Kyle Erickson
In this book, we follow two timelines- one in 1915 during WWI and one in 1947, shortly after WWII. In the former timeline we follow Eve, a young girl with a stammer who is recruited to join The Alice Network, a network of female spies working against the Germans. In 1947 we follow Charlie St. Claire, a pregnant 19 year old American who comes to France looking for her cousin Rose who went missing during WWII. Charlie meets an older Eve and the two stories work in tandem.
This book was good. I appreciated the real life aspects of this book, and how Quinn took little bits of history and expanded them into full fledged characters and plots. Charlie, however, was a very unlikeable person to be in the headspace of and I didn't particularly think she was written well- she's good with numbers and sees everything in life as some sort of “equation” - solve for X. I'm sure people like this exist, but her thought process struck me as something someone would put in a book and not how an actual person would think constantly. Her love story is also fairly uninteresting, even for romances, and her relationship with Eve develops inorganically in my opinion.
Everything to do with Eve, though, was fantastic, both in 1915 and in the 1947 timeline. Eve was a great character and it's a shame she's fictional. This book did alert me to the real life Alice Dubois though, who ran the Alice Network and was a pretty heroic and relatively unknown figure from WWI. This book is worth reading for Eve and Alice (codename “Lili” for most of this book) alone.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit, the stories inside were fascinating and gruesome, while also getting into the moral complexity of using research as ill-gotten gains. The Nazis are the most obvious to come to mind here, but there were lots of shady research experiments done in the past. The story that stuck out the most to me was the one from Winnipeg regarding the David Reimer case- I live in Winnipeg and I had never heard anything about this. This story was absolutely horrifying!
I did have some problems with this book, though. The author did use outdated language a few times; It mostly didn't bother me too much because due to the context, I could tell that Kean was trying to keep the language “as it was”- I believe he used Indian after referring to a group that had Indian in their name and their stated goal was to “kill Indians”. While it's a term I would normally look down upon an author using today, I felt in the context to switch to “indigenous” would have felt awkward- but a disclaimer after the fact would have been nice, especially since many Americans still use the term colloquially, to help normalize it felt weird. The second irritating thing he did was to keep promoting his podcast. Such a weird thing to do. Maybe it's an audiobook thing only, and in the physical book, they are instead footnotes? Either way, it was jarring.
I recommend this book, but with some caveats. It can be pretty heavy, and it's possible the language may put you off it (or the constant podcast-advertising).
Most of you know who Danny Trejo is. Even if you say you don't, the instant you see his face, the feeling of recognition dawns on you. The man is prolific. He currently has 406 acting credits on IMDB. He's known for playing tough guys, although the twilight years of his career have seen him branching out to play a more rounded set of characters, although almost always with a tough exterior. That tough exterior is there for a reason- Danny Trejo is a convicted felon. He was once seconds away from murdering an inmate before someone else got to him first. He once got a call from the head of the Mexican mafia warning him that a certain film was going to be trouble, ending in the deaths of eight people. He once did a favor for Kiefer Sutherland by threatening Sutherland's stalker into leaving him alone. You get the idea. But Trejo is also a man who turned his life around entirely, and now lives to enact as much good as he can while he's still on Earth. The juxtaposition of his past and present selves is fully evident in anything Trejo does, including here, in his long anticipated memoir.
Full disclosure: I have wanted Danny Trejo to write a memoir since I was a teenager and first heard his story. I am an absolute sucker for people who become successful from nothing (Educated, Born a Crime, The Glass Castle, etc) and I am even more of a sucker for people who turn their life around to help others. Danny Trejo has also been in some of my favorite projects ever (Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Rick and Morty, B-99, Predators, etc) and has been involved in many movies from my childhood nostalgia brain (Spy Kids, Anaconda, Con-Air, etc). Not to mention, I have co-writer and fellow author Donal Logue on FB, where he sometimes shares short stories he's written about his life including, I realized as I finished this, his collaborator's note for this book, and I think he is a wonderful writer (I'm hoping the success of this book allows him to write his own). So there was virtually no way I wasn't going to enjoy this. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the free copy in exchange for an honest review! I will say that I enjoyed the book so much, I immediately pre-ordered a signed copy after finishing.
