"Pippi Longstocking" by Astrid Lindgren

I read this book right after reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and boy was that a contrast.

(Actually, I just noticed that on the surface, they do have a few similarities. Namely that both books are about kids who live alone, whose mothers are dead, and whose fathers are alive -- |well, not for the whole book in Huckleberry Finn's case| -- but not here. That does not change the fact that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a serious anti-slavery novel, and Pippi Longstocking is a cheerful children's book.)

One cannot help but smile at the adventures and shenanigans of this book. It has no pretentions of seriousness, and it's just fun to read about Pippi's horse who lives on the balcony and her chest of gold pieces.

My favorite part is probably the part with the robbers trying to break into Villa Villekula. 'Tis hilarious, especially how utterly unprepared the robbers are for Pippi Longstocking being Pippi Longstocking.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E, probably.

4 stars.

    "Hurray!" said Pippi. "This must be my lucky day too! Policemen are the very best things I know. Next to rhubarb pudding."

    Page 39.

(Endnote: Despite all my knowledge of mathematics, I have yet to master pluttifikation.)

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain

First, I would like to say that all the written-out dialect does get easier to read eventually. A little easier. But you still do have to translate things like "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place" into "I was almost to the foot of the island before I found a good place" in your head, which can get rather tedious.

Second, I would like to make another note about the racial slurs. Yes, they're in there. Yes, there are more of them than there were in Tom Sawyer. In modern times, we shouldn't say them; they shouldn't have said them back then either. However, the book was written in a time when they were commonly used, and set in a time when they were even more commonly used, so it wouldn't make sense for people not to use them.

And also! It should be obvious to anyone who's read it that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply anti-slavery book. As my mom said in her review of the Manga Classics version, the racial slurs are in there for a purpose: "to show the cruel thoughtlessness of racism." That said, they are offensive to black people today (and almost certainly were back then as well), so let the reader be aware.

This concludes my note about the racial slurs. Now we can get to the rest of the review.

I wish we hadn't spend quite so long with the king and the duke. Really I wish we hadn't spend any time with them, but if we had to, I'd rather it have just been a couple chapters. They annoyed me. I'm pretty sure they annoy everyone.

I do like Huckleberry Finn as a narrator. I just... like how he narrates, and I like him as a character. He's an oddly endearing combination of cynical and innocent.

The ending, which can be described as "Tom Sawyer tries to turn this into an adventure novel while everyone else stands there looking bewildered," was one of my favorite parts. Tom Sawyer clearly knows that Jim |has already been freed|, but he can't resist the temptation to make rescuing him as dramatic as possible. Meanwhile, Huckleberry is taking this seriously, and being increasingly confused as to why Tom wants to do things like saw through the table leg holding Jim's ankle chain when it would be much easier to just lift the table and take the chain off. That, I think, is what really sold me on Huckleberry Finn as a character.

However, I suspect that if I hadn't known beforehand how the ending went, I'd have liked it a lot less.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T, probably, for some violence and all the racial slurs. It would be a good thing for a child to read with parental guidance, so the parent can explain things to them.

3 stars. I liked the ending, but the ending being good does not, in my mind, outweigh the chore that is reading the rest of the book.

Favorite lines:

    ...and I'll think of you a many and a many a time, and I'll pray for you, too!' -- and she was gone.

    Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size.

    Page 200.

(Endnote: Despite Tom's insistence to the contrary, Sid does not appear in this.)

"To Hell and Back" by Audie Murphy

I'm having a hard time writing this review without coming off as flippant.

As with most historical books that are also written as a narrative, To Hell and Back is somewhat fictionalized. I do however trust that it remains reasonably accurate.

For all that it's what Audie Murphy is famous for, the book spends hardly any time on the Colmar Pocket incident. I was honestly impressed by the lack of glorification of that.

I read this book for school; it's not part of my first completed quest, unlike almost everything I've been reading lately.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for swearing and graphic violence. It does not shy away from depicting what the Second World War was actually like.

[EDIT, 5/5/2026: 4 stars, upon reflection.]

(Endnote: I probably could have said more if I were less serious about it, but this isn't really a book you can be unserious about.)

"Beezus and Ramona" by Beverly Cleary

At first glance, one might say that this book is similar to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. After all, they're both books about fourth-graders with annoying younger siblings.

But in asserting that, one would miss the crucial detail that Beezus and Ramona is much better.

Ramona, for instance, actually faces consequences for her misbehavior. Relatedly, the parents in this are much better than Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing's parents, hence their willingness to actually give Ramona consequences for her misbehavior.

