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(Feb 14, 2011) I can't fault his cleverness in setting up the plot, but the style of writing is not really for me. I am having a hard time figuring out who these characters are, and the dialogue and prose seem kind of strained, making it hard for me to read. I have noticed this in other stories by Watts as well. I've gotten a little over halfway through and I think it's time to give up on this.

This prequel to the author's His Dark Materials trilogy is less of a wide-ranging adventure than that story. A few characters recur here, with the infant version of main character Lyra at the center and younger versions of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter seeming practically identical in character to they way they were portrayed earlier. The first part has a bit of light intrigue and conflict in the setting of fantasy Oxford, the last half takes place on the floodwaters inundating the Midlands and southern England depicting more peril and scary situations for young readers. None of the exotic settings in this version of a parallel Earth show up making it feel like a more miniaturized story. There are a few new characters given fairly detailed traits in the author's style along with one new villain with sinister motives looming over the young heroes Lyra and her two young adolescent caretakers. This made the book feel in a young adult or maybe middle grades book category rather than the more adult style of the earlier trilogy In the series title "Dust" refers to the main supernatural innovation distinguishing the story universe from our own, but none of the players except for the antagonist have much understanding of the concept.

The action of the story does not really fill in a vital part of Lyra's character arc that had thought was missing. I take it that the sequels to this volume jump forward past the timeline of His Dark Materials to fill in later plot points, which I am not eager to learn. The audiobook presentation was pleasant, but ultimately not of the same caliber as what went before, in my opinion.

I liked this book of poems from a dozen years ago, though I spent a lot of time in a kind of dazed puzzlement, particularly in the first section. These took on a fragmentary, run-on tone, with capitalization but mostly without punctuation to give the reader help in parsing the lines into sentences. The second section had a more conventional presentation the way the sentences aligned frequently with the line breaks, but there the emotional content felt unstable with unexpected outbursts that would pop off suddenly. By the time I got to the last section I grew to notice a pattern of intrusive more-or-less unrelated phrases or images that made these little poems seem as though they were under some kind of attack. It's like when you are working with AI model and try turning up the temperature so the words start veering far from the direction the other parts of the text have established, only these were written long before LLMs and all that. Anyway, it inspired me to write a verse of my own to play with what I discovered. These poems take on a fresh approach unlike what I have seen by other writers, and I will be looking for more recent book of poems to see what new tricks the author has come up with.

This collection of stories was recommended to me by Netgalley based on items I read and rated before, and I am glad they did. Many have appeared previously in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. These are all stories about ordinary people, though story-universe celebrities and other people of stature occasionally wander past their lives, and their main activity is just trying to figure out how to get through their lives the best they can. There are romantic partners, siblings, parents and children, people who meet by chance, some with complicated pasts, some with uncertain futures. These might not be the kind of people I would want to read about for an entire novel but I was perfectly happy to spend time with for an hour or so. I think in each case the author provided a reasonable way for the reader to take their leave, whether or not every plot point ends up being resolved or not.

The style is the kind that will appeal to readers interested in character nuances, but don't care as much about strong suspense or drama. You have to be fine with reading while feeling uncertainty. I would personally enjoy looking at this author's previous books.

I read this book as an advance reader copy through Netgalley in exchange for sharing my review.

When I read this author's book Cherished Belonging this one had already been on my shelf so I decided to read it for Advent this year. It is different from his later book in the way it quotes spiritual literature for guidance only infrequently but the words of spiritual guides are definitely present.

It is a memoir of the work the author has done among the Latino community in Los Angeles to counteract the influence of violent gangs among the boys and girls growing up in poverty. The Homeboys community organization that he founded in turn showers him with boundless love and admiration. For many ex-gang members, he is the only reliable guide to a better, more humane, way of living and they recognize that. To most people coming to this book for the first time, the way it comes off is to put the author in the company of saints, which he tries to undercut by including the rough language and self-deprecating accounts of his own weaknesses, but I think he can't escape the characterization so easily. High profile individuals all the way up to the national level know him for his vision of a way to bring goodness out of some of the worst situations that can be imagined, and have giving him and his ministry accolades.

