Intentionally confusing, and that's not a good thing
340442
With the exception of his nonfiction work, I believe that 'Pygmy' catches me up with everything Palahniuk has written to date.  and much like Palahniuk's more recent efforts ('Choke' and 'Snuff' immediately jump to mind) it appears that he is becoming more interested in playing with form than trying to tell a story that is not only compelling but also marginally easy to follow.

While I did find the voice of the story to be interesting - the broken, somewhat literal English of the main character - it also became  somewhat irritating that said character would know the spelling of completely obscure English words yet be otherwise oblivious to the meaning of more common ones.
I also found the "subplot" with the activities of the mother of the family to be...well, it just didn't seem to serve much purpose (I'm intentionally being somewhat vague about this as it isn't exactly family fare).  I get how it then fits into the end of the book, but that could have easily been handled more deftly by introducing something equally as wacky.

Perhaps my least favorite thing about the book was how each chapter introduced a quote by either a philosopher or (in)famous world leader, which would then be repeated verbatim toward the end of the chapter - often with very little bearing on the events that the chapter might have been focusing on.
2631943
Did everyone else read a different book?  *sigh*  I forced myself to read this one because I ordered it Interlibrary loan and it was due back in only a couple of days.  Thank goodness I didn't buy it.  Perhaps I didn't enjoy it because I just took the book at face value and didn't bother with including an overlying meaning to what the text COULD have mean (I mean, really--in that case we can pretend EVERY book out there has a double meaning).

The story flipped from person to person and skipped years at a time in just a manner of a few pages. The reader then had to flip back and forth between pages just to figure out how old, whose talking, what's going on.  I perfer my books to flow.  This whole light and dark think was confusing.  Even the ending and alter stuff was confusing.  Again, I had to read and reread just to get the gist of it.  Again--I perfer my books to flow.

Needless to say, I won't revisit this author.
1032600
This book was not written for students.  It was written so that the author can gain respect from his from his academic peers.  The explanations are absolutely horrible.  It purposely explains simple concepts in overly verbose, complicated ways.  The idea is to make the subject appear as complicated as possible when it doesn't need to be.  It reads like those academic papers that are purposely written in overly complicated language so that nobody understands what the author is talking about except the author himself.  The idea is to impress his academic circle by showing that he did a "complicated" analysis.

When are these people going to learn that "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Da Vinci?

Here's an example.  Do you know what's a percentile?  Think about your SAT or GRE score report.  80th percentile means 80% of the people scored lower than you.  90th percentile means 90% of the people scored lower than you.  Simple, right?  This book introduces the concept like this:

"The d.f. of a random variable X gives us the probability that X<=x for all real numbers x.  It is often the case that we choose a probability, like 1/2, and we want to know where in the distribution of X we can find that probability.  For example, suppose that X is the amount of rain that will fall tomorrow and we want to place an even-money bet on X as follows.  If X<=x0, we win one dollar and if X>x0 we lose one dollar.  In order to make this bet fair, we need Pr(X<=xo)=Pr(X>x0)=1/2.  We could use all the real numbers x trying to find one such that F(x)=1/2, and then we could let x0 equal the value we found.  If F is a one-to-one function, then F has an inverse F^-1 and x0=F^-1(1/2)." - P.114

Lol! If you want to learn like this, go ahead and buy this book.  I'll give this book two stars because there are probably a few souls out there who actually do prefer to learn like this.
1259163
Despite a phenomenal premise and MAJOR buzz among librarians and the like, I found this to be near unreadable.
Improbabilities piled on improbabilities, and the overall effect felt like watching someone try very very hard to be clever- offputting.
A charismatic cult leader and a spy walked into a bar... no. A cult leader accepts donations from North Korea... timely, but no.
A cult leader watches his life fall apart, as he is betrayed by the few people he trusts, comes closer, but hardly sums up the chaos and over-reach of this overly tangled plot.
Perfect for fans of Swamplandia, or such.
594659
"Petty Magic" is a bit of a hodgepodge that is, ultimately, quite a bit of a mess.  The novel contains, among other things, descriptions of magic that is best suited for a YA novel (most notably, traveling via the "loo flue"), fairly graphic allusions to late-middle-age female sexuality, intra-coven squabbling among "beldames," a present-day love story, and a love story between two anti-Nazi operatives.  In the end, it was all too much and it was hard really to care too much about any of the characters.  Had some of the excessive details and extraneous plot lines been eliminated, "Petty Magic" could have been either a moving love story or an entertaining story about some extraordinary beings.  (I would have prefered it if the book took the latter route, as the author does particularly well with lighter material and has quite a way with humor.)  As it is, though, reading this novel was a laborious exercise that, in fact, got more arcane, confusing and difficult as it progressed.
1161787
Possible spoilers...

