Reviews and Comments

A sweeping history of the history of punk rock to alt rock as traced by the whirlwind path of Dave Grohl, this book certainly ventures out of the strict boundaries of a Dave Grohl biography, but I loved it wholeheartedly. To tell the story of a man who has been making music since age 12, released his first demo at 15, rose to prominence drumming in Nirvana, and then went on to lead his own phenomenally successful band, and jumps in on side projects with some of the biggest names in rock for the hell of it, you've got to cast a wide net.

It helps that I skimmed reviews here first, and was therefore prepared for a heaping side of music history with my main serving of Dave Grohl anecdotes, but I rarely found myself disinterested in any of the "auxillary" notes. He spends plenty of time savoring the various albums and acts that Dave intersected with, and his day job as a music writer is fully apparent, but Brannigan does a good job of tying things back together before too long, and especially for someone like me who knows next to nothing about the environment that forged Grohl's musical sensibilities, they help tell the tale very well.

I was a glad to find that the reviewers that complaints about Brannigan's dwelling on Nirvana at the expense of the Foo Fighters were a bit overblown, in my opinion. Numbers-wise, the book is pretty evenly chunked into three sections: pre-Nirvana, Nirvana, Foo Fighters. So by pages-per-year, Nirvana does get about twice the coverage of Foo Fighters, but I didn't feel like I missed anything. Nirvana and his pre-Nirvana years are pretty important chapters in Grohl's story, and those chapters are closed. Foo Fighters is a story that's still being told, and frankly, it's not as dense in significance and interesting stuff as the first couple phases. We'll get the Foo Fighters bio in a decade or two, but at this point, I think the balance was very well handled.

So anyway, I came away from this book loving Dave Grohl even more than I did - it's a fantastic portrait of a fascinating man, and simultaneously same time a sweeping history of rock in all of its incarnations, with the two threads intertwining to tell each other's story. If you really don't like music criticism, or are going to get bored reading about things that aren't directly related to Grohl, you might want to skip it, but if you think you have space in your reading schedule for some punk rock history along the way, it will be well worth your while.

Wowsers, what a ride. Fascinating universe, intriguing and wide-ranging characters, and a huge, complex story arc - perhaps at times too huge and complex. I never could really get fully on board with the mythical/metaphysical component woven throughout, which at times made things a little rough to get through. The fact that the narrator throughout was (sort of) a metaphysical-ish character made it difficult sometimes, but it was played down enough to work fine. And it was a crazy, wonderful ride regardless - the dilemmas set up were immense and presented well. Gladstone was a particularly powerful and engrossing character, and was very well portrayed - definitely a solid candidate for one of my all-time favorite characters. The universe of farcasters and particularly the consequences that played out through the climax were fascinating, and Gladstone's hand at the helm was expertly written. The chapter following the destruction of the farcaster network - little more than a list of worlds and their reactions - I thought was brilliant. The ubiquitous accepted reality of interconnectedness in the society was built up subtly but relentlessly, and the series of vignettes illustrating its collapse was excellent. While the planetary summaries were just a monotonous series of paragraphs, I thought it was quite fitting - this multitude of worlds that had been effectively one continuous expanse of humanity were now each relegated to a small individual paragraph, each dealing with the collapse in their own individual ways, dealing with the ripples of a severed galactic economy. Loved it. Oh, which reminds me of an eyeroll-inducing paragraph: somehow, even though the Catholic church has evolved and moderated over the last 800 years and elected a fucking Teilhard disciple as pope, basically endorsing humanism, the token Muslim planet reacted as all Muslims apparently do and always will: immediately descend into fundamentalism and middle-ages darkness. Come on, Simmons, you can do better than that.

And the Ousters! The future books had better feature more of them, because there is so much awesome potential there, and I am sad about how limited the glimpses I got in this book were. At this point, I care about them a lot more than Moneta and all that lot - it's just too handwavey and disconnected for me to follow or get too involved in so far.

Overall, a fascinating saga [edit: so far, yes Keegan], sweeping and grand and delicious, but got a little too metaphysical for my taste from time to time. But still well-worth the read, and of course with plenty of parallels and reflections on our world to make fodder for late-night discussions if one were wont to.

Eoin Colfer had quite the helm to pick up writing a sixth Hitchhikers, and he did a pretty bang-up job of it. Adams' spirit popped up here and there throughout, it was an interesting, entertaining read, with the characters we know and love tromping about the universe meeting gods and demi-gods and immortals and alternate realities and of course Vogons.

