Pretty cool idea for the origin of Vampires (but I kind of like C. S. Friedman’s pseudo-evolutionary ideas in The Madness Season better) and some dramatic scenes, but fairly tedious on the whole. I’ve skimmed a couple of her other books. Competent, but not really my cup of tea.
People who like this sort of thing will like this.
The best tellings of any mythology I have ever read. The first stories sound like translations, but as the book gets underway Crossley-Holland finds his own voice and the characters come alive. Loki is given a development from mischievous to malignant that makes dramatic sense.
Although the weakest volume in the series, it ends with the story in which Gaiman finds his voice and the character of Morpheus the Dream-King comes sharply into focus. The rest of the series is wonderful, chilling, funny, tragic, hopeful and done just exactly right. Story telling of the best sort.
A gem. Half the book teaches the Common Lisp programming language from elements through optimization, and most importantly, teaches how to think in Common Lisp.
The other half of the book recreates several classic AI programs, covering the theory and presenting complete implementations. The sections on Natural Language Processing go right up to the state of the art at the time of publication (Norvig worked on the Verbmobil project.)
I love everything of Gaiman’s that I’ve read. Neverwhere was first written as a teleplay for the BBC. I’ve watched it: it was pretty bad. I read the book first, and loved it. Typical Gaiman - characters you care about, Good vs Evil, death and dreams and a world you’d like to be part of for its strangeness and charm, and despite its dangers and discomforts.
The key character of the Marquis is much more interesting in the novel. The actor in the teleplay was quite good, and played the character something like Dr. Who - arrogant, manipulative, but not really as much in control of the situation as he’d like you to believe. The novelized character is more mysterious, more in control, more magisterial rather than brash, and consequently scarier. The comic duo of the villains were also much more terrifying in the book, while still managing to serve as a form of comic relief. In the teleplay they were too clownish, and they overacted.
“The wings of Angels and Devils are very much the same, though the wings of Devils are better kempt” - or something very like that. And though I love both Gaiman and Pratchett, I can’t tell who wrote that line. Wonderful book.