Tag: book review
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Atlas Shrugged – Review, Summary, and Quotations Guide
So, a little over two months ago, I started reading Atlas Shrugged. It’s a book my Dad has been suggesting I read for almost ten years, and since I’m currently unemployed and don’t have any more college reading to do, I figured I’d buckle down and git ‘er done. What I found is that Atlas…
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Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear
I really fell in love with this book, but after talking to people about it at our scifi book group I’ve heard all kinds of reactions. Some people really liked it, some not so much… it’s a 100-page book, so the plot is very simple. It’s about an Earth soldier who crash-lands with a Drac…
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The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian by Andy Weir is one of those rare cases of indie success that’s turned into mainstream success. Weir wrote the book for fans of his personal website, and thought his book would appeal mostly to hardcore science nerds. When a reader suggested he put it up as an ebook on Amazon, it climbed…
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The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells is my favorite author, but when I tried to read this in high school I had to put it down after a few chapters. The first bit of it is extremely slow and if you’re not reading it closely it comes off as very racist. I must have been really tired the first…
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Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein is a bit of a genre-founder, but politically bizarre. It has the prototype of men in powered space-suits fighting an insectoid enemy (“The Bugs”) which would remind a modern reader of StarCraft, but it also has repetitive scenes of the characters in a classroom being lectured to on what may…
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The Dragon and the Needle by Hugh Franks
When I read the email from the marketing assistant about The Dragon and the Needle, the plot sounded intriguing – a mysterious disease called ENDS (Extraordinary Natural Death Syndrome) is killing high-profile people around the world, seemingly by old age, and a British doctor and an American acupuncturist team up to find the causes and…
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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is both sensual and challenging, shocking and learned. Its content is lewd but moving and its style is high but not above blunt jokes. It’s hard for me to put how I feel about it into words, but I’ll do my best. Lolita is the story of a literary, effeminate pedophile who captures a…
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“When Did You See Her Last?”
Welcome to Stain’d-by-the-Sea, where all the children are sharp, all the adults are foolish, and all the people are peculiar. My brother suggested I read “When Did You See Her Last?” while I was visiting family in Milwaukee. Since I haven’t read anything by Daniel Handler (alias Lemony Snicket) since the Unfortunate Events series, I…
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
You’ve probably heard Jonathan Safran Foer’s name before. His book Everything is Illuminated was a huge hit and the book I’m reviewing in this post, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was made into a movie in 2011. The writing in this book is pretty good and the protagonist is lovable, but it doesn’t quite live…
