
Salamander Sun and Other Poems
Book
Pia Tafdrup is one of Denmark's leading poets. She has received the Nordic Literature Prize -...

The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend
Book
A gripping retelling of the timeless epic of romance, enchantment and adventure, Peter Ackroyd's The...

The Master and Margarita
Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky and Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov
Book
Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a fiercely satirical fantasy that remained...

The Portrait of a Lady
Book
Regarded by many as Henry James's finest work, and a lucid tragedy exploring the distance between...

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition
Book
Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary...

Manabeshima Island Japan: One Island, Two Months, One Minicar, Sixty Crabs, Eighty Bites and Fifty Shots of Shochu
Book
More than just a Japan travel guide, Manabeshima Island Japan paints a colorful and entertaining...

Realistic Simulation of Financial Markets: Analyzing Market Behaviors by the Third Mode of Science: 2016
Hajime Kita, Kazuhisa Taniguchi and Yoshihiro Nakajima
Book
This book takes up unique agent-based approaches to solving problems related to stock and their...

Washington Square
Henry James, Philip Horne and Martha Banta
Book
Henry James's classic tale of romance in urban nineteenth-century America, Washington Square is...

Sarah (7799 KP) rated The Last Librarian in Books
Jul 24, 2020
The good thing about this book is that the idea behind it. Set in a futuristic society where a pandemic has wiped out a large part of the population, the thought behind it is fairly relevant and in keeping with today’s events and you can almost imagine that this could’ve easily happened today. That however is where the good stops. The story is far too overly complicated and predictable, and also pretty dull. It doesn’t help that the author has decided that despite being set less than 80 years from today, everything has changed - the language, the continents, technology to the point where everything has a ridiculous and laughable new name. I never understand why authors try and rename everything just because it’s classed as a futuristic book, it’s entirely unnecessary. And then there’s the acronyms. Within the first half of the book so many silly acronyms are introduced that I quickly lost the will to even try and remember what they stood for, it’s far too many.
The characters are whiny and self absorbed, with a large part of the chapters taken up by their monotonous and rambling inner monologuing. And then they all seem to inexplicably talk in literary quotes all the time, to constantly stress their self importance and the worthiness of the books. The relationships between characters also seem poorly developed yet progress far too quickly.
Overall I really didn’t enjoy this book, and the fact that it has been set up for 2 further sequels doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I’d have to be very desperate to read those.

Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
Book
In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the...