I don’t usually write about short fiction, but Burrough’s The Girl from Farris’s is almost novel-length, and it packs in at least a novel’s worth of plot, with intrigues, betrayals, and skullduggery to spare. I read gobs of Burroughs in my adolescence — John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, et al — but this [...]
Entries Tagged as 'g-title'
Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Girl from Farris’s
31 Oct 2011 · No Comments
Tags: b-author · fantasy · g-title
Libba Bray : Going Bovine
24 Sep 2011 · No Comments
At the outset of Going Bovine, Cameron Smith, a quintessential teenage underachiever, finds out he’s under an unusual death sentence: he’s contracted Mad Cow disease. With some supernatural aid, he breaks himself out of the hospital and goes on a whacky road-trip to save both himself and the universe — or then again, maybe he [...]
Tags: b-author · fantasy · g-title · satire · young adult
Greg Conti : Googling Security – How Much Does Google Know About You?
30 May 2011 · No Comments
I can’t remember where I saw Googling Security reviewed*, but the review made a strong impression. It exposed at least a couple of the provocative tidbits in the book, like that even if you personally refuse to use Google’s Gmail service on privacy grounds, as soon as a friend sends you a message with Gmail, [...]
Tags: business · c-author · g-title · science
Tim Gunn (with Ada Calhoun): Gunn’s Golden Rules
23 Dec 2010 · No Comments
I’m probably waaay over thinking my reaction to Gunn’s Golden Rules. I was entertained and amused, even a little bit edified. But it still strikes me as an odd, even inconsistent book.
Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some [...]
Tags: c-author · g-author · g-title
Larry Doyle: Go, Mutants!
17 Sep 2010 · No Comments
Go, Mutants! has a lot going on. It’s set a genaration after pretty much every 50’s sci-fi/horror flick ever made actually happened. J!m, the son of a prominent but disgraced and deceased alien invader, is in high school, struggling with high school issues like how to fend off bullies and get a girl to go [...]
Tags: d-author · fiction · g-title
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
27 Jul 2010 · No Comments
The key to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo appears almost at the end:
Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor — there had been no time for any fine polishing — but the book was animated [...]
Tags: g-title · l-author · thriller
Ann Aguirre: Grimspace
05 Jul 2010 · No Comments
Grimspace is a fast-moving space opera that melds an impressive array of tropes and plot devices — the emotionally damaged protagonist, the corrupt interstellar megacorporation, the incrementally revealed backstory, and a plethora of captures, escapes, and firefights among others — into a surprisingly cohesive whole. The overall vibe, with a small crew of misfits on [...]
Tags: a-author · g-title · science fiction
A.J. Jacobs: The Guinea Pig Diaries
04 Mar 2010 · No Comments
In his introduction, Jacobs lays asserts that his participatory journalism draws on the tradition of writers like Nellie Bly and John Howard Griffin (the author of Black Like Me). But I would assert that he also belongs somewhere along the continuum of writers like Dave Barry and Mark Leyner, who blur the lines between the [...]
Tags: g-title · j-author · nonfiction
Daniel Waters: Generation Dead
07 Feb 2010 · No Comments
I think the combination of the current young adult publishing climate and the packaging of Generation Dead do Daniel Waters’ novel a disservice.
For better or worse, in the wake of Twilight’s success (not to mention Harry Potter’s, Buffy’s and the more explicit books of Hamilton’s, Harris’s, et al) there’s a lot of supernaturally-themed young adult [...]
Tags: fantasy · g-title · w-author · young adult
John Connolly: The Gates
15 Nov 2009 · 2 Comments
Warning: This review is more than a little mean.
I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations [...]