Solid Book Polluted With Puns and Parantheses
920021
At R/GA they have a house rule: when you're reviewing your ideas, ask yourself, "Is what I'm creating adding something to someone's life? Is it useful, entertaining, or beautiful?"

For most of "Chasing The Monster Idea" we delve into each of these questions, as well as a few more. Is it novel? Is it authentic? Does it tell a story? Even, does it scare you? The latter I've not seen in any other book and found Stefan Mumaw's personal tale quite moving. And the chapter about authenticity was one of the best, providing excellent examples of company successes and failures. A Target vs. Wal-Mart case study shows what happens when the medium the audience is using to experience the brand (in this case, social media) isn't used authentically. I chuckled upon reading that McDonald's, in an attempt to be hip, used the headline, "I'd Hit It," not realizing they were promoting hamburger sex. Plus, there's mention of the movie The Joneses. Great movie.

Apparently, "going monster" can also come at the expense of quality. Anyone I know in advertising groans at the Swagger Wagon rap video, but as of this writing it's amassed 12,695,808 views. Because it's entertaining. But I don't identify with the parents and it doesn't make me want to buy a minivan. Though it went monster, as Mumaw put it, "the end goal of brand messaging became secondary to entertainment." The author knows his stuff.

That being said, how do you mess up the tag line for Dos Equis? The book quotes it as, "I don't always drink beer but when I do, I drink Dos Equis." But that's not it. The phrase is: "I don't always drink beer; but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis." The subtle difference means everything in portraying the Most Interesting Man In The World as a person of sophisticated discernment. Dos Equis is a matter of superior preference. Sorry, that mistake just really bothered me.

So why three stars? I love puns. LOVE them. What I don't love is that the author felt it necessary to not only call out each of his puns, but also proclaim how genius they are. Literally. From page 36: "JWT was brought in to once again take this concept of love and marry that (pun intended. C'mon, that was good!) to the concept of "forever." Or sometimes he'll go on a tangent. From page 85: "Think of it like a singing telegram (sidenote: whatever happened to singing telegrams? This seriously is one industry that needs to make a comeback. Who's with me? Okay, nevermind.)."

Joking or not, these parenthetical prose distract heavily from the rest of the content. I often found myself having to reread the first half of the sentence and then jumping past the parentheses to finish it. I'd actually be inclined to recommend this book to a friend if it came sans parentheses. Or maybe I should just get a Sharpie.
14451
The story is a blast of tongue-in-cheek silly fun very well done.  So why the single star?  How about a little respect for the reader?
There is a popular readily available software that shows how much an author earns on each e-book each month on Amazon.  This month this book is on track to earn $9,850.  Yes almost $10,000 in sales for this one book just this month.  Yet it is full of errors. The type of errors a $300 proofreader will fix in a few days.  The book has been out for eighteen months! That certainly is enough time to send the manuscript off for a little fix.

Heck, I'll bet that roasted pig in the background of his author photo with his happy family in the foreground cost more than what an edit to clean up the book would be.  So, it is clear to me, this author does not respect or care for his audience.  So, even though I enjoyed the funny approach I won't buy more from this guy.  There are plenty of other good authors out there who care about the fact that their books are peppered with typos, wrong words, and even the occasional nonsense sentence.  Just to be clear, I'm not in any way the grammar police and fully understand a few typos will always get through, but a few dozen? No, that is just disrespect for both the trade and the readers.
4739850
Much of the material in this book is great and Kelby's breezy style (and insight) can work very well.  However, his lame and juvenile humor is often excessive and it detracts very significantly from the book's potential.  He needs a better editor.  If you do buy this book, be sure to register it with Peachpit Press so that you can get the Lightroom version 1.1 Update Kit; Kelby did a good job with it.
3894383
I downloaded this Kindle book two hours ago and finished it in one sitting. I am grateful to Mr. Connelly for many new ideas about ways to become a better reader. Readers will find some of these tips and techniques invaluable.

Despite these words of praise, I rated the book at two stars. Why? It was not because the book was self-published, but because the author did not employ a copy editor before publishing. The result is insufficient punctuation to make sense of the author's complete sentences, incomplete sentences, and run-on quasi-sentences. Typos and/or misspellings abound.

