michael_taylor's reviews
268 reviews

This was a big miss for me.
The writing style felt very...off...
The page spaces were huge and a lot of paragraphs felt disjointed from the rest of the book. It felt like the author was trying to prove how fucked up he could be, all the time. 

I didn't care for any of the characters.  Too bad, because I liked Kosinskis'  other works.

Clear, consice and (thankfully) short. And easy read that humanizes the way we think about money.

Very little techno babble. Just straightforward advice and reassurance for normal folks. I though this was great. 

This book really runs the gamut of how I feel about Murakami. Sometimes I love him. When he's weaving together threads of semi connected surrealism I'm all in.  Gimme those weird dreams and half-visions and cats with crooked tales!

Sometimes I can't be bothered with his digressisions. Why were Creta & Malta Kano in this book? They all but vanish and then kinda (maybe?) matter towards the end. Sometimes, the side plots are far, FAR more compelling than the main story (Loved the Lt. Well stuff.

I think he's an author with a unique prose that isn't much concerned with how (or even if) the reader picks up what he's putting down. In this particular case, it didn't work as well for me as it could have. 

I learned that this is the last novel that was released by Mr. Bradbury. I don't know that I would count it among his best, but I get what he was trying to do. It's a story about a young boy in a mock war with the old men of the town towards the end of summer. It's written with a very ethereal, floaty prose. This both helps and hurts the books. When it helps it, he really captures the feeling of being a young, hellraising kid without a care in the world. When it doesn't work it feels stilted and a bit off. 

The last couple chapters throw a bit of a curveball that really make the rest of it feel a bit weird. Let's just say that there is a passing of the torch that is a little bit...odd. I actually found myself wishing this were longer. He is playing with a lot of ideas and not all of them feel like they have room to breath.

Still, I like Ray Bradbury. He was the sort of author who would write about anything without much regard for whether or not it worked for the reader. A voice in literature that is sorely missed.