Movie Review: Disclosure Day (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

In this Steven Spielberg film, a faction of government operatives breaks away and “goes rogue” because they believe that the world and the public has a right to know that there are aliens on earth and that the government has been hiding this fact and hoarding the amazing alien technology for themselves. The movie is a cat and mouse game of bad guys (the government) trying to stop the good guys (the rogue faction) from disclosing the information to the world. This goes on for 2 hours and 25 minutes. And that’s the action.

The whole thing is a collection of trite clichés associated with aliens. Naked little grey men with big heads, but then there are also naked very tall men with big heads. Crop circles form for no reason in the middle of a wheat field. Alien technology allows humans to teleport to other locations and be in two places at once, forcing their will on other humans. Humans abducted by aliens as children suddenly display supernatural powers, like speaking foreign languages, being able to look into their thoughts and read their pasts. It’s like Spielberg tried to pack every alien cliché into this film, seemingly without plot reason or context.

Yes, the acting was pretty good, but overall this film just ingrained the superstitions about aliens and our U.S. government’s role in hiding them.

Overall, there is nothing here. This is a one-star movie, but I upgraded it to 1.5 stars because it’s Spielberg and the acting is good.

 

All Quiet at the Grand Canyon

On By Norbert HauptIn Are We Great Yet?, Economy, TravelsLeave a comment
picture credit: Andy Starflinger

Last week, on Friday, June 12, my brother from Germany and I visited the Grand Canyon. I love taking people to the Grand Canyon “for the first time” as that first view into the void usually takes their breath away. After being there and even hiking down dozens of times over a period of 50 years, it still happens to me now every time.

What struck me however was how “empty” of visitors it was this time. June is usually high season. Many tourists from Asia and Europe visit the Canyon during the summer. Lines to get through the park gate can be several hours long, yet we drove right in. There were only five or six cars in front of us at the entry gate.

There were plenty of parking spaces everywhere. There were no lines in the restaurants. We went to eat at the Bright Angel Lodge for lunch. We were able to walk right in and there were plenty of open tables.

Outside of the park, the town of Tusayan was practically deserted. We went into the visitor center with the IMAX theater and a bunch of restaurants, and the place was empty. It seemed like we were the only guests in that huge facility.

There are many possible reasons for this.

  1. A real reduction in visitation especially from international travelers, which disproportionally affects the Grand Canyon.
  2. The new $100 nonresident fee policy for many foreign visitors appears to have discouraged overseas tourism. The fee is charged per person aged 16 and older. This surcharge is in addition to the standard park entrance fee, which is typically $35 per vehicle.
  3. Heat advisories are causing some people to postpone trips. Even though the temperature at the rim was only around 80 degrees F while we were there.
  4. General softness in leisure travel due to higher travel costs.

All the above could contribute to the decline in visitors at the Grand Canyon.

If you’re local and want to visit our National Parks, now might be a good time. But the overall trend makes me wonder: Are we great again already?

Book Review: The Dog Stars – by Peter Heller

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

It’s about 9 years after a global pandemic, where a deadly flu killed 99.9 percent of the population. If that makes you think of Stephen King’s The Stand, you are right on. The Stand is one of my favorite books of all time.

After 9 years, all gasoline has become stale. Regular unleaded gas gets old after a few months and will be unusable after a year. Cars and motorcycles can no longer drive. Too bad, Mad Max!  However, Jet fuel, because it is a highly refined kerosene, lasts much longer, and with additives can be used for years.

Hig is a forty-something man and an experienced pilot. He maintains “the Beast,” a 1956 Cessna he keeps at his home base at a small airport in Colorado. He lost his family and his wife. The only friend he has left is his dog, Jasper. One day a gun-toting crazy guy named Bangley arrives and the two of them live in a strange symbiosis keeping each other alive fending off marauders and attackers – with Bangley doing most of the killing. 

During one of his flights he hears a strange transmission and he hopes, against all odds, that there are other people out there that are not out to kill them. He fills up his plane with provisions and flies beyond his capacity to return home (there is only that much gas he can carry) in hope of finding a better life.

