This ain't no whirligig tour.  This is a no-end-in-sight slog for people who don't know the difference between solids and gases.

ABORT.

This book  might be the thing.  It has 42 chapters.

A casebook of neurological tragedies.  The title patient had perfectly good eyes but couldn't see.  He could describe everything in terms of color and shape, but his right brain was fucked up so he found no qualitative difference between a foot and a shoe, a face and a clock.  He saw like a computer, meaninglessly, and navigated his life by sound ( Read more... )

These stories are not for me.  Chabon paints sad little miniatures of futile, fearful little people.  The fat 11-year-old whose family falls apart, the man who despises his wife for marrying a man "whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist," the husband who got displaced by a rapist's sperm.  Each character is such a small and suffocating person ( Read more... )

I'm always baffled by bad books.  Shouldn't someone have stopped this train wreck before it hit the bestseller lists?  First, there's no apparent objective as anti-hero Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever makes his cretinous way across a Tolkien-in-a-blender landscape.  The central conflict is some muddled conglomeration of "I wish people would treat me ( Read more... )

This is some sort of heavy-handed fanfic for a set of tapestries.  The story does not have an independent reason for being.   I read half the book while stuck in a cafe with no other options, and it was precisely as engaging as watching an infomercial because nothing else was on.

Perceptive readers will be able to see through to the source ( Read more... )