ajsterkel's reviews
812 reviews

This book contains four of King's most famous novellas: "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," "Apt Pupil," "The Body," and "The Breathing Method." Most people are familiar with these stories because all but "The Breathing Method" became movies. My favorite story was "Apt Pupil." The tension was amazing. I flew through it. I had to find out what happened next. My second favorite story was "The Body" because the young characters are more realistic than the young characters in many other books. I also love the movie "Stand By Me," which was based on "The Body." My least favorite story was "The Breathing Method." It felt like it took a long time to get going, but the end was great (and bloody). Overall, I think that some of King's best writing is in these novellas.

I usually don't mind reading books that require the reader to think. I understand why people enjoy Virginia Woolf's work and why English professors force their students to read her books, but I find her writing style tedious. I just don't "get" it. I was ready to give up on this book by page 80. Slogging through the rest of it was difficult. I had to resort to using Google to help me figure out what I was supposed to get out of reading this book. I was mostly just bored.

Emma Woodhouse is a beautiful, smart, and rich young woman who loves to tamper with the romantic lives of her friends. She believes that she is an expert matchmaker, but her plans keep backfiring and causing problems for everyone in her life, including herself.

I didn't like this book nearly as much as I liked "Sense and Sensibility" or "Pride and Prejudice." Every single character in "Emma" is irritating. They are snobs, whiners, self-righteous idiots, manipulators, and busybodies. I know that the characters were intentionally written that way as a social commentary, and I do appreciate the skill that it takes to write characters who are so flawed, but it was very hard for me to get into this book. I did enjoy reading about Emma's meddling enough to finish it, but it was hard to stay motivated to keep reading when I didn't like any of the characters.

These stories are realistic, gritty, beautiful, and amazing. Having grown up in Colorado, I was familiar with the setting of this book, but I've never seen it described this well.  Annie Proulx has a gift for using language precisely. I can see why she has won so many literary prizes.

All of these stories are about tough Wyoming ranchers. None of the characters are likable, but most of them are fascinating because of their flaws. The most well-known stories in the collection are "The Half-Skinned Steer," which was featured in the anthology Best American Short Stories of the Century, and "Brokeback Mountain," which became a movie.

"Brokeback Mountain" is the strongest story in the collection.  I also liked "The Mud Below" because it seemed more straightforward and less sparsely-written than the other stories.  I liked the humor in "The Blood Bay." I had a hard time picking favorite stories because I liked them all.  This is one of the best short story collections I've read in a long time.



  

This book was entertaining. I stayed up way too late over the last few nights to read it. It's quickly paced with a ton of action, and I was pulled into the plot right away.

While I liked the action, the majority of the book was action and not much else. The characters spent most of the story training for battle, and then they got to put their skills to the test at the end of the book. The pulse-pounding action scenes will keep you reading, but the number of action scenes doesn't leave much room for character development. You can only learn so much about the characters by watching them fight. It took me a really long time to get a sense of Tris's personality. Four is an intriguing character and has a lot of potential, but I don't feel like I know enough about him to care about his relationship with Tris. Most of the other characters seemed like cardboard cutouts who were created just to die. I didn't feel anything for them when they died because I didn't feel like I knew them.

There are similarities between this book and The Hunger Games, especially in the beginning. I didn't like this book as much as I liked The Hunger Games, but I'm still looking forward to reading the next one. I have to know what happens.

I didn’t like this book as much as the first one in the series, but it was still entertaining. The pacing was slightly slower. In the first book, the pacing was so fast that I didn’t have much time to think about or care about the logical flaws in the narrative. They were much more noticeable to me in this book. (The faction system doesn’t quite make sense; Tris is a very good fighter for having only a few weeks of training; some of the decisions that the characters make are convenient for the plot but probably not something that an intelligent human would do.)

The characters in this book got on my nerves more than they did in the first book. Tris is depressed about what happened to her parents and Will. I understand why she is depressed, but her parents and Will are so underdeveloped that I didn’t really care about them. Since I don’t care about them, Tris’s depression comes across as whining and gets annoying fast. I also don’t know what happened to Four’s character in this book. He suddenly became rude, angsty, judgmental, and selfish. I’m not sure why. He seemed okay in the first book.

I did like the plot enough that I’m going to read the final book in the series. The “twist” at the end of this book is predictable, but it’s intriguing enough that I want to know what happens next. I also appreciate the fact that some of the characters had complex motives, and I was never totally sure who could be trusted. I want to know how all of that turns out.

