Though the stated premise is a history of the American dialect of English, this book is really more of a ramble through various interesting factoids about American history. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—most of those factoids are pretty darn interesting.
Chandler just has such a talent for mood and turning a phrase. His narrative style has been parodied to death, but no one has ever really captured the essence of what makes it so great.
Reading this novel was very different for me from the first one because I’ve never seen the film this time. It really allowed me to let Chandler paint the pictures without any existing images getting in the way.
I’ve read a lot of books that give advice on my various creative pursuits, but I think this one does the best job of any of them when it comes to truly capturing my experience as a creative person. The book is filled with simple, clear perspective for the internal struggles that I’ve faced a million times over, and I believe I shall reference it for years to come.
In a few places, Rubin gets a bit too woowoo spiritual for my taste, but in most places where he talks about things like energy and universal source, I can choose to take it as metaphor for the complex intangibles of inspiration.
I’m probably not the first person to say that what makes this book special is the characters. They’re especially effective because of McMurtry’s skill at setting up pairs of dramatic foils and playing them off of one another.
It’s sweeping, funny, tragic, and unforgettable.
I don’t typically read memoirs, but the college where I teach handed this one out at an all-hands event as a way for us to better understand some of the challenges our students face. On that score, I’m pretty disappointed. Sure, here and there Land makes a few decent points about the hurdles and indignities of living in poverty, but it’s hardly the focus of the story.
But if I was looking for focus, I was quite mistaken; there is none. The chapters meander between the random occurrences of her life, and any hints of theme that manage to flit by are often contradicted in the next turn. And Land’s depiction of scraping through college as an underemployed single mother is sullied in its heroism by the depiction of her poor choices and general immaturity. (So much so, that the part of me that’s very close with my own impoverished childhood finds itself wildly speculating that Land is some sort of plant meant to convince readers that the poor really are what the right wants us to believe.)
Still, there might be something redeeming if the prose were beautiful or her ability to draw a scene arresting, but it’s all very casual and unadorned.
I hope the next memoir I pick up will be better.
Each story is like a little puzzle that seems at first almost simple but holds a lot of big ideas about technology, logical reasoning, and unintended consequences. Asimov’s characters are very 1950s, but within that scope they are quite entertaining, especially the two beleaguered robot troubleshooters who play off of riff on each other as they rack their brains to overcome each new problem they face. True comfort reading.
This book has a lot of ideas, many of them particularly progressive for the 1980s, in which the novel was penned. And I respect that, I really do. But the storytelling is meanderingly awkward, the prose is often hard to follow, and the character motivations are just bad. I’ll be honest, I quit reading when the “liberated” sexual politics of the book lead to actions that were perplexing at best and terribly exploitative if we’re honest about it. Yuck.
Nick and Nora Charles are a charming (and surprisingly progressive in their relationship) couple of protagonists, which is why the film adaptation of The Thin Man spawned several sequels and even a TV show, not to mention lent their names to a style of cocktail glass.
Comparing this to Dashiell Hammett’s only other novel, The Maltese Falcon, it’s interesting how it is so much more lighthearted in tone, and yet so similar in its hard-boiled oeuvre at the same time. Without at all reading like a parody, it manages to place a pair of rye bon vivants right in the middle of a corrupt and morally grey noir world. Nicely done.
This novel is epic, complex, humorous, and full of character. And tragic, very, very tragic. Hugo excels at depicting the ways in which we project our own needs and desires onto other people, and especially how that can become obsession. Occasionally, the book escalates into true melodrama, but not enough to detract from the scale of its achievement.
Incredibly ambitious in scope and ideas, especially for time. Immensely readable, as all of Clarke’s novels are. There’s just a bit of hoakiness in the climax that brings it down somewhat in my estimation.
As he proved in Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann can really make history come to life so that it reads like a novel. Part of it is that he’s a fantastic writer with great prose, but part of it is that he finds stories that make your jaw drop, repeatedly.