If this sloppiness is not offensive to readers, it should be. If this is the future of publishing, we're all in trouble.
2268689
This has some great stuff in it. Overall it was enjoyable content, however, the monotony of saying the same thing in different words really got played out. It made staying with book much more difficult. Aside from the clever analogies and non stop alliteration and beating the same points over and over again to death, it was helpful. Undoubtedly, there are some nice gems in the rough if you have the patience to keep rereading the same recycled words. Wit was definitely emphasised by the author, a turn off for me.
3388099
In general, this is a pretty funny book. It's formatted with a "party game" feel with some questions asking you to insert the name of someone the group finds either detestable or desirable, but it's also an easy solo read. It's small and light-weight and the material is pretty on the page. The issue I have is with the content. Some of the scenarios are creative; others are downright raunchy. The ones that are creative and/or raunchy are hilarious. The problem is that you have to sift through 20 mildly funny, PG-13 scenarios before you get to these truly interesting ones. My husband and I found ourselves shrugging at a good portion of them saying "Well, I guess that's kind of funny" or "Oh, I get it" (insert bland expression here.)

Overall impression? Too much money for so few laughs.
1746736
It's a solid outing for Junot Diaz, and this book is an easy and fun read most of the time. Some chapters are very gripping. The story really works when there aren't forced in Fuku or Lord of the rings references. I was never really bored while reading this book, but I've got to admit, there were several times I was irritated by the prose. Oscar Wao's weakest points are I think what many consider its strengths--The surreal elements, like the Fuku, and the pop culture sci-fi/fantasy references, and the humor... But I was rolling my eyes anytime any of that came up. I figured I would love those elements (one of the reasons I bought the book). The pop culture references show up every couple of pages, it gets really annoying and doesn't feel authentic. The fuku stuff is really cheesy, comes up way too much--and I feel it's put in there simply for exposition; dumb readers. And the humor isn't funny to me, which is fine, I understand humor as one of the most subjective aspects in life, but Junot's is just lame. He thinks saying mother f'r and the N-word, or mentioning lord of the rings will make things funny, and it might if there was a joke or something, but there isn't. Everything just comes off as forced. Lastly, Oscar comes off as a pathetic whiner. It's hard to feel sorry for him whenever bad things are happening, because everything bad that happens to him is mostly due to his own stupidity and failures. And when you can't relate to or even empathize with the main protagonist, there's a problem. I think I might've enjoyed this book a lot in middle-school though, so I think it warrants the 2 star rating.
4050952
This book was a lot of fun to read. However, I have mixed feelings about it. On his blog, Cole compares his work to Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. I loved Ready Player One...and yet, I felt pandered to the entire book. It was odd to be immersed in the story while constantly telling myself, Wow, I sure am the audience of this book! Unfortunately, I often had the same thoughts while reading Nick Cole's book, and I was helped along by my fellow readers, who are also the audience for this book, when they highlighted such gems as this:

"Which was an important and must- have skill in the current times of perpetual outrage and fines by the misdemeanor- level Micro-Aggression Courts."

On my Kindle Fire, I can see my own highlighting right below my fellow readers' highlighting. By contrast, I highlighted what I found to be an absurd and funny bit of text:

"Ron Rourke swiveled his chair back and forth, absently whistling some long- lost tune to himself, as if trying to capture a moment long gone from back in the 1980s. As if trying to get it right for umpteenth time in a set of umpeenth times. Never completely satisfied he'd actually gotten it right because if that were to happen then he'd suddenly be back there, wherever "there" was, back when that song was playing in the background of a seemingly ordinary moment that would become so important in the hindsight of the years to come."

I'm not one for destroying my reading experience with highlighting text (I'm not in school any longer, friends -- no need to highlight relevant paragraphs for further literary analysis), so that's the only paragraph I bothered to highlight. It's a brilliant paragraph, but it's hardly the only brilliantly funny paragraph in the book. Nick Cole is funny. But he's also playing a political pandering game, with a not very subtle nudge-nudge, wink-wink at his audience.

Ultimately, though, it's a fun and satisfying story that reaches for something greater than Ready Player One (to continue with my comparison), with themes such as the blind seeing farther than those with sight, self-sacrifice, uniting with one's supposed enemies to fight the real enemy in the midst. It almost makes it there, too, and then...the end happens. The end was a rushed few pages of the the world is destroyed and then set right again, oh, and by the way, everything turns out perfectly for our heroine in one paragraph because corporations are benevolent, unlike modern welfare states (this sudden bold assertion at the end that corporations will save us is a little jarring; it would make a good conversation to have throughout the book, though). And one of the characters who wasn't sacrificed to save the world, JasonDare, was entirely dropped. Did he have a happy ending, too? I don't know.

