Review: Ringo: With a Little Help

Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Starr
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Here is a case of the value of information vs the presentation: I have read plenty of Beatle books, but never much about Ringo himself. They always focus on the songwriters, leaving Ringo quite underrepresented. This book seeks to tell Ringo's story.

But holy cow, the editing is just awful. Frequently whole sentences and paragraphs are repeated, slightly reworded but with otherwise identical content. It's almost like the author wrote a couple of versions of a particular thought with the intention of deleting it but then forgot to remove the alternate version. And it happens all the time. It makes for a very sloppy book.

I don't blame the author here, though. The publisher, editor, and copyeditor should have caught this.

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Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One tends to be afraid of reading series out of order. You never know what important things you'll miss, but it is very likely that you'll miss key points. Not here. The first novel (but not first story) set with the Oxford Time Travelers is Doomsday Book, but it gave you just about as much info going in as this one does. Read away, order irrelevant.

At any rate, the story is about nothing. It's practically a Victorian Seinfeld. I mean, there is a plot, something to do with a lady obsessed with rebuilding Coventry Cathedral to its exact condition the day it was destroyed in the firebombings in WW2. But it's not what it's about but how it gets there. It almost feels like a Vonnegut novel in the utter ordinariness of the characters, how even with the weirdest circumstance, people are just fundamentally focused on their own needs and wants. (Obviously, I suppose). But it's so pointless. So inconsequential.

DOesn't sound like a recommendation, does it? Well, it is. Read it.

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Review: Doomsday Book

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this book is an exercise in patience. For several hundred pages, nothing really happens. You have the impression that lots of things are about to happen, but they don't and don't for quite a while. I wonder if that was intentional: the characters all had to deal with the fact that they were stymied in any attempt to figure out was going on. We the readers are in exactly the same position. We just have to keep waiting until it all comes together.

It was a trying effort, but the quality of writing certainly made it work. I will say I preferred the sequel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which I read first at no loss. There isn't much connective tissue between the two. They are really quite different stories.

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