Review:I like the concept that the elderly are so invisible that they (we) can get away with almost anything. However, the writing was heavy-handed and humorless. A very slow read with a less than satisfying outcome. Read more

Review:Tristram Shandy, like Don Quixote, is a classic humor novel. It contains some hilarious premises (i.e. his father being obsessed with his family's noses and Tristram's nose getting smashed by clumsy forceps work during his delivery), but the digressions, which are the central conceit of the book and can be humorous on their own, dilute the fun to the point of making it a tedious exercise to finish it. The author is clearly impressed with his own cleverness but also has a sense of humor about h... Read more

Review:a real good and entertaining read. Odd Thomas and the "good" characters are so like real people although Odd would comes across as a liitle off in real life. but that makes the stories even more entertaining and interesting. Read more

Review:This is a great book, and it knocked Blake Snyder's Save the Cat right off my bookshelf. It's funnier than hell, and the tip about writing outlines instead of screenplays was alone worth the $0.05 I paid for my used Amazon copy. And no joke, with my next script, I did that and had a completed (brilliant) script like two months later. The only issue I have with it is that I am not a successful Hollywood screenwriter yet, and I thought the book would help me take care of that pretty quickly. I mea... Read more

Review:I first got to know David Mitchell through his extraordinary CLOUD ATLAS (2004), a matrix of six connected stories in different genres and periods, encased in one another like a matroshka doll. He repeated much the same formula in his recent BONE CLOCKS (2014), though there the separate stories are linked linearly thro... Read more

Review:A very interesting book. The chapters leave a lot left open for you to expand upon should you choose. There are three epilogue chapters that all relate to each other, but the rest of the chapters (maybe 30 of them or so?) are only a few pages long and don't relate to each other. It can be tough to wrap your mind around some of the ideas, but once you get it they are very interesting. A great book for upper intermediate to advanced readers. Read more

Review:The plot wasn't particularly attention grabbing; however, the stories that are spun by Kolya's father are fantastic. I also like the feel you get of the Russian culture in each of Dostoevsky's books, and this book is no exception. I found it interesting that Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy, just like the Prince. The idea that "those kind" are particularly loved by God is a relief in an age where "those kind" are avoided like the plague. Overall, it is the least favorite of the three novels... Read more

Review:Sometimes a Great Notion is an anti-union manifesto, a work of flowing literature that should be studied in the cloistering halls of higher learning--not as much for its deep meaning, but rather for the structure of its text (I dare a professor to take any one of the 600+ pages and study it for an entire semester), a masterpiece of prose, the second novel by The Great Ken Kesey (1935-2001), a juxtaposition of two brothers that has been unequalled since Tolstoy.

Sometimes a Great Notion is... Read more

Review:HHhH is the most refreshing historic novel I've read in a long time. Superbly researched, well written, humorous on a painful theme. Laurent Binet starts his novelist career with a real master work !!! Read more

Review:The only thing I found intriguing about this title was the fact that it was written before the totalitarianism it describes was in full effect.

That said, the book offers little else of worth. It was compiled from a collection of chapters that the author himself never presented in a complete form, and while the overall narrative is engaging enough to keep you paging through till the end, the work as a whole reads very much like a rough draft. Aside from the protagonist, most other chara... Read more