Lamb was the first Christopher Moore book I’ve read, and I was impressed. The book had me chuckling right in the first couple pages, and kept me going through the end. There were a few moments that felt a bit heavy handed, but given the nature of the story and the overall lighthearted buddy comedy feel to the entire story, they were easy enough to let pass without a mark against the book.

Originally, I found this recommended on a list that included other humor authors I love (Douglas Adams, for instance), and I can definitely say it was an excellent recommendation. I look forward to more of Moore.



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I read this book in high school originally, and apparently remembered it so poorly that it was as if I was reading it for the first time. And you know what? It was a good time. Brave New World deserves the fame it has, as I actually got chills at occasional points from some of the parallels drawn between Huxley’s world and the one that we live in now.

Pick it up sometime. It’s a giant of the sci-fi and dystopian worlds for a very good reason.



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The Minority Report shares about two things (aside from its title) with the movie: the main character’s name (not his position in the police, or his actual current place in life, just his name), and the fact that his police station has 3 precogs predicting crime. Of course, in the story, every police station has their own 3, and violent crimes have been eliminated from society.

This one is a mind bender by the end. The report in question sets up a series of events that leaves the reader wondering whether free will exists, or whether Anderton was predestined to go down the road he went down. At 100 pages, it was also easy to burn through on, say, a lunch break, so I would maybe suggest picking this up from a library (so you don’t drop $15 on something you’ll finish in an hour or two). It’s definitely a really good read, and one you’ll be pondering for potentially even longer than you spend reading it. Worth every word.



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One interesting thing about the Penultimate Truth is that you know what the con is going in. You are not having your reality questioned by Dick, but you instead get to watch someone else have theirs questioned, and you are an observer in the process. It leads to a strangely detached experience that doesn’t tend to happen as often in Dick’s works. However, that doesn’t take away from the story at all. I wouldn’t say this was his best work (by far), but it was certainly an enjoyable read, especially if you’re already a fan of his.



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Childhood’s End was fantastic. It was by turns sad and happy and beautiful, and I finished the last page impressed with the fact that Clarke seemed to know both where and how to end his story. This was also the first book of his I’ve read, but it will in no way be the last.



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The only real problem I had with this book was its publication date, and it’s not the book’s fault in the least. “Physics of the Impossible” came out before the LHC was turned on, and before the last four years of discovery and advancement. Still, it’s full of really interesting and thoughtful approaches to rather mind bending topics. In all honesty, the material presented was a bit more interesting than the actual presentation itself, but I could live with it. Kaku gives real thought to a lot of these topics, and admits at multiple points that there’s a lot we simply don’t know, and therefore it’s difficult to make these sorts of predictions.

If you were a fan of Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time” or “Universe in a Nutshell,” you will definitely enjoy this book.



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Ray Bradbury is a tremendous writer, and he never seems to be too concerned with pigeonholing himself into a specific genre. Never is this more evident than in this book, where he goes between people living on Mars or having robot grandmothers to spirits and fairies to regular people living their regular lives, but with a touch of the beautiful in them. Although I occasionally got hung up on the fact that most people don’t talk the way he has them talk at times, I still never found myself complaining.

This is definitely another great book to add to the long list of them from Bradbury.



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My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I don’t know why I read The Magician King. The Magicians was absolutely awful, with its only redeeming quality being the potential it had (which, really, means there was nothing to redeem the story or characters), and yet I still checked TMK out of my local library to read it. I can honestly say it is not as awful as The Magicians.

That is the highest praise I can give it.

The Magician King left off where The Magicians ended: the Alcoholic, the Popular But Mean Slut, the Goth Witch That Appears Three Times In The Last Book, and the Whiny Pointless Main Character are inexplicably ruling as kings and queens of Fillory, which is like Narnia but without any of Narnia’s charm, interesting characters, or stories worth reading. Eventually, some of these morons eventually allegedly save things in what is probably the single most boring “saving” scene in literary history, two characters you nearly forget about return for no discernible reasons (that’s not entirely true – Penny is the epitome of deus ex magica for Grossman, so of course he had to return), and a new girl is introduced so that Quentin has someone new to sleep with without ever suggesting either of them are ever remotely attracted to each other on any possible level people can be attracted to one another. I guess that makes sense, though – Alice is dead (or something? She’s only mentioned in one passing thought in this book), Julie is…possessed? or something?…and Janet already slept with him, so naturally he needed a new girl.

The Magician King also picks up where The Magician’s terrible style left off, this time upping the ante by having the word “literally” appear in the normal narration, as in, “They literally walked two miles,” making me think that perhaps Lev Grossman decided his entire story should be read as if the narrator is a 15 year old girl with a cell phone in her hands. The level of uncaring emotionlessness that both narrator and characters display for each other and their environments is absolutely mind boggling, and became even more enraging in this book.

I gave this one two stars because of two really interesting, potentially excellent story elements Grossman introduces and abandons as his shitty “magician” main character is somehow too stupid to just stick to his own boring dimension. The story elements are, in order of appearance: 1) An underground network of magical halfway houses that hate the established system, one of which accidentally pisses off an entire pantheon of old world gods, and 2) a secret order of wizards, magicians, and sorcerers that exist in the Neitherlands (ie, between dimensions), and who eventually join up with dragons to go to war with the old world gods.

