Loved this. Grabbed it for the Kindle. Pollack has been one of my favorite character actors since forever and he did a great interview with Marc Maron that I just got around to listening to. This book is basically a “How I got to be where I am” starting with Pollack lip synching to Bill Cosby records and ending up with a fellow poker player turning him on to Twitter and him getting an internet-based chat show. Fun read, lots of name dropping, Pollack’s charm and self-deprecating humor and breadth of experience are interesting to poke around in.

It’s hard to tell when you like a popular fiction writer that a lot of people don’t like and they say “Don’t read his latest book” if they’re saying that because the book is a bad book of his or just a bad book. I did not like this book. I liked other Dan Brown books. It seemed to suffer from lack of editing, was too long and had a long rambly bla bla bible part at the end that was gratuitous and a little insulting. I like basic puzzle-ish books and Dan Brown’s level of “Hey let me tell you about this symbol” stuff is fine with me. But this story sort of wrapped up and then had a super long denoument part that was a snore and mostly talked about the bible which is a bit of symbolism that has sort of been done to death and I didn’t need to read more about. You may like it, I did not.

I enjoyed the little parts of this book that talk about nerdy library/archives trivia stuff. The plot was one of the more far-out ones that Meltzer has come up with and was not my favorite. Too jumbled up, too all over the place, too much you looking at the book thinking “Why are they doing this, that looks like it will get them into trouble...” and sure enough, it does.

Second book I’ve read for the kindle! This one was not as interesting. Had a lot of characters I sort of couldn’t get into, no characters I really enjoyed. Interesting story about the history of Superman and the search for an ancient book, a lot of son-father imagery and exposition. Some good cameos by librarians but ultimately not that awesome, though still a great page turner.

First book I’ve ever read on a kindle! I’ve liked this series since I started it and it’s been even more interesting since I’ve been watching Downton Abbey. A lot of cultural parallels and, in this book a pretty straightforward similarity where a woman dies in childbirth and her daughter is given the name of the recently departed mother. Maybe that sort of thing was a regular occurrence but for me to see it happening twice in a week because of being involved with these two series, I was surprised. I also like these books now that the title character Lady Jane is married to the guy she was all intrigued by in the first three books. I like some smoldering romance as much as the next person but not for books and books. There are a lot of interesting discussions and explorations of what it means to be in a partnership or in a marriage that come up that make better reading than smoky looks across stuffy drawing rooms. Liked this book, will read future ones.