The Wager does just that. It’s hard to believe what these sailors went through, what they survived, and the choices they made. You sit on the edge of your seat, holding your breath for what might come next, terrified and hopeful. It’s exhilarating, harrowing, and a lot of fun.
A really solid mystery novel from the end of the 19th century. A compelling character, a confounding mystery, and some great twists. I’m really enjoying the books in the Library of Congress’ series of forgotten crime literature.
A wonderful historical novel! Graves manages to take the messy lives of four Roman Emperors and somehow make them narratively satisfying without sacrificing fidelity to the source material. More than that, the narrative voice he provides Claudius is rich, lively, and compelling. I can’t wait to read the sequel.
The Stanley Kubrik film – written simultaneously and in tandem with the book – is so iconic and looms so large on my mind that the experience of reading the novel is important to separate, far more so than any other source material I’ve ever read.
The thing that really stands out is that Clarke and Kubrik, though telling the very same story, are interested in completely different things. Clarke is interested in science and possibility and the wonder of the universe. Kubrik, on the other hand, is interested in psyche and mystery and creating images and effects that strike something primal in the viewer. One story, two purposes.
I look forward to reading the sequel novels, where the film won’t dominate my mind so thoroughly and they’ll have a chance at being experienced on their own merits.
This book has a fairly simple point to make–that engineering follows a unique and practical method distinct from its reputation as applied science. You could argue that the point could be made just as well in a shorter format, and books that could be pared down to article length are typically one of my pet peaves.
But the way this is written, with many examples drawn from the history of engineering and invention, is just so enjoyable to me that I can find no fault. And the core premise, though simple, is actually a pretty meaningful one for how we think about discovery and problems solving.
This book was a bit of a disappointment to me. I probably expected too much, because it was a Hugo Award nominee, because Jo Walton gave it high praise, and because an endorsement quote in the front matter called Delaney scifi’s Melville. I expected all that, and what I got was a fairly tepid space opera with a plot in need of tightening.
A short little book that’s filled with some great typographic and linguistic facts, all presented in fun and creative design. I think I’ll pick up a copy in print for my office bookshelf.
There is a lot of really interesting stuff here for language nerds like me. From how dictionary definitions are structured and divided into senses and subsenses, how meanings are divined from piles of reference quotations, and how dictionaries are treated as authoritative arbiters of what is correct and true, there’s plenty to chew on here. It’s a shame, though, that the writing indulges in the quipy style that is so trendy right now.
The Big Sleep is such an ur-example of the hardboiled detective genre that it’s hard to read it without a wash of associations and connections that cloud your reading experience. The dry, wry narration style has been cribbed and riffed on as voiceovers in everything from other detective novels to Veronica Mars to The Animaniacs. And then there’s the iconic film adaptation by Howard Hawks starring Humphrey Bogart.
It’s that last one that sticks in my head the most as I read. I suppose that for me Bogart will always be Philip Marlowe–and that’s not a bad thing! It’s been long enough since I last saw the movie that I only retained a general impression of the plot and scenes, but they come rushing back as I read the same events on the page.
But for all the ways it’s impossible to read this book with truly fresh eyes, it’s still really good. For me, the exploration of civilization’s unseemly underbelly through the actions of a seemingly Machiavellian, but ultimately morally centered hero is a great setup. The characters are complex. The language is sharp. I can’t wait to read the next in the series.
Ursula LeGuin’s first novels is in some ways a simple book. But all the subtleties that made her the writer she was were there from the start–the psychological and anthropological depth, the lyrical, starkly evocative prose, and the wabi sabi sense of the sorrow and beauty of impermanence and imperfection.
A really solid broad overview of Typography, written in an approachable style with plenty of character. There are a few things in this edition that are already slightly outdated (like the explanation of the need for pixel fonts), but I still think I might adopt it as a secondary text for my typography class.