The author writes in a strange, chopped style, with sentence fragments, and pretty much no dialog. It takes a little time to get used to it, but it grew on me quickly and I kept turning the pages. Life in America after an apocalypse comes alive in this novel and it will scare the shit out of you. No matter how hopeless, how brutal, how demoralizing every day is, when I was done reading this book, I closed it and I immediately missed it. I wanted to know what would happen next.

 

Interestingly, after I finished reading The Dog Stars just a few days ago, I came across this movie poster when browsing Reddit. Looks like it’ll be in the theaters in late August.

 

I am definitely going to see this.

Book Review: Going Zero – by Anthony McCarten

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

The tech company WorldShare was started by a hacker named Cy Baxter. By creating spyware and surveillance technology called Fusion he became a billionaire. Working with the CIA, they came up with a program to test this spyware. Ten random Americans have been carefully selected to test Fusion. If any of the candidates can evade detection for one month, they win a prize of three million dollars. So starts “an amazing race” to stay underground and off the grid.

Going Zero is a fast-paced action story that had me rooting for the contestants.  I thought I was learning a lot about surveillance technology and the police state that we are all living in now. But as I progressed through the book, I had my doubts grow over time, as the technologies became more and more unbelievable and even outrageous. Toward the end of the book, I started calling bullshit.

For example, this author has no idea what databases are, and what database sizes are:

But is that even possible, to download so vast a database, this catalog of every person ever investigated for some misdeed by the U.S. government? God knows how much data that would be! More than teraflops for sure; there would be more like peta- or exa- or zetta- or even yottaflops of it. Just how criminal is America?

— page 243

First of all, data sizes are not counted in “flops” but “bytes.” Flops are “floating point operations” and those are a unit of measurement for computer processing speeds. Like a gigaflop is a billion floating point operations a second. Measuring database sizes by processing speed makes no sense at all. It would be like saying “I just had twenty degrees Fahrenheit for lunch.”

But let’s assume he actually meant bytes:

  • Two pages of typed text is a kilobyte
  • A short novel is a megabyte
  • I pickup truck full of books is a gigabyte
  • Estimates are that every word ever spoken by human beings is about 5 exabytes, an exabyte being a million terabytes.
  • A yottabyte would be a trillion trillion bytes.

Saying in once sentence that a database expert like CyBaxter would ruminate whether the database he is trying to download is definitely more than a terabyte, but might even be a yottabyte, is ludicrous, since the difference between the two is a factor of a trillion. Kind of a big difference.

Then he is downloading this database and making a copy of it. Hmm, to download  just an exabyte of data with today’s fastest technology would take hundreds of thousands of years. According to Paul McFedries’ book Word Spy, it would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a one yottabyte file.

Yet, Cy apparently does it in a matter of minutes. And he needs to store all that data:

Plus, he has all the links he needs right now to vast data farms where he could route and hide a downloaded copy.

That action is a significant part of the plot of the story at the end, but to anyone who actually understands this stuff it’s complete nonsense.

Of course, this obvious lack of understanding by the author undermines the credibility of much of the other surveillance technology that is central to the plot of the book. I am not an expert on surveillance technology, but if it’s as far off the mark as his database knowledge, then that too is all nonsense.

I did read the whole book. There was good suspense and action that kept me turning the pages, but the techno-fluff and the general billionaire adoration watered down the whole experience.

Book Review: Unwanted Starship – by John Walker and David Brown

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two StarsLeave a comment

Ethan Cross is a machine maintenance technician who works the second shift at Meridian Industrial, a manufacturing company that uses big machines, like hydraulic presses. He lives a quiet life with no wife or girlfriend, no family, and just a few good friends, all from work. One night he is called into the backyard to diagnose a machine problem when he sees something impossible right there between old steel drums, discarded pallets and the general detritus a manufacturing plant will spawn. It looks like a big hulking thing that makes no sense to him. Then he touches it, and nothing is like it was ever before.

It turns out the thing is an ancient alien spaceship, generated by an ancient and extinct galactic race they call “the Elders” who had technology unlike any race in the galaxy ever was able to recreate, and they had it more than 13 million years ago. The spaceship Ethan touched is of that vintage, and it made Ethan its owner and pilot, but also its victim. The neural bond between she ship and the owner can’t be broken, unless the owner dies.

