Eternally Boring & Terribly Serious
931639
"A masterpiece!"

Maybe..For me, this is kind of film that makes me eternally boring mainly because it is so serious and so heavy. A good try for a film student with visual and musical sensitivity, but felt like a sociological treatise. Failed as a story.
3642656
I actually bought this as a gift for a friend and then decided to read it myself. I then bought another book instead as I did not wish to be associated with this as a gift to a discerning friend. To begin with - all facts of history aside - the writing is terrible. The author has chosen to write it in the present tense, presumably in an attempt to add immediacy and suspense. In the end, it is merely extremely tedious, fanciful, clich-enriched and dull, like the very worst journalism. Beyond this, I am not prepared to waste any further time or energy! Forget it and try something authoritative!
1227729
I am an atheist and always enjoy a good roasting of any and all silly superstitious nonsense, but I'm glad I didn't pay any more for this book. Although I respect the author's credentials and appreciate his efforts to cast The Wholly Babble in the most ludicrous light possible, I found this book to be neither particularly funny nor in any way compelling. From this atheist's perspective it amounts to a typical "sit & bitch" or "rip the Bible" session with my inebriated, atheist buddies, which is always enjoyable, but in the end accomplishes nothing. From what I would imagine to be a typical non-atheist perspective, it just sounds like someone who is unfairly misrepresenting just about any Christian view I've ever heard. It doesn't provide anything useful, or humorous, that one could extract & present to either a Christian, or even just someone in the process of deciding what to believe. It reads much like a book that just about any junior high school, back-of-the-class joker could have written.

If the author cannot write better jokes, I think he would better spend his time and better serve the interests of enlightenment of the delusional if he used his considerable knowledge of The Windy Blather to provide a book with more effective ammunition that might have a chance of putting a crack in the Wall of Separation of the Religious Sheeples from Reality-Based Facts. Or, team up with someone who can write better jokes.

I consider this book to be a complete miss, but I do hope the author will keep swinging. The business of trying to re-educate people, or in many cases educate them for the first time, is a very serious business these days since these superstitious dupes are now the base of the God's Own Party's presidential candidates. I think that the author should spend more time planning what to say and take the subject itself more seriously, even if writing a humorous book, keeping in mind that no matter how light and entertaining the subject matter may be presented, the work itself can still serve an important purpose in combating fear and ignorance. But, only if the writing is effective.
4827374
Boring, boring, boring...

I couldn't finish it and I have left book unfinished only once before. I can't believe that this peace of literature garbage got over four stars. You fooled me, once.

I think only mentally lazy preteen would read something like this.
160710
Boring, formulaic, repetitive, tedious, unrealistic dialogue, plodding.

UNREADABLE DRIVEL!

Stick to writing the blogs and tacitly espousing religion-based homophobia.

ABSOLUTE DRIVEL.  INDIGESTIBLE CRAP!!
3803503
Boring, snoring, not in the least alluring...obvious, sophomoric and terribly uninteresting...Oh yes, and did I mention tedious ? I'm sorry, but this book was torture from beginning to end (in my humble opinion). With a background in both Classics and Religion (to some degree) I very much looked forward to reading this book & liking it. There is just something about CSL's writing(s)that does not resonate with me, and I cannot say exactly what. I've read other works by him & felt much the same way afterwards. Perserverance is not always a good or noble thing I suppose, as the time spent reading this book could have been better used in more enlightening pursuits.
Similar sentiments have been expressed to much greater effect (for me)in a number of
places...from the Bible to the classics to poetry, music, opera etc. *JTQ
529326
Seriously a waste of time for anyone with intelligence. Not funny.
4048988
As I started to read this I thought it was some kind of bad joke.  The people reviewing this are clearly friends of the self-published author.  The author clearly did not have an editor.  It was one of the worst things I have ever tried to read & quit half way through.  There were typos in ever other sentence, at one point I counted 14 exclamation points on one page (pg. 19)

Writer & editor M.D. Lynn once said "One of the most frequently misused forms of punctuation is the exclamation point or the exclamation mark as some people will call it. As an editor, I have frequently told the authors with whom I work that I am going to remove the exclamation point from their keyboard. Don't get me wrong here, the exclamation point has its place in writing, but it is frequently overused or misused."  The author apparently missed this article in the New York Times.

This author clearly did not even take a general "How To Write Fiction" course at a local community college, do not waste your time or your money.  It was a painful butchering of the english language & basic writing rules that were laid out to us in elementary school.  At one point I counted 81 exclamation points in 10 pages.  I cannot express enough to the author of this to spend her money on a basic  writing course before she tries to self publish another book.

