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Ich habe das Buch geschenkt bekommen, ohne irgendetwas darüber zu wissen, nicht einmal die Gattung, ob Fiktion, Essay oder Sachbuch, und das war sehr schön so, weil ich oft überrascht wurde.
At the age of seventeen, on Wednesday, November 21, 1984 I stumbled on a tv play on German daytime televison. Black and white, originally produced in 1965. I liked it very much.
25 years later I found out that play had been was a version of Chesterton's "Magic"; by then I had read quite a few of his novels and stories. Now that I finally read the play: Four stars. Less funny and more serious than much of Chesterton's other work, more concise, and effectively spooky. But that may have been because I kept thinking of that excellent old tv production. Hasn't been on since then, apparently.
Masters of Atlantis is a cock-eyed journey into an America of misfits and con-men, oddballs, and innocents. Lamar Jimmerson is …
A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore …
The enigmatic villain of The Man Who Was Thursday, the curious puzzle solutions of The Club of Queer Trades, but less dynamic than either, less frantic and hilarious action. Still, good.
The easily-guessed plot twist and some of the characterization reminded me of Ray Bradbury's story "The Best of All Possible Worlds", and Curt Goetz's play "Hokuspokus" - both younger works, though in Goetz's case only by a good dozen years.
A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore …
The enigmatic villain of The Man Who Was Thursday, the curious puzzle solutions of The Club of Queer Trades, but less dynamic than either, less frantic and hilarious action. Still, good.
The easily-guessed plot twist and some of the characterization reminded me of Ray Bradbury's story "The Best of All Possible Worlds", and Curt Goetz's play "Hokuspokus" - both younger works, though in Goetz's case only by a good dozen years.
The witty chronicles of a stable of young London barristers, narrated by their former tutor, …
Very entertaining. If the characters weren't so charmingly Wodehouselike, you might call them frightful yuppies in the making. Still, they are very very funny.
The story is told in an intriguing and effective way; most of the characters are far away from the scene of the crime, they (and we) learn about developments via the postal service and the electric telephone, and the temporal offset of these various forms of communication is used very satisfyingly. One of the main characters we never meet in person.
Not long after the middle of the novel we are told by the garrulous yet curiously distant narrator that now all the necessary information to solve the crime has been presented, although the narrator at that point hadn't made the connections. Both of which is neat. Unfortunately, the solution itself at the end is rather far-fetched, and something of a letdown. But then, you don't …
Very entertaining. If the characters weren't so charmingly Wodehouselike, you might call them frightful yuppies in the making. Still, they are very very funny.
The story is told in an intriguing and effective way; most of the characters are far away from the scene of the crime, they (and we) learn about developments via the postal service and the electric telephone, and the temporal offset of these various forms of communication is used very satisfyingly. One of the main characters we never meet in person.
Not long after the middle of the novel we are told by the garrulous yet curiously distant narrator that now all the necessary information to solve the crime has been presented, although the narrator at that point hadn't made the connections. Both of which is neat. Unfortunately, the solution itself at the end is rather far-fetched, and something of a letdown. But then, you don't read this mystery for the plot.
When her personal copy of the current Finance Act is found a few metres away …
Very entertaining. If the characters weren't so charmingly Wodehouselike, you might call them frightful yuppies in the making. Still, they are very very funny.
The story is told in an intriguing and effective way; most of the characters are far away from the scene of the crime, they (and we) learn about developments via the postal service and the electric telephone, and the temporal offset of these various forms of communication is used very satisfyingly. One of the main characters we never meet in person.
Not long after the middle of the novel we are told by the garrulous yet curiously distant narrator that now all the necessary information to solve the crime has been presented, although the narrator at that point hadn't made the connections. Both of which is neat. Unfortunately, the solution itself at the end is rather far-fetched, and something of a letdown. But then, you don't …
Very entertaining. If the characters weren't so charmingly Wodehouselike, you might call them frightful yuppies in the making. Still, they are very very funny.
The story is told in an intriguing and effective way; most of the characters are far away from the scene of the crime, they (and we) learn about developments via the postal service and the electric telephone, and the temporal offset of these various forms of communication is used very satisfyingly. One of the main characters we never meet in person.
Not long after the middle of the novel we are told by the garrulous yet curiously distant narrator that now all the necessary information to solve the crime has been presented, although the narrator at that point hadn't made the connections. Both of which is neat. Unfortunately, the solution itself at the end is rather far-fetched, and something of a letdown. But then, you don't read this mystery for the plot.
Jack London's dystopian vision of the future. Sixty years after Great Red Death, a scarlet plague, wipes out mankind, a …
