didn't like: the dialogue is pretty stilted, sometimes distractingly so. the story meanders a bit.
i found it entertaining. i enjoyed it.
though technically classified as sci-fi, this is a total humanist liberal fantasy, and for that i love it. it's kind of like reading david levithan, who writes regular fiction that i would still catagorize as fantasy because there is no possible iteration of humanity where this could actually happen. not just because parts of the plot are over simplified but because people are simply not that good.
this, like those levithan novels, is a guilty pleasure. it feels good to think good of our species, even if it's only within the confines of an impossibly scenario.
not exactly what i expected. i had read a number of reviews that compare “the magicians” to a grown up harry potter. i believe that is misleading.
while the basic day to day life of the story is potteresque, in that it's a special school for magic, the comparison really kind of stops there. the mythology and driving plot points are all chronicles of narnia, in a thinly fictionalized form of course.
honestly, i'm not sure what to think yet. i expected something different and so don't really trust myself to review it on it's own merits rather than how it differed from my own expectation. so i will say this only:
it is solidly written.
it was entertaining.
i learned 3 new words.