How many stars do I give this book? That's a hard call. I love the author's satire. In fact, after having listened to a video, <a href="http://www.nickcolebooks.com/2016/04/30/publishing-what-i-might-have-done-differently/">of the author being interviewed</a>, I realized I probably like the author as a person, too. But that isn't enough to persuade me to give his book five stars. So I'll settle for four.
2643903
The five stars are for the book, which is a classic. Is Schweik as feeble-minded as he lets on, or is he the smartest guy in the room? Hasek lets you figure that out for yourself, and you'll have plenty of fun along the way. You may also find the book a helpful survival manual for life under a decrepit, corrupt and authoritarian empire, such as we are increasingly resembling under Obama.
This e-edition, however, is terrible. First of all, whenever there is supposed to be a dash in the text -- and Hasek seems to use a lot of them -- the dash is left out and the words on either side of it are run together. In addition, there are hard page breaks that don't correspond with the page breaks you get on the Kindle. As a result, a footnote number may appear on one page, but the footnote itself will be found floating in the middle of the next page, or even the one after that. It's quite frustrating.
The Good Soldier Schweik deserves a much better e-edition, and Amazon ought to provide it for free to anyone who made the mistake of buying this one!
1261134
I am posting this for the book's publisher:

I am this book's British publisher and Mr Simpson has made some very facile remarks. He evidently doesn't appreciate that Walendy spent several years in prison for his work, and what people like us have to go through to publish such a book. I got a five-year prison sentence for publishing a comic book which questions "Holocaust" claims (see www.heretical.com). In fact 'Forged War Crimes' was the first title the Heretical Press ever published, so important did I consider it to be.

A few copies have had a problem of pages sticking together. They were printed on gloss paper in Germany and I think it depends on how they are stored. Whoever supplied his copy obviously didn't check it  if there are stuck pages after storage you have to roll it. My own stock was impounded by British police who returned them after I was released from prison, over three years later.

Getting a book like this into a reader's hands is an arduous undertaking. Any title that challenges the dogma of German wickedness will be ignored by mainstream publishers, and you can reach your own conclusions why that is. I really get annoyed when Walendy and myself, struggling to overcome that blockade, and paying such high costs as to actually be imprisoned for it, have some New York Smart Alec pontificating about cosmetic details.

It is accepted that the book's central thesis is true, so Mr Simpson should ask himself why an astonishing book like this, which exposes many commonplace "photographs" as forgeries, has not received the production and promotion it deserves. These so-called photographs fill our libraries today.

Simon Sheppard
138812
I love a good laugh as much as the next guy, and to be sure, there are plenty of laughs in Carolla's book.  But the self-proclaimed non-racist, non-bigot, non-sexist makes too many derogatory references to homosexuals and "Mexicans" for my taste.  And that's just in the first half of the book!  Referring to a sign posted on the door of a port-a-john calling it a Mexican Space Shuttle?  But he's not a racist (so he alludes at least a few times), he just exploits the incident as humor, but at whose expense?

Someone who claims to not have anything against homosexual marriage shouldn't have anything against not using the words and phrases he does to express certain ideas.

Carolla needs to look a touch closer at the words he serves up for those in Congress who protest too much over gay marriage, and apply those words to his own writing.

As far as what he writes here, he is a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot.

If I could delete it from my Kindle, I would.
1360953
There are a few cannon errors in the book but otherwise a very entertaining read.  I have the Kindle version and it can be read in half a sitting easily, but it is fun to read about all the little factoids.

One thing that is dreadfully annoying is all the footnotes.  I do not understand the concept, basically that this is one book that must have been sitting in the Jedi Temple Library and there was only one book or at least only the main characters checked out this one copy of it but there are random footnotes on every page that get extremely distracting and not very entertaining.

Ashoka calling Skywalker - Skyguy, and the constant attempts at "foreshadowing" and evil "muhahahaha" quips are just un-called for, kind of makes it cheaper.  But I am a die hard SW fan and a consumer whore so I bought it.
2551159
This book is a really inspiring book and I recommend reading it. However all the jokes that this book has to offer are C-O-R-N-Y. It's like my grandfather told me these jokes.
3898418
Adam Roos is back with another collection of themed jokes, this time poking fun at the proverbial dumb blonde. Having suffered through several of Roos's other attempts at humor, I was expecting the worst here. Surprisingly, what I got wasn't all that bad.

The book contains about 90 jokes, most of which are variations on the theme of blondes being incredibly stupid. To get enough material for a book, he's expanded the definition of "blonde" to include stupid men, and a number of his jokes are variations of some I'd heard in elementary school, when we referred to them as "moron" jokes. The jokes in this book aren't nearly as bigoted and insensitive as those in some of his other books. Most of them are fairly innocent and rather juvenile, and a fair number are actually amusing. In addition, there's less repetition than in most of his books... the theme may be the same, but the actual jokes differ (there's a large number of ways people can act incredibly stupid).

Although the book is the best one of Roos's books I've read (that actually fairly faint praise), it still has problems. Unlike some of his books, this one isn't comprised mainly of question-and-answer one-liners, but, rather, narrative jokes. However, story telling isn't one of Roos's strengths, and his awkward phrasing and an unfortunate tendency to ramble spoil a few of the jokes. For example, he takes a full page to tell a joke whose punch line is that a blonde thinks the capital of Arizona is A.

