"Economics In One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt

After some consideration, I have condensed this book into two main points:

A) "The world would work beautifully if humans weren't both dumb and selfish." (If humans were dumb but not selfish they would use this revolutionary technique called "sharing," and if humans were selfish but not dumb they would understand economics.)

B) "The economy would work beautifully if governments would stop trying to make it better." (This because basically every time the book mentioned government programs, it was in the context of "They thought this would stimulate the economy, but actually, as we can see, all it did was mess it up.")

It is my personal opinion that everyone with an influence on economic policy should read this book, even though it spends much of its time yelling "you're being dumb" at everyone with an influence on economic policy. It is not my personal opinion that everyone, period, should read this book, because if you're not the sort of person (like me) who would find it interesting, you'd probably be bored to tears. But if you're going to be doing economics anyway, you can presumably handle it.

For a single lesson (that being "look at the secondary consequences of everything, not just the primary consequences, you numbskulls"), this book is quite long.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. There is nothing objectionable about this book. That said, it's not the sort of thing a young child would want to read, but there's nothing stopping them. Except boredom.

3 stars. It was interesting and I learned a lot, but all the "the economy was made so bad by this thing" was also kind of depressing.

(Endnote: After much consideration, I decided to read and review this book instead of the author's other work, Floating Point Errors in 1.0000000000000001 Lessions.)

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by Roald Dahl

This book is weird. Fun, but weird.

It's pretty famous, and a lot of people know the basic plot, but I'll recap it here anyway: Willy Wonka, candy maker extraordinaire, has put five Golden Tickets into random chocolate bars somewhere in the world. The recipients will be invited to his mysterious factory, which nobody has been inside for years. Four of the Golden Tickets go to kids who are some flavor of bad, and the fifth goes to none other than our protagonist Charlie Bucket. The bad kids meet with their comeuppances, and Charlie Bucket |inherits the factory|.

Reading it this time, I was struck by how the Oompa-Loompas are basically a Greek chorus. I mean, think about it. They're this group of people, who are in the story but not a big part of it, who follow the main characters around, and who explain the point to the audience by singing about it. Like I said, they're basically a Greek chorus.

(It also helps that their songs are well-written and actually quite funny.)

Really, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a much deeper book than people give it credit for. It's just also very silly, and not a lot of people see through that.

This review is part of my first completed quest. In fact, it's the final part of my first completed quest. I've been on this one since September 21, 2023, and finally completed it today, May 19, 2026. (Well, I wrote this review on April 24, but I published it on May 19, so that's the date I'm counting from.)

...now I have to go back and change everything that said "my ongoing quest" to say "my completed quest" instead. Agh. That's going to be a bit of a chore. I think I'll put that off for a bit.

My mom reviewed this.

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

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    They streaked past a black door. STOREROOM NUMBER 71, it said on it. WHIPS--ALL SHAPES AND SIZES.

    "Whips!" cried Veruca Salt. "What on earth do you use whips for?"

    "For whipping cream, of course," said Mr. Wonka. "How can you whip cream without whips? Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all unless it's been whipped with whips. Just as a poached egg isn't a poached egg unless it's been stolen from the woods in the dead of night!"

    Page 86. This is probably one of my favorite exchanges in all of fiction.

(Endnote: It's a pity the sequel had to jump the shark so hard.)

Mini-Reviews 19: Remaining Quest Objectives

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I can see why this is such a popular book. I mean, it kept me interested while I was sleep-deprived on an airplane, and that is no mean feat.

Treasure Island doesn't use all the pirate tropes, it started all the pirate tropes.

My mom reviewed this, and this mini-review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for reckless violence.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, classics, pirates, rated E10+

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I didn't enjoy reading this, and I think the reason for that is twofold: A) I'm too old for it, and B) it was meant to be read aloud.

This mini-review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. It's meant to be read aloud to children.

2 stars. Star ratings are a subjective measure of how much I liked a book, not a more objective measure of how good a book is, and I didn't enjoy reading this.

Tags for this one: 2-star, classics, rated E, talking animals

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

Honestly, I like this better now that I'm older. When I was younger, I found the book too tense, but I think it's just right for me now. Also it's about a mouse, so that's a definite plus in my opinion (I am, after all, the person who named his blog "Sam the Library Mouse").

I really enjoyed how the toy motorcycle works. You make it go by making motorcycle noises. It's just such a fun explanation. |And it's made even better by the toy ambulance, which shows up later in the book, being powered by making ambulance noises.|

This mini-review, too, is part of my first completed quest. Hence the title of the collection.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, rated E, talking animals

(Endnote: Oddly enough, all three of these books have prominently yellow covers.)

