Read
-
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
Original Review
I'd be curious to see this live. The medium did it no favors - the writing style is so far from Rowling's that it read more like fanfic than the "real thing."The story itself is fun and interesting. The pacing is more like a play than a novel so I’ll grant it some leeway there.
The dialogue is often quite bad and feels like it was written by someone unfamiliar with the characters he’s writing.
Happy to have gotten a little more time in the Potterverse; kind of bummed/underwhelmed in what I ended up getting. Beggars can’t be choosers I suppose.
-
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 Note Re: Rowling
-
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
-
Stranger in a Strange Land
Finished
-
Infomocracy
Finished
Kind of fun. Felt a lot like Snowcrash early on, but went much more toward politics than tech and action. The characters weren’t very fully developed and the whole thing felt kind of light. But I appreciated that so much of the world was insinuated rather than spelled out. If there were a sequel (the plot was fully realized but I could see more here), I’d probably pick it up.
-
No One Knows
Finished
I picked this book up as some pulp to listen to while running. The first half set up a lot of intriguing clues and presumable red herrings, and I was hoping it’d be a fun kind of mystery/thriller in the vein of (if not as good as) Girl on the Train , etc. It seemed like it might be. But it ended up feeling closer to a cheap Lifetime movie than anything else: most of the secrets are unveiled or at least heavily telegraphed in the early second half, and… well, spoilers:
SpoilerThe final chapter before the epilogue, which reveals that the protagonist was in on it all along (…?), seems to imply that the entire thought process of the character, through the whole book, relayed in the third person, was … a lie? If she was in on it, why was she so confused the night of his disappearance? Why was she shocked to find he was alive? Why didn’t she seek him out? It’s a pretty ham-handed effort at the “unreliable narrator,” a trick which can be mind-blowing when successful, but there’s not even an attempt at an explanation here. I think there was something about medication? But the medication was not properly established up to that point, if so. Or even properly asserted at that point.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I liked the first half. I just felt like it unwrapped poorly, and Spoilerthe weird attempt at a final twist didn’t come off well.
-
Old Man's War
Finished
-
A Passage to India
Finished
-
Career of Evil
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 Note Re: Rowling
Original Review
Rowling (as Galbraith) is really a fantastic storyteller. This book is pure genre fiction, no doubt, but it's also very well executed. I particularly enjoyed this installment, in which Rowling's own convictions (many of which I share) shone through without ever seeming heavy-handed or detracting from the story. -
Fear Itself
Finished