Tries Too Hard To Be Mysterious
581637
This book has a seriously interesting premise. I found however, that it tries to be too mysterious for the first half that I got a bit bored during the first half. Granted, this is a YA book and I am a mature reader. But the corridor running that the group goes through for the first half of the book, had me yawning. There wasn't any payoff for reading the first half of the book that sets up the twists and turns that Alive takes.

This book does get much better. I think that had I known what was going on first hand from the onset, this would have been a much better book. The reader goes through the waking up of Em in a strange coffin with a piercing in her neck. She then helps to spring others in a mysterious room. The group picks Em as a leader after a bit of fanfare.

I think, as a reader, I would have been much more interested in this story had the whole idea been planted and told from the perspective that unfolds toward the end of the book. I would have enjoyed it much more than how it did unfold. This is a fairly entertaining story and some will like it more than I, but I felt kind of duped reading it.

Em's strength did remind me a bit Katniss-she is very strong and determined to save her group. I think after this book is out of the way, the series can take off a bit more and this first book was a bit slow. Some activities take pages of detail to get through, all the while maintaining this air of mystery because the group has no idea where it is or how the people came to be in their little pods or coffins from which they came.

This is like a C story to me. The rest of the books may get much better once the action begins.
1399998
Well-written and has an enigmatic storyline that draws one in.  Certainly found myself needing to turn the page to find out what it is that the protagonist 'doesn't get'.  Although containing plenty of enjoyable reflections on youth and aging and the many changes in perspective and memory accompanying each phase of life, I found myself increasingly annoyed by all the characters in the book as I progressed, ultimately making reading through a chore -- the only thing that kept me going was the desire to found out just what this mystery was leading to.  In the end a MacGuffin is used to resolve everything, which I found highly unsatisfactory.

This book doesn't go anywhere, although it promises to early on.  Might spark some self-reflection, but again really falls apart towards the middle and end in terms of narrative and characters.  Also leaves many points unresolved and often unclear in a way that, to me, is more annoying than thought-provoking.  I recognize that one of the themes explored is the question of how difficult it is to know anything, but I didn't need to read the increasingly meandering thoughts of an annoying set of characters through to an implausible ending to gain a better appreciation of that.
1352614
The books most endearing quality was the authors attempt at coming up with funny names for her characters.  The clues to the solution of the mystery went in all directions and no direction.  While some surprises reward the diligent reader, for the most part the events seemed a little too convenient.
3137518
I know this novel was on the bestseller and recommended lists, but don't understand why. The title character begins complaining and fretting about herself on page one and continues throughout.  Most of her statements include a complaint about her state of being but she never establishes any reason why we should care in the first place.  It is difficult to spend time with her. She is concerned with not sleeping, being burgled, being ignored, being dissed by her ex, being misunderstood by her boyfriend, being under-dressed or overdressed, having a headache, being drunk, being hungover, being perceived as having been drunk and hungover, being ignored by associates, you name it.  I was wishing she would go get a night;s sleep and come back to resume the story so I did not have to hear her complain about sleeplessness any longer. The mystery takes a long time to get going and then, after briefly looking into the clues, reverts to the title character's self-reflective suffering for extended periods of time.  This is where I stopped reading it.
430938
I don't demand Shakespeare when I read suspense thrillers, but this book really bothered me. Two things, in particular, need to be said. First, for the plot to work the protagonist has to be the biggest, most irritating  wimp on the planet. I realize the man has Tourette's, and I realize that  would affect his interactions with his loved ones, but if once, just once,  he pushed a little harder with some of his questions the mystery would be  quickly dispelled. Hecht seems to realize this and tries to figure out ways  around it, but I don't think he ever really solved the problem. Second, the  ultimate answer to the mystery is incredibly silly. It may be plausible,  but the reality of the climax is laugh-inducing.
3923467
Freaky.there is way too much emphasis on the characters. Needs improving
1875536
This has all the ingredients of a gripping period piece suspense thriller - a unique, largely unexplored setting (Sweden, late 18th century), a shadow struggle for the crown, a cast of colorful characters, the dark arts of tarot reading and divination, masquerade balls, etc. But I found it simultaneously hard to follow with too much going on at once - and ploddingly slow with too little going on.

Maybe it's the structure of the "octavo": the main character, a low level bureaucrat, is told that eight people will fill certain predefined roles in his life (the teacher, the trickster, etc.) and once they all come together, er, his destiny will become clear or something like that. So he spends most of the book trying to fit everyone he meets into one of those roles. "Ah, she's my companion. Or wait, maybe the prize? Or the prisoner? But stuck in what prison??" It's never clear how this all fits together, although the last chapter does a decent job drawing a conclusion.

The other problem is that in order to fit eight roles, the author needs to flesh out more than eight semi-major characters, which is tough to do in a 400-page book with a lot of white space in between short chapters. As a result, some of the "eight" are pretty two-dimensional. A few, however, are compelling in their own right.