"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.)

"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!)

"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.)

"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!)

"Stuart Little" by E. B. White

Stuart Little is the second son of a perfectly normal American family. He is inexplicably also a mouse.

This book is an odd one. I should probably have put off reading the first few chapters until such time as I wasn't extremely tired, because it didn't make much sense to me. And it meant I couldn't tell whether later chapters were also not making much sense to me because they just didn't, or because my experience with the book had been colored by first reading it when I was extremely tired.

That said, I shall now attempt to provide a summary of the plot.

Stuart Little is, for no discernable reason, a mouse. He lives with his otherwise normal human family, who are oddly fine with the fact that he's randomly a mouse. He wins a model sailboat race for a guy by making his model sailboat actually have someone sailing it. He also meets a bird named Margalo, who then flees when the family cat (who has somehow never eaten Stuart) plots to murder her. Stuart likes Margalo, so he goes on an Epic Quest in a tiny car to find her.

Stuart |does not manage to find Margalo| by the end of the book. Slightly |anticlimactic|, that, but I'm honestly fine with it, because if |we had gone until he found her|, the book would have to have been several times as long.

I hadn't read this before, and thus was not expecting Stuart to act so much like a grown-up. Or to be a supposed-to-have-been-a-human-but-is-actually-a-mouse-for-some-reason; I thought he was just a normal mouse. Really, I was expecting this to be more like The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

[EDIT: This review is part of my first completed quest.]

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

3 stars.

(Endnote: Oddly enough, hardly anybody is like "What the heck, is that a talking mouse???" when Stuart shows up. I guess this is just a Thing That Happens in this universe?)

"The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I actually rather like The Secret Garden.

That may seem a tad weird coming from me, because I don't usually like slice-of-life or slice-of-life-adjacent things. However, most of the reason for my dislike of such things comes from the fact that I don't often care about the lives of the random people they revolve around. And I actually do care about Mary Lennox; she's a character I like to read about. The same goes for Dickon. I care less about Colin and his dad, but even without them it's still two characters who do interest me from the start, which is two more than most slice-of-life or slice-of-life-adjacent books can boast.

Having said that, I will now also say that I think the first half-ish of the book is better. The second half is where the kids (mostly Colin, but the other two as well) decide that Magic is a thing that exists (and must be capitalized). I entirely forgot about that, probably because I like the first half better.

To be entirely honest, I don't have much else to say. (Although I realize, writing this, that the previous two paragraphs were written under the assumption that you already know what happens in the book. If not, I'll take a stab at clearing it up a bit for you: Mary Lennox is the protagonist. Colin, Dickon, and Colin's dad are not the protagonist.)

Colin's dad is named Archibald. I know his last name is actually Craven, but my brain insists it is in fact Asparagus.

My mom reviewed this. Also, this review is part of my first completed quest.

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

4 stars.

(Endnote: This should not be confused with "The Secret Garden," by G. K. Chesterton, which I have also reviewed.)

"The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes

I first read The Hundred Dresses several years ago, for school. I didn't enjoy it then. Oh, I had nothing against it, it was just that A) I wasn't really interested, and B) I was reading it for school but wasn't interested so I went through it rather faster than I might otherwise have. This time around, I was reading it of my own volition, and I liked it much better.

Right. The plot. The Hundred Dresses is about a girl named Wanda Petronski, who insists that she has a hundred dresses. This despite the fact that she quite obviously does not, because she wears the same one to school every day and would surely wear some of the others if they actually existed. The other girls at her school make fun of her for this, because... uh... nobody's actually sure why. Including me. Kids are mean, I guess.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that Wanda is neurodivergent somehow. I also don't know much about neurodivergence, so I could be wrong.

At its core, this is a book about bullying. And it's deep enough and good enough to make me write sentences like "At its core, this is a book about bullying," which should probably tell you something. But anyway, it's also one of the best books on that subject I've ever read. (Admittedly, that's a bit of a low bar, because I haven't read a lot of those; however, as I believe I've said before, just because the bar was low doesn't mean you didn't jump high.)

The art in this is good. It adds to the story, and it fits very well with the general tone. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. There's nothing in here that younger kids couldn't handle.

4 stars. Like I said, I liked it better this time.

(Endnote: This is where I'd usually make some kind of joke, but that feels rather too much like joining in the "make fun of Wanda Petronski for saying she has a hundred dresses" game. So I shall refrain.)

"Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" by Grace Lin

Remember how I complained a bit about Tikki Tikki Tembo? This book is like that book if it had some actual depth. And was about a hundred times as long. And also had an entirely different plot. So really they're just both set in ancient China and told like folktales.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is about a girl named Minli, who probably isn't twelve. She and her parents are literally dirt poor, so she embarks upon an Epic Quest to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how to change their fortune. She meets various other characters along the way, including a dragon, who's featured on the front cover.

There's also a subplot slash backstory involving a power-hungry magistrate who eventually became a power-mad magistrate, then died |and turned into an evil supernatural tiger|. That backplot was woven into the story with much better execution than the Saga of Phoebe Winterbottom and the Lunatic who Wasn't was in Walk Two Moons. It was almost like this book had one plot that's just kind of tangled and complicated and that gets revealed in a long and slightly fragmented way, rather than two plots that are almost entirely divorced from each other.

I should probably include here the same disclaimer that I did in Tikki Tikki Tembo's review, that being that I don't actually know very much about ancient Chinese culture. So I'm probably not a very good judge of how accurate this is to actual Chinese folktales. However, this does seem pretty similar to the other ones I've read.

[EDIT: Forgot to mention that this review is part of my first completed quest.] 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. There's a scary bit with |the evil supernatural tiger|, but I think kids would be able to handle that.

4 stars.

(Endnote: There are actually a lot of mountains on the moon. This book is about none of them.)

"Tikki Tikki Tembo" by Arlene Mosel

This review's wordcount is probably a significant fraction of that of the actual book. Tikki Tikki Tembo is not very long.

I freely confess that I don't know very much about ancient Chinese culture. However, from what I do know, this does not seem like a very accurate depiction. It's less "China specifically" and more "Stuff I vaguely heard about Asia once."

This book is one of those "this is how it got this way" stories, which in my opinion are always fairly pointless. In this case, it's explaining why Chinese first names tend to be kind of short, using the tale of a kid named "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" who falls in a well. Problems ensue because his name is long and hard to say, which messes up his brother's attempts to tell people he's fallen in a well.

There's a character in this, the Old Man with the Ladder, whose two defining characteristics are "is old" and "has a ladder". He's on the cover; you can tell it's him because he's holding a ladder. I'm not sure what he does with his life.

[EDIT, 3/14/2026: Fixed some truncated sentences in the above paragraph.]

Yeah, this review is short. So is the book. But I had more to say than would fit in a mini-review, so here we are.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. For all its faults, there's nothing really bad in it.

2 stars. If it hadn't been for my first completed quest (which this review is part of), I probably would never have read this book; now that it's over, I probably never will again.

(Endnote: I can't think of an endnote for this post. Maybe I'll just say "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo" a few times. That name, what with all the times people say it, also probably makes up a significant fraction of the book's wordcount.)

Mini-Reviews 18: Wheels on a Big Rig

Callings for Life: God's Plan, Your Purpose by Jeffrey Leininger

This book takes a hundred and fifty-four pages to say something that I can pretty comprehensively sum up in three sentences: "God probably hasn't called you to do something grand and epic, so you should focus on where God has put you now rather than the grand and epic thing you think God wants you to do. Having a normal life is not bad, and you should value it. God intends you to do a lot of small things rather than one really huge thing."

As you may have suspected, I was not enthralled. Oh, it's a lovely exploration of the doctrine of vocation, I just couldn't get into it because A) I fully grasped the point from reading the back cover, and B) I already understand the doctrine of vocation. I read nonfiction to learn things, and I honestly don't learn much from a book that repeatedly tells me something I already know for 154 pages.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for people dying in some of the examples it gives. It would make a supremely boring videogame.

3 stars. It's not a bad book, it's just also not the right one for me.

Tags for this one: 3-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams 

This book is quite short. Also slightly sad. Though not as sad as I was expecting, given that I expected |the titular rabbit to die outright, and he only sort of dies|. Also there's a fairy involved. 

I had to look up what velveteen was, because I didn't actually know. It's apparently "velvet but instead of making it velvety by cutting the vertical threads, you make it velvety by cutting the horizontal threads." Or something of that sort.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being sad.

3 stars. It somehow manages to be both slightly depressing and slightly sappy.

Tags for this one: 3-star, rated E10+

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

This book is less short than The Velveteen Rabbit is, but I have similarly little to say about it. Hence this being a mini-review.

The plot of this is not terribly believable, but that's part of its charm.

