So, I find myself again reviewing a book I enjoyed in many ways but which fell short of its stated goal. I liked reading these interviews, but felt that they were united more by their NPR-iness than by anything they had to say about the creative process. I am a fan and supporter of NPR (making me atypical for this site, I know), but I never really differentiated between the segments, other than to squeal with joy at “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” or “Car […]
Too much of the latter, not enough of the former
This is my first review in weeks, in part because reading this took soooooo long, and I knew I’d be reading this book for a solid year if I didn’t commit to finishing it. As it stands, it took me three months of false starts to completely read its four hundred pages. It’s a hard book to assess, in part because I found the subject matter interesting, and my favorite parts of the book probably would need to be trimmed in order to make it […]
Ask a Manager: The Book
I found this book via recommendation in the comments of the “Ask a manager” advice blog run by Alison Green, and as soon as I got a few pages in it was pretty obvious why. This book is essentially that website in novel form. The plot is essentially Ender’s Game by way of Office Space; a corporate drone realizes that all the bureaucratic frustrations in his job have been artificially and intentionally inflicted on him, but the tone is solidly comedic. It’s an amusing if […]
Not another thing, please
I forget where I read it, only that it is not my own observation, but someone put my most frequent problem with fantasy and sci-fi best: the more made up words it contains, the less likely I am to enjoy the book. This is a fairly short book that is long on nonsense. My eyes just glazed over half the text for a lack of intelligible prose to grab on to. A continuation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series written by Douglas Adams, […]
I swear I didn’t ctrl-z my Ian McEwan review
Oh, Jeffrey Eugenides, will I ever judge a book of yours fairly after you’ve written Middlesex? This is something of a theme in my reviews in part because I’ll buy books based on the strength of the author’s name if I’ve fallen in love with one of their works, and then they end up in my “I’ll get around to it” pile. But man, I honestly feel guilty with Eugenides because Middlesex is so damn perfect nothing will ever measure up. It’s a top five […]
Pretty writing hides a lot…
Oh, do I wish some other authors could write like McEwan; I’ve read so many books with poorly executed plots or glimmers of a good idea rendered inert by flat prose. I often joke of my favorite authors that I’d read the phone book if it had their name on the cover, but I didn’t expect to be taken up on it the way McEwan does with Saturday. So, that’s perhaps unfair; things DO happen in the book. It outlines the beginning of the weekend […]
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