Left with no choice, Ethan takes the ship to the stars. Soon he is a stranger in a strange land, in a vast galaxy, populated by dozens of intelligent and spacefaring alien species, most of which want him dead because they want to get their hands on his ship – and the Elder technology it is made of.

It sounds like a cool story which was a fun read, and I kept turning the pages, but in the end most of the world, the galaxy, was pretty trite.

All the aliens were basically bi-symmetrical,  bipedal humanoids, with knee joints, elbows, albeit one key species had an extra arm joint. Most of them had faces, ears, eyes and mouths. Magic trick 1 was they all spoke into translators which allowed them to seamlessly communicate across species, including human English, right from the start. Magic trick 2 was that interstellar travel with ships seemed effortless, through  a variety of portals, where space bent on itself. Magic trick 3 was that they all communicated instantaneously over hundreds of lightyears using some “quantum technology.” Magic trick 4 was that somehow all planets and space stations seemed to have just the right air mix, temperature and pressure to suit humans, and all aliens. Nobody seemed to need any space suits.

Picture yourself in the bar in the early Star Wars movies where all the aliens just hung out and ate and drank, like humans in alien suits, jolly and jovial.

Cute, but not serious enough science fiction for me to want to read the other books of the Unwanted Starship series.

Movie Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

I read the book Remarkably Bright Creatures a couple of years ago and here was my review. As it often is with movies based on successful books, the story becomes more shallow and big sections of plot are bypassed. However, the visuals sometimes enhance the experience. So it is with this movie.

The story is told from the viewpoint of an octopus named Marcellus, who was rescued after an injury some 4 years earlier and has lived most of his life in a tank in an aquarium in the Pacific Northwest. Marcellus observes the humans who visit him, and he befriends the cleaning lady Tuva (Sally Field).  While he philosophizes about his own life, he also observes the humans in his orbit, recognizes their misery, and plots to help them. That’s a pretty challenging task for an octopus that is about as close to humans as a space alien would be.

In the end, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a feel-good movie that draws out a few tears at the end and makes us feel good about the simple things in life, like a picnic in the yard, surrounded by good friends, neighbors and family.

And as I am wont to do, I will put in my English language lesson: The English plural of octopus is octopodes, often also octopuses, not “octopi” which we often read. The word comes from Greek, and the original plural form is actually “octopodes.” The Latin word for “octopus” is actually “polypus.” There is no “i” in any form of octopus.

I have written a lot about octopodes in this blog. Put the word “octopus” into the Seach box and see for yourself.

2.5

Movie Review: Pressure (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

One of the most important and most consequential days in the history of the 20th century was D-Day, the day the Allied forces invaded France by landing on the beaches of Normandy. Pressure tells the true and mostly untold story of one of the contributing elements to the decision to invade on that day: The British weather.

In the last 72 hours before the invasion, Britain’s chief meteorological officer, Dr. James Stagg (Andrew Scott), is called in to evaluate the weather and advise the Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Frazer) on the weather and if it was suitable for the mission. As it turned out, there was a huge weather front coming in and Stagg could simply not allow the mission to proceed, even though the entire high command, and most of his own subordinates, were pressuring him to go along. Too much was at stake.

You can’t watch too many war movies. After I walked out of the theater, I had to tell myself that I had just witnessed one crucial aspect of one of the most consequential battles in history. Yet, all I could think of was: Here was another example of our leaders sending other people’s sons and daughters into harm’s way. Eisenhower surely learned, but our president today plays with this awesome responsibility like it’s a reality show – you “get killed” and it means you’re voted off the island. Well – no – you get killed and you’re dead!

Dead!

Pressure is a movie I definitely recommend you watch. It made me think I should pick up a biography of Eisenhower so I could learn what stuff real presidents are made of.

Movie Review: Nuremberg (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Four Stars, Movies1 Comment

The final last quote on a black screen at the end of this movie was:

The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.

— R. G. Collingwood

(Robin George Collingwood, 1889–1943) was an English philosopher, historian, and archaeologist best known for his work on the philosophy of history.

