Tom

Of the 4 or 5 I've read so far, this is the best Flashman book I've come across. Only the first one even comes close. It's aided by an amazing cast of characters, but the impressive thing about the books (at least in the order I've read them, somewhat constrained by my local library) is the characters keep getting more outlandish and over-the-top. Impressive because they're all historical figures. Like all the better Flashman books I've found, this makes me want to go dig up some of the original sources and read them as well.

Re-read this recently. Just doesn't work for me: it's effectively three separate stories strung together around a thin premise. And the mystery solution is a weaker version of The Thin Man.

Not so much a 3 star as a 2 and 4 star mashed together. It was fun (though the depiction of a slave ship was stomach-churning), but too much stuff happened. It was a dozen disasters strung together as a story.

Another re-read. Read this one in the parking lot I worked at in high school. I know it's been the inspiration for a number of movies, but someone needs to make a straight-up, Gus Van Sant-style film copy of it. I've never understood the indie rock snobs who act as though Hammett is miles ahead of Chandler– I think the smaller output helps his reputation– but I love the Continental Op.

An incredibly strange read. Contrary to Eddie Izzard's assertion that Scooby-Doo is the only work of Western art with a coward for a hero, Flashman is a coward and a cad of the worst kind. It made for rough sledding at first because he's (knowingly) hard to root for and the author repeatedly trounces your assumption “He isn't really that bad, he must have a heart of gold” with violence against women, dishonorable behavior and general boorishness. All that aside, it feels like the protagonist is simply a good excuse for the author to rail against the incompetence of upper-class British military officers during the 19th century.

One word of warning: while the main character is actually fairly progressive on the topic of race for a man of his time and upbringing, the language/ racist abuse might be a turnoff.

Basically impossible to review: parts of the book were 4/5 stars, tremendous stuff and parts of it were sub-zero. I'm all for pop culture lists, but many of the lists were too-clever attempts to echo (one of) the book's theme about drone music. Instead of playing repetitive beats with minute variations, he provided pages upon pages of lists that required a careful eye to catch any variation (or point).

Additionally, I didn't really care for the Kylie Minogue biography conceit that tied the book's various pieces together (in a very loose way). It made sense in the second half, but required an unnecessary amount of slogging in the beginning.

All of that said, I'm going to pick up one of his essay collections at some point because I think I liked this. I'm just not sure. I did enjoy the idea of an unreliable narrator in what purports to be non-fiction (e.g., describing the White Stripes as a legendary band from the '60s).

Nowhere near as good as “At War”. This seems to be earlier stuff so I can understand it being weaker, but the format of the book does it no favors. The arrangement makes no sense: where “At War” is a chronological set of newspaper columns, this is organized into broad sections depending on what kind of rant it is.

The highlight comes in the first piece, which includes a long, apparently humorous, dialog in Gaelic. Rather than providing a translation, the nerds who compiled the book explained the joke.

Started really well, kind of fell apart at the end, but still interesting.

With this and the previous book, the series really fell off a cliff for me. Same plot 3x over (bad admiral needs Our Hero to tell him what to do, but he's a jerk about it). The ham-handed sex really made up for it though. Woof.

Could not get into it.

This is two books in 6 months where I've slogged through to find out what happens and (SPOILER ALERT) nothing does. Awesome. The book does a good job establishing mood & tension and a nice job of exploring how you might get very paranoid as the only person on Earth, but then it does it 100 more times. There's an interesting sub-plot that never really gets resolved in a satisfying way.

It'll make a cool movie, but it was too long by half as a book.

Perhaps not the great American novel, but a fun thriller. As an airport read, it's 5 stars for anyone who likes the Spenser series or other books about impossibly competent guys who have a code.

A bit of a slog at first. Even knowing the backstory from a review, it was hard to follow what the author was hinting at. Once it got going though, it was really strong. Felt like 5 stars for a while, which is really good for what's basically a straight-up police procedural, but it lost a bit of steam at the end.

I slogged through this book on the basis of some good reviews. And then when I was ready to quit, I willed myself through the rest just to find out the answer to the mystery. Ha ha, no answer.

This doesn't qualify as a spoiler since there isn't really an answer, but I'm pretty sure the narrator had a stroke and is suffering from a mental condition that makes for great non-fiction by Oliver Sacks, but does not make for great fiction by a different doctor. I was excited to read a book that continued the exploration of what it means to live in a narrative after just finishing Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but this wasn't it.

I stuck with this for 400+ pages. At that point, I think I'd read about 2 sea battles, neither of which was Trafalgar or the Nile. It was enjoyable but too slow, stuck in the Doldrums with nary a headwind.

Just so I'm clear: the first 200 pages of this book are 95% about the architecture of the world it's set on. It's a slog. In addition, there's this issue:


Normally, I agree completely with that: I can't stand science fiction that gets caught up in itself and thinks just inventing a world is good enough. But in this case I think Stephenson's use of unfamiliar words is a great idea: it forces you to pay close attention and puts you in a frame of mind where you need to be thinking about what's being said anyway, so when the discussions turn to physics and geometry, you're in a mindset that helps you follow along.

Coming into the book I thought it would be a critique of current American culture along the lines of Mike Judge's film Idiocracy. There's a bit of that, but the book seems to serve the same purpose as a textbook, teaching a subject, only it does it in a way that doesn't feel like so much work. If you're a bit of a nerd.

The beginning is rough sledding (I'll cop to my standard skim technique: jump to the next set of quotation marks when architecture exceeds a graf), the end was a bit anti-climactic. But the big fat middle was a lot of fun.

A fun read, but it fell apart for me at the end: it's one of those books that follows a story from two tracks, but the tracks don't come together until the very end of the book. Also, whatever the author was trying to say about relationships with the three parallel pairs of men and women enjoying shitty, non-communicative love, I missed it.

Disappointed by this, but it's worth getting from the library for the 3rd story, on LA and the San Gabriel Mountains

Started off great, didn't shy away from “hard science” and had some great ideas about language/ symbol interpretation if/ when AI agents become available. Drops to 3 stars (and almost ot 0 stars) because the last quarter of the book resembles a video game that was enjoyable until the final boss fight: “Oh, that wasn't the real final boss, this is. No, now fight him again. Now fight both of them at one time.” Like a kid who doesn't know how to end a story, “And then this happened!”

Also, throughout the book I kept thinking the author's name was Rudy Ray Rucker (it's not), which reminded me of Karla Faye Tucker and that is bad news. An additional demerit because I usually only read science fiction from writers outside the US.

This is another pop science/ math book that eschews science/ math. Where Freakonomics was light on the math, this book tosses it over altogether because the reader must be too dim to even understand a bit of what the author (by all accounts a very bright person) gets. It's a book for CEOs to flip through and then tell an underling, “We need to start doing that.”

Definitely hit or miss, but the good sections are terrific. Having since read another book by the same author, I think I would be quicker to just skip whole sections now.

Gets an extra star for the hyphenation remark in the first story.

Liked this much better the second time around. It's the odd piece that is improved by reading spoilers.

Just not for me, not a fan of books where each character is more despicable than the last.

May have added a half star for the Drive-By Truckers reference.

This is the first book I ever intentionally purchased as an audiobook and I'm glad I did (though it made sitting through the glossary chapters a little slow/ weird). I'm in love with the ideas that underpin the book, that we only know a place as well as we can describe it, a sort of Sapir–Whorf hypothesis for physical locations.