Preposterous and Pretentious
354802
As other reviewers have said: Political correctness and poor writing do not a good read make. Not to mention the stereotypes that let us know how very progressive, non-judgmental, and unimaginative the author is. There's the precious gay couple who run the B&B. There's the witty  black woman. There's the feminist scene where they get together to shake some prayer  sticks in a ceremony for the murder victim. Of course. she has already had a Catholic Mass of Christian Burial, but, hey, what's a funeral without chicks with sticks?
I knew who the killer was as soon as he said he was opposed to being forced to use the French language in Quebec, although this had not been an issue until some radical politicians decided otherwise. Of course, anyone so evil that he wants to speak the language he prefers in a country founded by English speakers, obviously is a villain. And as far as mysteries go, the biggest one in this book is how the reader is expected to believe that the nefarious niece managed to get into her aunt's  house in this busy body village, and do a complete redecorating without any nosy neighbors noticing. This is the worst book I have read in 20 years.
2745769
So  many  sentences  literally  rewritten  from  old  books. Pretentious  statements  used  excessively.
3334435
Having enjoyed the Hunger Games novels, I thought I would also like this series. I could not even finish the first book. The plot line and the idea that one can only be one "thing" (smart OR brave, etc) is just incredibly preposterous. The main character is seen as special because she, like all of us, is multifaceted and can't fit into one group. I can only suspend my disbelieve so much, and by page 100 I couldn't take it anymore. No society of humans would ever function like this. The Walking Dead seems more fathomable to me than this YA drivel.
2376035
The title caught my interest. The first chapter is good. After that it goes down the tubes very quickly. The book is a bore.
The story is simply preposterous. The characters are very shallow. The technicalities leave a lot to be desired. The writing is so-so.
I should have put this down very early when the Pope became involved in the story; along with an ex-nun. Nothing against His Holiness, but in this story? It's a stretch
Being a first novel, I hope this was part of a learning curve for Mr. Greanias
819337
If you care for plastic dialogue, shallow characters, predictable events without realistic research or background, this one's for you. If you think that describing a police captain as "tougher than a three dollar steak" is clever or relevant in 2012, then you've found your authors. The initial plot line - that the most exclusive, highly skilled police team in NY needs to be out in full force because the shooting of a motion picture brings out all the most dangerous criminals - is preposterous.

If you find this to be a brilliant premise - The main character has to work the case with his old girl friend -  then you're in for a heap of excitement, especially if you're still living in 1955.

The authors apparently consider their shoddy style to be "snappy patter." In college such composition was relegated to a class called "Dumbbell English."
1812806
This book manages to be trivial and pretentious at the same time-- the "idea" behind it
is such a standard graduate student production, more intended to prove
that the writer is clever and theoretically facile than deep. But big deal.!
It's wrong headed and mainly what it proves is that Lerner has no soul.
We're glad that Ben Lerner has learned to write angsty little novels;
let him leave poetry alone--he only denatures and undermines it.
3396239
Only in passing will I note this shoddy little book's many errors of grammar, syntax, and diction, and its redundancy (some passages, particularly citations, are repeated verbatim from one chapter to another). Suffice it to say that "Poetic Amusement" is embarrassing even by the fairly lax standards of a master's thesis -- and maybe that's no surprise, given that the author's education in "poetics" (by which term I suspect the author means nothing more than the study of fixed, ossified poetic forms) seems to have come by way of a single mentor, in the setting of a burger joint.

Even though that mentor was the late William Packard, founder and longtime editor of the New York Quarterly (and author of the mean-spirited, hilarious novel "Saturday Night at San Marcos"), it's impossible for me to believe that anything but the ethics of an old boys' network accounts for Packard's bequest of the NYQ's editorship to such an intellectual nonentity -- or for Raymond P. Hammond's being allowed to edit anything at all.

I'm no apologist for MFA programs and their institutional dominance, but Hammond adds nothing to the discussion by setting up and knocking down the straw man of oppressed MFA students forced to produce a univocal, uniform poetry. And get this: "The responsibility of agonizing revisions and decisions are [sic] left to a committee's caucus rather than to the gut tendencies of an artist who is willing to sacrifice for his art. The resultant work is left gang raped and abandoned in a dumpster, barely recognizable." That's offensive, not to mention ignorant and demonstrably untrue.

Oh, and don't be fooled by "Only 1 left in stock (more on the way)." Translation: "This is a cheaply produced POD volume, and the time it takes for printing will be added to your Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, so make that Amazon Prime 3-day shipping."

I had been looking forward to reading an astute, provocative book of real substance -- the manifesto that "Poetic Amusement" was advertised as being. Instead, the book turned out to be the reactionary, splenetic grousing of a crank, an amateur in the worst sense of the word.

What a disappointment. I want my $14.67 back.
3612269
The plot is not only preposterous, it is not really concluded.  The characters are nothing more than two dimensional.  A complete waste of money.
3109318
The most dreadfully boring and pretentiously written book that I have ever attempted to read.
4880928
When I had the opportunity to grab a collection of essays by a woman with such impressive publishing credentials, I was delighted and fully expected to enjoy every last word of the book. This was an entirely bad presumption on my part. The author's writing style, at least in this volume, seems to rely on the use of excess verbiage in an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the opinions presented.