I decided to lead my review with this powerful statement. Of course, the movie refers to the man Hermann Göring, the Reichsmarschall of the Third Reich and Hitler’s second in command. But the message of the film reaches far beyond what happened in Germany during World War II. We often say that what happened in Germany in those years could not happen again. Yet, all over the world we are seeing men seek totalitarian powers right in front of us, in broad daylight. That, my friends, is what I believe Nuremberg is about.

The movie tells the story of the Nuremberg trials largely from the point of view of Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a US Army psychiatrist assigned to assess the mental state and trial-worthiness of the prisoners and also to keep them from committing suicide. His main objective is to get through to Göring (Russell Crowe), who is the obvious leader. If he is convicted, they all will be. A lot is at stake. In the course of his assessment, he crosses the line and perhaps gets too involved in the life of his patient, to the point where he carries letters between him and his family.

Nuremberg shows the intense preparations and illustrates the extremely high stakes of the trial. Rami Malek does a masterful job portraying Dr. Kelley, and Russell Crowe is superb as Göring. I would not be surprised if one or both of them were to win awards for these roles.

IMDb has good background information about this movie, which I recommend. Here is the link. It points out many goofs, factual errors, and historical inaccuracies. I will not list them here separately. Just a couple of key ones are in the spoiler section below:

Mild Spoiler – will not destroy the experience.

  • Douglas Kelley was not fired, discharged from the army and sent home in disgrace. He never spoke to a journalist, or publicly denounced Robert Jackson’s ability ahead of Göring’s examination.
  • Both prison psychiatrists Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert arrived at different conclusions regarding the mental states of the prisoners, there was no antagonism between them. They never had a physical fight.

Overall, Nuremberg is a powerful movie with a running time of 2 hours and 28 minutes. It goes into depth and it puts a spotlight on the atrocities by the Nazis and makes us think about whether we today are better, given what is currently going on in the world.

Could it happen again?

Hell, yeah, it could!

The Loneliness of a Green Lawn

On By Norbert HauptIn Bad Product, NatureLeave a comment

I am currently reading The Comfort of Crows – by Margaret Renkl. It’s a book of chapters, one for each week of the year. I usually just read one chapter per session.

This one – an excerpt of Spring – Week 5 gave me pause and made me rethink the grass I am trying to grow in my backyard – unsuccessfully.

The flowering trees—dogwoods and redbuds and serviceberries, crab apples and peaches and cherries—are in full splendor now, and every time it rains, the streets are paved with petals. But the flowers I love best are the tiny ones, invisible from a car window. Exquisite flowers, most of them smaller than my pinkie fingernail, bloom all around my house in April, and they have wonderful names: woodland violet, spring beauty, daisy fleabane, pitcher’s stitchwort, birdeye speedwell, yellow wood sorrel, purple deadnettle, creeping Charlie, dandelion, and many others. Something new every day. Most people call them weeds.

A few of these flowers aren’t native to Tennessee, and some of the non-natives can be invasive. Those I pull up, or Haywood mows down, but the others are beneficial, early blooming wildflowers that pollinators need. Long before my actual pollinator garden is lush with cultivated flowers, the flowers I didn’t plant are blooming, an ankle-high meadow thriving in the place where most Americans grow grass. Wildflower seeds are carried on the wind, on the coats of animals, and in the digestive tracts of birds. Anybody paying attention would see them for the gifts they are: flowers that arrive, through no effort, to feed the bees and the butterflies.

Suburbia isn’t paying attention. Homeowners are still in thrall to a status symbol invented by English nobility. People enraptured with the idea of a lawn as a rolling carpet of grass, a green that remains green even during seasons when grass is supposed to be dormant, can’t help but see these homely flowers as intruders. They consider this question, if they consider it at all, as a matter of personal preference: I like wildflowers, and they like grass. But with biodiversity disappearing from every ecosystem on the planet, including our own, our preferences aren’t ethically equal. Lawns are a waste of precious water and soil because non-native landscaping like turf grass and boxwoods and crepe myrtles and Yoshino cherry trees provide little habitat or food for native wildlife. Worse, a manicured lawn requires many different poisons to maintain.