There was no depth to this story & the author jumped around from one scene to the next without truly detailing her storyline.  It felt as if she was trying to imitate Carrie Bradshaw on SATC but with a severe case of ADD/ADHD.  The characters were actually more shallow than those of the show if that is at all possible.  At one point I felt bad for the fictional children in the book for having a mom that seems to just drink, spend money & goes out hunting men.  She refers to MILF's as MIWF's ( I have no idea what that is, MIWF?)  Her references to the story line were very 1995, at one point she talks about DKNY, Palm Pilots the TV show Cheers?  I think this was supposed to be set in today's era, but I am still not sure.  I'd venture a guess that this authors glory days were in the mid-nineties, and she is till stuck there.

The word coffee or java was used more than I care to count, and someone needs to remind her that sentences cannot begin with the words OF or OR.

I will not be recommending this to anybody I know.
1026838
My sister & I saw the trailers months ago & couldn't wait for the DVD release. Wow, the trailer is very misleading. It is soooo boring, long & unimaginative. Only one short scene is funny, i.e., a "Dance Fight" scene. The rest is a very long hodgepodge of scenes involving humpty dumpty, jack & the beanstalk, and the goose that lays golden eggs. Bits of these fairy tales are haphazardly mixed together with no real story or direction. We were so bored & agreed that even when we were kids we would not have liked this over rated & over priced<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Puss-in-Boots-Two-disc-Blu-ray-DVD-Combo-Digital-Copy/dp/B004LWZW88/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Puss in Boots (Two-disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)</a>&nbsp;"cartoon".
3706155
Let me start by saying that, like many others, I hugely enjoyed "Complications". So to say I was disappointed with "Better" is a serious understatement.

Unlike the aforementioned book, "Better" has zero heart, passion, or feeling of personal connection from the author.

Let me be very clear to all potential buyers: you should understand in advance that 90% of this book is stories and research easily gleaned from Wikipedia or Google. You will not be reading Gawande's personal anecdotes or experiences. He spends endless pages relating interviews, facts, figures and medical stories, none of which he had anything to do with. I hated the fact that for chapter after chapter I was reading things I could have easily googled. And the title is misleading. Where are the notes on his surgeries?

When he does, finally, talk from a personal standpoint, it is brief (often one or two paragraphs), lacking in depth, and uninspiring.

I want to read about surgeries and medical procedures Gawande did, what happened, how he feels about them, what went right and wrong. What we get is he went to India to ride along with polio immunizers, and makes me read 30 pages on the history of the battle against polio--most of which I could find on the Rotary site, not to mention Google. And that's just one chapter. Another you learn all about how lethal injection works (hello? Google?). Ditto for birthing (do I need Gawande to tell me what a doula is, or an epidural? These are everyday knowledge!) And on and on. Now if he had spent some time telling us how he did during a birthing surgery, I'd be quite interested. But no.

It is for these reasons that I suspect Gawande had a contractual obligation for one more book and chose the easiest path: just spend a few weeks googling factoids about the military, executions, birthing, hospital cleanliness, cystic fibrosis, malpractice, etc, getting permission to use them (or free from Wiki) adding a few personal thoughts and hey presto! his book went to the printer and he got a nice fat check.

It is, to be frank, insulting to the reader to have paid good money to read googled and Wikipedia material, and this is a limp, insipid, far fall from the very engaging first book.
1355795
If you can make it past 50 pages you are better than me.  It has a funny, but sort of twisted Saturday-Nite-Live kind of take on the Bible and religion in general.  But, I have to agree with the one 2 star reviewer, it went on, and on, and on, and got so tedious that it was just mind-numbing.  I couldn't come close to finishing it, not by a long way (even though I'm a voracious reader).  So, I eventually switched to skimming all the sections, and it never got any better.  This was essentially a waste of money, and is one of only 2 books that I have ever actually just thrown in the trash, because it was honestly that boring and that worthless.

Overview = not really informative at all, somwhat funny for about 10 minutes tops (if you're lucky), then quickly tranforms into completely lame and a thorough waste of ink and paper (IMHO).
3106126
I found the absurdest story line and the arcane references un-amusing; the characters uninteresting; and the continual interjection of real and imagined trivia just plain dumb.  No matter how many times I picked up this book, I would always put it down with the same thought: "that was a waste of time."

