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This is an excellent book filled with all sorts of things that will appeal to all sorts of girls. There are biographies of famous women, the rules to different sports, how-tos for crafts, letter writing, foreign language lessons, etc. etc. It's fun and informative. It is however a little lite. Most of the instructions are extrememly basic and if a girl actually wanted to do the described activity she'd probably need to do further reseaerch. It's also very back to basics, eschewing all electronic technology which is a definite weakness, but it's still a remarkable book encouraging girls to try new things and to break out of their comfort zones.

What would you do if you loved a girl more than life itself, but you know and events conspire to convince you that she will die if you continue to stay near her? You leave. And Meyer explores the downward spirla Bella goes through wehn Edward leaves. As a romance novelist Meyer excels almost beyond belief. The prose still lacks in smoothness. The introduction of Jacob as a serious suitor provides a definite level of inevitable heartbreak, but he never seems a serious contender which makes him seem rather pathetic. Jacob is left at loose ends which bothers me, but of course Bella and Edward end up back together ready for the next stage in their movement toward happily ever after and as I said, Meyer is the master of the romance novel.

I read it so fast and then the next two and now I've read the first three twice just like that without hardly coming up for air. Yes, it has problems. The prose can be noticeably rough, and there's one glaring gap in the logic, plus some of the explanations of things leave something to be desired. But none of this changes the fact that Meyer can definitely tell a story. It's sharp; the characters are captivating and complex; the action is gripping and this first novel of the set does a brilliant job of pulling the reader in, making us want to know what happens next.

I came to reading the book having already seen the fantastic movie and the book and movie start out pretty much identically so I was rather astounded by how much the stories diverge in the middle and not just in detail but in significant plot points and themes. I found myself truly delighted by these differences. That a story can have two such spellbinding versions written by the same author is so cool. The book is not quite as spectacular as the movie and Yvaine's fate is sadder, but it is certainly no less sweet or endearing.

Jingo is about the political machinations that start wars over silly, petty things and the uneducated prejudices that feed war mongery. In the sea an island rises up between Ankh-Morpork and Al-Khali and both countries want to claim it as their own. The assassination of an Al-Khali political leader on Ankh-Morpork soil sends both countries into a frenzy of war preparation. As it turns out the police chiefs of both countries undertake to prevent war by investigating the assassination as a criminal act. Jingo is told with Pratchett's usual masterful skill with satire and comedy and the always underlying implication that the world is far too amusing to consider taking it seriously.

An exquisite story, so deftly told. Her attention to detail, the bredth of her imagination leave me breathless. Russell writes with such detail without getting bogged down in it; her characters are beautiful individuals -- even the ones I didn't like. And the story itself is so passionate and gripping. I couldn't put the book down. I wanted to savor and enjoy every word, but I had to know what happened next, how an endeavor with such promise and apparent fatefulness could come to such a horrifyingly tragic end.

It's a faithful day-by-day recounting of events that happened to George and Kathleen Lutz when they moved into their new home in Amityville. As such, it's not bad. It's pretty dry though. The prose is not stellar and every once in a while to cue his audience that they should find a particular fact shocking Anson throws in an always slightly awkward exclamation point.

Ryrie admits right off that he expects the majority of his readers to share his beliefs. So it reads as a rhetorical manual defining the particulars of that belief, not as a conversion text, which is nice. As such it manages to be inoffensive to a non-believer like myself. However Ryrie suffers from the same problem as most philosophers and eschatalogical writers, i.e. the need to pin everything down, the need to absolutely know and define everything about the unknowable. While I often find it amusing to read such word games and logical constructs, I very seldom find them edifying or even educational. And Ryrie isn't nearly a good enough writer to be the exception.

Le Guin is amazing and this is an amazing effort. An anthropoligist from the present visits the far far future and this is the report sent back home. It's filled with poetry and myths, descriptions of rituals and ceremonies and little autobiographical sketches. In the back she has appendices and a dictionary. It's awe inspiring. As for reading it. . .that's a little more difficult. There is no plot, very little actual story, no beginning and no end. And I probably spent 3 or 4 months working my way through it. Was it worth it? Definitely. All things Le Guin are worth it. Has she written better stuff? Absolutely.

A wonderfully entertaining instructional guide on reaching enlightenment. Part history of man; part critique of other existing philosophies: it's funny; it's light; it's incorrigibly optimistic much like The Singularity is Near. But not just optimistic, Wilson strives to be pragmatic and encouraging and of course he ends up being just the least bit full of himself.