The wind that carries wildflower seeds to my uncultivated yard also carries wildflower seeds to my neighbors’ highly cultivated grass. It’s not easy to pull all those weeds, so homeowners—or their lawn services—set out poisons that keep the seeds from germinating. Then they spray a different poison that kills any plants that germinate anyway. Still another poison kills the insects that eat the “desirable” plants. Yet another kills the field mice trying to survive in a place without fields. And those poisons don’t stay put. They end up in the air and the water. They end up in our bodies, linked to asthma, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, and several cancers.

It kills me to think of my baby bluebirds hunting poisoned insects in the yard next door. It kills me to think of Cooper’s hawks eating the poisoned bluebirds. Every time I see my neighbors’ children rolling around on their poisoned lawns, absorbing into their skin and breathing into their lungs these dangerous endocrine disrupters, I have to work hard not to cry. So much life is imperiled by what is merely fashionable: a green lawn, a tidy yard. It makes me feel lonely to think about it.

— from The Comfort of Crows – by Margaret Renkl –  Wildflowers at My Feet and Songbirds in My Trees – Spring – Week 5

Movie Review: The Town (2010)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

There is a neighborhood in Boston named Charlestown, which is famous for having an unusual high number of armed robberies. For generations, crime families have arisen and their children stay in town, live lives of crime and robbery.

A group of friends are particularly good at it. They wear masks, enter banks, rob them at gunpoint, and hope nothing goes wrong before they can escape with the loot. Due to an unexpected twist, they end up kidnapping a young female bank manager, and they have to let her go later, hoping she didn’t recognize any of them and pick up any clues.

The gang leader Doug (Ben Affleck) ends up falling for her. They develop a relationship that is based on some massive lies. She cannot ever find out he was her kidnapper, and his gang friends cannot know he is dating her.

As you might suspect, things don’t go well.

This movie is well-done, fast-paced and full of tense moments. A great crime story.

The 4444th Post in this Blog

On By Norbert HauptIn Feelings5 Comments

This post is my 4444th post in this blog.

I am not into numerology, and round numbers are just numbers.

It’s just that recently I was curious how many there were so I programmed a widget that displays the number of post in the right sidebar. That’s how I noticed.

So I thought I’d give myself 4 stars for 4444 blog posts.

 

 

It’s going to be a while before it’s 5000, but I can aim, can’t I?

Book Review: The Lost Bookshop – by Evie Woods

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

The Lost Bookshop is the story of Opaline, a woman who lived in England in the 1920s, and Martha and  Henry, who are contemporaries. All three of them are book lovers and in their individual journeys, they come together in unexpected ways.

The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the three main characters, where Opaline lived over a hundred years before the other two. As the plot develops, we learn how Opaline’s life affected Martha’s and Henry’s in unexpected ways.

The main themes are illustrating the class system of English society, and above all the role women played as sub-humans, basically the chattel of the men in their lives, which was very true for Opaline a hundred years ago, and still true for Martha today due to her abusive husband.

The story weaves around Emily Bronte’s only novel, the classic Wuthering Heights. The characters believe that she might have written another manuscript that was never published before she died at age 30 from tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights became one of the most famous works in English literature shortly after she died.

One might say this book is about Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights, because the entire plot is developed around her character. So much so that I decided to dust off the book in my Kindle library and start reading it again. See my review here.

The Lost Bookshop is an entertaining read, full of nostalgia, some outright magic, quite a bit of mystery and above all outrage about the suffering of women, through history, and up to today.

Book Review: Wuthering Heights – by Emily Bronte

On By Norbert HauptIn Books (not finished reading)1 Comment

I don’t seem to do will with classics. Check out my category of “Books (not finished reading)” and you’ll find a lot of classics there.

Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous novels in English literature. I have tried several times to read it, and I usually get to about 10% before I toss it away – hopefully never to try again.

Recently I read The Lost Bookshop and Emily Bronte, the author of Wuthering Heights, is a central character in the plot development. Reading so much about Emily and her life and aspirations, I decided to dust off Wuthering Heights again and give it one more shot.