I love a large vocabulary and appreciate books, essays, and articles that use large words to great effect. Unfortunately, in this book, the author seems to have sat down with a vocabulary list and a very basic slate of ideas. These ideas were then dressed up by removing more conversational language and inserting weighty synonyms and obtuse similes and metaphors.

Even after getting past the pretentious tone of the essays, the actual content of them is greatly lacking as well. The author makes a habit out of presuming that people, particularly a certain subset of women, who are not like her are somehow faking it. Of course, several caricatures of self-doubting appear in the book to attempt to humanize the writing, but they largely fail because these moments and commentaries feel even more pretentious.

I couldn't recommend this book to anyone. Perhaps if it had attempted to talk TO readers and not AT them, the collection could have veered to two or three stars, but, as it is, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on.
2278130
This is a fabulous book if you want to learn everything about who played on which album, on which tour and in which session.  Watson gets most of that correct.  But the analytical portion overwhelms the factual portion and is pretentious in the extreme.  He casts everything in the light of his personal dialectic, and in a way that sets the reader's head a-reeling.

One random middle-of-book quote will suffice to illustrate Watson's dog-Marxism.  Referencing "Apostrophe (')":  "The interest in punctuation is...itself a practice that arose to a fine art alongside the emergence of the bourgeois class.  The anal retention of the accountant, the concentration on minutiae coupled with paranoiac mistrust of everybody else, is the secret soul of capitalism...The dialectic between discipline and chaos in Zappa is derived from a self-conscious extension of capitalist logic, a play with the nihilistic violence that lies behind repression."  What pompous twaddle.

And you should thank your higher power for the ellipses above.  There's actually a pony in there somewhere, but don your hazmat suit before plunging in.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this book's about "Finnegan's Wake", or Philip K. Dick or Wyndham Lewis, since he namedrops at least one of these cherished favorites every handful of pages.  Tedium ensues after the first twenty such references, followed ineluctably by the desire to do to this book what Thomas Jefferson did to his Bible.

Furthermore, this Englander -- though seemingly knowledgeable about the roots of Zappa's music -- displays profound ignorance of American society and its undercurrents.  His dialectic take on these is alternately laughable and irritating.  He tramples on the elementary dictum, "Write about what you know".

One particularly galling and egregious example is his insistence that "The Torture Never Stops" is sung in "n----r slang" (his characterization).  To justify his vile term, he points to the deliberate pronunciation of "rehearsed" in the line "His carving style is well reHOISed".  A pronunciation unknown to any African American slang -- and it shows this mook's never been within hollerin' distance of Joisey.

If you can wade through reams of this sort of thing, you'll find some interesting nuggets of Zappology in there.  But its absurd cognitive dissonance makes abundantly clear why Zappa guffawed when he read it.
981574
This book is not written by a historian.  The author argues that the US has been in decay since the cultural revolution of the 1960s- that revolution which included the following:

1) recognition and rights for LGBTQ people
2) a wealth of civil rights for African Americans and women
3) voter protection for non-whites

...and the list goes on, and on, and on.

This struggle is ongoing, but to say that these various movements and protests resulted in merely "moral decay" is not only false, but preposterous.
2248036
Wallace may be the most pretentious author I have ever read. Make sure you don't skip over the 14 pages of Introduction where the author builds his credibility. He does admit to being professionally ostracized, so at least he warns you to approach this book with skepticism. He would also like you to know that he is a reader of Herodotus, Montaigne, and Melle Mel.
That being said, this book is a collection of easily obtainable facts encapsulated by layers of confabulation and bias. I think this book was written much the same way Michael Crichton turned fossilized DNA into living dinosaurs in the novel Jurassic Park.  Wallace like Crichton started with a backbone of old parts that he mined out of the internet like blood from amber. He then filled in the missing parts with bias that he found festering in the most primitive parts of his brain... and behold.. this literary tyrannosaur that you should start running from NOW.
2632618
This is a terrible book. Preposterous plot, stilted and inept dialogue, very poor character development. So many factual errors (yes, some facts matter even in fiction) that it's impossible to list them all. I struggled through half the book then quit. Maybe his other books are better, but I'll never know. Once burned, etc.
2154821
I actully enjoy shorter novels, but this is one of the most pretentious books I've ever attempted to read.  I couldn't get beyond the first 25 pages. I used to like Ms. Beattie's writings, however now it seems Ann thinks we're all interested in her self-centered world.  The sad thing is the book's premise is a good one.  But all the upper crust references are just silly and boring.
2006434
As is to be expected of a Berkeley ideologue, the author busies himself with mocking conservatism and conservatives at every ostensibly cryptoanalytical opportunity.
CJ's animus is apparent in the pseudo-random selection of linguistic examples that ridicule Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, et al.
This I found unprofessional and off-putting.

Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little
Indeed.
2597806
Trite. Offensive and, hopefully, forgetable.