This review is also part of my first completed quest.

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

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, junior fiction, rated E

(Endnote: And they're rollin' rollin' rollin', rollin' rollin' rollin)

"The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This book is manifestly okay.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against it. It's a lovely and poignant book, with a good message about how grownups should stop being boring and have some whimsy in their lives. It's not even sappy. It's just also not my cup of cake.

Basically, an aircraft pilot (who might also be a bit of a self-insert for Saint-Exupéry) crashes in a desert and meets the titular little prince. He's from another planet. (Well, it's more of an asteroid, really, and it really shouldn't have enough gravity to hold him on it, much less an atmosphere, but that's not important right now and the narrator would chastise me for paying attention to the boring fact things when the important parts are staring me in the face.)

The little prince recounts his adventure on his planet, the other planets near him, and Earth. There's poignancy in there. And that's basically the entire book.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

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

3 stars. There's nothing wrong with it, but as I said, it's not my cup of cake. Or, to put it another way, it is my cup of tea, because I have nothing against tea but I don't drink it by preference.

(Endnote: It's pronounced roughly "Ex-ooh-parry", and all French-speakers everywhere will probably be furious at me for that bit of butchered phoneticism.)

"Thing Explainer" by Randall Munroe

This is a book of not-simple stuff explained in simple words. Or, as the person who wrote this said, "the ten hundred words people use most often." It has a place in the back that tells you what those words are.

I decided to write this in the spirit of the book, so I'm also only using those ten hundred words for this. We'll see how that goes.

Thing Explainer explains a lot of things. Some of the ones I like best are:

"Shared space house" (International Space Station)

"The US's laws of the land" (US Constitution)

"Tree" (Tree)

"US Space Team's Up Goer Five" (Saturn V rocket)

(Yes, I know the things inside the bent lines aren't in the ten hundred words. The book does the same thing in the things-in-this-book page, and I felt like it would make it less confusing.)

What If and What If Two had little drawings on most of the pages. This doesn't, because its pages are full of big drawings of the stuff it's explaining. (But there are sometimes little drawings inside the big drawings.)

For some reason, the number after eight is not in the ten hundred words. I don't know why.

If this were a game for computers, I would say it was for: Everyone.

Four stars. Some of the things it explains are things to do with that belief where people think that animals turn into other animals over time and that's how all the animals got to be themselves, but it's easy to just not read those pages. If you were reading it with a small child, they could be a good thing to talk about (like, "this is what a lot of people say, here's why it's wrong.") The rest of the book is good, though.

(End note: I didn't have to look up every single word I used here in the place in the book where all the words are. The computer place for the computer pictures the person who wrote this draws has a nice little thing (or at least it did when I was writing this) where you can write things and it tells you if you used words that aren't in the ten hundred words.)

"My Father's Dragon" by Ruth Stiles Gannett

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Our protagonist, the hilariously named Elmer Elevator, meets a talking cat who tells him about this uncharted jungle island with an abused dragon on it. Elmer Elevator (who's also the narrator's father) has always wanted to fly on an airplane, but he can't afford an airplane, so he goes off to rescue the dragon so they can have adventures together.

This book is seemingly designed to be read out loud to a small child. It has that sort of vibe. It's written in first person, but not from Elmer Elevator's perspective; the narrator isn't ever really described, presumably so it can be assumed to be whoever's reading it out loud.

The cat is the single most questgivery questgiver I've seen in a book in a long time. It hits pretty much all of the fairy-tale fairy questperson beats:

-it's a downtrodden person that most people just ignore (usually a beggar in fairy tales, a stray cat in this)

-the main character shares his food with it (usually bread or something in fairy tales, a saucer of milk in this)

-it parts ways with the main character near the beginning, but tells him about a journey he could go on (your various fairy tale quests, or this book's dragon rescue)

-it gives the main character a bunch of very specific advice and things that turn out to be exactly what he needs in order to succeed (usually advice and a magic item or two in fairy tales, the rather random but weirdly useful things it tells Elmer Elevator to pack in this)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Especially if you're a mom reading this out loud to your kid and can talk things through with them.

3 stars. It's not bad or anything, it just... didn't catch my attention.

(Endnote: My IRL father is unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on your perspective--not named Elmer Elevator, so I guess he doesn't have a dragon.)

"Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott

I probably wouldn't have read this again for another decade at least if it hadn't been for my first completed quest. Yup, I've started that up again, mostly because I was running out of ideas for things to read. Maybe I'll finally make some headway on it.