Ramona is also not so consistently malevolent as Fudge from Tales, etc is. She acts out, but she's not as gleeful about it, possibly because (again) acting out has consequences for her.

I read both entire series with these characters (the Henry books and the Ramona books) back when I was in like fourth grade. Hence why I have occasionally wished to have grown up in the 1950s.

For anyone who hasn't read this (and if you haven't, you might want to), I should probably mention that "Beezus" is a nickname for "Beatrice".

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Bingle-bongle-by!)

Boss Design Studio: False Knight

Bang, bang, False Knight's macebug hammer came down upon your head!

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my roughly fortnightly (except when it gets interrupted) essay series wherein I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think about them.

In this post, I'm looking at the first boss of Team Cherry's 2017 game Hollow Knight: False Knight.

If I had to briefly sum up this bossfight, I'd say "flailing".

For a Hollow Knight boss, False Knight moves rather sluggishly. He jumps around the arena, but not very fast, and occasionally sort of tries to hit you with his mace. I say "sort of" because his mace attacks aren't targeted very well; he mostly attacks the floor, which sends a shockwave at you. All his attacks are also telegraphed pretty far in advance, giving you ample time to get out of the way or prepare to jump over the shockwave. He's almost more likely to hurt you by landing on you than by actually hitting you with the mace.

All of which is good for a first boss. You need something to provide a challenge for players at the beginning of the game, while also not being too hard. A first boss also nees to serve as an introduction for the general pattern of how later bosses are going to work. And False Knight, with its long attack telegraphs and general slow movement, checks all of those boxes. He's a good challenge for newer players, and he's good for showing you the ropes of Hollow Knight's combat.

Excuse me as I briefly note something. Many bosses in Hollow Knight have a "stagger": at certain points in their fight, they'll briefly fall over, deflate, drop to one knee and take a breather, turn into a cloud of bats, et cetera. Basically, you can stun them by hitting them enough. This lasts a few seconds, and they won't attack you during that time, giving you a chance to heal some damage.

At first glance, False Knight appears to be just a normal (if rotund) bug knight with a giant mace. He jumps around the arena, trying (somewhat ineffectually) to hit you with said mace. But when you deal enough damage to stagger him, he faceplants onto the floor and his helmet pops open, revealing this:

Surprise! He's actually oddly cute!

As you can see, that's where the "false" part comes in. Later lore drops reveal that this armor was not in fact intended to be piloted by the squishy guy who's piloting it now; he just stole it from its original owner, who was an actual knight.

And once you know that, you start seeing the little ways it's woven into the fight. Like how when he jumps, he tucks his feet under him. The lack of accuracy with the mace also makes a lot more sense, as does the fact that between attacks he just stands there for a bit.

After his first stagger (of three), he stands in the middle of the arena and flails to either side with his mace, sending barrels falling down from above; you have to dodge them or you'll take damage. After each subsequent stagger, he does it again. Each time, it also upgrades one of his other floor-hitting attacks with more barrels from the ceiling. The barrels also aren't targeted at you, so they're more a thing-to-avoid-accidentally-running-into than anything else.

The fight ends with him attacking the floor just a bit too hard, causing it to collapse and dropping him down to the room below. There he lies until you finish him off. It's nicely foreshadowed by the way his flailing is causing the arena to deteriorate (i.e. the falling barrels), but I always feel kind of mean for killing him.

(There is a way to skip this fight, but it's not intuitive to figure out, and all it means is that you'll have to come back later for the key he drops when defeated.)

False Knight's arena is honestly kind of drab. It has the same dark bluish palette of everything in the Forgotten Crossroads (the surrounding area), and it's just... not very visually interesting. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing; the less interesting the boss arena is, the less distracting it will be during the bossfight.

Behold, the arena. It's dark bluish.

All right, the music. False Knight's battle theme is the aptly titled "False Knight", by Christopher Larkin (who did the entire Hollow Knight soundtrack). It has a melody, it has percussion, I think it's relatively major? For all that I dabble in composing, the intricacies of the major/minor difference still elude me. It's the most melodious of the battle themes I've mentioned so far, though given that those consist of "Boss", "You Can't Escape, You Know", and "Bombs for Throwing At You", that's not exactly a high bar. But it has a driving beat without being oppressively percussive, and it's pretty exciting, so... all in all, a solid boss theme.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for a double feature of miniboss-ish bosses from this same game.

"The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster

Do you like puns and allegory? If so, this book is for you.