And finally, fans play a very big role in this book. You've got to care about the look, feel, and aesthetics of fans to merrily work your way through some of the chapters. And not just fans, but an entire language of motions and moves through which a fan can be used, apparently, as everything from a primary communication channel for potential suitors and ladies to a weapon of assassination. In the world of this book, apparently, fans are more important than the wizarding wands of Diagon Alley.

I did ultimately enjoy this book, although I had to force myself to continue at points.
3470821
As he prepares to explain style, E.B. White writes: "Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries."

It is this mystery which causes this film to fail. There is so much of so much potency here; yet, it rarely ignites. (I think of only the two times the thin, black woman with very funky, dready hair breaks into song. There. . .that works. . .that moves. There is something going on inside her which merits more time, more exploration. That pathos, that struggle, that pain, that courage, that journey was what I was expecting in this film.)

The rest? It's mildly interesting. I'm made mildly curious about the world of drag kingdom as I could be made mildly curious about anything slightly foreign to me. But this way of life is not just slightly foreign to me.

The people? They were also mildly interesting. The entertainers seemed quite ordinary--like clerks with unspectacular lives--quite content within their own orbits and with their own celebrity. One of the entertainers talks about attending, then giving, workshops. . .

. . .There. . .That's it! That is exactly it: that all this--this potent stuff: this agonizing gender confusion, this social ostracism, this devestating loneliness--can become a matter of workshops?

Of course, although this film too often allows, it can't be.
2309422
It's a shame that A Noble Radiance is cast as a mystery.  Take the need to solve the mystery out, and this would be an above-average novel about contemporary families in Venice.

Ms. Leon takes a long time to set up the mystery.  Then, she has the investigation proceed very slowly as well.  That would be fine if the resolution was interesting, unexpected, and credible.  But to me, the resolution was nonsense:  It just didn't ring true.

With much of the story taking place outside of Venice, there's not as much of the local color as usual. The best parts of the story relate to Guido Brunetti's father-in-law warning him about Guido's marriage to Paola, eating Chira's first dinner she's cooked for the family, and exploring Signorina Elletra's seemingly contradictory morals about getting secret information and making public investments.

Here's the set-up:  A house and garden have fallen into ruin because the heirs are squabbling until a German buys the place for a huge sum and starts fixing it up.  While the garden is being tilled, a bone sticks up that turns out to be human.  As the police dig around, they also find a ring with the crest of a noble Venetian family, the Lorenzoni family, best known in recent times for having sold out the location of Venice's Jews to the SS during World War II.  The family's son had been kidnapped two years earlier, and he was never found.  When the autopsy shows a bullet hole in the skull of a young man, Commissario Guido Brunetti looks for a dental match.  Finding one, he now has reason to dig into the kidnapping, looking for murderers.

The Lorenzonis have taken on their lost son's cousin as their heir.  Was he involved?  Why else had a motive?

As you finish this book, think about what the purpose of a family should be.
1281017
The befuddled sleuth is unappealing.  It's not at all clear that she is skilled in anything, except self doubt and whining.
2825202
As mysteries go this one was not well constucted as there are arbitrary devices in place only to move the mystery aspect.
4705508
While not averse to sparseness (love Lisa Germano, Ani Difranco) there needs to be some strong underlying talent that can capture the imagination. These guys don't seem quite up to the task (keep trying) :>)
3454733
The subtitle leads one to think that the authors will explain why it matters that we discover our cosmic selves, but fail miserably to deliver that information. Just another 'scientific' attempt to explain physics while eliminating God, using such phrases as (p 186): Human beings might be a bright idea the universe had, or (p224): Cosmic mind is an organizer with a viewpoint; Consciousness is the driver which selects states; and :If the cosmos has a mind, it must be alive. In addition, they never attach any meaning or purpose to human consciousness, nor explain afterlife and  consciousness after death. Their presentation is smartly clever, but is empty.....it doesn't apparently matter at all that we live on Earth.
721629
Death, the first horseman of the Apocalypse, and who is actually a woman tooling around in a car with a hood ornament shaped like a horse, comes riding into a small town to do battle with an apparently paranormally gifted minister.  Author Charles Grant, as has been his style for years, pays closer to building an atmosphere of mystery and impending doom than any kind of actual story.  Those looking for something that speaks in whispers and enigmas will find something to like here, others wanting something more focused on plot and answering the questions it raises should look elsewhere.
3718863
The premise of Byatt's novel is both clever and intriguing enough: Phineas, a graduate student chained by abstraction, declares, "I've decided I don't want to be a postmodern realist." Understandable. So one of his professors kindly (or maliciously) sends him off on a wild goose chase: researching the biography of the obscure biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, whose only published work was a study of an equally obscure writer and whose death (or disappearance) is a mystery.

"The Biographer's Tale" is a commentary on the inherently imprecise nature of biography, but Byatt stacks the deck somewhat: not only is there not much information on Destry-Scholes, but Phineas is a notably untalented and easily distracted researcher. In fact, given Phineas's limited skills set, it's not surprising he ends up supporting himself with a "real" job as a clerk at a travel agency operated by two seemingly frivolous lovers--and even that employment proves too much for him. (I couldn't help but imagine Phineas as an up-to-date reincarnation of Ignatius J. Reilly, from "A Confederacy of Dunces.")

