What the actual fuck? Oh no, Mr. Bill indeed! Wow, these are some truly twisted and excellent stories. Frank Bill is in the same rarified hillbilly noir company as Daniel Woodrell and Donald Pollack. When I say that, I am saying you should read this immediately.
This is a pretty damned gook book. I am one of the few who like the book much more than the movie. In fact, I think the movie sucked and should not have veered so far from the excellent source material. If you are only familiar with the incredibly poorly acted movie, do yourself a favor and read the book.
Very good book that was just a little too disjointed to be great. I think this was put together from short stories and the seams show a bit. Still a fast paced, relentlessly hard boiled read.
Another Travis McGee novel, this one notable only for its change of venue; Arizona this time rather than Florida. I was not particularly impressed by the story, but the pacing and dialog were of the familiar MacDonald quality. This isn't his best work, but any MacDonald novel is going to be worth reading.
This was like the book version of one of those 60's ensemble comedy movies, or Cannonball Run or something like that. I really hate to say this, because I love Westlake and everything he wrote...well, now ALMOST everything he wrote. I just couldn't get into this one. It had plenty of funny parts and is well written throughout. It just didn't work for me. Most everyone else has given this a very good rating so what do I know? Give it a shot if you like such things.
Yeah. This is still a great book. I first read this in the late 80's and it was as new and fresh as anything I had ever read. SF set a couple years in the future and so close you could feel it coming. The book has aged since then. It's not as new or fresh or inevitable as it seemed 20 some odd years ago, it is still a good book. A damned good book.
I stand by my earlier five star rating. An absolutely mind blowing book. Snow crash is both a parody of the cyberpunk novel and one of the best examples of cyberpunk. Mix in a generous sprinkling of religion and philosophy and there you have it, a five star book. One of Stephenson's best, and he has some really good ones.
Not a bad book, Joe Pike is an interesting character but not interesting enough to headline a novel unfortunately.
Very fun book, not as excellent as the first novel. The writing was good but the plot was a little uneven, some serious ghosts in the machine on this one. The characters were delightful and remain the high point of this series to date. I will definitely read the next volume and look forward to it.
I have nev read a bad WJW book. I would say most of what I have read of he has been very middle of the road. This book is no exception. Some good concepts and the usual workmanlike plotting and such from WJW in this volume. There was nothing in this book that lifted it from the crowd of SF books out there. It was entertaining and you could certainly do much worse.
Re-read. I liked this volume, but not as much as I did many moons ago when I first read it. After the passage of many years, Gibson's stories seemed less revolutionary than they did before. Not because the WERE less revolutionary, but because the world and literature has changed in the intervening time. All-in-all, still a worthy collection of historical cyberpunk stories.
This just in, PKD writes some weird stuff. This book is no exception. It's about a television star, Jason Tavenor, who wakes up in a motel room with no identification. This would normally not be a problem but this particular universe is a police state where not having ID is an extremely bad thing. Even worse, Tavenor discovers that no one knows him anymore, not even his closest friends. If you have eve read any PKD, you will not be surprised to discover that this all has to do with drug use.The usual Dickian themes are here, drug use, authoritarian government, conspiracies, paranoia. No one can be trusted, not even ones own memories can be trusted. This is a good read.