I am going to review the book after I have read the entire thing. Normally it is difficult to write a review on a book that one has only read 1/5 of, but ithiss message is really urgent, I assure you. You often hear that such and such book was great, but stick with it because it takes awhile to start. I don't really understand that concept. Why not take out the part "before it all starts" and skip to the good stuff. Sure, we need an introduction, background and motivations for the characters, but how long does that really take? I'm on page 80, and the book hasn't started. Yes, Crowley you write beautifully about poor emo, just-lost-his-job Pierce Moffet and the world of the "Faraways," a random little town in the mountains where everyone seems to lust after their next door neighbor's wife. But honestly, if I wanted to read a book about small-town gossip meets romantic comedy, I would have. I want to know about the world of Aegypt, and why there is more than one history of the world. Oh John Crowley, why must you torture me so!!!

Apparently this book is "very well-written," and "an example of beautiful prose"-I agree wholeheartedly with this. However it doesn't have a plot to speak of(this is from many review on amazon.com). Well, damn. Why didn't I think of writing some awesome phrases and beautiful descriptions and call it a historical/fantasy novel??? Oh wait. That's been done before. It's called post-modern poetry(without the historical fantasy part). I will however, finish the book because it's well-written and it was a birthday gift.

I think that this book was very unusual in that it kept me reading until the bitter end, even though there was not much plot to speak of. Crowley's prose is indeed beautiful, but I felt as if I kept waiting for the book to begin. I really enjoyed the little interludes into books that the main characters were reading, but those plots kind of just drifted off into space. I also thought that the little "joke" at the end, that he kept mixing up all of the Roses in the small town of Faraways was weird. I was still confused, considering three characters were named Rose, with no distinction. I also did not particularly like the main character, Pierce. He was cold, unemotional and hard to relate to. However, most of the other characters like Spofford and the Roses were really great. Overall, great character development, excellent prose, but leaves you scratching your head, and wondering what exactly happened in those 450 pages or so. I'm still not sure if I will finish the series.

A really good book about the history of finance.

I especially thought the list of cognitive traps humans are prone to very useful. (pp345-6)

1. Availability bias.----------------------------going with "what you know"
2. Hindsite bias.-------------------------------"everybody knew that would happen."
3. The problem of induction.-----------------basing decisions on too little data.
4. The fallacy of conjunction.----------------thinking "likely things will always occur"
"unlikely things will never occur"
5. Confirmation bias.-------------------------believing what you want to be true is true
6. Contamination effects.--------------------considering irrelevant information
7. The affect heuristic.-----------------------believing what you feel should be true is true
8. Scope neglect.-----------------------------"only gamble what you can afford to lose."
9. Overconfidence in calibration.------------conflating"best case" with "most likely"
10.Bystander apathy.-------------------------"somebody ought to do something!"

I found the beginning a little confusing because she keeps switching points of view but trust me this novel is extremely worth reading. Once you get a third of the way through it the character connections start to make sense and it's a very compelling novel.

This is a collection of history-related comics by artist and genius Kate Beaton. I love these comics - if you love inside history jokes, you will, too.