“On that day, a warm day on Santa Monica Boulevard, all those years came back- good memories, bad memories. I didn't have many people left who I could kick it about that time in our lives. The homeless man with a broken arm had been a big-time dude in Soledad. He was political, got respect, and now he was living on the streets. I wondered how he'd broken his arm, what had happened all those years since the mid-60's when I'd last seen him; I wondered if he needed help. I wish he hadn't walked away. I wished we could have had a cup of coffee and cut it up. I wish I could have given him a hug.”
“I was a bad man on the hardest prison yards, but the most terrifying thing I ever had to face was my own emotions. I'd been taught to harden my soul against all those feelings, and I'd been afraid if I opened that door, it might never close. But now the door was open, and it was painful and scary and uplifting and right.”
“My film career is simply a vessel that helps me amplify a message to help a wider audience. Don't get me wrong, I love movies. Reenacting movies kept me sane in Folsom and Soledad. Movies teach us valuable life lessons. They teach us if we reach deep enough inside ourselves, we can overcome whatever problems we're dealing with, regardless of the odds. But the most important thing to me about my life in the film world is that it helps me carry the message of God to as many people as possible. If people are interested in me because of the films, my hope is that they will dig a little deeper into who I am and what I'm about in a way that helps spread the message of recovery. If you think I walk as I talk, you might be more curious as to what I did to turn my life around. “
“An interviewer once asked me if I liked working on bad movies. He wasn't trying to be rude, but I didn't love the question. I don't believe there's such a thing as a bad movie. I see every movie and TV role as an opportunity for me to support Maeve, my kids, and the people who depend on me. If my involvement helps a movie get made, it creates jobs for crews that have families of their own to support. How can that be bad? And a bad day on a movie will always be a million times better than your best day in prison.”
“The scene was so real, it was uncomfortable. Tears poured out of me like a dam had broken. I thought of all those times I'd looked at death, at a lifetime of imprisonment while waiting in Soledad to see if they were going to charge us with a capital crime. I thought of the deaths of my birth mother, my father, my uncle, my mother. I thought of the women I'd treated badly, the relationships I'd destroyed through ambivalence and selfishness, the fear for my children. All the times I never cried when I should have finally caught up with me. A certain set of rules helped me survive the first chunk of my life, the rules my uncle taught me. Another set of rules kept me going all those years after I got out of the hole. I stayed clean and sober by helping others get clean and sober. But there was a part of me I had never dealt with or accepted that I had to confront.”
“My kids are healthy, I'm healthy, my dogs are healthy. We're all happy. I think, tomorrow I'll be 76 and I still have so much living to do, but in that moment, I'm content to let the world spin and enjoy being at home with my doggies. I ask God one last question: I say, “God, how am I doing?”. God replies, Great, Danny. You're almost out of hell. Keep it up. I smile to myself and thank Him for my life.”
I think this novella was a mistake in format. I would have enjoyed this much better in almost any other way. A full length novel could have really fleshed out the two characters and especially the world, which is felt was both focused on too heavily and also underdeveloped. A movie would probably be incredible, as would a miniseries. I even think if this was adapted into a graphic novel, I would love it.
But I thought it was a pretty poor novella. The writing style was nice but needlessly esoteric to the point where it was hard for me to visualize what was happening and how they got from point A to B in several instances. And the escalating “plot” just seems to kick in and be resolved and then have a twist all way too quickly. It just needed more room to breathe. It especially feels like a shame to build this whole conflict/time war/universe thing merely for this novella.
So there are three stories in this, and the longest one, And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, I have already read and given 5 stars.
However, the other two stories in this collection I did not like AT ALL. The title story had a weird writing style, an incoherent premise, and was a bummer in a not-good way. The final story was really short but was just absurdly cheesy (even for Backman) and was about with depression who manifests a troll from his imagination to help him learn to be happy. I get that it's a short story, but it was such a simplistic, “just think happy thoughts and then you'll be happy” message that it left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'd give both of those stories one or two stars. However, I can't rate the collection that low, because the largest story is incredible. So I'll give the entire collection 3 stars, with the caveat that I only personally liked the middle story.
