Idiomdrottning demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to culture users but at the same time quite foreign.
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I thought the first one was so bad but I loved the second one since I had the right expectations going in on that one. Trashy over-the-top fun.👍🏻 This is book three in the series.
Three young women share a London flat. The first is a coolly efficient personal secretary; …
Now this one was a treat! One of Christie's finest and I didn't know this before I read it but it was published right before my very fave of hers, Endless Night. And almost thirty years after the one I most recently read, Murder is Easy, which was also great. What a career!
This one has a hippie chick with memory issues, bohemian artists, spies, jealousy, of course a big mansion but also London flats. Just great.
Puzzle review in rot13: Guvf gvzr V jnf pbzcyrgryl sbbyrq! V fhfcrpgrq Pynhqvn gunaxf gb n qryvpvbhf erq ureevat jurer fur naq gur erny xvyyre jrer frra pbagenqvpgvat rnpu bgure. Terng naq snve chmmyr jvgu cyragl bs pyhrf. V hfhnyyl eryl ba aneengvivhz engure guna pyhrf gb fbyir gurfr ohg guvf gvzr V jnf orfgrq.
In recent years, countless books, articles, and documentaries have addressed the negative effects that social …
This one was not good. But Reddit is not okay.
City is a 1952 science fiction fix-up novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak. The …
My new audiobook after Never Flinch. So far I don't like it at all because I have a hard time paying attention to the narrator. Way Station was Eric Summerer (and Never Flinch was Anja Lundqvist). This other guy is more droney and hard to stay engaged with.
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to …
Content warning Spoilers, including plot spoilers, for Stephen King's "Never Flinch".
It's time for "Never Flinch" a.k.a. Holly 7! Or Holly 6 if "If It Bleeds" doesn't count or Holly 4 if Mercedes trilogy doesn't count or Holly 3 if neither of them count. I've seen the book sold under all four of those numbers.
Throughout the series King is being really nasty to those who missed the previous books. He always take care to spoil the climaxes of the previous books. I'll use a made-up example (so don't worry, there are not really any weresharks or boats): "Holly thought back to when she defeated Jane Doe who in a surprise twist was revealed as the were-shark onboard the S/S Atlantica. She doesn't talk to Barbara and Jerome about it anymore." He unabashedly writes about the endings of previous cases but under-explains who these people are and how they know each other. You're supposed to just get who Izzy, Barbara, Jeromee, Charlotte, Bill, and Pete are, and how Holly was before the start of the series. Barbara and Jerome are main characters so you get to know them during the course of the books, but Holly even though she is such an excentric but you have to just carry that with you into this one from previous books because that's not shown here.
All that to say is that read the books in order or get punished.
Or don't read them because they're pretty messed up.
So spoiler warning: I'll spoil the twist that's revealed about a third through of this one.
Here, there conincidentally are two killers and both are plural and one of them has a female alter and that's not handled great. Another protagonist, one of the targets, is a pretty unkind caricature of a girlbossy [second-waver][s] on a pro-choice speaking tour. Ultimately I like her but reading the book without flinching (as the titel admonishes) was not easy.
The book also sometimes veer into copaganda but ultimately (okay another spoiler and this one towards the very last chapters, at the apex of the story) the cops are unredeemed as Jesus Christ's divine intervention miraculously causes a brutal fistfight between them and a station of macho firefighters.
Overall this is one of the weaker King novels. He is in a writing mode where an idea pops into his head and he'll use that idea a couple of times even in the separate threads rather than just once. Like someone would use a gesture or an unusual phrase and then it happens again in the other thread. Often this is lampshaded which does mitigate the problem a lot or almost even fully, (lampshading is seriously one of my favorite tropes as a reader. When something is weird or looks like a bug, it helps my immersion when the author lets us know that "okay, that sounds weird but that's what happened") but not always.
Am I going to read "Holly 8, Holly Goes Buick" or whatever the next one's called? Probably but that's more because of sunk cost than actual high hopes at this point. Not happy with this one. Maybe I won't. I did quit Discworld half-way through Unseen Academicals and while I've reread many of my old faves since then, I've often wished I had gotten off that particular train one or books earlier.