This book was a jumbled mess of confusion and misdirection.  I'm pretty sure that the author has an idea where she is headed with this story but there was so much going on, it almost became impossible to keep it straight. So many characters vying for attention. So many secrets. It might have been better to attack one main thought with some minor deviations than to have multiple storylines that take years to play out only to have the reader greeted with a cliffhanger.  Ugh!

I liked some of it. I was confused by most of it. All through the book, the main theme is everyone wants Tinsley to marry one man when her heart is with another, except for the man she loves. But at the end, everyone's just okay with what happens?  Really?  With a simple explanation that the reader struggles to understand given the ruthlessness that pretty much bled through the entire book?

Sure there's a book 2.  Will I be reading it?  I'm not sure. After a while I just stopped caring about Tinsley's happiness. I'd like to know what the he** Elizabeth has been up to for 20+ years, so maybe.  Olivia is just plain crazy. Noah...blah.  I really don't care about him. Terrible parent all around. Terrible partner too. Ava... poor child, who I know nothing about, has the worst parents ever.  She's the only one I truly cared about and she was barely mentioned.  Maybe when I find out more about her, I'll think differently.  Ha ha.

Did the author spark my interest to read the next book?  Sigh. Probably. But when you've spent hours reading something that seems to be going nowhere then left hanging, I'm not sure I want to invest any more of my time in it.
1862758
This book primarily focuses on an elaborate plan to mislead a murder investigation by cleverly manipulating evidence.  The plan eventually unravels. One of the main characters decides that he could either invest his time in disappearing the body, or in covering up the evidence that would lead the police back to the murderer.  He decides to concoct a scheme to leave the victim amid a pile of conflicting and baffling evidence to throw the cops off.

Meanwhile, though barely mentioned in story, the protagonist has apparently so carefully hidden the body that it is never found...

So this book is about the brilliant and convoluted plan to obfuscate a murder -- a plan that never needed to happen in the first place, because apparently -- way off stage -- the body simply disappears forever.  The author gets so caught up in the protagonist's plan, that he doesn't see how senseless it all looks in light of this.  A story killing oversight.

Had the characters settled for hiding the body and doing nothing else, they clearly would have gotten away with the crime.  But that would be a boring book.  Instead, you have The Devotion of Suspect X.  A clever read about a hopelessly useless and overly elaborate attempt to get away with a crime that the characters had already gotten away with.  Sound like a good read?