Entertaining, worth reading if you've exhausted your stock of Adams and want to frolick through that universe a bit more, and don't mind things being just a little different and less sharp. It's still quite good, and there's a lot of spark - it's a solid homage to the incomparable genius of Adams' work.

I found myself reading this in fits - it didn't hold me very well, and I took long breaks - but then again, I read the original trilogy in a similar manner anyway, so that's not much of a knock on it.

I don't know how to feel about this book. The problems it set up, the conflicts it presented, the questions it raised, the people it introduced...they were all brilliant and fascinating and thoroughly engrossing. Riveting, mind-expanding, so many delicious adjectives. Five-star adjectives, without question. Diverse, real, complex characters that deal with problems every bit as grand.

But then...everything just got tied up with such infuriating neatness. Deus ex machina that couldn't get more blatant if Zeus himself had descended from Olympus and manipulated things to their neat ends. All of the most crucial solutions - in addition to what will surely be the backbone of sequels - quite literally conjured out of nothingness. In fact, one could probably argue that things were tied up quickly and neatly in order to make way for the hastily-introduced seeds of the coming conflict.

I can't give it less than four stars because the majority of this book was just so strong, and the people you're introduced to, and the added depth to those you already knew, are entirely worth the journey. But the conclusions did little justice to the myriad complexities and richness of the problems that they solved. And that makes me sad. I'll just say that if you find yourself skimming once you hit 450 or 500, and completely giving up around 550...I'm not gonna argue with how you choose to spend your time.

All the same, this book and the people, peoples, and problems it introduced me to will remain with me long after I've forgotten how it ended. I loved this book. I just wish it could have had the conclusion it deserved.

I picked this book up for like $2 in a ferry terminal book rack (alongside the pulp romance novels as you would expect), and wasn't expecting a whole lot, but I knew Brin was well-respected.

As such, it far exceeded my expectations - this book was fantastic. Engaging, well-written, lots of interesting characters, a mystery plot that twists and turns and caught me off guard more than once, and some really fascinating creatures and exploration of some interesting ideas.

The great thing about this book is that there are so many different elements, and they're all very strongly written, such that each of them could probably stand on its own as a shorter story, but they're all here working together to tell an engaging story that much better.

The uplift social dynamics from which the saga takes its name is well thought out and has lots of interesting consequences, for humans and aliens alike. The motivations and interactions of the characters are great - I always love when sci-fi writers actually make use of the fundamental differences between the species they conjure up, rather than just describing them and then treating everyone more or less as differently-shaped humans. The characters are interesting, varied, and easy to care about and get tied up with.

Lots of brilliant stuff excellently written makes for a book that's easy to read, hard to put down, and an enjoyable jaunt through the realms of science fiction for your brain.

I initially rated this book three stars, for a couple reasons. For one, I had just rated a bunch of books 4 and 5 stars and felt like my rating scale was too narrow. But mostly - and this isn't something that I have changed my mind about - the writing isn't stellar. It's not really bad, but the craft of writing itself isn't something that seems to be Doctorow's strength, and at times that was pretty evident, and made it a little difficult to get into the book at first. Some of the dialog feels stilted or forced, character development is a bit awkward at times, and the writing/editing juts isn't as polished as I've gotten used to.

So why the upgrade and late review? Because over the past few year, this book just kept popping back into my head, because the ideas and characters were intriguing and fascinating and - since it is set in the near future - increasingly pertinent to issues at hand today. Oh, and because I just recommended this book to a friend and realized I had never reviewed it.

Doctorow's strength is in his ideas and the way he explores them, and this book excels in delving into those interesting issues deeply and intriguingly. Makers is an exploration of what happens when corporations are increasingly possessive of more expansive copyright claims in a world where riffing on and building things with those copyrights is increasingly effortless and lines get murkier, thanks to the internet and ease of access to things like photoshop and, particularly in this near-future world, 3D printing. It's a window into a very plausible future, and its explorations of how corporations and individuals might either collide or work together is mind-expanding, and the characters that play out his story are well-written, even if they take longer than they should to really take form.

TL;DR: Makers is a book full of ideas and characters worth reading, and writing that is certainly good enough to convey them, as long as you can get past the initial bumpiness.