Booknan the Bookuser

There were parts I genuinely liked among all the things that were only so-so.

Lauren Beukes is like a butterfly in this book, flitting from one subject to the next, trying to cover all the flowers in the field, and never really completely emptying one of nectar. In her wake is a host of flowers half-drained and unsatisfied.

Oh, and for all that research she did, she really should have known a Smith&Wesson uses a magazine, not a clip :P

Although never quite boring(this book is about one thrilling heist and long con after another after all), this book was, at times, disappointingly predictable.

It seemed like Lynch thought he was a lot smarter than he really is, thereby constantly underestimating his readers. Your interludes are not clever! They're just unnecessary, too revealing and defuse the tension you spent two chapters carefully building. All that backstory didn't really do much for the plot, or the worldbuilding, and at times it only felt like filler so Mr Lynch could pad out his book to a respectable fantasy-size.

I felt like I was being force-fed information that I really didn't need, or had any desire to know, much like reading anything by Rothfuss. Both Lynch and Rothfuss seemed to have Hemingway's iceberg-principle backwards - only 20% are supposed to be visible, not 80%!!!

I like the setting, though.

P.S. I think Hannu Rajaniemi did a better job telling almost he same story, only with fewer words...

Remember that feeling you had when you finished watching Donnie Darko, Primer and Coherence for the first time? Or even Prometheus, Memento and Inception... That weird feeling in the pit of you stomach telling you that you have all the puzzle pieces, you're just looking at the puzzle wrong?

Fuuuuuuuck

This was weird from start to finish, and I loved every second of it. I am in awe of Vandermeer's imagination, ingenuity, his poetic prose and his wonderfully odd characters. I don't think I'll ever read something quite like this again

What on earth did I just read? There were killer kitten tornadoes and mecha-chickens and an AI named Tammy...

I can't even

Ok, it was seriously funny, and gave me a unique insight into Erikson's mind.

This collection contains three short stories, The Devil Delivered, Revolvo and Fishing with Grandma Matchie. All of them are super weird, absurd and crazy. I'm not even sure what I read most of the time...

It was fun, a quick and easy read. Maybe too quick and easy. I felt like something was missing while I read it.

Now that I've had some time to think about it, I realize a lot of things bother me about this book. First and foremost, the relationship between Zack's parents, and Zack and his parents. They met in high school, she got pregnant and the he died one year after Zack was born. Now, 18 years later, Zack's mother is still pining away for her dead high school lover, and it's made out to be this great and tragic love story... but I don't buy it, at all.

Also, Zack's obsession with his father is weird. This is a man who has never been a part of Zack's life, and yet he still feels this deep connection with him... I don't buy that either.

Secondly, the characters are flimsy, some of them are straight up wish-fulfillment/ gamer fantasy personified and the dialogue is stilted and choppy, because Cline feels an incessant need to jam in popcultural references every which way. It gets real tiresome, real fast.

These things have to come naturally to be good, but Cline seems to insist on putting the square brick in the triangular slot.

The plot is very anticlimactic.

I'm starting to wonder if dear old Cline is a one trick-pony...

Military fantasy with hints of The Crusades and the American Civil War.

For readers who like military campaigns, tactics and strategies, comraderie between soldiers, crazy generals, muskets, cannons and a little bit of mystery and magic :)

Terry Goodkind is not a terrible fantasy writer, he's a terrible writer, period.

I bought this book because my version had a dragon on the cover, and I thought "Fuck yeah, dragons!" Alas, I was sorely disappointed. Instead of dragons I got a boring and morally questionable hero who likes to kick little girls in the face, a super-powerful wizard who does exactly one trick during the course of the book, a villain who has the most annoying "tick" ever, a convent of SM-nuns, a plot that's pretty much a rip-off of The Eye of the World, and some rape to drive said generic plot forward whenever it gets stuck, which is often.

And I haven't even gotten to the uninspired and choppy prose, or the way Goodkind force-feeds the readers his ideals and philosophies.

An action-packed breeze of a read. Some wacky ideas a little poorly executed. The prose is pragmatic and confusing at times, as Weeks doesn't differentiate between regular text, thoughts and dialogue, whatsoever. The appearance of howitzers really annoys me, not the guns themselves, but the fact that he hasn't been able to come up with a better term for them, that fits the setting better.

Also, the whole drafting/Chromeria-business sounds a little silly, if you ask me.

Two thirds of the book is spent on backstory and character-building, and the book ends when things are finally getting interesting. Brett is also too obvious when moralizing, not clever when borrowing inspiration from the real world, and some of the things his characters do does not make sense, although we've spent almost two-thirds of the book getting to know them!

It's basically Dragon Age: Origins, but not as fun or interesting.

Two of the stars are for the prose alone.

Although this book very well-written, and I finished it, I didn't much like it. Seems too few authors these days appreciate In Medias Res, and letting the reader find out things on their own. There's just too much information, some of which is uninteresting and irrelevant, and the pacing is horrendously slow. When the information load is that great, there isn't much room for surprises. We already know what happens to (young)Kvothe, so when he finds himself in a dangerous situation there's no thrill or excitement there, because we already know he's going to pull through. His life is never really at stake...I find the outer tale to be far more interesting, and I wish he'd spent more time on that in the first book. I am going to read the second book just to see how things happen, and if there's more of a development in older Kvothe's story.

But my main issue is that young Kvothe is, for me at least, a wholly unlikable character. He's too "perfect", he's selfish, ego-centric, reckless, disrespectful, inconsiderate and in general a major douche. But maybe I just think that about all teenage boys who have no siblings. A kid without siblings is an acquired taste, especially as grown-ups.
That said I didn't like Harry Potter much either. Oh, I loved the series, but HP himself is a brat. Ronny Weasley, on the other hand, is a wonderful character. The problem with The Name of the Wind is that Kvothe doesn't really have a Ron Weasley to even out some of the douchiness...

If I was going to compare this book to any other(without having read Lies) I would say Peter V Brett's The Painted Man. Almost two-thirds of the books is spent on backstory, and the plot itself is barely enough for a 100-150 pages.

This one's a slow burner. Erikson is collecting all his threads, shuffling his players around on the board - keeping some, removing some, preparing for a grand finale.

A slow, deliberate, torturing build-up and then everything EXPLODES!!

Probably my favourite out of all the Malazan books.