[s]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism "Second-wave feminism - Wikipedia"
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to …
So messed up 🤦🏻♀️ King does a Virginia Andrews or Robert Galbraith. Not into it
One of Graham Greene's best works. The story is set at the time of the …
Added one more paper book to the reading rotation. Was recommended to me as an Andor fan
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to …
My current audio book. Love you Holly!
(I'm putting the review and reading dates of entire series under my fave, The Score which is the third book out of four (would've been more but Cooke tragically died). I don't wanna add an entry for every single volume in a multi-volume comics set that took me shorter time to read than one prose novel. Not sure how to best go about that problem going forward so Bookwyrm advice welcome.)
Wow, what a masterpiece this is. You know how you read something from the 1960s and it's like 70% tinged with sixties and 30% is just normal universal stuff? ("Moonlight and love songs never out of date. Hearts full of passion, jealousy, and hate".) But when you read something like this which is a masterfully executed pastiche of sixties aesthetics, you're getting a lot more than 70%. There's this one image in the second book (The Outfit), …
(I'm putting the review and reading dates of entire series under my fave, The Score which is the third book out of four (would've been more but Cooke tragically died). I don't wanna add an entry for every single volume in a multi-volume comics set that took me shorter time to read than one prose novel. Not sure how to best go about that problem going forward so Bookwyrm advice welcome.)
Wow, what a masterpiece this is. You know how you read something from the 1960s and it's like 70% tinged with sixties and 30% is just normal universal stuff? ("Moonlight and love songs never out of date. Hearts full of passion, jealousy, and hate".) But when you read something like this which is a masterfully executed pastiche of sixties aesthetics, you're getting a lot more than 70%. There's this one image in the second book (The Outfit), an exterior shot of an apartment over a garage that I just wanna mainline. I wanna live there. I love the stair, the wall texture, the dormer windows plural, the location in the middle of a bunch of trees far from any road, and the brush and wash fashion-magazine–style rendering.
I loved reading these four books, what a treat. (CW: buckle up for heavy helpings of retro misogyny before you head in because there's gonna be a lot of that.) The three first books are almost equally good and it's by a hair that I'm gonna choose The Score as my fave. Again, this series is Cooke's masterpiece. My usual issues with him is that he's maybe the best artist who ever lived if we're talking about each individual frame. I mean maybe not some of his fill-in work on X-Statix or other earlier stuff but this, peak Cooke with a supportive editor who buys into the sixties fashion mag schtick? He's up there with my other faves like Xaime or Ami Uozumi. Maybe even number one. But panel-to-panel trying to tell an actual story? That's where he sometimes has fallen short, extremely disproportionately so given how good the dialogue and again the draftsmanship is. And for the first two books in this series (by second book I mean The Outfit; ignore The Man with a Getaway Face, you don't have to get that one, because it's a strict subset of the comics pages in The Outfit) we get to see a Cooke with storytelling that works. The third book, The Score, has a few weird situations where you're not entirely sure of the lay of the land (like how does the weird truck ramp relate to the rest of the town?) but that's very much ameliorated by a few schematic gimmicks like huge town map spreads.
So it's heartbreaking that the last book, The Slayland, both the main story and the bonus adaptation of The Seventh, are confusingly told messes. The source material for Slayland isn't very good either—all of these graphic novels are adaptations of prose novels by Richard Stark, and Slayland kinda sucks. It's cool that Stark tried a new gimmick, I'm just not into seeing the happiest place on Earth become a slasher flick.
This is a book from 1970 that was reprinted in a facsimile edition thirty-nine years later in 2009 and now it's been another sixteen years since then.
It was meant to be hope-inspiring I guess but it's a really frank and ruthless look at class (and racist) exploitation throughout human history starting with the dawn of mercantilism throughout the triangle trade and industrial era into the 1960s. They promote violent revolution and worker uprising; they fully criticize Soviet and Stalin but attribute its misteps to "okay that one failed we won't make the same mistakes next time". That's just a tiny part of the book; the main gist of the book is showing how systemic injustices and capitalism work. As per ushe from us on the left: the only ones who have a full understanding of the problem but not much in they way of solutions.
