jasonfurman's reviews
1367 reviews

The opening parts of this book made me nostalgic for growing up in Manhattan. The world of the 12-year-old narrator reminded me a lot of mine, except I wasn't a 12-year-old girl. And one of my friends didn't travel back in time to save another one of my friends from being hit by a truck. Overall, highly enjoyable and recommended, if slightly odd and imperfect in the way the entire story fit together.

An interesting, enjoyable book. Although the review said it has a lot in common with a police procedural that was the least interesting aspect. The kaleidoscope narrative from the perspective of three different narrators -- many of whom don't like each other -- centers around a a beautiful ice skater, a rink a bureaucrat diverts money to build, an aging opera singer, and her young friend. Unique, looking forward to reading more by Bolano.

Not the book for me and I'm not exactly sure who it is for. I was hoping for a book about astrobiology. I got that. But also got short introduction to just about everything in science, whether or not it was relevant to the topic, from dark matter to evolution to geology to the multiverse. As a result I didn't learn much.

That said, the book is comprehensive and the chapters on the solar system and the search for extra solar planets are reasonably interesting.

The books are both well written but therin lies the problem. Wanting is composed of two parallel stories: one of Charles Dickens between the time his daughter died and the time he met the actress Ellen Ternan. The other is Sir John Franklin, his wife Jane, and the aborigine girl Matthina they adopt in Van Dimen's island as it was then called. The Dickens book was reasonably routine, reading more like biography than novel. The Franklin book -- or really the Matthina book -- was more fascinating, especially the heartbreaking description of a girl who goes from exiled aborigine to adopted daughter to ignored daughter to abandoned. The problem was that I didn't find these two stories worked well together and that having them in one cover subtracted rather than added.

That said, would still recommend this book to anyone and would look forward to reading more by Richard Flanagan.

Brilliantly plotted thriller with multiple twists which, satisfyingly, I mostly didn't see coming but in retrospect they seemed inevitable. Not the best writing or characters, but what do you expect?

My five star rating is the average of six stars for sheer inventiveness of a world and exuberance of language. And four stars for the ability to sustain it over the course of a novel.

Super Sad True Love Story is set about 50 years in the future. The world is a super extreme version of aspects of ours. American has been reduced to three industries (Credit -- where men aspire to work, Retail -- where women aspire to work, and Media -- which is largely individuals live streaming their lives). Everyone carries around an iPhone-like device and spends most of their time social networking, ranking each other, shopping on line, etc. Occasionally they take a break from this to "verbal" with a friend. America lurches from financial crisis to financial crisis as corporations, foreign governments, and sovereign wealth funds all swoop in to take over. And the super-rich are becoming "post-humans" thanks to life extending treatments that promise immortality.

Set against this backdrop, the novel tells a love story in chapters that alternate between Lenny Abramov, a schlubby Jewish intellectual aspiring to immortality, and emails and chats from his much younger Korean girlfriend, Eunice Park. Both narrators are somewhat unreliable and the story moves along reasonably well, as the world around them disintegrates and a predictable triangle in their relationship appears.

The writing is hilarious and amazingly inventive, but has diminishing returns -- although never turning negative. And the plot is a decent enough scaffolding and keeps you interested from beginning to end. Overall, one of the best books of the year.

I think this is Arthur Phillips best novel (although I haven't read Prague). It is a perfectly written and plotted story about middle-aged man obsessed with a younger singer, who also appears obsessed with him. But they keep passing it in the most glancing of manners. Reading it through the lens of the unreliable narrators in Phillips' earlier books made it more interesting.

This police procedural is set in Sicily and has a plot grounded in the byzantine and corrupt local politics. The plot itself moves along and maintains interest but is not particularly thrilling, unexpected or extraordinary. But it has a lot of other elements, many of them more important, to recommend it including an excellent detective, much better than average writing with a wry sense of humor, and a great Sicilian setting that is integral to the story itself.

A very good book, well worth reading, but somehow falls short of astounding or perfection. It tells the story of the (self-named) Bigtree family who live in a Florida swamp/island and operate Swamplandia!, a decaying alligator wrestling attraction. The story opens with "The Beginning of the End" as a slick new attraction opens on the mainland, threatening Swamplandia! The father goes off to fix the situation, his eldest son runs off to work at the new attraction, and the youngest daughter goes on a journey to the "underworld" to find her sister who she thinks has been kidnapped by a ghost.

An aura of magic lies over the entire book but at times the stark, depressing reality that these dreams and delusions float over is exposed. In the end, it is an unconventional family story that deals in only partial and ambiguous triumphs of reality over fantasy.

Richard Wilbur