The ending to this series took a lot of courage for the author to write. I’m giving the book 4 stars for the sheer ballsyness of the ending. The author had to know that a lot of readers would hate it. I admire her dauntlessness.

I did struggle through the first 400 pages of this book. It felt very repetitive. I couldn’t connect with the underdeveloped, inconsistent, moody characters. The worldbuilding and plot were flimsy and illogical. Switching perspectives between Tris and Four didn’t work for me because their “voices” sounded so similar that I sometimes forgot whose perspective I was reading until something came up in the story to remind me. I did consider putting this book on the shelf and reading something else for a while, but I wanted to know how the series ended. So, I read a summary of the entire book online. I did spoil the ending for myself, but spoiling the ending was what kept me reading. I wanted to know how the author would make that ending happen.

There were some things about the book that I really liked. Tris’s complicated relationship with her brother was interesting, even if you disagree with the choices they made at the end of the book. The action scenes were written well. I liked the parts of the story where the characters realized their own smallness. One of my favorite parts of the entire series was when Peter put a dot on the world map and realized that his entire life had taken place inside that dot. Chicago was Tris’s whole life because she didn’t know anything else, but Chicago was only a small part of the lives of the scientists who were observing/controlling the city. The scientists didn’t have much of a problem destroying Tris’s whole world because their world was much wider than hers. They were incapable of seeing how important Chicago was to her. I liked that element of the story.

Overall, I’m happy that I read this series.

This fairytale examines love from every angle. The characters all love someone or something, and that love makes them selfless, brave, and patient. It also makes them cruel, hateful, jealous, and power-hungry. It terrifies them. It makes them behave foolishly. It saves them. It destroys them. It makes curses and breaks curses. It's the most powerful force in the world.

Moonlight is the prequel to The Subtle Beauty, but it is a stand-alone novella, so you don't have to read The Subtle Beauty to understand it. The heroes of Moonlight, Aowyn and Xander, aren't afraid to take on the bad guys and stand up for what they believe. Aowyn is a strong female character who can think for herself and fight just as well as the men. Xander can be brash when he's with his fellow soldiers, but he loves Aowyn, respects her decisions, and sees her as his equal.

Moonlight puts a new Celtic spin on the classic fairytale The Swan Princess. I enjoyed reading it.

I have no idea how to review this book. I considered not doing it because I don't know what to say, but I'm going to give it a try.

This is one of the most honest and realistic books that I've read in a long time. I know that a lot of people hate the ending, but I thought that the book ended in the most realistic way that it could. I would have been disappointed if it had ended in a morality-tale kind of way. Alcoholics don't just stop being alcoholics.

The dialogue is amazing. Sutter is very funny, and he always knows what to say. I like that he's an unreliable narrator who is incapable of seeing himself clearly. I like the glimpses of him that we get through how the other characters react to him. I like that he truly cares about people and wants to protect them or make their lives better. He can save everybody but himself.

Even though I can see the good in Sutter, and his jokes are hilarious, I dislike him. He's an arrogant, self-centered, attention whore. I probably would have been one of the people yelling, "Sit down!" when he started singing at prom. I think it's irritating when someone needs to be the center of attention all the time. I spent the whole book going back and forth between hating him and feeling sorry for him. I think I mostly hated him for his attempt to "fix" Aimee. He decided that something was wrong with her and that he would be the one to fix it. Even if he did end up making her life better, his behavior seems very presumptuous. He probably could have gotten the same results if he'd just been a good, honest friend to her and treated her nicely. 

Usually, I try to be more objective about the books I read, but I guess this one hit too close to home for me. I know people like Sutter. Reading it made me uncomfortable. I liked the book a lot, but it was also like watching a slow-motion train wreck. My brain is still processing it. I think my brain will be processing it for a long time.

Thomas wakes up surrounded by strangers in a maze. He has no memories of his past and no idea what he's doing in a maze. He doesn't even know his own age. Now, he has to find a way out.

The premise of this book is what drew me to it. It sounded really interesting, but there are so many brilliant YA dystopias that this one seemed unspectacular by comparison. It's a fast-paced book, but I had a hard time staying interested in it. I never felt a connection to any of the characters because their memory loss made them flat. How was I supposed to get to know them if they didn't even know themselves?

The author's writing style also made it difficult for me to get into the book. We were told over and over that Thomas is scared, frustrated, etc., but I never actually felt it. The world just didn't feel that scary to me.

This isn't a bad book. There are some unexpected twists. My favorite part was when Thomas started remembering his past because he became a lot more interesting after that. I'm not in a huge hurry to read the sequel, but I will probably read it eventually. The epilogue made me curious about what happens next.