Just Some Micro Reviews That I Used To Know

Books

YA/MG fiction
The Sixty-Eight Rooms ( *** – enjoyed)

Adult fiction
Sandman Slim: A Novel (**** – liked)
Hide Me Among the Graves (**** – liked)

Adult non-fiction
Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks & the Hidden Powers of the Mind (**** – liked)
Feynman’s Rainbow ( **** – liked )
The Information ( **** – liked)

Fanfiction
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (incomplete) (**** – liked)

Movies

The Dark Knight Rises (**** – liked)

TV 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1 (*** – enjoyed)

Anime

Death Note (**** – liked)

The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone (MG fantasy novel, 2010) – Two children, Ruthie and Jack, find a magic key that lets them shrink and explore the Thorne Miniature Rooms. While the plot was interesting and had an air of something a child might imagine as he or she looked at the real rooms, the writing style felt a bit… grey. With such interesting conflicts and possibilities, I felt like it could have been more gripping and evocative.

Sandman Slim: A Novel by Richard Kadrey (urban fantasy novel, 2009) – This is your typical boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-sent-to-hell-by-evil-magicians-who-then-kill-girl, boy-becomes-professional-killer-escapes-from-hell-and-takes-revenge story. It’s like Harry Dresden with teeth and a more theological mythos. The author cleverly balances the wish-fulfillment powers of the protagonist with the totally scary capabilities of the demonic and angelic guys.

Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers (historical fantasy novel, 2012) – This book started off a little slowly for me, but once I got into the story of the (real) nineteenth-century Rossetti family, their unwitting allies, and two ancient vampiric deities, I was hooked. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the story so much if I didn’t come into the book already knowing a bit about the Rossettis, since part of the pleasure was seeing how the obviously fictional narrative dovetailed with real-life facts about the principal characters. The daily-life details were terrific, but my favourite part was the slow realization of the blockbuster-like slug line to which the mysterious, atmospheric, and intricate plot boiled down.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (incomplete) by Eliezer Yudkowsky (novel-length Harry Potter fanfiction, ongoing) – Thanks for recommending this, Ryan! This fanfiction asks what might happen if an educated, super-intelligent believer in evidence-based empiricism encountered Hogwarts and if all the characters in J. K. Rowling’s universe were actually smart, independent people. It’s a bit tough to swallow that the aforementioned super-intelligent believer is an eleven-year-old boy named Harry Potter, and sometimes the veneer of plot on top of philosophy wears thin. But all in all, this story is a fun, funny, and clever rebuttal to Rowling’s original universe where feelings and truthiness run unchecked.

Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks & the Hidden Powers of the Mind by Alex Stone (biography, 2012) – This non-fiction book about its author’s obsession with magic and determination to better a previous dismal performance at the Magic Olympics is an easy read. I liked the insight on the backstage world of magic; although I study Victorian magicians (among other figures), I’m not a part of the word-of-mouth, socially connected network of magicians, and it was intriguing to have an inside view on that world.

Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life by Leonard Mlodinow (non-fiction book, 2003) – This semi-autobiographical account of the author’s first few years in the Caltech physics department and his interaction with the late Richard Feynman during that time is a quick read. The title is a bit misleading: the book is more about Mlodinow’s journey as a fledgling academic than Feynman. However, its take on dealing with Imposter Syndrome and finding one’s direction in life is engaging on its own.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick (non-fiction book, 2011) – I wavered between labelling this ambitious history of information, from the beginnings of writing to the age of the iCloud,  “liked it” and “loved it.” I acknowledge the inherent limitations of such a broadly focussed study, but in some places, the author described historical events in a way I felt was slightly misleading when you consider the complex background underneath the simple story. Regardless, this was an excellent book with an intelligent focus and something interesting for every curious reader.

The Dark Knight Rises by Christopher Nolan (film, 2012) – Thanks, long list of people (you know who you are*) for seeing this together, and thanks, Ryan, for organizing the outing! This movie is about Batman and Bane and Catwoman, and if you need more of an explanation than that, you probably won’t like watching it. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t feel like it deserved to be so long (165 minutes), especially with what felt like forty minutes of resolution scenes at the end. But the themes felt uncomfortably timely, if maybe not the ones I would have chosen, and I loved the twist that fooled me despite having all the knowledge to put it together.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1 by Joss Whedon (TV series, 1997) – Thanks, Juliana (and Amanda B.), for lending this to me! I’m told that Buffy gets better in later seasons, and I can believe it. I felt like I could still see the scaffolding in this one — good blueprints but walls not quite complete — and some of the acting was rough. But I look forward to watching the show improve/stealing more DVD sets from friends/observing the developing professional relationship between Buffy and Giles, because that’s really the only thing I care about so far.

Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata (TV series based on manga, 2003-2006) – Thanks, Dan, for recommending and lending this to me and not minding when I took forever to watch it! I enjoyed the conceit of this story, in which Light, an intelligent young man, finds a notebook that allows him to kill anyone by picturing their face as he writes their name in its pages. Although the main characters were all kind of jerks, they were interesting to watch, but what tripped me up was the lack of meta-back-story: I never got a sense of how these notebooks fit into the scheme of the universe ordinarily, or what was the purpose of their many specific rules. In general, I think I’d have preferred to read the manga and so better control my intake speed.

* Actually, if I count everyone in the theatre and not just our row of friends, I guess you probably don’t. Oh well.