In his own words
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The Wise Man’s Fear
Review: Given enough time I can find fault with any book. This one didn’t take much time to display its faults. The carefully crafted university narrative comes to a crashing halt, hero-dude takes a gap year to go on a D&D quest with a merry band of adventurers. Quest completed he heads off to a…
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Sprinting Through No Man’s Land
Review: A big fat DNF for this mangled narrative. Research means research from primary sources, not just reading old newspapers and conjecturing what you think the characters would have been like. Overly dramatic, dime novel level descriptions are blended with dry as a dusty road narrative. Action jumps from years prior to the race to…
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The Preserving Machine
Review: My first exposure to Philip K. Dick, which is weird considering how much I like Dicks. A dark journey into time, post-apocalyptic futures, and paranoid obsessive realism. Read the story that Total Recall was based on. Both are excellent, the story and the movie. I can see now why there is award called the…
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The Blue Pavilions
Review: A hidden gem. I had no idea that Quiller-Couch wrote anything. I knew him as the legendary editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse. The prose is wonderful. It is never strained or overly wordy, and it blends humour with drama and even well researched details of the life aboard sailing ships in…
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The Flowers of Evil / Les Fleurs de Mal
Review: Brilliant. A dark, disturbing masterpiece. I wish to hold sway overYour life and youth by fear,As others do by tenderness. Remember, time is a greedy playerWho wins without cheating, every round. Eggplant emoji. I will re-read these for the rest of my life, they’re simply beautiful. I award this the coveted 5 stars. This…
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I Owe Russia $1200
Review: Not one of the best in the Hopian oeuvre. I am a pretentions fop. Hopian oeuvre. An opus. Basically less than 40 pages about the Russia trip and all written with a lame gag from his writers every third line. The rest of the book rehashes the post-war Hope Christmas tours, nice enough but…
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Midnight to the North
Review: Excellent, well researched history. The author spends a lot of time making sure you know that she did a lot of excellent well researched history work to make it an excellent, well researched history. I don’t know how anyone could have survived that journey. This book made me want to: wear more warm clothing…
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Son at the Front
Review: A powerful, moving, intensely captivating piece of Whartonian brilliance. This one is not one of her noted masterworks, but it really should be. Mobilization and the Great War seen through the lens of Paris from 1914-1918, and seen through the experience of Americans before they joined the war. Fascinating. It emphasized to me how…
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Songs of a Sourdough
Review: Great stuff. Boy’s Own Annual style, daring men in the frozen north. Really evokes the atmosphere of the Old Yukon, the last wild place. It’s not great poetry, it’s entertaining verse for Canadians on cold nights. This book made me want to: stay warm Overall rating: Readability: Plot: Other: Igloo ambiance
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Pleasures and Days
Review: A little gem of a book. All of Proust’s juvenilia, all written before he was 23. All of it excellent. The first story he is definitely working Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich but with a more Proustian feel. The little vignette pieces are glorious. Moonlight walks through beech woods, you can really see the…