Alice A-703A 1 Takım Keman Teli Set itibaren Alice içinde LIT biçim

Lark Lark _n_ark — One of the best books I've read. Just awesome. Conservatives will love the first 2/3s - how much better things are than they used to be - and groan the final 1/3 - when Easterbrook proposes a push to eliminate poverty and make health care insurance universal - but the whole thing is important and worth thinking about.

Vrushali Vinod vrushalivinod — Given to me in 2oo8 by Ellie Anderson

Sirisam Llerena _irisam_lerena — Maybe more like 3.5. I vacillate between enjoying the books and being annoyed at Riordan's jokes that aren't all that funny. This book redeemed itself in the end when the stupid jokes stopped and some substance came out.

Ian Challo _an_hallo — The book is hilarious, satirical, witty, and a quick read. Lots of dialogue and plenty of action. The characters' stories weave together nicely and the complex plot unfolds effortlessly. The ending felt rushed, but I had fun exploring Max Barry's incredibly capitalistic, but not completely unbelievable, world.

Andrea De _ — Five stars, not because it's an epoch-making masterpiece, but this prose is simply about as good as prose can get. It's a book to be savoured slowly, not a gripping narrative to be devoured like a Dickens novel. Fitzgerald's strengths are not in narrative. The skeleton of her story could have been turned into an extensive Victorian double decker, but that would have required longer stretches of lower-intensity prose. As it is, her narrative tends to crumble and falter a little, not unlike real life perhaps. Her real strength, it seems to me, is in her style. By that I don't mean, in this case, anything very poetic or mellifluous. There are even some rather clumsy turns of phrase. It's more a matter of the sensibility you see at work, a terribly acute mind and a great wit. I'm not sure how to describe it, so I'll try to illustrate it simply by listing a few favourite quotes, starting with the striking opening paragraph, with that stunning image of the 'indecision' of an eel 'struggling to escape from the gullet of a heron': In 1959 Florence Green occasionally passed a night when she was not absolutely sure whether she had slept or not. This was because of her worries as to whether to purchase a small property, the Old House, with its own warehouse on the foreshore, and to open the only bookshop in Hardborough. The uncertainty probably kept her awake. She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much. Florence felt that if she hadn't slept at all - and people often say this when they mean nothing of the kind - she must have been kept awake thinking of the heron. (7) What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well. (22) I loved him, and I tried to understand his work. It sometimes strikes me that men and women aren't quite the right people for each other. Something must be, of course. (23) The right-hand wall she kept for paperbacks. At 1s. 6d. each, cheerfully coloured, brightly democratic, they crowded the shelves in well-disciplined ranks. They would have a rapid turnover and she had to approve of them; yet she could remember a world where only foreigners had been content to have their books bound in paper. The Everymans, in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach. (39) [They] both bought books by former SAS men, who had been parachuted into Europe and greatly influenced the course of the war; they also placed orders for books by Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men, and questioned their credentials. (46) She wrapped his purchase carefully. She would have liked to have been instrumental in passing some law which would entail that he would never be unhappy again. (47) 'They really ought to be divided into Romantic and Humorous,' said Florence. These, indeed, were the only two attitudes to the stages of life's journey envisaged by the manufacturers of the cards. The lobster took a humorous view of parting. The sunset card was overprinted with a sad message. (55) Late middle age, for the upper middle-class in East Suffolk, marked a crisis, after which the majority became water-colourists, and painted landscapes. It would not have mattered so much if they had painted badly, but they all did it quite well. All their pictures looked much the same. Framed, they hung in sitting-rooms, while outside the windows the empty, washed-out, unarranged landscape stretched away to the transparent sky. (58) The truth is that Florence Green had not been brought up to understand natures such as Milo's. Just as she still thought of gravity as a force that pulled things towards it, not simply as a matter of least resistance, so she felt sure that character was a struggle between good and bad intentions. It was too difficult for her to believe that he simply lapsed into whatever he did next only if it seemed to him less trouble than anything else. (63) Christine liked to do the locking up. At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done. (64) As a source of energy in a place like Hardborough which needed so little, an anergy, too, which was often expended in complaints, she was bound to create a widening circle of after-effects which went far beyond the original impulse. Whenever she realized this she was pleased, both for herself and for the sake of others, because she always acted in the way she felt to be right. She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct. (99-100) In those days, the separate pounds, shillings and pence allowed three separate kinds of menace from their three unyielding columns. (104) Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once. (106) 'Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.' 'I don't see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can't be called a success.' (107) 'A curious experience, fainting. One can't tell if one is doing it properly. There is nothing to go on. One can't remember the last time.' (113)

Maricruz Hernandez summer2204 — Compelling and horrible, but also a wonderfully funny joke.