Dominus is essentially a series of short stories that are loosely connected through the lives of one family across time. They take place from the reign of Marcus Aurelius until Constantine. The first half of this book was very engaging, but about the 45% mark, I lost most of my interest.
The short story format of following generations of family has been done well before, but it is done to middling effect here. Saylor uses this format to dip in and out of various interesting parts of Roman history but does absolutely nothing to deepen any of his characters or provide them with characteristics or personality that differentiates them from one another. He also doesn't really do anything to examine how their lifestyles have changed over the centuries. They are always well off and they are always sculptors (by the way, over many generations, this powerful family of Romans never has to enter the military? I think I counted two of them that ever had to join the legions, which strikes me as woefully unrealistic. Of course, we don't get enough about any of them to know one way or another if they served). Every single patriarch of this family was utterly indistinguishable from the other. Which makes reading a chore, and the interest in the story only as good as whatever Roman Emperor they're discussing.
The first half-ish of this book followed a single character and his son, along with their friendship with the famous physician Galen, and their friendship and tenuous partnership with Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, respectively. This had enough of an arc that I was completely invested. Once Commodus leaves the stage though, all life leaves this book. What follows is a series of clips from the highlights of each of the most well-known emperors in this time period, then a time jump of a few years, some exposition about what happened in those years, 1-3 conversations with somebody being insane, then another time jump. After every time jump or two, you get introduced to the next generation, the same as the old generation.
If you want to just have a nice series of short stories that give you more context and information about Ancient Roman Emperors, then this will be pretty enjoyable. But overall it just felt like a giant montage. I admire how much history Saylor is trying to cover here, but maybe he was trying to do too much.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free copy in exchange for an honest review!
First half of this was pretty good. I always enjoy the “getting the band together/getting successful” parts of music memoirs. The second half falls apart entirely with just a bunch of bitter rants about legal battles and band feuds. I've seen people write books about their bands and their breakups/legal troubles with much less time to process that came across much less bitter and angry than John does here. It's been almost 50 years, maybe you don't have to “get over it”, but you should be able to talk about it with less ire. Really ruined this read for me, he didn't come across well at all during the second half.
Sigh. This book has everything I would think I would want. And I did not enjoy it whatsoever. I am the one in the wrong here, lads, I will admit this. I wanted to like this book. But at about the 60% mark, I was just hoping to be done as soon as possible and I honestly don't think any of it was giving me any pleasure.
Firstly, I have to mention the audiobook narration. The author is American and he puts a thick Irish accent on and it makes it so hard to pick up on everything happening and I just think this was fully a mistake. I hated it. Understand, I got a free review copy from Netgalley (thanks, Netgalley + publisher!) and I disliked the narration so much that I procrastinated the book until it actually came out, got myself a physical copy, and finished it that way. That's how much the audio wasn't working for me. Maybe some people liked the Irish, but I did not. It is one thing if the author is actually Irish, but he is not, and I think its a mistake for authors to narrate their own fiction books. Also, Kinch is supposed to be funny and Buehlman delivered everything incredibly flat. I didn't find ONE thing funny until I switched to physical and could read it in my head instead. Terrible.
Now onto the actual book. The entire book is in Kinch's POV. He's a thief that is coerced into going on a quest. Twists and mayhem ensue. Here's the thing. I love a good quest. But I hated Kinch. I hated his humour. I hated his speech style. I didn't like a single thing about him. This may be partly the audiobook, again- everything he said and did was so flat for the first half that it made have affected how I viewed the character for the second half. I don't know. All I know was...he seemed annoying. And he seemed incompetent. He mostly just succeeded at not dying throughout this book, which is fine if you're trying to be funny, but I didn't find him funny. I think if you like Kinch, this book will land much better for you.