Here’s how Grossman ruined both:

1) The network of halfway houses had so much potential. There was apparently a lot of animosity for the established magic order, and a lot of the people that spent time at these places were apparently armed anyway. Could you imagine the sheer spectacular nature of a war between the houses and the magic colleges like Brakebills? Well, Grossman couldn’t. That system was there as an excuse to eventually send Quentin back to Fillory (which he left by accident because he’s basically a tall 4 year old), and also to give what’s supposed to count as back story to Julie, a character who challenges Quentin for “most boring character in this book.”

2) We never see this war. In fact, the old gods – who are apparently around ten foot tall silver beings who are literally rearranging the circuitry of the universe when they appear for all of two paragraphs in this story (the second paragraph is to call them boring, which is kind of the pot calling the kettle black here) – just sort of exist below the Neitherlands, then dragons show up, Penny says that they’re going to hold the gods off (whatever that means), and then the reader gets to follow Quentin and New Girl back to Fillory, because Lev Grossman hates both fun and his reader. Two potentially excellent storylines, ignored because Grossman does not understand good stories.

By the way, in case you were wondering: yes, there is fox sex in this book too, and yes it’s even more uncomfortable, as it’s more of a Starfox kind of fox raping a girl in a scene that is, somehow, inexplicably, just as mind-numbingly boring as the entire rest of this book.

Don’t read this book. If you liked The Magicians then you’ll probably like this one too (though you’ll hate the pointless ending more, I’m sure). But if you still value yourself, don’t read this. Go read the newspaper or something instead.

At least interesting things happen there.

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My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There is only one reason this book is getting two stars, and it is because the clear potential of the story kept me turning pages. That was it, the entire thing I really, actually liked about The Magicians: the potential. But the rest runs the gambit from forgettable to pointless to maddening.

The way the story was presented was bland and predictable. It was rushed as well, as if Grossman couldn’t bring himself to hate Harry Potter long enough to create a full book, so he had to rush on to hating the Narnia series as quickly as possible. Naturally, this creates a very disjointed timeline that doesn’t actually appear to fit together in any believable way, and that barely seems to have enough time for all the characters to do the necessary things that don’t matter.

The characters are equally bland, and barely seem to muster up the energy to be archetypal. The main character, Quentin, is apparently incredibly smart and stupidly rich, although we only ever actually see any evidence of the latter. Or maybe his family isn’t rich. It’s never really clearly established, although it’s clear his parents have plenty of money, at the very least. The book stars with him and his “best friends,” who show no evidence whatsoever of even liking him, which is fine since he shows no evidence of liking them (outside of wanting to sleep with the girl). When he ditches them to go to magical school, his ambivalence toward them is flagrant. In fact, his ambivalence toward everything is astounding. I’m fairly certain Quentin is supposed to have emotions, it’s just that Grossman never wrote them to be remotely believable. Really, Quentin just comes off as a self-important douchebag.

The side characters are no better. There’s Alice, who is basically “Goth” Hermoine. There’s Penny, who seems to be this story’s “punk” Ron Weasely, although he’s really only there so he can be brought back in a deus ex machina moment near the end (or, given the world of this book: deus ex magica?). There’s Eliot, the alcoholic who suffers absolutely no ill side effects whatsoever from the amount of liquor he never stops drinking, and who is apparently gay (which was discovered in what was supposed to be a huge reveal moment, and was then never mentioned again in two full books aside from two or three winks and nudges by the author). There are four separate characters with names that begin with J. One is a guy, and the others are pretty much interchangeable girls. There’s even a villain, referred to just as The Beast at first, that appears exactly twice in the story: once, to be set up as the villain, and the other time to be the boss fight. Before the first and in between the two appearances, you never see or hear of this character.

Deus ex magica.

Really, the biggest enemy in this story is entropy. Lev Grossman somehow found a sweet spot between “moving too fast” and “never actually doing anything with the story.” Every other page there was another reason to get pulled out of the story, and wonder why anyone would write what was written. Then there was the darkness of it all.

This is not a dark story, or an edgy story. This is a story that keeps tossing things as you, saying “look how dark and edgy I’m being!” It’s the equivalent of a college freshman girl getting a butterfly tattoo on her lower back, because tattoos are rebellious.

The Magicians is the tramp stamp of fantasy literature. Save yourself the trouble, and go read something by a good author.

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The problem I have with Notes from Underground is the same problem I had with Demons: Dostoyevsky hits a philosophical notes and then rambles for three or four pages. Once one finally got to the meat and potatoes of the story it was pretty good, and he did raise some interesting points in it, but overall Notes wandered on and on, going in circles that never found a point to get to. The Double was a bit better, as the schizophrenic breakdown of the main character is rather interesting, but also easily hate-able. It takes a bit of work to get through it, although less than Notes from Underground.

In the end, it’s a Dostoyevsky book. There are worse things, but this is not his best work.



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