To no avail. I just cannot read that book. I just can’t make myself care about the characters and their challenges. This time I got to about 10% again, and I was relieved when I finally succumbed.

Books (not finished reading) do not get a rating in my reviews. The just live there and invite your comments.

Movie Review: The Christophers (2025)

On By Norbert HauptIn Art, Movies, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Julian Sklar (Ian Kellen) is a once famous and somewhat notorious (and obnoxious) artist whom his children expect to die soon. They do not have a loving or even respectful relationship with their father, and as one would expect in that situation, he thinks of them as losers and grifters.

Julian has a number of famous works in his portfolio. “The Christophers” are a series of paintings he did more than thirty years ago when he had a love-affair with a Christopher. There was a series of nine more drafts of Christophers in the works when they had a bad falling out. It appears that Julian never got over that, and he never finished the 9 remaining paintings. They were sitting somewhere in his attic.

His children thought of hiring a forger to finish the paintings in Julian’s style without his knowledge, hoping they would be worth millions once he died and there would be something valuable they could cash in as an inheritance. They find Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who is an artist, an art restoration specialist and also an expert forger. Lori reluctantly accepts the gig and goes to meet the artist. She expected to meet a senile and ill old man, but that’s not quite what she encounters.

The Christophers is a quiet movie that I, as an artist myself, enjoyed tremendously. There really are only two actors, Lori and Julian, with the two children being supporting actors. This whole movie felt like a play. It could be performed on a single set stage.

Michaela Coel has very striking features. From the beginning of the movie on I saw her as one of the female aliens in Avatar, and I could not shake that sentiment. She was born in 1987 as Michaela Boakye-Collinson to Ghanaian parents and brought up in England. Both she and Ian Kellen did an excellent job acting in this movie, and I would not be surprised to see either of them nominated for awards.

The Christophers is a movie about the inner and outer world of an artist, the artistic community and their lifestyle, and the lasting effects our youth and its loves and passions have on the rest of our lives. There are some things in life we just don’t get over, and sometimes it may take until the very last days for us to realize what really mattered.

Book Review: Squeezed – by David Atkinson

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

Squeezed was recommended by friends years ago; they thought it was “really funny.” But after reading the description, I passed. Just a few weeks ago, I read another book by this author, Future Proof, and I liked it. When creating that review, I came across Squeezed again and finally decided to go for it.

Squeezed is a book I almost didn’t finish reading. I even have a category in this blog: Books not finished reading. And I don’t rate those. Sometimes I drop out after just a few pages. Sometimes I make it to 50%. With Squeezed, I lost interest at 10%, then again at 20% and again at 50%. Fortunately, I just had knee surgery, and I had a lot of time on my hands with not much to do and no better books in the queue, so I just kept going. Well, here it is.

Scott and Hannah have been together for seven years, they had two children, and the two finally were able to go on a honeymoon in Thailand. While in their hotel room, Hannah told Scott she had ordered a prostitute to spice up their evening with a threesome. She didn’t discuss that with him, and he didn’t really have much say in the matter, because the “package was on the way.” Thirty minutes later “Marilyn” showed up, and matters commenced.

They proceeded with their vacation and went back to their home in Edinburgh, Scottland, and continued with their modest lives, where taking care of their two young daughters and holding up their middle-class jobs took all their energy. They lived in a tiny and cramped apartment, and they shared a beater car. But there was happiness in their lives, and love, or so it seemed.

One day, during a terrible blizzard, their apartment doorbell rang. Marilyn from Thailand stood there, inadequately dressed, and six months pregnant. She said Scott was the father. They had no choice but to invite her in and set her up on their couch. 

Now they had some explaining to do, to their friends, to their parents and families, and – as it turned out pretty quickly – to the authorities.

Squeezed is a story about hapless family that is trying to make a living against all odds and yet has to deal with life’s adversities whether they are ready for them or not. 

The reviews said that I’d be laughing out loud from the first page on, that Squeezed was a romantic comedy.  I didn’t think that at all. It was funny here and there, but it was no comedy. It was slow and boring at times, as the author went into great detail about things that didn’t seem to matter in the plot, but I just kept plowing on, as I said above, and in the end, I found the story rewarding.