At least I think it's an allegory. It doesn't seem to have a strong overarching point, other than "the world is actually interesting so don't be bored just for the sake of being bored"; aside from that it seems like a collection of mini-allegories. But there are definitely a lot of puns.

I recall loving this book as a preteen. Now that I'm older, it's unfortunately lost a bit of the charm it held for me then; I can see the fact that it's allegorical and yet at the same time slightly pointless, not just the fun adventure story aspect.

That said, I did love the book when I was younger, so it appears this is one of those "books I'm too old for" that I also read when I wasn't too old for them.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E, probably. I'd have rated it E10+ for fantasy violence, but nobody actually does any.

3 stars. As I've said before, the star ratings are not a measure of how objectively good the book is, they're a measure of how much I liked it. And I... honestly was indifferent to this book this time around.

(Endnote: "Welcome to the island of Conclusions." "How did we get here?" "Jumping.")

"Anne of Green Gables" by L. M. Montgomery

Behold, it's slice-of-life that I actually like.

Perhaps this is because it's not boring. As you may know, Bob, the main reason I don't tend to like slice-of-life is that it bores me to read about the everyday lives of these characters about whom I do not care; Anne of Green Gables manages to be interesting, and it also manages to have characters I care about. They have personalities.

I would like to live in Avonlea. It's full of people who seem like they'd be interesting to know.

During this readthrough, I realized that pretty much everyone in this book is happy. To greater or lesser degrees, sure, but they are. 

Anne talks like a book, so she will occasionally say things like "I swept her a look of withering scorn." It's implied she got most of her vocabulary from reading. As the person who once used the word "oscillates" in a paper because it legitimately did not occur to me that something like "switches" would perhaps be a better choice, I see a bit of myself in that. Anne also occasionally manages to talk for several pages at a time without a paragraph break, which... I don't think I've ever done that?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Anne, are you killed?" shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. "Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed."

    To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the girl who was the cause of Anne Shirley's early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly: "No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious."

    "Where?" sobbed Carrie Sloane. "Oh, where, Anne?"

    Page 301.

    The first person we saw was Moody Spurgeon sitting on the steps and muttering away to himself. Jane asked him what on earth he was doing and he said he was repeating the multiplication table over and over to steady his nerves and for pity's sake not to interrupt him, because if he stopped for a moment he got frightened and forgot everything he ever knew, but the multiplication table kept all his facts firmly in his proper place!

    Page 417.

(Endnote: My mom reviewed this, twice. And this review is part of my first completed quest.)

"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift

Did you know that this book doesn't actually end when Gulliver leaves Lilliput?

Well, it doesn't. Lilliput (the land of the tiny people) is just Part 1, and there are three others. I suspect that Lilliput may be the famous one because by the time most people get through it, they've had about enough Gulliver's Travels for one lifetime.

(Also, the Lilliputians are supposed to be like six inches tall, so they're usually drawn much smaller than they're acutally supposed to be.)

Part 2 is in Brobdingnag, which is the opposite of Lilliput: it's full of giants. Their society is apparently so much more perfect than 1700s England that Jonathan Swift (through Gulliver) feels the need to spend multiple chapters expounding upon this.

Part 3 doesn't confine itself to one fictional society, instead moving rapidly (for this book, at least) through the following:

-Laputa, an island city-state (of normal-sized people!) that flies using a giant magnet. They're good at astronomy and geometry, and almost nothing else.

-Balnibarbi, Laputa's vassal state. They aren't even good at astronomy or geometry. They are in fact an incredibly obvious satire of 1700s science, hence the utterly ridiculous science projects they get up to.

-Glubbdubdrib, an island with magicians (the kind who summon ghosts). Gulliver spends a while talking to the ghosts of random famous dead people, and we get to see Jonathan Swift fanboy over Brutus for a few paragraphs.

-Luggnagg, the most normal of the made-up islands. Its only quirk is that it has people who don't die of old age, but they do age normally so that's not as awesome as you (or Gulliver) might think.

-And finally, Japan, which is literally just Japan. We spend like one chapter there.

And Part 4 involves Gulliver's journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms. It doesn't have an actual name, it's just called the land of the Houyhnhnms. In this land, horses (also known as Houyhnhnms) are sentient and humans (also known as Yahoos) aren't. We spend frankly too much time lampooning modern 1700s European society and comparing it to the much more perfect and truly beautiful utopian society of the Houyhnhnms, and using Yahoos as stand-ins for all the vices Jonathan Swift thinks are ruining the world.

If you ever wondered where the term Yahoo comes from, look no further. It's from this. 

