s_n_arly's reviews
730 reviews

I had some trouble getting into this one (too much techno babble early on) but once I was in, it was good... until the end, at which point I wanted to hurl it across the room. This is the first of two books (there are others in the same universe but this one and Fall of Hyperion are essentially one monstrous book split in two. At the end of this book, the story just stops without any sort of wrap up.

At the end of this book I couldn't decide who I was more disgusted with. Dan Simmons for the long drawn out tale of whatever, or me for thinking he might actually tie things up in some fashion.

Like Moby Dick, this was very wordy and there really wasn't a whole lot of point to a lot of those words. I saw all the twists from a mile away, and the things that I couldn't figure out were not sufficiently explained.

I give it two stars instead of one because there was some neat storytelling in the little vignettes and I liked some of the points made (one individual's hero is another individual's war criminal). That said, I will never get the time back I spent reading this.

This collection of lesbian ghost stories doesn't go overboard with the creepy overdone ghostly tropes. There was a nice mix of serious and sweet with a few tales that really tugged on the heartstrings and a dash of silliness.

Unlike some themed anthologies, the writing and copy-editing were uniformly good.

This is an older out of print suspense novel that was made into a Disney live action movie in the 1960s (which I vaguely recall scared me silly as a child). It suffers some of the characteristics of a novel of its era, but I enjoyed reading it anyway. The descriptions go on for pages - they are beautifully written, and without them this could have easily been a novella or short story. The infuriating "women are weak" issue really stays in the background until near the end, and I did my best to excuse it given the era it was written in.

This had been on my shelf for years, and I finally got around to reading it. In all my college lit classes and personal library forays as a youth, I never came across this one.

I enjoyed the story, but did find the writing a bit of a slog. Either I've been away from literature (the nice musty older stuff, that is) for too long and I've lost my edge, or this thing was just a bit wordy for my tastes.

This was fun and silly, but it's a bit dated and definitely not as funny as some of Pratchett's newer stuff. I'm sure I only got about half the jokes (or references when something was being mocked), but I don't consider the time ill-spent. A good early novel for an author who continued to improve his craft over the years.