Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
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A Tale of Two Cities
Review: This was amazing. This was grim. All Dickens is grim. But amongst all the grimness of the Dickens, this rises above the rest. So it was amazingly grim. That works. A few parts took suspension of disbelief too far so I’ll take off a star, but this is truly a great novel. This book… Read more
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Leaves of Grass
Review: Wow. That was gay. Seriously, get a room. Whitman reminds me of one of those big bushy bearded professors or writers who act like they’re native and then it comes out they were born in Brooklyn to Orthodox Jews. Like James Fenimore Cooper, he writes what he thinks the working man must be like,… Read more
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Eugene Onegin
Review: My goal in reading this was to simply get through it, and hopefully to gain a better understanding of the Tchaikovsky opera of the same name. But this was good. Really good. Being a verse novel it is broken up into 8 cantos, composed of around 50 stanzas of 14 rhyming lines. At first… Read more
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The Complete Odes and Epodes
Review: When you first pick up a 2000 year old book of poetry you have the obvious apprehension, and hope that you can make some sense out of it all. This was different. Very different. The odes, epodes and hymns within this little volume are as vibrant today as when they were first written. Horace… Read more
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The Rat Pack: Neon Nights with the Kings of Cool
Review: An excellent non-whitewashed history of the legendary Rat Pack. These men are all terrible human beings. Malevolence, greed, political machinations, philandering, drinking, drinking, drugs, drinking, backstabbing, and possibly murder. I can see how they appeared to be the epitome of cool. When Joe Six-pack punches out from the steel mill he dreamed, as he… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more