The few pages the …
This is a book from 1970 that was reprinted in a facsimile edition thirty-nine years later in 2009 and now it's been another sixteen years since then.
It was meant to be hope-inspiring I guess but it's a really frank and ruthless look at class (and racist) exploitation throughout human history starting with the dawn of mercantilism throughout the triangle trade and industrial era into the 1960s. They promote violent revolution and worker uprising; they fully criticize Soviet and Stalin but attribute its misteps to "okay that one failed we won't make the same mistakes next time". That's just a tiny part of the book; the main gist of the book is showing how systemic injustices and capitalism work. As per ushe from us on the left: the only ones who have a full understanding of the problem but not much in they way of solutions.
The few pages the book spends on criticizing social democracy got it into a lot of trouble which I think was too bad; even us who advocate for social democracy needs to address its problems straight on and not only are those problems (corruption and collaborationism) on full display here, social democracy has betrayed the working class again and again in even bigger ways since 1970 like the lontagarfond rug pull or the selling out of public interest or the dismantling of labor rights.
So, okay. Great book if you wanna do step one, comprehend the systematic problems fully. How to fix it is left as an exercise to the reader.
Everyone believes that Lenora Hope is a mass murderer. When the Hope family was massacred …
I've compared The Only One Left to a mashup between We've Always Lived In The Castle and Saint Maud but those are works of art and this is pageturner trash without merits beyond being a tense gothic read. But it's a perfect tense gothic read. Great characters, every chapter has a revelation or clue, the milieu is awesome, there's nothing superfluous, just every puzzle piece perfectly assembled, and it's simultaneously a Gothic classic and a by-the-book golden age whodunnit cozy.
The 1985 setting is perfect in how it's no tech, it's still creaky old stairs and typewriters; no Memphis Design in sight; this is 1985 as a bridge to 1929. Loved it. Maybe I ought to dock it a point because of the "when you reread it some things don't make sense" flaw. So maybe some of the jigsaw pieces were a li'l forced. But I don't care. It was …
I've compared The Only One Left to a mashup between We've Always Lived In The Castle and Saint Maud but those are works of art and this is pageturner trash without merits beyond being a tense gothic read. But it's a perfect tense gothic read. Great characters, every chapter has a revelation or clue, the milieu is awesome, there's nothing superfluous, just every puzzle piece perfectly assembled, and it's simultaneously a Gothic classic and a by-the-book golden age whodunnit cozy.
The 1985 setting is perfect in how it's no tech, it's still creaky old stairs and typewriters; no Memphis Design in sight; this is 1985 as a bridge to 1929. Loved it. Maybe I ought to dock it a point because of the "when you reread it some things don't make sense" flaw. So maybe some of the jigsaw pieces were a li'l forced. But I don't care. It was a great summer read.
The translation was good too. Full Swedish rather than "svengelska" i.e. they correctly translated "so?" to "och?" and when the numbers of words in sentences and letters in words matter, they did a good job with that. Verse not so much. 🤷🏻♀️
I don't wanna understate how dumb the book is! But that's fine.
Everyone believes that Lenora Hope is a mass murderer. When the Hope family was massacred …
I'm halfway through this mashup of We've Always Lived In The Castle and Saint Maud.
What a curious gem of a book densely packed with oblique quotes from occult tablets and tomes all refluffed into bug-eyed 1963 tropey SF! Page after page straight out of emerald tablet and its ilk. All stuffed into an actually good story with great warm caring characters (CW well-meaning ableism that was pretty hard to get through). Dinged for initially using weird framework as a tension driver but to my delight it was read by boardgaming's darling, Eric Summerer! I didn't know he did audio books! Although it was hard to hear it was him because he got deep into character, really elevating the main guy.
Not sure when I started it because it has been an awful experience with the LP3 audio book playing podcast app. Always losing my place or even having to redownload. Kept at it because I loved the book.
Now this one was great!
On the prose level, I was not into it; every turn of phrase was a one-two punching unkilled darling. Although the conlanging and formality levels were great.
On the macro level is where I loved the book! Separate vignettes that end up braiding together almost like the typical Pratchett or Dumas structure. Fun idea and great setting and characters.
