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chan_fry's reviews
164 reviews
3.0
Fifteen years after a former boss gifted me with a copy of this, I finally read it, and finally understood why she recommended it to me. I struggled through the first third, thinking I would close it forever, but eventually my brain attuned itself to the weird rhythm of Kerouac's prose. I kept trying to think of old people I knew who'd lived in those times, but none of them ever lived like this so I was having a hard time with it.
Then I remembered that the former boss had made this recommendation after listening to me tell stories of my past, and that it was me who reminded her (she said) of Kerouac's story. Everything began to fall into place then. The wild and frenetic journeys full of pleasure and pain, the confusion, the loss, the lostness, the drugs, the drinking, the poverty — all of it.
I probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone else unless they too reminded me somehow of the crazy life described in the story, and it's absurd that any editor or publishing house let this through (these are the reasons for the missing two stars), but I enjoyed it in a strange sort of way that I no longer like to feel very often.
(I've published a longer review on my website.)
3.0
This wasn't Scalzi's best effort, but it was still fun to read.
My specific complaints: (1) too many characters to keep track of, (2) an overabundance of plot twists and/or startling new information, (3) heavy on the exposition, as opposed to action and dialog, and (4) an unusually frequent occurrence of the word "coincidence" or derivatives.
I'm a little surprised because this was written not long after Old Man's War, which was — in my opinion — far better.
I have published a longer review on my website.
4.0
I mistakenly thought this was going to be a sequel to Old Man's War; it wasn't. It was simply a book set in the same universe, which happens chronologically after the other book. Once I got past that, it was an enjoyable read.
Scalzi corrected in The Ghost Brigades a few items I saw as problems with the first book. (1) He cleaned up the jump-forward, flash-back style of narrative that irritated me so much in Old Man's War. Here, it still happens, but the transitions are smoother and the exposition is more efficient. (2) Instead of just letting us *guess* why all the sentient races in this crowded interstellar area are at war with one another (as before), Scalzi here offers at least a hint — that it has something to do with humanity, explaining that most other races aren't at odds with everyone like humans are.
A few parts felt forced — for example a conversation near the end with a young girl, which went *nothing* like the same conversation would go with my daughter (of about the same age). But overall the story was enjoyable, especially if you're a sucker for going-to-war sci-fi like I am.
(I have posted a longer review on my website.)
3.0
The Last Colony is the sequel to both Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, though those two were both standalone books. This story, like the previous two, was enjoyable, mostly light, and I thought it wrapped up the trilogy nicely. Most of the main characters will be familiar to anyone who's read the previous books.
I still find strange the near total lack of description of characters' appearances, but I can think of legitimate reasons for this. My primary complaints are two: (1) As in the previous books, Scalzi uses a skip-ahead-but-then-review narrative style which can be tiring. (2) This one includes a rare case (for Scalzi) of deus ex machina, in which he solves a plot point by introducing a heretofore unmentioned advanced technology. That part of the story was still fun, and the action around it was enjoyable, but it seemed like bad form.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
2.0
I was fascinated by this look into Hitchens' life and I think I picked up some new perspectives along the way. (Before reading, I knew nothing about British life in the decades after the second World War; now I know a little more than nothing.) As with most Hitchens books, there are quotable portions.
But also as with most Hitchens prose, the reading thereof is laborious, filled with parenthetical phrases inside other parenthetical phrases, manifold multisyllabic constructions, and name-dropping like I rarely experience elsewhere. And I'm either less cultured than I thought (which is possible) or the people whose names he drops are more obscure than he thought they were; I had heard of almost none of them. I simply can't recommend a book to a friend if the book is so mindnumbingly difficult to read.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)