The first 100 pages are pretty excruciating. The language is beautiful but everything is dead and dying and ash-covered and nothing happens. After about page 91 things pick up but there's till no real plot and it goes from excruciating to excruciatingly heartbreaking. It's so sad and hopeless until the end with its strange "The Savages" twist. The blurb on the front refers to "the miracle of goodness." I'm not sure I saw any "miracle of goodness" but it is a testament to the tenacity of life and in the end the hopefulness. Overall it's worth reading.

An excellent book. Easy to read, concise, thoughtful and thought-provoking. Rose takes us into the world of the working class and shows how much intelligence and intellect play a part in blue collar and "unskilled" work. In so many ways he articulates ideas I've had for years. It was a real treat to read someone's well-researched authenitication of the ways in which physical labor enhances one's cognitive skills. Definitely on my list of must reads. The writing is easy to read and articulate. He elucidates his point beautifully. The two shortest chapters --one on plumbers and one on electricians -- are counterintuitively the thinnest and most strained. However both are essential to his main thesis, and their lack is due mainly to the overlap of material most of which he covers in his chapter on carpentry. It's an excellently cohesive work though and well worth the time.

I dreaded reading another book about the Holocaust. And I foud the ending really, really hard to read. However Zukas writes deftly and manages to convey total, random senselessness of the Holocaust with little pockets of hope. His narrator is Death, very much in the tradition of Terry Pratchett's "Mort." The tone works beautifully with its dry humor and its subtle sense of awe of humans. Our heroine is the scrappy, young Leisel whose father has been taken and mother, at the beginning of the book, may soon be taken by the Nazis -- for being Communists. Her brother dies right in front of her and she is haunted by him. To protect her from an unknown fate, Leisel's mother places her in foster care in Molching, Germany on Himmel St. (Himmel meaning "heaven") and in some ways -- though life on Himmel St. is hard -- it is heaven and it is filled with the sort of people one might like to meet in heaven -- though not all the characters are so likeable. It is the story of a blond, white Germany who does not agree with the Nazis -- whose foster parents do not agree with the Nazis -- who still must grow up in Nazi Germany. It's sweet and poignant and terribly, terribly tragic. And hopeful.

I know Le Guin's written more Earthsea books, but I really enjoy the trilogy -- the way it's constructed. This last book is a beautiful closing. The last great act of a great man. His life nicely progressed with the first book being about his coming into his power and his realization of the responsibility such power brings, the price such power costs. The second book an interlude where he goes on a foolish quest that nearly kills him. Then there's this last quest because bringing peace to his world isn't enough. This quest forges the next leader -- a teenage boy -- into the leader he has to be. Our hero uses himself up in this last great act. He has no power left. He returns home finishing his life with the same simplicity with which it began. It's sad, but in its own way it's also comforting and sweet.

The characters – Natalie and Owen, the narrator – are a bit. . .incredible. Well, not really incredible. Natalie’s focused in a way that most teenagers aren’t, and Owen – Owen’s very, very smart and very, very stupid. The story is very beautiful and almost tragic, but not quite. Le Guin captures the confusion and uncertainty of adolescence but the story lacks intensity. It’s told with too much detachment. Le Guin develops this voice of detachment in many of her stories with great effect, but with this slim volume I felt the voice fell flat. Still the flattest of Le Guin is more potent than the best of most writers.

It’s an interesting attempt to fictionalize Schroedinger’s Cat. It’s not bad and as usual it’s worth it to get to the end. His preoccupation with sexual relationships detracts from the plot development and often seems an obsession instead of truly adding to the story.

Tenar is chosen as a child to be High Priestess. She undergoes a ritual death and takes on her role of privilege and isolation and is an example of the ways in which darkness takes hold and perpetuates itself through ritual and tradition. Le Guin writes a stark, austere story of a girl who lives a stark, austere life. A life lived in darkness until the strange sorcerer comes and lights the cavern where light is forbidden and she sees the beauty that has been withheld all these centuries. In freeing the strange sorcerer Tenar not only frees herself from the darkness but she frees the hope and path to peace for all Earthsea. Le Guin’s pristine prose hides the darkness so that we do not know we have been buried until we see the light and feel the weight lifted. How much more perfectly can a story be told?

