Good fun reading about his experiences, though I'm sure much of them are completely made up.

One of the better Grishams lately. It's a sign of the times we live in that even the most commercial writer in the world feels the need to write a book decrying the corrupted state of the systems we've put in place.

I was shaking with anger at the end of the book about the unjustness of it all.

Uplifting book with a refreshing lack of sentimentality.

Good writing, tight plot, but in the end it's too clever by half. It's difficult to get really into something when you know you're being manipulated and have no idea what's really going on.

Hornby's a good writer, so the book goes by fast and is entertaining, but that is a different thing from saying it's "good". To me at least, "good" means something permanent: Am I going to remember this book? Are people still going to read this book 50 or 100 years from now? Did I learn something from the book that I can apply in my own life?

This book doesn't fulfill any of those criteria. It's full of dumb people acting even more dumbly. Hornby's portrayal of teenagers seems forced and unnatural; they seem both childish and too mature at the same time.

The skateboarding seems thrown in for no purpose other than to try to make the book more "hip": it has absolutely no purpose in the plot and could be replaced by any other hobby without changing anything else.

So, definitely a minor Hornby.

The book equivalent of a Big Mac: enjoyable enough but ultimately forgettable.

Surely up there with the best of them. I've read this before, maybe 15 years ago, and I remember feeling sad for the old guy at the end. It's interesting that this time I didn't: He may have lost the fish due to no fault of his, but he gained something more in the process.

It's a good book, but it's from 1992, and it may have been groundbreaking at that time, but all through the book I couldn't help thinking "The Wire did this better". 599 pages of text can't really compare to 5 seasons of a TV series focusing more or less on the exact same subject, covering a much longer time period and a much larger cast of characters.

Sometimes you see an okay movie based on a book but have a feeling that the book itself might be much better, so you buy the book and it turns out you were right. It happened with Richard Russo and it's now happened again.

All the characters, naturally, have much more depth in the book compared to the movie, and the book is full of intelligent insights about many aspects of life, and aging specifically. Being in my thirties now and so on the downhill side of physical and mental health, it's a topic of much interest to me.

I read the book in a day, which hasn't happened in a long time. I wasted a month trying to read "David Copperfield" by Dickens but got nowhere, and the end result was that I did no reading at all. I wonder when I'll learn to abandon books sooner when it becomes clear it's just not going to happen...

The first half is quite good, the usual Houellebecqian commentary on everything, but the second half veers off course badly and the end is downright bizarre.

Better than the movie, which focused way too much on his relationships with the random people he met on the road. In the book they occupy the role they should have: minor background characters in the story of his journey to his ultimate fate.

Also missing from the movie, but present in the book, and basically the reason why I bought it, is how Krakauer uses this tale as an example of a phase most young men go through.

About what one expects from Houellebecq. He extrapolates trends found in modern Western societies and pushes them to their limits. Sometimes he's right, sometimes he's somewhat right, and sometimes he's flat-out wrong, but it's always entertaining and thought-provoking.

Daniel's inability to enjoy his life irritated me though. If a reasonably young man has 42 million euros, surely he can do better than have sex, as Houellebecq puts it, "with Romanian whores who won't suck you off without a condom".

Calling this 81-page novella a book is not justified, but whatever. Houellebecq could scrawl on a napkin and it'd probably still be entertaining reading.

I did not think there was much more I needed to know about why religion is bad or how to fight it, but I was wrong. Reading this book should be mandatory for everyone in the world.

If a book has a blurb by Stephen King proclaiming it as the "best horror novel of the new century", I'm buying it. The author is Scott Smith, whose previous book "A Simple Plan" was turned into a very good movie.

I haven't read the previous book (but I've now added it to my todo-list), but the movie and this book both share a similar concept: Take an intriguing premise and follow it realistically to its logical endpoint. Sounds simple, but it isn't. Much of fiction is ruined by the reader going "WTF is he doing that, is he braindead?" at one or more of the characters. In this book, I can't really see anything I would've done differently had I been one of the characters.

I don't want to say anything about the plot since it would just ruin the experience for anyone who has not read it yet. Simply put, if you want a book you can't put down you need to buy this book.