koshpeli's reviews
268 reviews

He sat down to write a review of The Da Vinci Code on www.goodreads.com. He knew that was a website from the letters www. He had a joke with his friend, the brilliant computer programmer who had once hacked Bill Gates' personal computer, that the www stood for Wild Wooly Wicked. That's how he usually felt about computers.

In fact, it stood for World Wide Web. He thought about that for a moment. The Internet was truly World Wide and also a web of interconnected ideas and computers and wires. "Another W word," he thought and chuckled. He quickly checked Wikipedia to come up with a bunch more didactic and ultimately completely useless information about the Internet. "Ah, here we go," he thought. Conceived in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original visionary of the Internet and a graduate of Queens College, part of prestigious Oxford University, the Internet had become very popular. And he should know since he was professor of the Internet at Harvard University. It was all too clear to him how popular the Internet had become last month when he saw someone accessing the Internet from their cellphone! He wasn't surprised though.

If you enjoy this kind of incredibly boring rambling on about every bloody thing the character encounters, the dumbing down of incredibly complicated ideas and historical movements, experts who don't know the most basic facts about their field, then this book is for you. If you enjoy suspense created by simply omitting characters' names when they are doing something EVIL, and giving their name when they are not, thus tricking the reader into thinking they are two people, go ahead and have your heart stopped. Ooh, or stopping the action on a supposed cliff-hanger, like, "He picked up the gun and walked through the door, ready for anything," only to pick it up three chapters later with, "The five year old boy was almost immediately hit by a blast of water so he took his water gun and shot the other small child," then this book is your idea of heaven.

On the other hand, if you enjoy good writing, believable plot or an interesting mystery, buy anything else.

An amusing story about the gondoliers of Venice and why they no longer sing even though they were once the greatest singers in all the world. I read it in about an hour, sitting at a coffee shop. I laughed out loud several times and a lot of the humor and simple, wise observations did remind me of the Princess Bride. This is shorter and less ambitious, but quite enjoyable for what it is.

I read it because I was told it was one of the few love stories in which both characters are fully developed. Typically the hero of a book is the lover and fully developed where as one us left wondering what us so great about the object of his or her love, except that often the beloved is super beautiful and sexy.

It is true that both Clare and Henry are fully fleshed out characters. So I appreciated that. The winding plot also works pretty well in some places. The book occasionally made me laugh and cry.

But in a lot of places the drama and emotion seemed manufactured. Too many time he pops in bleeding and she hugs him and cries. But why is he bleeding? Is it serious or just a paper cut? A couple of places where she deliberately gets us worked up for nothing.

And then weird things like mutual masturbation and odd resolution. Ok if his future self fucks her then she can get pregnant safely because in the future the dopamine blockers have .. Oh wait no. All that science crap comes to nothing. Sometimes it felt like she had made a brainstorm of things that could be emotionally dramatic and then written them but without the emotion.

Also given that people who find out about his condition don't seen to care and it doesn't change his relationship with anyone ever, I'm not sure why he doesn't just tell everyone.

In short, good idea. I'm glad I read it. I probably won't read it again.