Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách
Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Kate Scott
OOOOO di Lampedusa!! Inconceivable outcomes become the new status quo. This book, and the plot in particular, taught me very well something that Villefot's father in Count of Monte Cristo says at some point to his daughter regarding his outdated affiliation to Napoleon. Back when I read Monte Cristo, I did not quite get it. After Lampedusa, it became clearer. O tempora O changes!
Sách được viết bởi Bởi:
maktub
Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Nguyễn Ngọc Tuấn
Michelle's published by my press, and she's a breath of unconventional air. Her blog is great which makes me all the more interested in her book.
Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Onishi Takahiro
"A pivotal paradox for us to understand is that simplicity is both a grace and a discipline...There is no way that we can build up our willpower, put ourselves into this contortion or that, and attain it...It is a discipline because we are called to do something." "The connection between obedience and blessing is genuinely significant, and the significance is not primarily in the notion of being rewarded for doing what is right. That has its place, but it is a minor place, almost a childish place. The deeper reality in obedience is the kind of spirit it works into us. it is a spirit that crucifies greed and covetousness. It is a spirit of compassion and outreach. It is a spirit of sensitivity and trust. Once this inner disposition has taken over our personality, material blessings cannot hurt us, for they will be used for right purposes. We will recognize material goods to be not for us alone, but for the good of all" The guy breaks down convenient theology that has infected much of the current church w/in america and challenged me to change my lifestyle because knowing God is more satisfying. This book should be pulled out every five years and read again.
... Si ce n'est pas un gros gros exemple de Gary Stu (Larry Stu, Marty Stu, comme vous voulez), je ne sais pas ce que c'est. Je passerai sur le fait qu'il ne vaut mieux pas être une fille dans ce livre, à moins d'aimer l'acharnement de l'auteur à faire souffrir tout ce qui s'apparente à une femme, de près ou de loin. Je passerai sur la misogynie latente. Je passerai sur plein de choses en fait. J'ai tenu jusqu'à la page 148, j'ai feuilleté jusqu'à la fin, je me suis dit "Tout ça pour ça", et j'ai repensé avec émotion à tous les bouquins que je pensais être mauvais jusque là. D'un coup toutes mes autres lectures en sortent grandies. Mais bon, ce n'est que mon avis.
Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Helen Exley
I really enjoyed reading this book. A child called it, made me realize that there are bad parents out there, and I am fortunate to have parents that care about me. This book was about a boy that had to survive living with his mother, who tortured him to death. She put his through painful punishments involving cruel work, sleep with clorox, and other dangerous things. In the End, the yound boy, who his mother never called by name, was sent away from the misery, and had other misfortunes in the sequel "The Lost Boy." This book would be great for someone to read who likes survival books.
I thought this book was a stinker! The information could be interesting...I enjoy history. But, I hated it.
I'm not sure if this is the same book by McAdams that I wanted to review, only under another title. The book I have is titled: The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making Of The Self. This is a great book that talks about how we all live by a story that we create in our mind. We live out our lives according to the themes and events of that story. It might be the loser story, a hero story of some sort, or some other theme. We project the image of our self according to the story we think our lives are being lived by. But what if you can change your story? What if you're tired of the image you keep putting out, and you realize that really isn't you, or the you you want to be? They are great questions. Change your story. It's time.
Great stuff (though I tend to skip over the more tortuo(i)s(e) Lewis Carrollesque dialogue interludes). I promise to finish this review when I finish the bo
The first series that showed it was possible to do an uninspired rewrite of Tolkien and make a mint was Shannara. After that the doors were flung wide, and the next to profit off the scheme was was Robert Jordan. Of course, I'm not suggesting it's bad to take inspiration from older authors--all authors do this, as Virgil did from Homer, and Milton from Virgil, and Byron from Milton. Tolkien himself drew on the Norse Eddas, Welsh myths, English fairy tales, and Blake's myth-making. But when a skilled author takes inspiration, they expand and change what came before, combining many influences to produce their own unique voice and vision. Jordan didn't have the knowledge of language, history, or culture to truly copy Tolkien's style, nor was he able to add a unique spin. The Eye of The World is a more accessible version of Tolkien, but Tolkien is already a simplified version of the Norse Sagas, meaning that Jordan felt a need to dumb-down the accessible, which doesn't leave his book with much personality. Jordan also takes influence from the Sword & Sorcery tradition, particularly R.E. Howard (Jordan even wrote and published some of his own Conan stories). However, unlike other authors of rollicking adventure Fantasy, like Leiber or Charles Saunders, Jordan kept Tolkien's plodding length. It is difficult to comprehend how an author could take such a simple, familiar story and stretch it out over so many pages. The hero is an orphan who looks different, he gets his father's magic sword, he goes on a quest with an old, wily mentor, gets attacked by evil (dark-skinned) mongoloids from the mysterious East, meets the princess by accident, becomes embroiled in an ancient prophecy, discovers a magic 'force' which controls fate (and the plot), &c., &c. