Arthur Leander, ageing movie-star, dies of a heart attack on stage at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. On stage is eight-year-old Kristen Raymonde, witnessing the death of a man who had been nothing but kind to her. Jeevan Chaudhary, former paparazzo photographer and entertainment journalist, now an EMT in training, jumps up on stage tries to save Arthur’s life with CPR. Later that evening, travelling home in the snow, he receives a phone call from a friend, working in the ER. There is a flu […]
A superfluous review
Everyone else has very eloquently summarized the plot of Station Eleven the first hundred times it was reviewed, so I’ll let Goodreads do the heavy lifting here (this is a half joke because I let Goodreads do the heavy lifting a lot of the time even when I’m not the last person in line to review a book): “One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and […]
Not quite Snow Crash, but still pretty good!
Zodiac, my second Neal Stephenson, didn’t really deliver the pure enjoyment that I received from the other Stephenson book I recently finished, Snow Crash. However, if I hadn’t just finished that one, and held the next Stephenson book I read to such a high standard, I probably would have rated Zodiac higher. Set sometime in the late 80s/early 90s in Boston, Zodiac is about an “eco-terrorist” named Sangmon Taylor (S.T. for short). S.T. works for a company called GEE, discovering which huge companies are polluting the environment (specifically, the […]
Live and Let Die
Victor Bayne lives in a slightly different America in Among the Living. In his America, it’s commonly accepted that there are people with varying degrees of psychic ability, and many of those train to be cops. It’s much easier to solve crime if you have a leg up, after all. Their partners are ALWAYS “Stiffs”, or people with no psychic ability, because their detective work is somehow more creditable if verified by a normal person. The idea is that the psychic will use their abilities […]
Economics + sexism = bored AND annoyed
I didn’t like this old-school sci-fi book as I was reading it, and as I’ve been thinking about it in preparation for writing this review, I like it even less. Pull one or two plotlines and the whole thing unravels. Rod McBan is 16, and lives on North Australia (Norstrilia), a phenomenally wealthy planet (due to the discovery of a drug that extends life indefinitely). The people on the planet like their quiet, simple, rural lifestyle, so they take drastic measures to make sure their […]
A Bridge Too Far
This may be the first time I read a book about something and at the end, feel like I have learned absolutely nothing about the subject. Not because Going Clear is not a good book, but because so little is known about the organisation it discusses, the Church of Scientology, that it’s hard to know what to make of it. A quick google search doesn’t reveal anything more: the book says X, the church says Y. In fact, there is an entire website – run […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 540
- 541
- 542
- 543
- 544
- …
- 601
- Next Page »