Early in the hunt, an archivist sends Phineas notes for three never-published biographical sketches found in the Destry-Scholes's file. Each describes a historical figure known for his generalizations (to make a generalization). Although the subjects are not named, it's immediately obvious that one sketch is about Henrik Ibsen, and Phineas quickly deduces the other two. These texts take up a quarter of the book, and many readers will agree with Phineas's assessment: "I found them both intriguing and irritating. The irritating aspect--well, the most irritating, there were others--was the air of perfunctory secrecy or deception about the whole enterprise." Actually, the most irritating aspects are that they are tedious and sloppily written, like--well, just like rough drafts. Added to the irritation is that another good chunk of the book is (I kid you not) a series of transcriptions from the index cards found in the biographer's research notes.

For a book about the study of life, this miscellany is remarkably lifeless. And I suppose that's Byatt's point: that any biographical endeavor is doomed to artificiality and interpretation. To liven things up, the results of Phineas's amateurish investigations are interspersed with his daily life, including his job, his peculiar employers (used to comic effect), a mysterious customer, and two love interests--Destry-Scholes's niece and an apiculturalist named Fulla Biefeld (one of the book's many unbearable puns).

Byatt's stab at pondering the nature of biography echoes several other works, such as "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf (whose ghost hovers over the entire book) and especially "The Quest for Corvo" by A. J. A. Symons (confusingly misidentified as Symonds, who also is mentioned elsewhere in a different context in the same section). This fixation with the nature and form of biography seems to have become a peculiarly British cottage industry; the novel also reminded me at times of the recent "Wainewright the Poisoner" by Andrew Motion.

I don't deny that there are some fascinating (and often very funny) passages in "The Biographer's Tale." Yet, unlike its literary predecessors or more recent counterparts, the novel as a whole is never as interesting as the cleverness of its parts. And its final pages, too, reinforce the idea that Byatt has diverted our literary attentions with the academic equivalent of a shaggy-dog story.
2685154
I have long admired Theodore Dalrymple's essays on a variety of subjects, his work as a doctor, art criticism, architecture, and the state of society generally.  Here he turns his talents to writing fiction, with considerable success.

What he attempts here could easily have gone wrong and been deadly boring.  The greater part of the book is an account by an unnamed forty year old man, who has been told by the appropriate government office to explain why he has been unable to work for the past ten years.  He is to undergo a medical examination to validate or invalidate his claim.

What follows is a lengthy description of how he lives his life, and why.  The narrator is clearly an intelligent man, with an autodidact's ability to absorb and memorize large quantities of information.  Unfortunately, this has been put in service of a total obsession with monitoring his health, taking any action that he thinks will be beneficial, avoiding anything that seems risky in any way.  This obsession has crowded out anything else in his life, relationships with other people, enjoyment of art, music, or other entertainments, the pleasures of food and drink, really everything.  He spends every day worrying about how to balance the innumerable risks of existence in order to live as long as possible, without doing anything that most people would consider to make life worthwhile in the first place.  Detail piles upon detail in what would be the ultimate in boring recitations if you actually had to listen to this fellow in real life.  Reading it, however, the sheer ridiculousness of it all has a cumulative effect that had me smiling the whole way, and frequently laughing outright.

The narrator is completely and cluelessly self-centered, claiming to care about the good of society, but never showing concern for specific individuals.  As a result, he leads a solitary existence, a prisoner of his own fears, unable even to seek connections with others and oblivious to what he is missing.  We can laugh at him while still feeling some sympathy for his condition.

Along the way, there are a number of recognizable Dalrymple touches.  He recycles some items from his factual essays: two Muslim women, completely covered except for eye slits in their veils, have a very British conversation; an elderly woman (incomprehensibly to the narrator) doesn't want to go to a doctor because she doesn't want to bother him unnecessarily.  The narrator's thoughts as he leafs through a popular magazine devoted to celebrities might well be Dalrymple speaking for himself.

The ending is no great surprise, indeed it's hard to see how any other way of wrapping things up would be as satisfying.  The great success of the book is keeping things going up to that point, finding the humor in what could be seen as a sad situation, finding the interest in a life which seems to be almost entirely devoid of incident.
837452
Istanbul. A Mellified man. The secret name of God. Experimental economics. Biological computers. And many more. The Dervish house is so full of research that it could have easily come with a 20 pages bibliography.

I am afraid however that the research is much more interesting than the 6 stories themselves. The reader can not really care for any of the characters (with the possible exception of an old professor) and the writer does not seem to realize that all his heroes speak with the same degree of eloquence, vocalizing his thoughts instead of their own.

Furthermore, some twists of the plot are too convenient for the writer but too impossible for the serious reader. There is a 3 centuries/3 continents old mystery that gets solved miraculously in 3 days by one character. There are toy drones with inexplicably miraculous energy resources used by another character, there is something of a stock market techno thriller that gets miraculously resolved by a third character, and so on.

All in all, if the writer had focused on less stories, or even just one (Mellified Man comes to mind) this novel could have been something. Unfortunately, now it isn't. 2  stars.