At one point in my life fat fantasy was my genre of choice, but I’ve found myself moving more and more away from that. I decided to test the waters again with this Robin Hobb trilogy, and as much as I enjoyed parts of it I am sorry I did.

It starts off slow, and I only found myself getting into it toward the end of the first book. When you consider that’s already an 800 page investment, there are better things I could have been doing with my time.

A lot of the writing in this trilogy is just bad. An almost constant use of cliché (“her traitor mind” anyone?). Contemptible characters are made likeable with no believable character growth to get us from one point to the other. Other characters remain contemptible, but are cast by the author in a positive light anyway. Jane Austen misunderstandings abound in the third book to keep things going – I mean heaven forbid the book weight in at less than 900 pages after all.

For all of that, the ideas that make this a fantasy novel were solid. Original ideas, some interesting characters, a thought out society, historical background, etc.

The poor writing quality just left me questioning myself though. I previously read (and very much enjoyed) her Assassins books. Were they better written? Or did I just have poor taste then? Maybe I’m just over fat fantasy. Sure it’s interesting, but cliché is pretty much par for the course (boom-tcsch!).

Ultimately I’d say it’s 3000 pages of badly written prose and good ideas. In the same time it took me to read these three I could have read ten better books. That wasn’t time well spent.

For me Radiohead peaked at OK Computer. It’s not that everything since then has been bad, just that none of it has been as good (though Kid A came close). Each album has been just a bit worse than the previous until this one, which breaks the trend only slightly by being better than its direct predecessor Hail To The Thief. It’s okay, but it’s just not that great – I suspect like Hail To The Thief it will improve with time, but not by much. Worth listening to? Sure, occasionally; but certainly no classic.

Nothing stands out here as being particularly memorable, or as something that will be remembered in years to come as a classic song. Having just listened to it it’s easy to forget; compare that with OK Computer that still resonates ten years after its release.

I haven’t given up on Radiohead, I just hope one day they’ll stop releasing so many mediocre albums and bring out something brilliant again (Thom Yorke’s Eraser showed he’s still got it in him to be brilliant). There’s a sameness to most of their albums that’s just getting really tiresome – time to reinvent and come up with something truly original once more.

I stalled half way through season one of Farscape, because it is one of the worst TV shows I have ever seen. In fact I can’t currently think of another I hated more. Lame attempts at humour, shockingly bad dialogue, bad writing in general, poor acting. An unbelievably bad show.

And yet for some reason everyone is so positive about this show. I didn’t (and can’t) understand why it’s so hard to find a negative opinion about something clearly so abysmal. Far better shows have far more detractors.

What it does have going for it is an interesting premise and interesting (if rather clichéd) characters. I wanted to persevere so I searched and did eventually find a few people saying what I hoped – it starts off rocky, and only gets better later in the series.

So I came back to it, and I’m now a few episodes past half way. It is getting better, although it still has a long way to go before I’d be willing to pursue season two.

I can only assume (or hope) that the show gets so good that it wipes clean the memory of the first half.

While I wasn’t expecting an anthology of fashion writing, I was expecting the essays to at least relate to the topic somewhat. Unfortunately this collection has pretty much nothing to do with fashion, or much of any unifying topic.

The closest I could come to describing a central theme would be NYC / politics / the post 9/11 world / NYC and politics in the post 9/11 world. Certainly not “the intersection of pop culture, the arts, politics, and fashion”... the blurb is nothing more than self-aggrandizing wish fulfilment.

Too many pointless anecdotes that don’t lead anywhere interesting, too much fiction, not enough substance.

There is, however, one positive thing I can say about the collection: the interviews are definitely worth a read. All are at the least mildly interesting, some contain genuine insight. The format of the interviews (generally a conversation between two similar yet contrasting subjects with a moderator to throw in an occasional topical question) works very well.

The book might satisfy readers looking for something different to myself, but not those who expect it to contain what the blurb promises.

Normally I’m a “worth consuming” kind of guy. Sure I mark things as not, but plenty of times I’ll mark something I didn’t enjoy as worth consuming, because I value the experience. I cannot possibly overemphasise how much this book is not worth consuming. It is a dull, tedious read. I read it with the force of determination, but I enjoyed close to none of it.

The books is pretty much just one series of “Here’s the people from X, they are subjects of the Grand Khan, worship idols, and eat grain.” after another. Probably the most boring book I have ever completed reading, and it gets a most emphatic not worth consuming from me.