The penultimate book in The Unwritten was a bit of a letdown. It felt really unfocused. Granted, the whole thing is about stories coming unraveled, and that might be the point, but either way, it wasn’t a super great reading experience. I feel like there could have been a better way to convey a world that’s lost its purpose without having the story feel a little bit purposeless as well. Tom has finally made it back to the real world after a year of being […]
A disappointing crossover with Fables.
Okay, first of all, what the hell has been going on in Fables while I’ve been away? Shit is MESSED UP. Second of all, this was way more of a Fables story than it was an Unwritten story, and it was a clunky Fables story at that. I haven’t checked in with Fables in years, and the last one I read was Vol. 6, Homelands. That ended in a very, very different place than this one began in, but it’s not hard to get into the […]
Don’t look back.
This is only the second volume in The Unwritten series to get less than five stars from me, but I think that might be only a preference thing. This is still a great piece of this story. It was just missing a little oomph for me. I’ve got to save my five star ratings for the oomph. Which is silly, because this was chock full of unbelievably cool things. Little stuff paid off from some of the very first issues. Everything ties together. Stuff happened that […]
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on a Galaxy Quest
Thematic spoilers follow. The failure of Armada, for me, was the recursive and self-referential style of Ernest Cline, which ended up feeling like a crutch rather than an addition to the fairly straightforward plot. Unbeknownst to me, this book is in a similar vein to my previous read. Redshirts is about the “red shirts” from the original Star Trek series. They were characters used to create dramatic tension by dying early in episodes (typically on away missions). These were characters with no backstory, and the […]
Mmm… books about books
At the risk of becoming too meta, I’m going to talk a little bit about one of my go-to books for choosing other books to read.* I tend to think – judging by the Cannonballers I actually know, the general bookish-ness around here, and the sheer amount of things that Must. Be. Read – that a lot of you CBReaders are similar to me, in that you tend to read quite a bit. (And write rather less often than you should/would like too, but that’s […]