So surprised so few other readers have figured this out.
23749
I have long held a fascination for true ghost stories. And so based on the overwhelmingly positive reviews 'Possessed Possessions' received at this site, I ordered a used copy. You can imagine my initial delight and confusion at receiving a copy signed by author Ed Okonowicz to its previous owners since the seller had not advertised it as such. Alas, my confusion turned to complete understanding after reading the book itself. For I, too, wanted to be rid of it soon after suffering through its ninety nine, interminably tedious pages. But as a charitable gesture, I have tossed my copy in the trash instead of re-selling it so as not to inflict it on yet another unwary reader. If genuine, the writers of all of the other 5-Star reviews here, warning of sleepless nights and guaranteed chills would be frightened by Casper the Friendly Ghost. More likely, I suspect, these raves have been "planted" by friends and associates of the author...or perhaps the author himself under various aliases? Indeed, the one and only imaginative stroke the author shows is his creation of the name "Billy Peaches" in order to protect the identity of an unfortunate gentleman terrorized by kitchen-door cabinets. While the book's basic concept is an intriguing one--i.e. true ghost stories concerning haunted objects instead of the standard house--none of the stories are worthy of the badly-designed pages they are printed on. If anything, the reader comes away with serious doubts about the mental stability of the objects' owners, rather than believing that anything supernatural is afoot. I mean really, are we supposed to be kept awake nights frightened by the apparition of a boy who leaps in and out of a bed's headboard or a plastic, oversize Barbie doll kept wrapped in plastic in a backyard shed? Unlike Mr. Okonowicz, I spent about five minutes on the Internet researching some historical bits noted in the tales only to learn of their utter inaccuracy. And as for the actual writing of the book, there is nothing wrong with a penny-plain style, but Mr. Okonowicz repeats phrases and information once too often in the same story. It was also a bit unfair to include a fictional piece by the author in this collection. Furthermore, it is odd that a biographical note on artist Kathleen Okonowicz (the author's wife, not surprisingly) is afforded an entire page. The only item I could find in terms of artwork in the book is the third-class black & white photograph that appears on the cover, and another smaller one on the back. So please do not waste your hard-earned pennies on this volume...or (gasp!) its sequel. You would do much better scaring yourself by visiting the author's Web site to learn how he has made a career out of peddling similar dreck in related books.
4686455
So many things just don't make sense. This appears to be a place where everyone knows all about paranormal beings, but the main character is totally clueless about them...except that she goes into the woods to visit her dead grandma. Isn't that a little odd? A little paranormal? The characters names are goofy and there is never an explanation...I mean Pea? Really?
There are so many aspects to the story that just don't quite make sense. I see potential with this...with some serious rewrites!
3136619
This book is useful in educating yourself about the pervasiveness of bad posture, and the comparison with other countries and previous generations is enlightening.

But some of the advice is, frankly, terrible. The series of steps required to put your feet into a "kidney bean shape" are quite simply bizarre -- I don't know where the author came up with this, but it's incredibly complicated, unnatural, and frankly laughable to imagine that this could be the foundation of any kind of natural, healthy posture. Similarly, she claims that we should balance the weight of our body on our heels, which is equally strange, when your body needs the stability of distributing your weight equally between front and back of the foot. Finally, she consistently gives the advice to breathe more with your chest and less with your belly/diaphragm -- which again is truly bizarre, since chest breathing is shallow and associated with stress, and for anyone learning to speak with a better voice (or relax/meditate/etc.), one of the first things they're taught is how to breathe with their belly/diaphragm.

Good posture is created through developing a sense of bodily awareness and improved balance. But this book has, for example, fifteen separate steps to follow for standing -- far too complicated and more than anyone can pay attention to anyways. So good intentions, but this book is simply not a solution.
2185149
I found this book utterly incomprehensible.

There are 218 pages on the Standard Model and after frustrating hours
rereading and rereading, trying to extract some kind of meaning from them, I
learned about 10 pages' worth of things.  Another 15 pages cover things I
already knew, but I doubt the vague explanations would have made sense to me
if I didn't.

And then it gets worse.  The next 79 pages cover all the rest of physics
beyond the Standard Model (string theory, etc.) and it was like reading a
different language.  I got nothing out of it (but by this time I was smart
enough not to spend any time trying - I just read through it once).

My background is a year of college physics and a year of college chemistry,
and lots of math.  I got A's in those classes, enjoyed them, and had no
trouble reading the text books.

The main problem appears to be that the book is just far too short to cover
the vast array of topics it attempts to cover.  In fact, it reads a lot like
an editing disaster - like it used to be twice as long and readable and
someone went through and indiscriminately removed half the sentences.

The text is paragraph after paragraph of undefined terms, ordinary words used
in apparently special physics ways ("force," "symmetry," ...), non sequiturs,
and aimless wandering.  The book tells me a positron is an electron moving
backward in time.  It makes no attempt to explain what it means for an object
to move backward in time, and the phrase is gibberish to my ears.

There are lots of diagrams, but they are sparsely labelled and scarcely
referred to in the text.  Most of the diagrams are Feynman diagrams, which
apparently depict the behavior of all subatomic particles, but the book never
tells how to read one.  One of these diagrams supposedly depicts an electron
moving backward in time.

In areas where I had enough background to possibly learn something, I found
fatuous statements like that the electric field is an object and that
potential energy is real, while the quantum field is just a mathematical
construct.

I learned there is something called a virtual photon.  I did not learn what
one is, except that it moves faster than the speed of light.  The book tells
me not to worry about this contradiction of a fundamental law of nature,
though, because virtual photons don't actually exist.  Not existing does not,
however, stop them from being essential to the book's explanations of several
physical phenomena.  I might have got lost in the book's frequent attempts to
draw a distinction between the "real world" and mere models of the world.  I
can't imagine the point of such a distinction.