Onto the worldbuilding. This is the best interpretations of goblins I've ever seen. Truly great and fresh and horrifying. But everything else about the worldbuilding seemed pretty underwhelming. There were a lot of places and languages and types of people and I struggled to keep them straight, and I'm an epic fantasy fan. I think partially I couldn't be bothered to give a damn about any of them, and partially another audiobook problem (see the issue?). They would mention a type of person and I'd go, “yep, that's a word they've said before” and move on. I just finished the book now and you could not pay me to remember who the main conflicted nations/cities/groups were, besides The Guild, which Kinch is a part of. The previous Goblin Wars all seemed pretty brutal and harrowing, so that was well done. The magic was fun, but also seemed pretty unexplained and just formed a large part of all the resolutions so it landed a bit hollow. I think my disconnect is that everything is filter through Kinch's POV, and he knows all these places/things/types/magics already, and he just is like, “ah yes, Narnia” and continues on his day. Maybe Buehlman should have kept some of his world building for further novels. Or maybe I'm just an ass. I don't know.
I also hate that he called humans “kynds”. This flies in the face of all logic. There are like 6 languages in this book, and Kinch presumably doesn't speak English. So he's speaking something that we, English speakers, don't speak. So everything is “translated” for us. So if Kinch's language says “kynd” for “human”, it should be on the page as “human”, the same as everything else. If he says “table”, we understand he's probably saying “blah blah” instead. But if every word is rendered in another language, we just aren't reading a book in English anymore. So it's HUMAN! I admit, I'm being pedantic, and this bothered me more than it should. But it just seemed like an overt attempt to be different instead of being authentic.
Notice I didn't really talk about the characters. Galva is a genuinely good and interesting character and probably should have been the protagonist, but I'm in the minority here. She was just more captivating and the person who the quest actually mattered for. There is also a semi-boring love interest, a blind cat, and some red shirts. The characters were the least satisfying part of this. Tomorrow I probably won't remember anybody besides Galva.
So...this was a disappointment. And I'm truly sorry to be so hard on it, because I heard such good things and I was so excited to read it. Alas, not everything good works for everyone. I've seen many people say this is the best fantasy book of the year, and gush about it. I'm happy they enjoyed it. I didn't.
PREVIOUS AUDIOBOOK RANT:
Here's me, trying to slog my way through the audiobook of this book I'm really excited to read. Why am I slogging? Because the author's Irish accent is thick, and I was given an ARC of the audiobook, not the physical book. Alright, can't help that, I'll do my best.
Now I just saw an interview with Christopher Buehlman. He is American and has an American accent.
This was infuriating. Who let him narrate his own book (a rarity for fiction), and beyond that, who decided to let him do an imposter, thick, Irish accent for it?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!?
At the very least, if he was determined to have an Irish narrator, they should have had an actual Irish narrator do it. I don't care how good his impression it, it makes me so much more annoyed to listen to it than I would be if it was a natural accent because it is so jarringly difficult to keep myself vested in the story. I sincerely hope they get a lot of feedback about this and re-record it.
The audiobook gets 1 star from me. But I'm not actually going to rate the book like that, because that's ridiculous, and I am still excited to read this book that is getting heaps of praise. Just keep this in mind if you're debating getting the audiobook.
I listened to this on audio, and that has pros and cons. McWhorter has a great voice and it makes it a lot of fun. But the subject matter of linguistics does require a fair bit of visualization to see the progression (at least for me). So I would barely get from “Shit and nice used to be the same word? That's interesting!” before already forgetting the way they changed throughout the years. I'd have probably gotten more out of this long term if I had read it physically, but I certainly enjoyed listening to it.
I enjoyed learning the origins of a lot of these words, and how murky the English language truly is. I also thought it was super fascinating how swears have progressed from “about religion” “about the body” and “about social groups”. I had never really considered “slurs” the same as “swears”. Which makes sense, because I consider myself somebody who swears but not somebody who uses slurs. Although it really puts into perspective how this changes over time. People from a different generation may have felt the same outrage at me saying “Jesus Christ!” as some of us feel about slurs today.
