chris

boring

Revisado: 02-25-24

Superbly written but rather dull. I didn't find any of the characters particularly interesting, and the ending didn't pay off. It could have worked if Bartleby had more to him but I didn't know enough about him to care.

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Don't believe the alt right review bombs

Revisado: 01-12-24

If you read some of the one star reviews here you would conclude this book is some kind of woke manifesto. The book's woke-ness all comes down to a few sentences. They are unnecessary and un-subtle but certainly don't deserve the overreaction they get. So I shrugged and read on.

The first book explores an interesting (and impending) premise and doesn't take itself seriously. It's just about fun, like the Harry Potter series. This book explores another interesting premise but takes it more seriously. Cline's setting, prose, and characterization here doesn't come up to the level of an Asimov or Pournelle and so the change in tone is a bit jarring.

My biggest problem with the book is the first quarter is mostly telling and not showing. It was like reading a Wikipedia page and I almost gave up. The plot did finally get moving and then it was much like the first book. If you liked that one you will probably enjoy this one ... eventually. I did.

Wheaton was an excellent narrator, as always. His style and personality suit this type of book perfectly.

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Classic Bond

Revisado: 08-09-21

Silly spy story loaded with puns and sexual innuendo. Very funny. Normally I find these all-dialog multi-narrator stories too hard to follow, but this one was no problem.

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Well acted nonsense

Revisado: 02-11-19

Well produced and very well acted. Unfortunately, it is also very dull. Nothing interesting happens. Not even the ending was interesting. I think the point of the book is to frame spiritual advice, but it was mostly generic nonsense. Going out into the world trusting completely in God and the goodness of people? That gets missionaries imprisoned and murdered. Taking the blame for everything won't make you a hero -- try that in a police station and you will waste their time while the real criminals go free. No one is stupid enough to do this. That makes this whole book a waste of time.

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Unexpectedy great

Revisado: 07-22-17

A fascinating tale, incredibly well written and read. I expected it to be humorous but I never expected a book on politics to be something I couldn't put down. It's not all politics of course, it's a lot of history including SNL and its era, though I would have liked to hear more about the SNL years. I'll be looking for his other books now.

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Great writing, great narration, great plot

Revisado: 10-13-16

Enjoyed every minute of it, right to the end. The pacing and the prose in particular were better than most other books in this genre.

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Wow.... just... wow

Revisado: 02-02-13

Hard to believe I have been reading this series for 20 years. The first five books or so were stellar, then it started to drag on as Jordan brought in more and more characters and storylines. People began to question if he had lost control of the story. I was one of them. Sure enough, some of those plotlines were forgotten, by me anyway. However, it started to pick up again around book ten (IIRC) and the last three books by Sanderson have been outstanding. This last book is the best I've read in a long time. Kudos to Jordan and Sanderson for a thundering epic fantasy series, and the narrators for bringing it to life.

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Diary of a Wimpy Assassin

Revisado: 12-01-12

I ended up buying all three books, and I enjoyed them, but it was really hard to like this hero. He is not much of an assassin. The only assassinations he does are by poisoning and those are mostly zombies, and he feels guilty about it. He kills in self defense and feels guilty about it. He doesn't take out the really bad people, even though everyone knows they are the really bad people and he would have saved thousands of lives and endless suffering if he had poisoned them too, because of some promise he made... but mostly because it would end the story too soon.

He has magic ability he doesn't want to use and doubts himself constantly and really hates himself... but ends up saving the kingdom anyway... and gets little credit for it. He spends a large chunk of the third book on a useless quest, and all the while he is thinking (and I was thinking) this is a bad idea. And it was.

Conan he is not. He is more like Conan's half-witted baby sister.

Despite all that, the plot was good, the world was rich, and the narration was very good. There is magic and herbology and animal kinship woven in here. I enjoyed it overall. I just wish the main character had more backbone.

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A perfect pairing of prose and narrator

Revisado: 11-05-12

This book is about walking along old paths, and not much more than that, however Macfarlane's prose is flawless and beautifully descriptive; it immediately drew me in. The narrator's voice is soft and hypnotic with a slight English lilt. I have never heard a better pairing of book and narrator. They weave in a considerable amount of history about these paths along the way, from Britain to Israel to Spain to Tibet. I enjoyed it enough to read it again.

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What the heck did I just read

Revisado: 10-23-11

The book starts slowly but depicts the utopian society well. The writing and descriptions are strong. I give the book three stars for that. But I found most of what was shocking to be predictable, and the ending was a letdown. The author didn't know how to end it, so he left it vague for the reader to figure out. Was it a dream? Was it real? Was it magic? Was it some benevolent deity? You decide. No, Mr. Author, you decide -- that's your job, not mine.

The setting is a spin on some old ideas. An Orwellian society was done in, well, 1984. The idea of society's sacrificial lamb has been explored before, such as Jackson's short story "The Lottery" which came out in 1948.

And there were huge plot holes. The author had a strong theme and point to make, which I applaud, but didn't plug the holes. I would have enjoyed this more if I wasn't constantly bothered by pesky questions.

Warning: slight spoilers...

If you buy the vague existentialism of everyone's feelings and memories being contained in one person and released violently if he/she dies, fine, but if they are so dangerous why do they leave it all up to one person? They think of everything else, so what about a backup Giver in case the one and only Giver decides to, I don't know, off himself because he can't take the suffering and isolation anymore? And seeing color is due to physical hard wiring, every mammal has it to a certain extent. You can't lose it because you can't remember what war or snow is like.

And the big one: you take a 12 year old who has not experienced suffering of any kind, then torture him every day for a year, tell him he is going to be an outcast for the rest of his life, tell him he has nothing to look forward to but a life of pain and isolation, tell him there will be no one he can talk to about it until some decades later when he is going to inflict all this on some other poor kid that he has to select himself... why are you surprised when the kid tries to escape? And I can't believe the last Receiver selected was the first since "back and back" who killed herself. This would happen every time.

And finally, where does the kid pedal his bike, for hours and weeks on end? If he was going through forest thick enough to hide from airplanes, where did he find roads to ride on?

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