Jake Moses

Disjointed, melodramatic, and juvenile

Revisado: 05-16-24

The Netflix show is mostly pretty good. I haven’t read the comic so can’t comment. But this audiobook is idiotic. I have great difficulty giving up on a book once started—I’ve only done it a couple of times. I finished this, but no other book that I’ve finished has ever so tempted me to quit. The stories bare almost no relation to one another. Just a bunch of pointless stories that go nowhere. The dial and situations are painfully melodramatic, often with background music added to memorably effect. There’s a full cast and much of the voice work is quite good. Much of it is unbearably bad, though. Some of the worst over-acting I’ve ever seen.
The stories are filled with idiotic shock content that sounds like it sprang from some late-night storytelling at a slumber party of 14-year-old boys.

It’s truly truly awful. I’m honestly surprised. I LOVED The Graveyard Book, and I thought Coraline and Good Omens were very good too. This garbage seems way beneath someone capable of writing those.

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So good

Revisado: 02-23-24

No matter how many times it happens, I’ll always amazed at how the classics hold up. This is a wildly entertaining, swashbuckling tale full of intrigue and adventure and mystery. A faithful translation to the screen could easily be a summer tensile blockbuster film. When you first start listening, don’t be put off by the formal language with all the “thy” and “thou”. You’ll get used to it quickly enough. It’s a great read.

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If you love thelove the word “fanciful”

Revisado: 11-20-23

This book was a slog. The premise is idiotic. There are secret magic doors that nobody knows about all over the place that lead to other worlds. The way you find them is by wandering aimlessly until you hear rumors about a door, then you just go where the rumor says to go. By using this method you can find HUNDREDS of sits to other works over the course of like 10 or 20 years. But somehow these portals to other worlds are still totally hidden even though random people have found them and talked about them (hence the rumors). A magical door to another planet that people have found but it just wasn’t interesting enough to become well known. And they’re EVERYWHERE. There are thousands of them (10,000 or an infinite number, unclear).

Other problems:
- Every sentence is written like you should be on the edge of your seat, even if someone is doing something totally mundane.
- The protagonist gets a dog that is described as huge and vicious and badly behaved toward anyone but its owner (his name, eye-rollingly, is Bad). The dog proceeds to accompany the protagonist everywhere she goes, insists and out, and is perfectly behaved at all times. He’s also utterly useless. January has an event at gunpoint and then the guy dives to the ground, retrieves a couple of small items that January took from him and threw into since tall grass, and runs away, even though January and Bad are right there in hot pursuit. This is just one example.
- Much like with Bad, the author spends the whole book telling us things rather showing them. She tells us that there are doors everywhere leading to amazing places, and the characters went to these places. And they were amazing. Like, if they’re so amazing, take us there.
- January writes a door/portal into existence. Jane, her best friend and protector, who is trapped in our world after her door was destroyed finds out January has this power and asks her to create a door so she can get home. January, who wrote a door to another world into existence when she was merely 7 years old, nonsensically tells Jane that she could die if she tried to create a door to another world. She then goes on to write multiple doors to other worlds into existence throughout the rest of the book with no ill effect on her health. She hilariously never tries to help Have get home.
- The villains are straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon.
- The word ‘fanciful’ is used A LOT.
- Ade is a hillbilly girl who was raised on a farm and she hears a rumor about a door at the top of a mountain that leads to a sea. So she builds a sailboat. She has no experience whatsoever with boat making, or even carpentry. She didn’t build a raft, to be clear. She built a sailboat for crossing seas. Then, also having never sailed, she sails that boat across the sea. By herself. Without issue.
- January learns very early on that anything she writes will come true. She then proceeds to struggle throughout the book. She’s being hunted. She could just grab a pencil and write, “They forget about me forever,” or “They die.” But that never occurs to her, lol.

One year after this book was published the author published her second novel, The Once and Future Witches. It doesn’t seem possible that in one year she could have gone from this amateurish melodrama to her second novel, which is a masterpiece, in so short a time. Skip this, read that.

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Only for francophiles

Revisado: 10-07-23

This is an exquisite read, but only for those who have spent substantial time in Paris, especially while very young and very poor. Also the amazing film Midnight in Paris will be FAR better if you’ve read this before seeing it. Otherwise, it’s a strange read, almost like reading personal journal entries. I mean Hemingway”s personal journal, so a lot more compelling than anything you’d find in most journals, but still slightly strange. If you meet the criteria mentioned earlier, read this immediately. Otherwise, there’s much better Hemingway to be had, and you can always come back to this when you’ve exhausted all that.

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An exercise in dishonesty and narcissism

Revisado: 06-05-23

Matthew McConaughey is obnoxious above all else. This is mostly a book of Matthew telling a completely BS story about how awesome he is, followed by him smugly declaring, “Greenlight.” When he was a kid, he snuck out of the house every single night one summer to break into a lumber yard to steal materials to build a tree house, which he built by himself, for only himself. He built it 13 stories. I’m not making this up (he is). He, as a child, on his own, built a 13-level structure on a single tree and then never showed it to a soul. And only god knows why—I guess because one day a solitary child wants to hang out by himself on the 9th floor, and on another the same child may prefer the 4th or 11th.

After he dreamt about floating down the Amazon in Africa, he decided to find it on a map and he searched the map of Africa FOR TWO HOURS for the river. Really? You just sat there looking, and looking, and looking, and looking, and looking, and looking . . . for two hours? Every single story and every single character is cartoonishly exaggerated beyond belief.

Aside from that, the man himself (he narrated) is insufferable. He adores himself and he sounds like he’s perpetually on coke. It’s obscene and annoying.

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Decent, loses its way in the end

Revisado: 05-26-23

The author tries too hard to write poetic prose much much of it feels forced and clunky. But it’s still pretty good until the end when he inexplicably continues going on introducing new characters and storylines long after the obvious end of the novel. The last 1/5 or so of the novel just meanders.

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Perfect-almost

Revisado: 05-19-23

Zevin wrote early in the book that eating a piece of fruit in Pac-Man gives the character the temporary ability to eat the ghosts. That’s wrong. Fruit gives you extra points—increases your score, and therefore contributes to earning extra lives. Power pellets allow you to eat the ghosts.

Otherwise, the book is perfect in every way. I loved it.

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Lovely

Revisado: 05-11-23

Not nearly the sprawling accomplishment of Jonathan Strange. This is much smaller, more intimate. Equally magical. It was wonderful.

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Rounding up from about a 3.7 or 3.8

Revisado: 05-07-23

Starts out as a brilliant history of the human race, in the vein of A Short History of Nearly Everything, but devolves in the end into a heavy-handed, patronizing scolding with a pretty hefty serving fairly outlandish claims. Overall it was definitely worth the read. Extremely informative and entertaining. But the last 25% was over the top.

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Great book, great narrator

Revisado: 03-23-23

So glad I listened to this. I loved it. The narrator was phenomenal, but good luck making out one in ten words coming from Joseph’s mouth. 😂😂😂

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