I knocked one star off because McWhorter brings up rabbits, due to them being tangentially related to the word “cunt”, but then drifts off into a random aside about how rabbits are “blank” creatures that don't have any intelligence or spark to them, and “never amount to much of anything”. I've had four rabbits, one of which is absurdly intelligent for an animal with such a small brain, and all of whom were complex, social, intelligent, and loving animals. I imagine McWhorter has experienced rabbits solely in tiny cages with no engagement or socializing. This normally would not be something that bothered me enough to knock a star off a book about linguistics...however, the book is about linguistics, including factually incorrect statements about rabbits for no purpose, and I have no way to express my disappointment to McWhorter himself so...one star less it is. I hope someone informs him of his mistake someday.
But again, very enjoyable read. I certainly recommend it (besides the rabbit slander
I have so many thoughts about this book, and no way to properly organize them. Let's give this a try.
This book is 1010 paperback pages. Around 900 pages in, I was sure I was giving this a three star rating, and was already writing my list of reasons in my head why this book is annoying. The last roughly 100 pages though was some truly all time 5 star material. Not because of what happens- the ending is actually pretty “quiet”- But moreso how the entire novel comes together to redefine everything that came before it, and realign everything that comes after it.
I've seen people talk about how much they love Roland as a character. I've enjoyed the previous three books, but I've never seen Roland as particularly great. This is the book where you learn who he is. Why he's doing what he's doing. What matters to him, and what his fears and traumas are. This book elevated Roland from a 4/10 to a 9/10 pretty quickly for me.
Most of this book is a large flashback to Roland's teenage years, and the first time he fell in love. And I really enjoyed this a lot more than I expected when it began. It was a surprisingly touching love story and I thought the entire thing overall was well done. The end “battle” with the antagonists was pretty refreshing too. I won't spoil it, but it handles this build up in a way that I don't see stories do very often.
So why was I originally going to give it three stars? Well:
-Here's as good a time as any to mention that I absolutely hate, despise, detest, the Mid-world lingo. So much. I like “forgotten the face of your father”, because it's just quirky enough to make sense but also be weird and mysterious. But I hate “Sai”, I hate “I wot”, I hate all the “thee” and “thy”, I dislike “cry your pardon” and I even hate “mayhap” most of the time. But I especially, fully, with my whole entire heart hate “thankee-sai”. Did Stephen King ever say this phrase out loud? Did he ever picture ROLAND saying this phrase? Nobody else said this out loud to him and begged him to reconsider? Truly? I don't believe it. This is the silliest fucking phrase I've ever seen in my life and it's used about 300 times in this book.
There are other “mid-world-isms” I'm probably forgetting. But overall, the dialogue in this book drove me crazy because we usually have Eddie, Jake, and Susannah to talk normal in contrast with Roland's dumb fake-child nonsense.
-I did really enjoy the long flashback, truly. But it needed an editor with a backbone. You could cut 150 pages from this 800 page flashback and lose LITERALLY nothing substantial, and you could cut another 50 and lose barely anything else. I'm all for marinating in a story, but there were entire pages I skimmed and didn't miss a single relevant thing to anything happening. That's not good.
-The book randomly turns into a Wizard of Oz reenactment, complete with magic shoe tapping. What, and I say this with much fervor, the fuck? I know this was King's post-Cocaine days but you wouldn't know it from this sequence. I'm sure this has some literary merit to somebody but I think this is the only full blown mistake in the plot to me.
-This isn't just Wizard and Glass, but something that bothers me about storytelling in general- when a character tells other characters information for the first time and then that information just happens to be super relevant immediately. Roland just basically arrives in Kansas and says, “Well, speaking of Kansas, one time I was in a small town” and talks for LITERALLY days and then 10 minutes after he's done, the story he is telling the group JUST SO HAPPENS OUT OF NOWHERE to be directly relevant to their quest all of a sudden. I understand the narrative impulse, it makes sense to put relevant backstory and info into the book where it's going to be relevant. But oh my god, Roland and the group travel for months on end! Just have him tell the story and then be like “they walked around for another month. Oh and then X happened”. Or something!! Roland just randomly getting an urge to finally open up at this time and place just feels too convenient.