This is a classic of slice-of-life, and as such, it is boring as nouns unless you care about the characters. Who did grow on me, eventually, but for the first third or so of the book, it wasn't a terribly enjoyable read.

Now, if you do care about the characters, it's pretty good. Once I got past the first third of the book and got invested in these people's lives, the book went pretty fast.

Oh, and did you know |Beth| doesn't die in this? That's actually in the sequel, also titled Little Women (or Good Wives in Britain), which usually gets smushed together with this one in a single volume. Faced with the daunting prospect of this already long book being twice as long, I decided to just go with the first one.

In case you hadn't guessed, this review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. Nothing objectionable. Old books are nice like that.

4 stars.

(Endnote: I was three days ago years old [when I wrote this post versus when I published it] when I realized I didn't have a slice-of-life tag on this blog and should probably make one.)

"Among Trees" by FJRD Interactive

I first discovered this game from iBallisticSquid's series of Let's Play videos on it. It was in early access then, and it hasn't changed much.

 

Actually, it's in beta now, and that's not likely to change. I did a bit of digging, and it seems the developers just abandoned it. It's playable, just unfinished.

 

That said, it's a very, very pretty game. Unfortunately it's also an equally heavy one, so unless you have a rather beefy computer, you can't experience the prettiness if you want a framerate of more than 1/10th of a frames per second. Which I do happen to want, so unfortunately, I can't experience the prettiness as much.

 

In the original (as in the early access version iBallisticSquid played), the crafting system would create the items you crafted as physical (well, "physical") objects on the crafting table, and you could pick them up. I thought that was pretty innovative, as crafting systems usually have the items you made go straight to your inventory. Unfortunately, in the version I have, they just go straight to your inventory; while it's not worse than other crafting systems, it's also no longer better.

There are some changes from that version that I do like, though, and some that at least make sense. You no longer find (as many) random beets around the world; I think most of them have been replaced with burdock roots. The loot sites you find around the world no longer respawn their loot, which, while it means you can't just get infinite loot from them, makes sense; after all, who would be going around to these abandoned metal tower things and restocking the crates full of rags and bent metal pipes and stuff?

 

(My headcanon for the reason those towers are surrounded by trash and campfires [that you can search to find more trash] is that these are the places where someone once came out to burn their trash until whoever runs this forest made them stop. As for what the towers themselves are doing there, I have no clue.)

 

There's a fishing minigame in this, but it requires a framerate of more than my current 3 frames per second to get the precision needed to actually catch any of the fish.

 

This is a videogame, but it's not rated by the ESRB (you don't have to have an ESRB rating, it's just that most games choose to get one to do their part in making this not a government thing). Anyway, if I were rating this, I'd give it an E.

 

4 stars. 

 

(Endnote: I have no idea what "FJRD" stands for.)

Mini-Reviews 13: It's Not Even Friday!

Playing with Fire by Derek Landy

Book 2 of Skulduggery Pleasant. (Book 1 is here.) In this one, some new (or possibly not so new?) bad guys show up and try to resurrect an evil giant monster thing. |They succeed, and the heroes have to fight it.|

It's been like a year since I read the last one, so I don't remember how many of the villains in this were mentioned in the first one.

Oh, and the Spring-Heeled Jack shows up, which was interesting.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for violence and giant spiders.

4 stars. However, as previously mentioned, there are giant spiders; I can read past them, but if you hate giant spiders, you probably shouldn't read this.

Tags for this one: 4-star, cool magic, modern setting, rated T, urban fantasy

The Wondrous World of Violet Barnaby by Jenny Lundquist

This is about a twelve-ish-year-old girl, Violet Barnaby, whose mom is dead and whose dad has recently remarried. She spends most of the book grieving for her mom and railing against the injustice of change.

She also spends most of the book repressing the urge to just snap and start shouting at everything. I, too, have repressed that urge, as probably have we all.

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

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, DRAMA!, modern setting, rated E

The Wolf of Cape Fen by Juliana Brandt

This book has a very twisty plot, and one that holds together in light of the new plot twists (I'm looking at you, Maximum Ride). Plus they're actually well-executed enough that I don't see them coming, which... either I've been reading books with untwisty plots or I've just gotten really good at spotting the plot twist.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for "deal-with-the-devil"-style magic (though not with the actual devil).

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, magical realism, modern setting, rated E10+

(Endnote: HALT IN THE NAME OF THE FRIDAY KNIGHT! Man, I really need to review Dragons at Crumbling Castle...)