This book is everything a good fantasy/fairy tale/epic should be. Our young hero has a lot of growing up to do – toughening of both the body and mind. A beautiful woman is in need of rescue. There are good guys, and bad guys and those who may be somewhere in between, and of course those we’re just not sure of yet. Fantastic cities have been built and there are the requisite fairy tale creatures: elves, dwarves, a werecat, a dragon, magic and sorcery abound. Paolini paces the work nicely and though his style lacks some maturity it does not drag the story down. I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

After I Will Fear No Evil I was hesitant to pick up another Heinlein book, but we have so many on our shelves. Heinlein spends too much time emphasizing Star’s inherent femininity, making her cloying and obnoxiously obsequious. However there’s never a point where she seems to need saving and she puts a great deal of energy into broadening her hero’s horizons, expanding his mind. The twist at the end is quite suitably pulled off and definitely worth sticking around for if only because it reveals a refreshingly intelligent reason for Star’s temperament. It’s also worth sticking around for because in the end this is not a story about men and women but a clever, cutting critique of accepted moral and social conventions.

Surprisingly gripping. It’s not particularly well constructed or even believable. The “hero” is unsavory and kind of a jackass; the guys he’s defending are outlaws. The murder is almost deus ex machine. It’s a little bizarre, but there’s a hint of hope that our jackass lawyer – who’s not even particularly brilliant, just lucky – will turn things around and make good. Pretty slim appeal really, and yet I had a hard time putting it down.

The father becomes a myth figure first. The brother becomes the destroyer. The hero must and does kill this destroyer – his brother – whom he loves very much. The girl the hero loves is gone, a sort of dead, and he must wait for her to return. It’s hauntingly sad and beautifully constructed. I’m looking forward to reading more books by Mr. Holdstock.

It was an ok afternoon read, but lacked cohesive style. Her intro discusses her fear of scuba diving, but the one scene in the book about scuba diving was bland and unimpressive. She goes a little overboard with the descriptions of food and cooking in the first couple of chapters and then abandons the topic. I don’t know how much of the relationship stuff is part of the series so that part may have been fine, but I felt just a touch lost – especially some of the stuff with her niece. I felt the whole book overall was anti-climatic. Not enough build up of the suspense at the right times. It made the story less than believable.

This is my second reading of the Earthsea trilogy and I am just as enchanted as I was with the first reading. Le Guin captures the character of Ged with such clarity and without overproduction. She crafts the story of his coming of age with such a light touch without preachiness. I admire the lengths to which she takes this character even to the point of death and then brings him back.

This is from one of the most significant contributors to voice-recognition software, so he knows computers. And it’s funny how computer scientists are so positive humans will merge with technology, but brain scientists (otherwise known as neurologists) are so skeptical. Kurzweil is a nut, but he’s a pretty convincing nut. He has facts and data and graphs and proofs. What I enjoyed most though is his unbridled enthusiasm and faith. He really believes we’ll merge with computers into the next stage of evolution within his lifetime, and he is unequivocally excited about this. I love his optimism.

Brilliant. The most earthily irreverent, anti-expansionist work I’ve ever read. A family comes to Remate del Males to help expand the missionary founded by a young couple. The missionaries want to save the natives not only from their paganism but also from the catalicos who have been in the jungles of South America for hundred of years. The natives are particularly resistant to conversion and somewhat adept at playing both sides. And Lewis Moon is a Native American from South Dakota who leads a shady life and the local government official of the district won’t let him leave the area. The earth tones in which Matthiessen portrays these people in their pride, short-sightedness, bumbling, sometimes sincerity is graphic and tragic, and blind-siding. And beautiful.