-similar to above, but I also hate when a character tells a bunch of info and then someone asks for additional info and the character says, “I just told you so much, I am so drained, don't you know we are book characters? We can't take a quick water break and press on with the info! Instead, that follow-up info is for a different book! Duh!” People don't talk like this, and pretending they do is frustrating. I can tell friends stories for hours. Even emotionally draining ones. And then if I'm drained, I just wait like 10 minutes or something and then I”ll tell them the rest.
-a previous book made an overt decision to save a certain antagonist from death, and built him up to be a threat. He shows up and is then disposed of permanently within two pages, affecting exactly nothing whatsoever. This is just a problem that happens when you take 20 years to write a series, you don't follow through with buildup effectively, but it was still an odd choice.
So, you see the dilemma. I will never read this book again, most likely. And yet, I think it's the best written of the series so far, and almost the most enjoyable. It made the main character of the series a fully dynamic character, and for that, I applaud it. So, 4 stars.
Onwards on the Path of the Beam!
Enjoyable, breezy (in style, not subject matter haha) book about some atrocious Roman leaders. Caligula, Nero, and Commodus take up a lot of space in this discussion, rightfully so, so it was nice to get to hear more about some of the lesser known monsters. My only complaints are it was VERY brief for most of them, and that for some reason, the author occasionally told the story out of order. (For example, skipping Tiberius's reign/Sejanus's villainy and then circling back after Commodus's death to discuss Sejanus and Macro?)
If you just want to hear about some awful Romans, or if you want to participate meaningfully in the debate about who the worst is, this book is for you. - Commodus, obviously. Why is this even debated?
4.5/5 rounded up to 5 stars because how much I've thought about it since finishing.
This book was fantastic and utterly engaging. I had a few small problems with it, but the pros are much larger than the cons and I can't wait to start book 2.
We follow three, but primarily two, main characters. Both of these storylines are interesting from first to last. We have Ruka, in the “land of ash” which is Dane-inspired, but with a matriarchy priestess leadership that makes it more unique than other Dane-inspired fantasy. Ruka is an outcast and is one of the most complex and fun to read protagonists I can think of. He does bad things, but you also root for him. This character alone makes the series worth reading.
Then we have Kale, fourth son of a king, in “the land of sand”, a Pacific Asian inspired kingdom. Kale struggles with finding a place for himself and figuring out his purpose. He also has a love interest, Lani. I generally find the romances in a story the least engaging parts, but I was genuinely interested in their story and was entirely invested in them, to my utter surprise. Kale's story goes to several unexpected places throughout the novel.
We also have Dala, who I found interesting but less so. She kinda fades out of the narrative after not accomplishing much, but I assume she's important for the rest of the trilogy. Still, the set up for her didn't feel boring, just unsatisfying because she didn't reach any sort of natural conclusion for her arc. I will trust that Nell has plans for her.
The characters and worldbuilding in this book are incredibly strong, and have me thoroughly invested. If you care about either of these things, I think you'd be satisfied.
Now for a few negatives:
-The grammar. This wasn't the biggest deal, but it was noticeable. I've read self-published before and I noticed more mistakes in this one, but nothing crazy. The one that bothered me the most personally is using ‘quotations' wrong in ‘places' where they ‘wouldn't' go. (He uses it for ‘servant' about 150 times for a character who is clearly not just a servant- this was my least favorite part of the book. We get it, there's more to him!)
-the pacing was incredibly strange. We would get like 5 Kale chapters in a row, and then not see him for like 100 pages. But then when we DID see him again, no time had passed. When we left Kale (or later, Ruka) it was at a natural “time lapse” part of the story, so I thought we'd be checking in on Kale several months later to see his progress, but it was the next day or something. I think alternating the chapters so it was less of large blocks of one character would have totally negated this.
And then the last quarter of this book covers A TON OF STUFF very quickly after being pretty slow for the first 3/4s. I've started book 2 already, so I know we are getting some flashbacks to fill in this time, so I'm less bothered. Still, without knowing that ahead of time, it can give the reader a ton of wipelash.
But that's it. This book is well worth your time and I cannot wait to finish book 2!
I didn't enjoy this one whatsoever, but it's still Backman so it's well written and has lines every so often that really make you think, so it skirts by with a 3 star by the hairs on its chinny chin chin.