It isn't a chronological history but instead a series of stories over the decades which all demonstrate his heroic ability to relate to everyone as a real individual deserving of love. In many of the stories there is violence and incarceration and quite a few end up fatal for the young person he is remembering, but he never categorizes people as bad or wicked even if they have done very bad things. There is even one where a member of a gang which had killed a beloved friend of the author's was himself fighting for his life, and Fr. Boyle's reaction is to pray for that person to survive. He rejects the idea that a person who turns away from gang activity once and for all is the ideal success, preferring to see depths of worth even when the ones he ministers to are at their worst.

(Copied from Goodreads) There was an interesting setup - a superintelligent android, the man who rediscovered reading, a woman who refused to take the mind-control drugs - but there wasn't the payoff in the end that I was hoping for. The long stretches of diary entries by Paul felt like filler in places, not really fitting in to the rest of the story in any way that led somewhere. I think you are supposed to admire the way he reinvents the emotions of love and compassion for himself, but too much of it comes of as kind of obtuse. Probably for its time the way love and sex were depicted in the book were provocative although it's hard to see them that way now. For a dystopian novel there was a lot less of the atmosphere of doom around our characters than most because of the general breakdown in systems that felt to me like it didn't gibe with the idea of a superintelligent being. Perhaps it was the suicidal tendencies that Spofford harbored that ended up being expressed in the world he was supposed to take care of.

(Added 2025-12-06) I listened to the audiobook of this and discovered that I remembered exactly nothing from having read it ten years ago, characters, scenes, the way it ended. I think it was a little hard to believe the account of how Paul taught himself to read when he was young, but it was offset by making him pretty unremarkable in mostother respects. I recognize the section where he is living with the xenophobic Christian community as a critique of evangelical churches in America, which is more poignant at the present moment. it was still hard to get into the mind of Spofford the robot who turns out to have been personally responsible for many of the worst things of the world the dwindling humans were suffering. I liked the character of Mary Lou better in this re-read and the way she gets to make choices for herself in the middle part of the book. When Paul shows back up, however, it felt like she had to put up with a lot of his baggage without being able to express anything she wanted for herself and her child.

This is mostly a straightforward account of what it is like to be the subject of an attempted murder in public, to recover from life-threatening wounds, to adjust to physical and psychological damage over long months afterwards, and to learn what the most important values were in life. It includes one section of imaginary conversation between the author and his assailant which shed light on the frame of mind of the former and seems to have served a therapeutic function. To me, the tone was not one of conceit or celebration of his own superiority, but that of a man truly shaken to the core, which I found sympathetic. He finds himself forced to think back to the fatwa issued against his life over thirty years ago which took away his ability to go out in public with ease without fear of bloody violence. He was pleased to find that many people were on his side hoping for him to pull through and return to his art someday. He tells us that he had to write about this painful episode because for a while those were the only words he had to give, that the stories would not come for him until this all came out.

This book follows a pair of Irish criminals over a few decades, but specifically at an important point in their old age while they are waiting for the daughter of one of them to appear in Algeciras having gone off to Morocco. All their lives, Maurice and Charlie have engaged in criminal activities to support themselves, sometimes amassing enormous quantities of cash through the international drug trade. But the money never lasted as long as they hoped even after laundering it because of their addictions and other vices. The book spends some time from the point of view of the missing daughter, Dilly, who's been warned off of her father Maurice by her mother in her dying days. Now that Dilly is grown she understands why she should have nothing to do with them, to be free of their control and their malignant influence, and yet they still represent all she has left.

There are flashbacks going back decades that delve into the seamy side of the men's lives. There is one absolutely harrowing scene where they are observed arguing in a tavern late one night which felt electric with tension. Then there are the depictions of them isolated, wandering or on the run, on the edge of despair. The dialogue is often raw and vulgar, tending toward the violence, but it can also be profoundly evocative. The way Maurice talks about Dilly falls into a line of patter over and over again, like the refrain to a tune. The writing is not infrequently beautiful. There's a bit of a supernatural element regarding an purported ancient curse associated with the spot of land that Maurice and his wife chose to put up a housing development. It makes you think about whether their paths in life are determined by elements greater than themselves.