The Count returns! It’s a fantastic ending to the trilogy. Angie – the girl with the ability to mentally connect to the internet – is back. As is Sally or Molly as she’s known in Neuromancer. New characters come in – Kukimo – a young, Japanese girl; and Mona – a young American junkie. There’s the damaged Slick Henry who builds fabulous, huge automatons to exorcise his demons. The plot is fun – 3Jane is jealous of Angie – now an international simstim star – and plans to kill her and replace her with Mona who naturally looks very similar and with some plastic surgery is close enough for the masses so that few will know. It’s wonderful, beautiful. Bobby and Angie are still deeply in love though through most of the book they are inexplicably separated and Bobby is deep in a personally constructed cyberspace. The story mainly centers on Angie and Mona – Angie is all grown-up fighting an addiction to a designer drug, missing Bobby, and generally having entered a state of ennui regarding stardom. Mona has been dragged into some kind of scheme by her loser boyfriend who swears this – finally – is their (his) way up. He ends up dead. Kukimo seems to be mainly an fanciful device to create new technologies and a nod to the increasing importance of Japan in technological advancement. An important detail in 1988. As usual Gibson’s prose is pristine and superbly paced. I’m still really invested Bobby’s fate, and as much as the story revolves around the women I’m most drawn to Slick Henry. Gibson doesn’t perfectly handle all the themes. The transition from biological to technological beings that both Bobby and Angie undergo is not handled with as much deftness as I would have expected. He does a much better job of this transition in All Tomorrow’s Parties. But he does make it sweet and romantic. I would say overall the book has a very sweet, romantic vibe that is touching.

Ketchum specializes rather fantastically in the psychotic serial killer. This particular volume is actually two stories. The first is filled with gratuitous sex, violence, psychosis, and murder. It’s a light fun romp. The second, “Right to Life,” has a bit more of a message and is in the end a bit more optimistic, but it manages to not be moralistic or preachy. It helps that the main character in this one isn’t the psychotic one. While in “Old Flames” evil triumphs, in “Right” good triumphs and triumphs most satisfyingly. These stories are not for the easily disturbed or those with delicate sensibilities, but they do make for a fun evening at home.

I did not go in expecting to like this book. I often find immigrant fiction maudlin and stifling in its disappointment with America or its overwhelming optimism toward American culture. So I was very surprised to find myself so captivated by Chang’s story (non-autobiographical). She writes with clarity, detail and poignancy. She informs the reader of the political climate of China during the war and Communist revolution without being preachy and mostly without taking sides. She sets up no expectations for her reader that coming to America will solve any problems, let alone all of them. Her characters, however, feel that optimism to a certain extent. Her prose is gorgeous. Her characters are beautifully developed . . . overall it’s just so mesmerizing that I’ve even sent it along to my sisters as something worth reading.

A beautiful example of the flexibility of Le Guin’s writing with parts of it being official reports, parts of it a record of a people’s myths, and parts excerpts from a person’s diary. She accomplishes the study of gender that Heinlein so clumsily failed at in I Will Fear No Evil. And she does it so well. How does a man live among and relate to a people who have no true gender? Le Guin proceeds to answer this and she also, in a way no one has ever done before, shows me the true bias and danger of using the male pronoun as the gender neutral pronoun – the way Gentry Ai so effectively silences the feminine. It’s stunning, brutal and bittersweet. A friend of mine says it belongs in the best 50 books ever written in the English language. I’m inclined to agree.

I had so much fun on this trip. I loved the Count – this wannabe technogeek who’s just a punk. Something about Count Zero really tugged and that’s the first time one of Gibson’s characters has really gotten to me. Even if I’m not technically savy enough to get his title. I also liked the loa which have this mystical edge. Of course it’s as technologically hip and as gritty as any of his stories and in some ways a continuation of the Neuromancer. Overall it’s a better effect than Neuromancer – possibly because it’s Gibson’s second novel. It works really well.

In some ways Heinlein writes a brilliant dissertation on the nature of identity, the power of biology, and the difference between men and women in a story that is engaging and thought-provoking. Except that it’s all about sex. The book may as well have been called The Book of Getting Laid, because all the characters do is think about and have sex. And then on top of being rather tedious with the sex, all the beautiful, young, sex goddess women are horny for old men. And I do mean old – 60s and 70s and one 120 year old. All the women think about is having sex, seducing the old men, and maybe – occasionally – having babies. At least every once in a while the men think about money and the law or something. It’s misogynistic in the extreme. Which is too bad.

Faith Crowell practices trompe l’oeil – a technique of painting illusions and Hitchcock uses this theme of illusions repeatedly – sometimes prettily, but sometimes clumsily. Her prose is unremarkable. Her characters are mostly bland and flat. Harry Pitt is the most remarkable character and even he’s a bit too molded. The whole effect is not one of a master craftsman but of someone having tried a little too hard, and perhaps who isn’t really capable of the deft subtlety necessary for this story.

Gibson’s debut novel defines a generation of sci fi. It also harkens back to the beliefs of John Campbell – an extremely influential sci fi magazine editor in the 1940s and ‘50s. Gibson excels at taking existing technology or technological ideas and moving them forward. He has some ideas of the future of corporations that are similar enough to mine as to make it utterly fascinating to see his visions. The book is well-paced, filled with his quite fabulous almost believable people and it’s all so very pretty in that post-modern sort of way.

