This one has been on my mental "to read" list for forever and I finally got myself around to reading it.
Yes, the narrator is fantastic, yes the book deserves the hype and the awards and the glowing reviews.
Really, what else is there to say?

So, overall, this was a nice, shallow read that passed the time. And, yes, it is the sort of book that I damn with faint praise.
I have this problem with Lackey's female characters (which partially explains my relationship with the Magic's Pawn etc. trilogy) in that she writes them badly. Its like she has this idea of what women are stereotypically like in fairy tales and it is a woman who is weak and screams too much and is pathetic and her characters will be the exact opposite of that.
THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Every single story has someone telling the main character that she behaves unexpectedly and the main character looking down on not even typical, but stereotypical femininity. There's rarely any reason given and even more rarely any character development to turn these anti-stereotypes into complex three dimensional people.
So, yes, as I knew she would, the heroine annoyed me. Lackey is, overall, bad at writing people and particularly bad at doing thinking people. They tend to think like someone writing out a flow chart, rather than like human beings. They lack...vitality.
But the stories are fun and the premise of the 500 Kingdoms is engaging enough that I'll suffer through the lousy characterization.

A good ending, better than I expected, although I find myself hoping for a sequel. I think Kagawa has gotten better at making Meghan likable and at least somewhat unique. She still has momente of unbelievable idiocy, though.
And Grimalkin the cat is still my favorite character.
All things considered, this was a nice, light read.

Definitely cute and a credible addition to Lackey's 500 Kingdoms series.

Though the end felt rather...forced. Lackey had been very good about character development (especially in a fairy tale) and making sure the romances are credible and based on something other than "Oh, we must be in love!" and then in the last ten pages, she quickly pairs off the spares without any thought for maybe introducing her readers to them as characters. I would have much preferred a separate book for them so that I could have a bit of closure.

Still, definitely a fun story.

Lethem is a New Yorker's author. Which is not to say that you need to be from NY to like him, but if you are, you will appreciate him all the more. We New Yorkers are a somewhat interesting bunch.
Anyway, the book itself is a great mystery/psychological novel with the right mix of character, plot and style. Or, to put another way, if Phillip Marlowe had had Tourettes, he would have been Lionel Essrog.

I don't usually go and read the Amazon reviews of a book after I finish it (why do I care what someone else thought?) but I almost felt as though I had to for this. They seem split between OMG brilliant and ugh, gimmicky.

I suppose that depends partially on whether you think gimmicks can be brilliant. Make no mistake, this book is going to have fun with you, perhaps even annoy you and make you wonder why you're bothering sometimes. However, I was under the impression that the book was an invitation to the reader to participate in the gimmicks and the absurdity and appreciate how ridiculous it was.
I found the mocking of academia to be spot on (and one's relationship to those sections seems to be based on whether they're read as mimicry or parody.I read them as the latter.)
Of course, the book works, and I truly do believe it works, because there is a story with compelling characters underneath the gleeful semiotics and absurd post-modernism (also known as academic jerking off). The story works as a backbone and I think that's what really makes the difference between the five and one star reviewers. If, at the end of the day, the actual story fails to resonate, the book will never be anything more than a gimmick. But if you care about the characters and the horror story bubbling through the cracks of post-modern verbiage, the gimmicks become actual artistic choices in service of a story and you can't imagine getting half as expressive a tale without them.

Though I can see what others might have found frustrating about this book, I absolutely loved it.
Mitchell does something really fascinatingly bizarre in the way that he ties together these stories within stories, letting them loosely hang together without creating the strong links we've learned to expect as readers. He teases us, letting us hunt for clues and run up dead ends and leaving us ever so slightly unsatisfied and wondering about how it all fits together.
All this would be irrelevant, of course, if Mitchell wasn't also a fantastic story teller. All of his characters are brilliantly realized and his ability to write within every genre he looks to is amazing. If Cloud Atlas were nothing more than a book of six short stories, it would be worth the read. As it is, it's so much more than that.

I am usually leery of actors branching out of their fields, but given that Stephen Fry is one of the great British comedic screenwriters, I had no reason to worry. His prose is light and effortless, with a feel for dialogue and a sense of cadence that is quite difficult to pull off. And, of course, the content is great and the humor that pervades even this serious story is pitch perfect.
Revenge is a modern retelling of Dumas's "Count of Monte Cristo" and I am truly impressed at how Fry fit the tale seamlessly into 20th century England, with all the little touches that add verisimilitude. The grounding of the story in modernity serves to emphasize the beauty and the cruelty of it. I can't wait to see what else Fry has to offer.

In a usual departure from my usual fare, I picked up Gleick's "The Information" because the NYTimes liked it and I liked learning stuff.

Speaking of information overflow, this was not an easy book. I really enjoyed the experience of reading it, but I also consider myself a fairly knowledgeable laywoman in terms of the history of physics and computing and I was stuck on a few things.

Still, the book was fascinating and very well written. Gleick's style is engaging and he writes as if he's shaping the history of the topic into a story without imposing narrative on the aspects that don't already use it. Also, he uses the historical characters to great effect.

Anyway, an excellent book that I should probably return to the library because it's nearly a week overdue (well, I had to FINISH it!).