From the men's point of view, you can see strong emotion here, which may be love for the one they seek, in part, but also guilt and shame. These men are portrayed as bad men who have each done hateful things and yet they are in their own way compelling. That is why they wait night after night on a sliver of hope. The two men are friends, but the connection is fraught with betrayal and suspicion. Each wears scars from their association. There is no assurance that they expect some kind of forgiveness from Dilly, if she does arrive on the boat from Tangier. And yet it hangs out there. Maybe some part of them just wants a quiet reconciliation as though the worst things never happened.

An Irish story talking about two men who are waiting for a third invites comparison to Waiting for Godot. The boat of the title is ever uncertain, there are continual rumors about its status, so it's easy to see parallels. I didn't pick up a clear reason why they thought they had to carry on this vigil, but I feel like I could understand their bleak lives and why the author had to write about them.

This is a first collection from an emerging poet which ranges over many topics, particularly the neurodivergent experience and gender and relationship issues. Most are told from a first-person point of view but not all are confessional in nature. A few come across as experiments with form and feature such techniques as erasures, and I noticed that a few ventured into wordplay which I always appreciate. In my opinion it seemed better than several other poetry collections I have read, whether first-time outings or those by more established poets. I will be interested in seeing where this author's writing will go in the future.

This is another one of those books describing how to find values that are meaningful to you in life. But the big difference is the experience the author had when his daughter was born with a congenital heart defect and how that played out over decades. It was a condition that even the medical experts had problems coming up with really very reliable prognosis for the treatment. So over an extended period of time the author's family went through a series of episodes of despair and hope regained and some normal stretches of time which were interrupted by declines. Although his daughter did outlive the first estimates given by the doctors she did eventually succumb to her illness, leading her father to rediscover meaning in life afterwards. He describes a dramatic story of a time when he had lost all sense of life being worth living, which culminated in an almost mystical experience that made him change his mind.

The author works as a professor of public health, but beyond that, he took his renewed mission in life to help people discover what the true important things in a worthwhile life. By getting to know this author as a person it is easier for a reader to understand the familiar advice books of this kind tend to advocate. These include advice to avoid those illusory pleasures and things that take us away from lasting contentment, to find the value in deep relationships with others, to take care of your own health even though you know it is not something that will last forever. To use money instead of letting your money control you, to really get to know yourself through meditation and mindfulness techniques - these represent the wisdom of the ages. Nothing in the way of new ground is being broken here, but it's all valid and it's good to hear.

The author got to know spiritual teachers and ask them direct questions about what happens at the time of death. He has some useful tips on how to keep up with a commitment to daily meditation. By the end, a long time after the loss of his daughter, he takes on a hopeful tone describing a new sort of happiness. I would recommend this book for anyone who has either experienced or anticipates having to cope with grief and desolation.

This book goes all the way back before jazz itself was a genre up to the 2010s, providing an overview that even most aficionados are unlikely to be familiar with. The author writes with enthusiasm about the things a newcomer would want to know - where jazz had its stat, who was influential in changing the direction it would go, the kinds of audiences that listened to early jazz both live and recorded, the waves of re-creation it went through during the mid-century decodes as new players reacted to what went before. The author is a well known music journalist whose articles and books have won him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association. He has performed himself on piano and writes here about the struggles a practicing musician typically finds keeping up with ever increasing new ideas in the art form. He does not dive deep into music theory beyond a description of the most prevalent song forms. Nor does he try to be an encyclopedic source, concentrating on getting the newcomer excited about what they will be able to find. Nearly all the greats of jazz are mentioned by name and a brief sketch of their important contributions is provided for the reader to explore further through listening.

I had been hoping the audiobook version would have had some audio segments to go along with the points the author was making, but no such luck. There isn't an official companion recording with all the suggested listening, but when I looked I found many of them on streaming sites in the form of playlists users have compiled. I think that reading this as a physical book or ebook along with the downloadable pdf list of recent musicians worth paying attention to would actually be more convenient that the audiobook format.