There’s nothing like reading a book I loved as a child to see how much my tastes have matured and been refined. The writing is not noteworthy or even engaging. A few years ago I read an article for a class I was taking that harshly criticized the Nancy Drew series for its white upper middle class elitist tone. So of course I spent most of the book noticing how valid the critique is. The negative view of the old, aristocratic class in all its decay; the idea that the poor just need a helping hand – a little lift; the portrayal of the African-American servant as being totally belligerent and complicit in the belligerence of her employer. Obviously the Drews were wise to hire someone white as their servant. These attitudes and unspoken comparisons are obvious. What really caught my attention though is the optimism the writer (for whom “Keene” is only a pseudonym of course) has toward technology. This attitude that is so prevalent in the early twentieth century. A segment of the society, apparently a much larger segment than exists today, believed unequivocally that technology would be the panacea to all the world’s ills. Telephones, electricity, the scientific method. As much as I view technological progress with the jaded eye of my generation I must admit it was a sweet nostalgia to remember once upon a time we, my fellow countrymen and mostly forbearers, believed with untarnished innocence that we were on the verge of utopia heralded by the harnessing of electricity for everyday use and the advent of the automobile. For that optimism alone this was worthy of a couple of hours of an evening.

It’s hard for me to know whether or not to recommend this book at all. Parts of it are brilliant, breath-taking with such a fascinating command of the English language and such youthfully exuberant joie de vivre that I want to rush out and tell everyone to pick this book up right away. Behold the intensity of optimism and let it carry you away. But then some passages are exceedingly dull. Plodding and monotonous, I wondered while reading them if the book would ever end. And then there’s his arrogance, his lack of sympathy or feeling for anyone. The impression that he only really respects philosophers he’s never met and a group of compadres whom he parties with every week but otherwise has no knowledge of or outside contact with. His attitude towards his friends is condescending enough but his attitude toward women is. . . definitely not enlightened. His view of sex, and he is famously graphic, is worshipful and comprises some of the best passages of the book. Miller however treats the ecstasy of sex as an essentially solitary journey. Women are contemptible sluts whom sex should be performed on. It’s not that they’re interchangeable, and one should have sex with as many women as possible to further the journey of the self, to free the soul, but while sex with different women is different, the woman herself is hardly worth considering. And consensual sex is not something Miller feels particularly important. In the end I am left exhausted and heart-broken. Such a brilliant mind holding such an indefensible position.

This collection of short stories shows a developing William Gibson. The intro is written by Bruce Sterling who co-wrote one of the stories and later co-wrote The Difference Engine. Not surprisingly Sterling writes a glowing introduction. For the most part Sterling’s praise of Gibson is well-deserved. Gibson’s prose is highly charged. His view of future technology which he so deftly creates is complex so it can be at once hopeful and bleak, our salvation and our downfall. Creating technology from an extension of what already exists is his forte. This means that sometimes his plot lines and character development can be shallow and seem to be repetitious. Many of his main characters are male techno-geeks who operate outside the system and while they may not be exact replicas of one another, they often bear a blurring resemblance. At his best however Gibson overcomes this handicap fusing a vivid vision of the near future with powerful plot and carefully created characters. My favorite I think would be “The Gernsback Continuum” which has all the shiny optimism so reminiscent of the sci fi of the 30s and 40s. It’s in stories like this one that the reader can see that though he favors a claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic, technology-infused story, he is beautifully capable of writing outside that paradigm. He collaborates well. Despite the fact that The Difference Engine falls flat, “Red Star, Winter Orbit” is well written, well plotted, and really a rather extraordinary nod to the ingenuity of Americans. The collaborations with John Shirley and Michael Swanwick are also solid. Overall this collection is an extraordinary overview of one of sci fi’s best.

In what Ursula K. Leguin calls a “story suite” Maeve Binchy tells the tales of individual villagers from a small village in Ireland. The characters lives intertwine form an equisite story of Ireland in a backwater village in the 50s and 60s. Binchy creates amazing detail viewing the characters from both their own perspectives and from the perspectives of other villagers. She tells of events from multiple perspectives as through a prism. This multiple perspective works in two ways. First it provides a rich, complex story, but it also explores the way we view ourselves versus the way others view us. And it does this with an amazing lack of self-consciousness. The richness of detail, the finely drawn characters in a rich, sweet, poignant story draws the reader in.

