Customer Comments

I'm a huge fan of wordplay, so I had pretty high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, I felt it was more "meh" than masterful. It's a blisteringly quick read (as would be expected) and some of the mnemonics/acronyms were amusing (using the acronym for the Screen Actors Guild as a mnemonic for the members of Simon and Garfunkel got an actual guffaw out of me) but, most of them were like an SNL skit: only kind of funny to begin with, made worse by going on too long. It would make a cute "white elephant" gift though - especially with the illustration of the elephant on the cover.

Great fun and a worthy follow-up to The Magicians!

Dense, but thorough. Not for the casual Twain fan or someone who just wants a collection of his witticisms (although those are in there). More for the Twain completist or researcher - I suspect this will end up being a very useful volume to connect his life with literary critiques of his works.

Whether you consider this a love story, mystery, or science fiction, this poignant novel will hit you where you live. Ishiguro once again shows himself to be the master of the emotional epic. His spare but evocative prose draws you in, word by word, sentence by sentence - and by the time the ending is revealed, it's like losing hold of a beloved balloon and watching it float away. We can naively believe, once out of sight, it will continue on its journey, but the grimness of reality tells us otherwise.