Gulliver's Travels is occasionally oddly prescient (among other things, it did predict magnetic levitation and the moons of Mars), and it should be cut a bit of slack for being one of the first books about entirely made-up places and societies. However, it's also long and mostly rather boring. The biting social satire was mildly interesting in Lilliput, and got increasingly dull with each subsequent new land full of people who symbolize what Jonathan Swift doesn't like.

Let no-one say that nobody ever goes to the bathroom in books, for in this one, people do indeed go to the bathroom. Let no-one also say that said bathroom-going is a point in this book's favor.

I should probably also mention that this Book is written in the older Style of the English Language, wherein all Nouns are begun with capital Letters (as German Nouns are in this Age), and all foreign Words and most proper Nouns are set in Italics. That Style took me some Time before I acclimated to its Difference from the Style of the modern Day.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: I think T15+ for crude humor, violence, sexual references, and nudity (including one rather bizarre section where {T15+ a bunch of Brobdingnag women use Gulliver as a sort of pseudo-sex-toy}). If that section weren't in there, it would probably be T.

2 stars. It's not that the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun, but... actually, the biting satire of 1700s European society isn't fun. I'm glad to be done with it. I'm also confused as to why this is on a puzzle of children's books (from which I took my first completed quest), because it gets increasingly less appropriate-for-children after we leave Lilliput. Maybe the people who designed the puzzle didn't realize that the Lilliput sections, which are reasonably family-friendly, weren't the entire book.

(Endnote: I shall now say "Houyhnhnm" and "Yahoo" several times until they lose all meaning.)

"The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien

One does not simply review The Hobbit.

I'm serious. You read it, you nod and you're like "oh, yup, that was a really good book," and then you go on your way. Nowhere in there does "reviewing" factor into it, because honestly, what would you even say?

Apparently, this.

I liked it reasonably well, although sometimes the narration style (with occasional asides of "of course, if he had known this, he would have...") got on my nerves. But as we later learn in Lord of the Rings that this is originally told by Bilbo as a story to small children, it does kind of fit.

Smaug is the best dragon. (He agrees with me on that point.) He's arrogant and powerful and terrifying and dramatic, and most importantly, he's villainous. All fictional dragons should aspire to be Smaug.

As it turns out, one also does not simply review The Hobbit because one does not have much to say about it.

My mom reviewed this, twice (first review, second review). This review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy violence and giant spiders.

4 stars.

(Endnote: Most of this book is actually based on a much older text by someone named Bilbo Baggins.)

"Fork" by Cave Gaming

I never expected to get so much entertainment out of staring at a fork, but Fork: The Game of Doing Nothing but Staring at a Fork exceeded my wildest expectations. (The Game of Doing Nothing but Staring at a Fork is its subtitle, which I left out of the post title because it made it too long.)

The gameplay in Fork: The Game of Doing Nothing but Staring at a Fork is extremely simple. There's a fork displayed on the screen. You stare at it. I was impressed with the rather intuitive control scheme, which consists of exactly no buttons; you don't have to press any buttons to continue staring at a fork.

Probably my one quibble with this game is that there's no music. I suppose that would detract from the tranquil experience of doing nothing but staring at a fork, and I'm probably also spoiled by the music of Minecraft, Hollow Knight, and Undertale. But it's still a bit annoying for the only sound in the entire game to be the startup announcment of "Welcome to... Fork! The game of doing nothing but staring at a fork!"

Everyone should play this game. I suspect many of the world's problems could be solved if everyone just sat down and stared at a fork for a few minutes.

By the way, the fork on the cover is not the only fork you can stare at in game. There are multiple forks; it picks a random one on startup. I've shared a picture of my favorite one below, spoilered in case you want to play the game and don't want to have the reveal spoiled for you:

I think they're going to make a sequel, Spoon: The Game of Doing Nothing but Listening to a Spoon. It's expected to release in 2040, once they finish recording all the myriad and nuanced sounds of a random spoon they found at a yard sale.

There's also a brief companion short story slash explanation slash game guide, "Starring as a Fork," where the people behind the game explain how they chose what fork would be the best one for players to stare at. It's free, so if you want to read about that, you can get it at doingnothingbutstaring@a.fork (or on the blog page I didn't set up for it).

I've tried staring at a fork in real life, but it's just not quite the same. Fork: The Game of Doing Nothing but Staring at a Fork is a truly unique experience.

This is a videogame, and it's rated: E. Nobody could possibly object to doing nothing but staring at a fork.

Fourk stars.

(Endnote: April fool!)