423 Lời Vàng Của Phật (Kinh Pháp Cú) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Smashworks Smashworks smashworks — I read most of this book on the flight back from London (UK) to Toronto. I was grateful for it's heft in filling up my overseas flight - in fact, I barely noticed the time.

Flemming Hansen spirtulv — It’s been impossible to ignore the Stieg Larsson trilogy, so I downloaded the first book on the Kindle and got reading. It’s an odd one. The story is good, intriguing, although it was never un-put-downable. I found a spoof of the writing by Nora Ephron and it’s spot on, particularly about the many similar Swedish names. That doesn’t make it bad, though. I did enjoy the mystery aspect, and the several sub-stories were good. I didn’t really like how they solved the Harriet thing only to have a good couple of chapters left. It felt like a bit of a letdown after such good puzzle work. The only other thing was the characters. Fascinating and intriguing, but ultimately not very likeable. Weird. I do still want to read the second book though.

Justin Norris _ustin_orris — The premise is simple: Insane fans who worship Bruce Campbell use unexplained technology to destroy William Shatner while he's hosting a convention, but instead it pulls many/most of his characters into our world and seals off the convention and pits the characters against "Real" Shatner in a battle to the death. When you put it that way, how could it fail? On the plus side: It's a novella, so the joke doesn't have time to fall too flat. It treats the "Real" Shatner kindly. Great running gags about the Singing Shatner. Includes Elizabethan Shatner and Twilight Zone Shatner and others that are easy to miss. Has Denny Crane Shatner, which more stories need. But there are plenty of minuses, mostly in the world-building. We have a hyper-violent society with unnecessarily explicit torture that only seems to matter once. Convention security are referenced repeatedly but only appear in two scenes. Some thought seems to have gone into how the two high-tech bombs work and how the failure of one leaves the imported characters (Kirk Shatner is able to activate a toy light saber, creating a spectacular crossover at the expense of a deus ex machina), but we get minimal, muddled explanations, as well as other plot devices like a "static field" that keeps anyone from leaving for help. The relationship between the rest of the world and the Campbellians is unclear and hard to believe. Some history about "network wars" and other celebrities being executed feels hand-wavey at best. The writing was readable, although muddled on any details that weren't action and avoided most action details by describing action after-the-fact. I couldn't tell it if was supposed to be a thriller, a comedy, or satire. The level of violence seemed erratic and probably gratuitous. The writing around the cold, murderous convention organizer was completely different in tone from the earnest, doomed terrorists or the desperate "Real" Shatner or the various parodies of Shatner's characters. Add in a bizarrely superfluous faux-Shatner character and a completely unnecessary and jarring scene with Animated Kirk Shatner and it felt a little like reading a shared-world story. But really, it's short, it's cheap, and it has Rescue 911 Shatner standing around dying people asking the air to stay tuned and see if paramedics make it in time, while The Negotiator Shatner (from the Priceline commercials) keeps saying he can get them out of here cheaper and every shatner stops to remind you not to interact with Singing Shatner, since "he only does it for the attention." As a wrapper for some fun fanboy slapstick, it's 3 or 4 stars. As actual science fiction, it's 2. Call it 3 stars, get the ebook version cheap, and have a fun, quick read.