My biggest problem with the book, however, is the price. If this book were priced at a more reasonable price like 99 cents, I would feel more comfortable recommending it. However, the normal price of the book is $2.99, and a lot of people may question whether there's enough funny material to justify the price. I got the book for free as a promotion, but it's generally priced the same as a number of other humor books that contain a whole lot more genuinely funny material. All in all, I found about 20-30 jokes to be amusing to some extent (and I do realize tastes in humor differ).  Those who find the general idea of the blonde joke quite funny will probably like more of the jokes.

I'm giving a mild recommendation to this book largely because it's so much better than some of Roos's other truly abysmal joke books. I feel he deserves some credit for avoiding vicious humor and not repeating the same joke over and over, as well as for providing enough material so that it takes more than five minutes to finish the entire book. As long as readers are aware of just how much material they're getting here, then the book should prove to be at least mildly amusing entertainment.
702300
I have strong feelings about Grossman's _The Magicians_ that are diametically opposed.  There is much I enjoyed about the story - in many respects is part homage part parody of "magical fantasy" stories of the&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Harry-Potter-Paperback-Box-Set-Books-1-7/dp/0545162076/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Harry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Chronicles-of-Narnia-Box-Set/dp/0061992887/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Chronicles of Narnia Box Set</a>&nbsp;- poking fun the types of characters these authors write, and the universes they live in and parodying the obstacles and issues they faced.  Simultaneously I couldn't help but think that there was a snyde mean-streak in his parody, that it was not meant in good humor, and that his protagonist was an obnoxious, self-centered brat cut from the same cloth as Holden Caulfield in&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Catcher-in-the-Rye/dp/0316769487/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Catcher in the Rye</a>.

To the first reaction, the paralells to the Harry Potter franchise are plenty - from a school for wizardry to the styles and personalities of the faculty to the progression of developing magical abilities (and the inevitable sorting into Grossman's version of "houses" based on one's strengths with magic.)  The repeated references to a series of books set in "Fillory" involving a set of English siblings is unmistakably an allusion to Lewis' Narnia.  How and where Grossman turns these beloved stories on their heads was more than once a source of a chuckle - from the difficulty of mastering and using magic (as opposed to the relative ease in other books) to the reality of Fillory as not quite the wonderful, magical place portrayed in the series (and as imagined by the characters) made _The Magicians_ seem a little more "grown-up" and believable (as paradoxical as that may be.)

However, there is an edge to Grossman's humor, almost to the point of a sneer at the interrelationships between the archetypcal characters that ruins the fun after awhile.  The protagonist, Quentin, has few redeeming qualities and only becomes more annoying and bratty as the story unfolds: his sense of entitlement, while initially grating, becomes almost unbearable by the end of the book; the resolution of the conflict (or the end of the quest, if you will) felt like Grossman ran out of ideas and had to quickly wrap things up, before writing an afterword in order to set things in motion for the next book in the trilogy.

And therefore I am torn in my reaction to (and evaluation of) the book.  The negative (1 and 2 star) reviews largely make excellent points with which I agree as to why this is a poor story and should be avoided.  Yet the favorable and enthusiastic reviews, too, make a solid case to the merits of the story and writing.  Without doubt Grossman has written a clever story incorporating many elements that are iconic (or perhaps cliched) in the "magical fantasy" genre.  Frustratingly, I cannot determine whether it is homage or caricature.  I suspect that you will either love it or hate it.
4231250
The Plague by Albert Camus is a book for those who like French philosophizing. And not the awesomely accessible enlightenment that Voltaire gives us in Candide, but the pantomimy "por qua" philosophizing that can be found in fake French art house films used as the set up for jokes in popular American comedies. Camus is not afraid to belabor a point.

While I've read in other reviews that the Eden Books version for Kindle is a travesty of typos and mis-punctuation, I cannot fathom how even a copy editing genius could give this dried out gristle of a book any moisture.

The true beauty of the Kindle edition though, is how you can see what other readers have chosen to highlight. Highlighters were busy for the first part of the first section, and the last part of the last section, but started to slow down some in between. In fact all of section 3 was devoid of highlights when I read it, leading me to hypothesize that most everybody skipped it. If only I could have followed suit.

I read this book on a dare. My sympathies go out to students and others who may be forced into it. On the bright side, when you're done you'll have one more entry on your resume under "Pretensions."
3921663
Anglophilia meets Douglas Adams in this ingratiating sci-fi/detective story involving heroine Thursday Next, a member of a special police squad which maintains the purity of literary texts.  In Next's world, literature and history are malleable realms, as is time.  When master criminal Acheron Hades kidnaps Jane Eyre, all of next's skills are required to save this masterpiece.  Awful puns and incisive satire make this a joy to read.