Suggest that potential readers take a taste first by reading the sample to decide if this is your kind of read.
2484546
Vonnegut complains in this novel about how television and movies have drawn away potential readers of novels.  Maybe that explains why the book is filled with hackneyed phrases ("Get this...", "The thing is..") and unfunny R rated humor and why phrases like Kilgore Trout's "The squeaky wheel gets the oil" is treated as if it were a clever phrase that he invented. We readers are such dolts after all that we would not appreciate an attempt at anything literary.
In his deconstruction Vonnegut mixes biographical information with a novel within a novel about the timequake in the title, in which everyone is forced to relive the last ten years of their lives.  In a monumenally lame attempt to make this interesting people experience the timequake on two levels.  They get to do and feel everything that happened previously and they get to watch themselves doing it. For me this requires an impossible act of disbelief suspension.  You cannot be a participant and a spectator at the same time.
What keeps this book from being a complete disaster is the biographical information it provides and the skill used in weaving back and forth between fiction and reality. I would recommend this book to diehard Vonnegut fans, but it is not one of his better works.
2060745
To sum up as succinctly as I can: not cute.

This was one of the most aggravating, childish books I have ever had to drag my eyes across. I really don't understand the high ratings -- the author is insufferable, lazy, self-aggrandizing, unapologetic, and above all tedious. The narration makes sense when she begins with her childhood, so the chronic self-centeredness feels like a justified match given her age at the time, but then suddenly she's married? With a child? And continually blaming others for her allegedly zany mishaps, making excuses, or else telling the world "you're welcome" simply because she has made others' lives more difficult? Please. Her desire to write this book comes from such an obviously selfish, self-satisfied place that you wonder how on earth she could have grown up to think her little stories are THIS important. If you claim to relate to her on any level, I have unfortunate news for you: you are deeply, deeply obnoxious.

I was genuinely annoyed while reading this book. In fact, I forced myself to finish it so as not to give the author the "pleasure" of driving me off "like all the others," as she would doubtless claim. Fake editors notes are not the mark of a quality read, and I should have acted on my revulsion from the get-go. Skip.
2519971
I forced myself to read this trio and in correct order. These have to be the most difficult novellas I have ever read.  The dialogue is sophomoric & totally unrealistic for supposedly smart, well-educated people.
2597341
I started "Wuthering Heights" really wanting to like it. Better minds and more caring souls sing its praises. The author's reported worldview and state of social isolation draw kindred feelings from me. As history, it captures a mindset almost wondrously unimaginable. So when I say I not only didn't like it but can't see why anyone else does, I write not from a place of snark but serious disappointment.

"Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all..." Well, not if you are Heathcliff, the central character in this novel. He loves a woman he cannot have, and revenges himself on the world, even after she is gone for good. "The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!" he exclaims.

Heathcliff does a lot of exclaiming, even if he is presented as asocial and withdrawn. There's a lot of awkward exposition in "Wuthering Heights," much of it in the form of conversations overheard by an old canty maid who apparently had the bleak manor of the title name wired for sound. The storyline is a slow-moving incestuous carousel of frustrated romance, insane passion, revenge, and back to frustrated romance. Heathcliff and the other main characters, six in all, seem to exist not as people but as motive forces for their author's intent, devoid of humor, charm, or ambiguous shadings.

And the women! They are either hysterical shrews, romantic dingbats, or self-aggrandizing gossips. The worst thing a woman in "Wuthering Heights" can do to herself is choose her own mate. If the author was named Emmitt Bront, he'd be high on the minds of feminist literary scholars alright, for quite different reasons.

A lot of great works flout our sense of what's practical and realistic, but if there is a charm in taking flight in "Wuthering Heights," it totally eludes me. Is losing out on love license to be excessively cruel? What sympathy can people draw from the cold Heathcliff? Does anyone understand the Yorkshire dialect of the rustic serving-man Joseph, or did they find him as impenetrable as I did?

Dense, boring, overbaked, farfetched, unlikable, humorless. I mean, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what else is there to say? One can't love every literary classic, but for me "Wuthering Heights" is something else, a marvel that anyone likes it at all.
395756
This book is definitely among the worst books I have ever read. It is blazingly unrealistic and terribly written. The excessive use of all caps and italics made this the first book to actually make me deeply angry toward the author for writing it. Anyone with a grasp of how real people converse would immediately realize that any dignified (or undignified for that matter) teenager would never be caught using words like "oogly boogly" or "goopy poop."
  Another thing that agitates me greatly is blatant stupidity of almost everyone in the story. Read the book for yourself if you really must know what I'm talking about, but I think you probably already do.

My closing thoughts:
If there really is a Hell, and I went to it, there would be no greater torture for me that for have to read this book for an eternity.