Big John

No.

This book was horrible, I expected a professional comedy show writer to have lots of funny or interesting things to say. There was literally nothing not one thing funny in this book. And it read (listened) like a boring geek trying to summarize the highlights of his high school journal.

Ya

Great story about an exceptionally smart and colorful individual. Don't be intimidated by the subject and his exceptionally brilliant work, you don't need to be a genius to enjoy this one.

No for Fforde and yes for Duerdan.

No.

This book is a non stop reference fest to classic books, so much so that the author will repeatedly stall the plot line to mention more classic literature, but in this world the literature can be changed, problem is I've only read about half of the stuff noted in here, so I don't know what's been changed.

You know those long running TV. Shows where a few seasons in the producer creates an episode just for the people who have been watching the show since the start, a pat on the back to make them smile...one that if you were to watch without knowing the characters it would be boring as hell and suck? That's this book, except the series is classic literature...

Funny thing is...well okay unfunny thing is, the author swears like a pirate with a corneal paper cut, even names one of the characters a cuss word...I never minded swearing, I do so way todo much myself, but the author is like a 3rd grader who just learned how to swear and thinks its exciting and funny every time...it's not, the name thing was funny for about three seconds, but that's a major character in the book...so now its stopped being funny and is just stupid...but frankly that's in character for this whole book, which halfway through still sucks.

This was the last book I had while stuck on wildland fire fighting duty, I forced myself through half of it and in the end actually chose silence over the remainder of this book.

I thought this was (because of the title) an introduciton to Zen, nope, it's a book written for experts encouraging them to have a beginners mind (whilst using terminology only the well learned in Zen would understand. the book opened talking about how important posture is durring meditation, included in this posture is the idea that one should be able to put your feet on your hamstrings while meditating, good idea, i've seen the pictures of people meditating like this, but i'm 6'3" 250 Lbs, i don't bend like that...i kind of lost interest after that.