A second problem is organization: The book is in storytelling format.  It
drags you through a hundred years of physics research, including the wrong
turns and bickering.  Chapter 10 is entitled, "The Standard Model, At Last"
and is where you supposedly find out what the Standard Model is: an equation
with 18 parameters.  If you think you can follow the thought processes of the
greatest physicists in history, you might enjoy this book, but for me a
readable book would start with the equation and then proceed to explain the 18
parameters, and then, if there is space and interest, explain how we know the
equation is correct and tell the story of its discovery.  I'm not sure what
all the subatomic particles the book identifies, a few at a time, have to do
with that equation, but again, a readable book would lead with a list of them.
It looks like there are about 70 kinds, but as they never show up all in one
place, and some exist only in historical science, I don't know.

The Standard Model does not appear to be difficult to understand; this book
just doesn't explain it in lay terms.  One thing I did get from the book is a
long list of things I don't understand.  Now I can shop for a book that
explains some of them; I doubt that book will be written by a physicist, like
this one.
774029
To tell you the truth, I couldn't make heads nor tails out of this book.  The language is too far away from even modern, and the characters are confusing.  I love sci-fi, even the new computer-oriented (some call it cyberpunk) stuff like "Snow Crash", but "Synners" is just strange.  Ala the Emperor's New Clothes..."Oh my, how strange!  It must be good!"  No, sorry, it's just strange.  I actually came here (to Amazon reviews) to see if anybody else had made sense of it.  I thought I might read farther if I understood it better.  I'm only to page 18, and I doubt I'll finish it.

Doug
2183908
I know you aren't looking for plot here, but truthfully I didn't get the point of this book at all
895822
It's hard to go more than a few pages without spotting something highly questionable.

For example classification errors like calling nutmeg and onion "herbs" (neither is an herb). Or items that really should be clarified in a reference, like calling chili pepper a "vegetable" when botanically it is a fruit.

And then there are the long, strange lists with unqualified items in them. Many of these contribute nothing and some are even confusing. Like the "condiments" list that contains items like "leek" and "sashimi", which I don't think anyone would classify as condiments on their own, "herb" and "Tabasco" which are only condiments in certain forms, and then "sauce" and "seasoning" which are so non-specific that they have no place in such a list.

These are just a few examples of the lack of care taken in assembling this book. Clearly the methods of lexicography were used to assemble this book, but I wonder if anyone who knows anything about cooking was given a chance to edit it. It would seem not.
2774065
It was too confusing for me moving back and forth between scenarios. Some might rate a 5, but, this was not my cup of tea.
311938
As a 4th year student, who has maintained a 4.0 average, this book was an ordeal.

In an effort to make things more clear, the authors would further muddy the concepts.  If you didn't understand the definition proof, they'll provide you with a three paragraph example that you must conceptualize because a visual aid wouldn't help to understand the traversal of a tree, right?

Instead of providing visuals, the authors often opted to explain everything with discrete math proofs and pseudocode.  If, in the rare event, a visual was used, it was referred throughout the chapter, "See figure 6.3, 10 pages back, while I use it 15 times in this paragraph...and while we're at it, I'll throw in a vague reference to a concept you won't learn for another three chapters."  Even the end of chapter exercises used this perpetual visual reuse, "Use figure 8.2 to apply algorithm 8.3, which alters algorithm 8.2, which alters algorithm 8.1."

To all professors reading these reviews, you know this is a terrible textbook.  Get it taken off the curriculum.
4847185
What a confused hairball of a book. Yet somehow, out of the terrible writing, forests of typo's, vast swaths of formatting errors, splatter-shot jumps of topic (from the minutiae of one company's website to settlement patterns of ancient Madagascar), SOMEHOW out of all the NOISE and IRRELEVANT and DISTRACTING signals, the errors, the garden paths, the red herrings,the  level jumps, and general mayhem in this horrific mishmash of a "book", some kind of ... INSIGHT... may begin to organically ... EMERGE... and may contribute to a careful and well-seat-belted reader's useful and possibly even ultimately coherent .... INTUITION ... about Deep Learning.