Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
-
No More Parades
Review: The second book in what they call the tetralogy of Parade’s End. Here we find the admirable protagonist Tietjens as an officer at a starting off camp in the Great War. It’s not an easy book to read or to understand. It’s literature for certain and woth the effort to read it. But I… Read more
-
The Blind Assassin
Review: This was my very first experience reading Margaret Atwood. There’s a reason she won the Booker Prize for this. Prose is elegant and shit-filthy by turns. I love reading Canadian books because I can identify with the places, the seasons, the attitudes. The point of these reviews is to provide a critique, for whomever… Read more
-
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Review: Yeesh, what a clunker. Like the Zeller’s burger, it tastes way better in your nostalgic imagination. This was great as a movie. As a book (adapted from the Dazzling New Film!), it creaked and galumphed along, borne gaily along on a tide of racism and archaic notions of cultural identity. Even as bad as… Read more
-
History of the World in 100 Objects
Review: Finally found a copy of this (in the UK, naturally!) and what a joy to read. This was of course originally a series of 100 podcasts from BBC Radio 4. First broadcast in 2010, I remember listening to each episode on my first iPod – a 2GB shuffle. This is the story – our… Read more
-
Super Space Encyclopedia
Review: An amazing, absorbing, informative book. The illustrations and photos are worth more than volumes of text. Even just the ones from Hubble. We’ve gone so far and yet we’re just barely begin to explore and learn. This book made me want to: increase funding for all space programs Overall rating: Readability: Plot: Other: Immensity Read more
-
Conan: The Hour of the Dragon
Review: Super good read. Fast paced, sword and sorcery. Proper old 1930s pulp magazine fare. However… Robert E. Howard stood apart from his pulp contemporaries by an Aquilonian League. A mile. His characters are well developed and he created a whole world. Think about Middle Earth and Narnia (which came later). If you’re not white,… Read more
-
Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology
Review: Like any great anthology, some good, some bad, some great, most average. This was, to put it simply, trying too hard to be cool. The Decadent Movement was a late 19th century literary and artistic phenomenon. Think Dorian Grey and you’ll get it. The creators disavow that Neo-Decadent is an homage or pastiche to… Read more
-
A Little History of Science
Review: What a superb little book. Science and its history explained in a clear and entertaining way. All the way from the Babylonian astronomers to the world wide web. Not a book of trivia, this was a clear and concise journey through the trials, errors, leaps forward, and disastrous steps backward that have created the… Read more
-
Rebecca
Review: I was enchanted for the first 30 pages but then it just went on and on. An influential novel, an important novel. A tiresome novel. Rebecca, or, Proust-writes-a-thriller. There was no need for this to be 428 pages. Even if you just cut out every description of scones you could trim a hundred pages.… Read more
-
The Red and The Black
Review: This was one of the selections from my Lifetime Reading Plan book. It was loooooong. Fairly difficult prose as it was translated from 19th century French. But. It was good, very good. Way ahead of its time (1830). A novel that challenged conventions and showed the inside machinations of church and state in post… Read more