A Wrinkle in Time, if memory serves, was the very first sci fi/fantasy novel I ever read. I was in the sixth grade at the time and it began a life long love affair with the genre. L’Engle however does not translate well into adult reading. She tends to be simplistic, overly moralistic with characters that are flat and a plot line that is convoluted and contrived. This book is a later one in the series about Meg and Charles Wallace. It begins with the President asking for Mr. Murry’s advice because Branzillo – a mad South American dictator – is threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb which – for reasons that are unclear – will end all life on Earth. What exactly Mr. Murry is to do is unclear, but Charles Wallace goes to a big flat rock and is guided by a unicorn through time to change the past to change the present. From her bedroom, Meg kyth’s with Charles Wallace to help him through his journey. The flashback scenes of this imaginary past are vivid and engaging, utterly charming. It’s really too bad the entire novel couldn’t have consisted of this alternative history line.

This is one in a series of books by these two authors, but one that works as a single novel. It’s about the lightest murder mystery I’ve ever read – humorous and romantic. Taking place in a Mayberry RFD-type town in South Carolina it is definitely rated G while playing at being risqué. Our heroine’s favorite exclamation is “Holy Cow!” It’s so cute it’s almost exasperating. It’s not the most clever, or best-written novel I’ve every read and the ending is quite jarringly thought provoking – a clunky attempt to give the story some weight. It does however work as a light read on some quiet afternoon.

A brilliant satire keeping a sharp, witty edge throughout. I think this is probably Heinlein's best book and certainly his funniest.

This is the first book I’ve read by Bruce Sterling but the fourth or fifth I’ve read by Gibson. The prose does not disappoint Gibson fans and the plot is as labyrithian as a fan would expect. Even the philosophy is ken. The book however still manages to be vague and off target. It’s an alternative history novel and yet many of the alternative history “facts” or “characters” seem superfluous and clumsy. Perhaps the authors enjoyed creating the alternate Sam Houston, but the character still manages to seem completely contrived. As an overall effort it falls flat.

Part mystery novel part vampire novel this story takes the reader to the London of 1906. Someone is murdering vampires! Hambly recreates London in superb detail: the streets, the clothing, traveling habits, the science. She spends quite a bit of time on the science and on the idea that vampirism is a disease with its own peculiar long-term symptoms. She handles the scientific details very deftly. Hambly shies away from having a true villain and so her characters all come off as a lithe too good to be true, but they carry the story smartly. She does drag a bit overdescribing the ways in which her main character – James Asher’s – enlightened wife’s scientific pursuits, but I’ve definitely seen worse. She curbs the tendency to dwell with some success. The ending continues her blending of the scientific and gothic. The theing that really bothered me was her constant insistence that everything in gaslight looks “primrose.” It’s a beautiful word choice once, but she must use it a dozen times and after awhile I began to wish she’d be a little more creative and a little less romantic.

This is a great book for anyone interested in being a personal trainer and especially for someone who would like to be in business for themselves as a personal trainer. It’s well-written, well-organized and thorough. Peragine constantly stresses the positive while at the same time underscoring the absolute need to love being a personal trainer. He’s goes over all the types of information someone needs to go into business for themselves including coming up with a business plan and marketing strategy that will impress possible investors. I love the checklists that are interspersed throughout the book. He has a checklist for everything from determining if I would be suited to a career as a personal trainer to one for when all the different federal business taxes are due. I just really think anyone considering being a self-employed personal trainer should invest in this book as an invaluable resource.

Every college freshman needs a copy of this book. It’s full of really useful advice on how to handle the expectations of college classes which can be so different from high school. There isn’t any actual numbering of the ways to make studying easier, and Roubidoux relies very heavily on bullet points which makes a straight read-through a little dry. The bullet points, however, make for excellent easy reference if I’m just looking for specific pointers. I thought Parts 5 “Handling Special Circumstances” and 6 “Avoiding Studying Downfalls” should have been reversed. Part 6 is full of tidbits that every student can use, but Part 5 has chapters like “Study Abroad” which aren’t going to apply to every student. The book, though, is so thorough that I feel like any situation that I could possibly run into is covered. It’s a really great way to help the reader get the most out of their college experience without burning out or flunking out.