Blue dotter, potter, novel reader, tuba player. Retired Texas HS Computer Science, English and Math teacher, so I have Certain Tendencies of Mind. 🤷♂️
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i couldn’t put this down and the prose is very fine. but be warned it is in first person with an unreliable narrator. he omits things, and perhaps even lies by omission. so read this as if you are playing a game with someone you care about and find fascinating — but can’t trust to be completely forthcoming.
Singular, capital, wonderfully enjoyable, this is the biggest collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories published …
holmes pastiches are something you have to like, so ... i liked em but ymmv.
The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the …
the trick ending really didn’t work for me. brace yourself for it.
I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater, and …
the narrative bits are as fine as anything. his theorizing about addiction is more or less claptrap. on the whole it would be more fun to see someone else depict de quincy.
returning to this as an old man, in some ways i’m surprised how good this is. the hst character, dr gonzo, is a gentleman loser, straight out of a steely dan song. thompson’s prose is truly wonderful. on the other hand, it is often puerile and stupid, and the 60s white journo hipster-style racist and sexist jokes don’t age well at all.
John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during an astonishing burst of activity between June …
i love this book, but i’m an english teacher. enlightening challenging wrenching, it was great reading on a literal route 66 car trip. at all costs, avoid reading this against a time deadline for a paper.
The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, …
The tale of a swashbuckling deep space ... board game?
Gurgeh is a master game player from The Culture who finds himself in a game tournament in an alien empire. But what is really going on? ... Faster paced and a bit shorter than the first novel, there are plenty of classic pulp tropes, the occasion gross-out, and a few Big Ideas here and there. Loads of fun.
a ripping yarn that involves galaxy-scale world building, political and religious passions and boyish joys such as space pirates, a vast abandoned train system, and a card game of disgusting cruelty. is it great art? ehh. but it’s great pulp in an amusing Brit-scifi vein that i couldn’t put down.
This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in …
I am not sure why I chose to read this at this phase of life, but the intuition was correct. It strikes me now as being somewhat in the vein of Joyce's The Dead. Fiction that speaks to me now, I think, is that which is a hard fought struggle to recover, and perhaps redeem, something, as this assuredly is. Not exactly a roman a clef, but much about Woolf's family is in it. Mrs Ramsey is Woolf's mother. It is a glorious and strange novel in which almost nothing happens.
A guide to reading "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the …
