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I first heard about The Name of the Wind from a post on Penny Arcade, and I was quickly impressed. Perhaps more telling is that I excitedly shared it with Rachel and she was impressed, reading it at a pace at least double mine as is her fashion. A while back I finally finished reading [...]

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I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy reading Tycho’s writings over at Penny Arcade. His command of vocabulary and rich, fantastic metaphor fills me with a tingly delight. After finishing Lolita, I think Vladimir Nabokov tops it, like a Tycho writing in the 1950s if Tycho was a trilingual synesthete.

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It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that [...]

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This was an excellent book – I especially loved the way Ray Bradbury ended it with the Afterward and Coda. Both of these bits have a confrontational anti-censorship edge that makes me smile, and continues to be relevant today

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Good science fiction authors are at the same time remarkably prophetic in their thinking and humorously influenced by their own time. I remember laughing aloud when one of the characters in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land began darning a sock.  

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I don’t know if I’m happier that I finished this book or that I’m finally pushing at least one of the Inheritance books off of my bookshelf display.

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I’m three books deep into this “cycle” and I really wish that Paolini would do the world a favor and just stop writing. In Brisingr, he adds Dragonheart and Redwall (sword forged from the metal of a falling star) to his list of stolen themes, while remaining true to form and adding nothing new to them. Much of the writing continues to be amateur, including several paragraph-long sentences punctuated with a single comma. These sentences and much of his description is filled with useless information in an attempt to sound flowery…

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Eldest by Christopher Paolini
rating: 1 of 5 stars
Inheritance Book 2: The Plagiarism Continues
I didn’t like Eragon, but I went into this book forcing myself to read it with an open mind. Once again, Paolini rips off the work of other talented storytellers while adding nothing new. The result is a predictable, flat story that, like [...]

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Eragon by Christopher Paolini

My review

rating: 1 of 5 starsThe concept of dragon riders seems like it would be cool, but I think it’s poorly executed. So much of the plot is predictable, from the missing parents to the wise old man with a mysterious past.
The illusion of depth is maintained [...]

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A few minutes ago I finished reading Flowers for Algernon, one of those extremely well-known titles that I wasn’t entirely sure if I had read before or not. It was an excellent book that I would highly recommend reading if you weren’t already required to at some point.
One of the benefits of being homeschooled through [...]

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