Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
This second book in the series is the weakest of all the Harry Potter books. It's too similar to it's predecessor and feels like it's treading water in terms of the greater story arc.
Don't get me wrong - it's still a fun read and has a couple of great sequences. I particularly love the diary of Tom Riddle and whole Polyjuice potion storyline.
I guess it's the almost videogame structure of the plot that makes it feel more generic and weak in comparison to the later books. It's all very linear in a 'solve this puzzle', 'play this sports section', 'gather these items' and 'face the big bad' way (Lego Harry Potter is one the best games I've played in years by the way). Now the flaw of the later, larger books is that there's too much in the matter of sideplots and digression. Failing to have any of that makes this book seem kind of perfunctory.
Mercury Falls
Satiric apocalyptic fantasy. A pleasant enough read but absolutely nothing extraordinary.
Chuck Klosterman IV
A loose collection of artist profiles, opinion columns and random other bits of writing. Klosterman is a very readable writer but can take some very annoying positions on popular culture.
He's got a whole more broadminded than thou thing going on, combined with a popular is good except when I don't like it stance. Like I say, annoying.
Foundation
One of the legendary books of science fiction has always been a huge disappointment to me. Essentially a loosely framed series of short stories with no sense of conclusion
Kitchen Confidential
Anthony Bourdain, thanks in large part to this book, now spends a lot of his time travelling the world making TV shows about cookery. Back when he wrote this he was the executive chef at a successful brasserie in Manhattan specializing in 'peasant-style' French cooking.
What he does in this book is tell his life story in terms of how he fell in love with food, how he ended up becoming a cook, how he nearly threw it all away before getting his life in order. He also throws in a few interesting truths about how the catering industry works and what it takes to run a successful kitchen in terms of equipment and attitude.
Sadly this book really doesn't stand up to a second reading, much of his attitude coming off as false, more of a schtick than his real personality. After all, he comes from a comfortable background, had every educational opportunity and any hardship he went through was largely down to his own sense of entitlement.
If you've never read it before, borrow yourself a copy and enjoy it for what it is.
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About
Millington's debut novel is inspired by some of the crazy and hilarious stories about his relationship with his long-term German girlfriend (and mother of his children) as detailed here.
The novel takes these anecdotes and fits them into a loosely plotted story of dodgy dealings and shifty politics within the university that employs his lead character, Pel.
Loosely plotted is generous. It basically amounts to a serious of very funny sketches that kind of hang together but not really.
Then again any book that features Laser tag, Triads, burial grounds and Library and IT in-jokes is hard to dislike entirely.
It really is frequently laugh out loud funny but then again if you've been following Millington since he used to write letters into Amiga Power, like I have, this will come as no surprise.
Hopefully one day he'll get a hang of the telling a complete story thing and he'll have something that I can praise to the hilt.
Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
The last book of the Paul Carpenter trilogy further illustrates the law of diminishing returns, so much so that the last third of the book struck me as utterly incoherent.
I can only say that it was a reasonably enjoyable ride for all it's incoherence, but that I'm very glad that he's stopped writing about Carpenter now and I don't have to buy any more books in the series. (Being a completist is a bitch).
If you like Tom Holt, have read the first two, and don't mind the random pointless, incoherent plot twists too much then you'll probably feel like you haven't wasted your time reading this.
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