Reviews and Comments

Soon I Will Be Invincible is one of my favourite superhero books. Sadly, Fight Me is not as good. I did love the characters and the writing is competent, but ... there was no ending, no real resolution to anything. It almost dragged this down to three stars, and I cannot really blame anyone who tosses the book at a wall in disgust.

Still, while reading, I enjoyed this immensely, just couldn't put it down. I just wish etc.

I found myself liking this not at all. The stories blended into one another, felt formulaic and pointless. Lovecraftian doom, purple prose, insinuations of great revelations which never come ... Barron hadn't yet found himself, I think. But being a completionist, of course I had to read it as well.

Definitely a product of its time -- a bunch of short stories, where the protagonists are physics and general left-brain approach to problems. The writing is bare-bones, the characters are paper-thin, the politics are facepalmingly dated. My three stars are because I like physics in my sci-fi, but it's more like 2.5 stars really.

Picking up the first Isaiah Coleridge book, I could never have guessed stuff would escalate to this. But it's all good. Think I'm becoming a Laird Barron fan.

Occasionally I get the feeling I might like to do martial arts again. Then I remember everything I disliked about doing martial arts, and stick to my climbing.

Angry White Pyjamas is evertything I disliked about doing martial arts, taken to absurd extremes. The narrator decides to enroll in a SRS XTRM aikido class in Tokyo, while making observations about Japan and the Japanese. The narrator is English. The observations are uncomfortable to read, the class is worse.

The whole book is a treatise on how people turn themselves into tools for the powerful in search of machismo. I have no idea if it was intended, but that was how it read to me. It wasn't a bad book in itself, I was never bored, only somewhat repulsed.