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Like a lot of modern fantasy, the plot and characters are nothing new. If you've seen Star Wars, then you know it by heart. Every fantasy fan has read this same story again and again from countless authors--some, apparently on purpose. Of course, when this old story is told well, with slick pacing and vivid characters, we can forgive the cliches, or even enjoy them freshly, recognizing their universal appeal. But when an author is simply trotting out an old, tired story and doing nothing to make it shine anew, then the only appeal it can lay claim to is bland nostalgia. There's no reason for this sort of repetition: a new book should be more than just fanfic of an older, financially successful book. There are countless different influences out there, long before Tolkien or Howard ever touched pen to paper (many of which can be found in the link at the end of this review), so it's disappointing to see authors continually rehashing the same tedious cliches completely unchanged half a century later. Jordan's long-winded style can't even boast the wealth of meticulous details with which Tolkien filled his pages (often to the detriment of his story). It's clear that Jordan's trying to build a one of those massively detailed worlds so prevalent in pop fantasy, but it's not an interesting, original world--it's just another generic, pseudo-Medieval Europe without any of the genuinely interesting bits that made that time period unique. It's just modern characters with modern psychology swinging around magic swords in a Disneyland version of history. It might not be so bad if the lengthy asides were actually interesting, in and of themselves. If each little piece was amusing in its own right, we might forgive. If they gave us some odd bit of defamiliarization that caused us to look at our own, modern world in a new way, that would be something. Instead, we get dry, lengthy explanations of extraneous facts that we had no reason to be curious about in the first place. Some readers have pointed out that these facts show up in later books of the series, which is probably true, but then, what are they doing in this book? If Mary doesn't appear until book three, it is not useful or interesting to stop in the middle of book one and tell us she has blonde hair. Facts should not be evenly distributed throughout a series, they should be placed in close proximity to scenes that relate to them. That way they make sense to the reader and we have a reason to care about them. That's the difference between foreshadowing and a word search puzzle. If an author has to stop the story every few paragraphs to explain what's going on, then his writing is simply not working. The world should be revealed to us through characters, through their interactions, through small details of verisimilitude that are lovely or interesting on their own, and through scenes designed specifically to illustrate a point without losing focus and falling into lengthy digressions. But Jordan's characters are dull and shallow, his dialogue bland, and his plot (though it possesses many parts) lacks twists or turns. We are given an unending parade of new characters and lengthy asides, which masterfully suck all the drive, purpose, and life from an otherwise simplistic story. At half this length, the book would have been merely another two-star fantasy rehash. At a third the length, it might have started to show some pep--but Jordan had to stretch out his all-to-familiar story to doorstop proportions. In Tolkien, the first hundred pages takes place in quaint Hobbiton. This prelude prepares us for the rest of the book, allowing us to understand the strange world and characters and setting a mood. When the action takes us away, we find we have formed a certain attachment to the bucolic charm of Hobbiton (sickly-sweet as it may be). Finally, when we do depart, the world we meet is much grander in comparison. In Eye of the World, you spend the first hundred and fifty pages in a drab farming community, so that when the characters finally leave, it will seem like something is happening. This is only an illusion. Some of Jordan's fans have pointed to the 'Wheel of Time' aspect as his unique contribution to the genre--mixing Eastern philosophy and the idea of eternal recurrence in with his mock-feudal world, but it's the same thing that E.R. Eddison was doing in the 1920s, and which Michael Moorcock has been exploring and expanding on since the sixties. As such, I don't see it as some new twist that Jordan has added to fantasy, but as another bland rehash of an interesting idea some other author had decades before. Also, like most fantasy authors, Jordan seems to have a problem writing female characters. They are either whiny and snotty, or emasculating ice queens. They all speak in the exact same voice--and the joke in the writing community is that anyone who has met his wife know exactly where every one of his female characters comes from. I couldn't count on both hands the fantasy authors who seem to think 'strong woman' means 'insufferable, unapologetic shrew'. Then again, it isn't as if his male characters aren't any more interesting or fleshed-out, even if they do get a more flattering depiction. I've also been led to understand that later on in the series, we get a magical band of lipstick lesbians who 'go straight' when they grow up (and meet 'real men', like our heroes), plus a bunch of sex-fetish weirdness about punishment by naked public spanking. But I suppose that if Jordan resembles other genre writers in terms of plot, length, setting, and character, he might as well go all the way and throw in some of his own unprocessed sexual hangups. And as the series goes on, the many problems with pacing, plotting, and unfocused asides only grow worse. If Jordan can't keep everything straight in his opening book, how will he possibly deal when the story starts branching out (as stories inevitably do)? It is hardly surprising that such a tenuous grasp will inevitably slip away--as it has for so many other authors in pop fantasy, from Martin to Goodkind, who start off intending to write a trilogy and end up with ten books, each of which takes five years to write, and none of which even manage to finish the plot started in book I. So, take the plot of Star Wars, add the long-windedness of Tolkien, the piecemeal structure of Howard, the cosmology of Moorcock, add in a pinch of awkward sexual hangups, and you have yet another crap pop fantasy, ready to sell a million copies to folks who want nothing more than to read the same story over and over as written by a succession of chubby, bearded, awkward dudes. I'm sure a violent, breast-baring miniseries is already in preproduction. UPDATE: one might point to the endless repetition in modern literature as a sure sign that there is no God, no grand plan, and no purpose to the universe. A benevolent power would surely spare us the pain of such unending mediocrity. However, if there were some deity, and he had a sense of humor, then he would allow the uncreative authors to publish, to gain fame, win awards, and rake in the cash, until their series piled self-indulgently to the length of a minor encyclopedia. Then our clownish deity would let the author announce that he is finally approaching The End (for real this time!), only to perish on the cusp. Since this is precisely what happened to Jordan, I will have to keep an eye out for other signs of this humorous demiurge, possibly in the form of leper-curing banana peels and hagiographic fright wigs. My Fantasy Book Suggestions
Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.