Here's what I think happened. I think Backman did Beartown, and then his community got together and took him hostage and was like, “you didn't portray hockey as important enough, you better DO IT AGAIN BUT THIS TIME, THE HOCKEY IS POSITIVE.”
There's a lot of things I didn't like, but a good amount of them are spoilers. The first problem I had is that I don't think this book justified itself. After finishing it, I do not think one storyline in it needed to be told. Obviously Backman can write whatever he feels he wants to, but nothing really came together at any point. It was just a bunch of people and once in a blue moon, something happened. The first half of the book is excruciatingly melodramatic, wallowing in the events of the first book. (which, for certain characters, aka the ones that were directly effected, makes sense. But literally half the book is people just pouting “we want hockey and now there's no hockey, boo hoo”).
There's also a political storyline with the hockey that is, for my personal taste, literally the least interesting thing a person could read. That one's on me, I'll take the hit here.
The way hockey is portrayed in this book is much more positive and central than the first book. This provides a disconnect because it was very obvious that the hockey culture was the problem in the first book, but the narrator doubles down and constantly talks about just how fucking GREAT AND WONDERFUL hockey is. I hated this, not sure if that was intentional or not but I doubt it.
The constant refrain of, “it's not important. It's just sports” as some sort of profound “oh wow sports can totally change your life, why didn't I see it before!” Epiphany was REALLY grating on me. I don't think anybody suggests sports are NOT important to the people playing them, and that they obviously can heavily impact your life. So this just seemed like a really stupid and bizarre thing to keep repeating and flies directly in the face of the first book, where the sports culture is VERY MUCH the problem that makes the central event so troubling. Yeah, sports are important, but toxic hockey cultures and entire towns worshipping teenager's abilities is decidedly not healthy, and you know that Backman...because you wrote the first book? This heel turn seems unjustified and like trying to walk back all the points from the first one.
The town of Beartown is like 100 times more insufferable in this one. But the narrator is still trying to make you think, “hey, these people are complicated!” and they totally aren't. They're aggressive, backwater, stupid, homophobic, stuck in their rut and unwilling to change. The town is portrayed so aggressively unlikeable for most of this book, except when they randomly decide not to be (like retiring a number on a jersey for someone and then cheering for 20 YEARS whenever that number is brought out). In Beartown, I understood why people would live in Beartown, even if I personally never would. In Us Against You, I think Beartown is a place where bad people go.
They also talk about this character, Vidar, for the entire book. He fuels SO MUCH of the narrative for the first half, and does not appear until 70% into the book! What! And then he shows up, is in a few scenes, has no personality, does one thing, and then the book ends. Everything about this is perplexing.
That's all I can think of without straight up ripping on the plot beat by beat. I'm genuinely upset I didn't like this one like the other Backman books I've read, but it was a mostly unpleasant experience that I kept wishing was over. I hope he releases the third book soon, so I can not read it, and then he work on something better.
Certainly wouldn't want to work for Elon, but you can't say the man is not a visionary. This is a great overview of who Musk is and what his achievements were, circa 2015. The problem with doing a biography about someone of Musk's stature and vision is that even six years later, this is pretty out of date. But it is perhaps his “origin story”.
The book got very repetitive in the last third, which is basically “Elon tells people to do something by X date, they dont get it done fast enough, Elon gets mad and tells them to do it faster, they do it faster, world is amazed” over and over again.
EDIT- I have since finished this book on audio and it was much better. I mean, I still don't ‘get' the hype or whatever, but I didn't want to claw my face off with my own sharpened fingernails, so definitely a vast improvement. I still think Paul is literally the least character that has even been a central character, though. Paul is wet sand. Paul is a blanket soaked in cat piss. Paul is a bucket of playdough that has been inside a toddler's mouth. Paul is the leftovers that hyenas and jackals leave after a feast. Paul is the literary equivalent of sitting in a room with your eyes closed until you die. That's really the crux of my review: Why does Paul exist?
PREVIOUS REVIEW:
Alright, I'm done. I throw in the towel. I really tried. For four months I tried to snail crawl my way through this book. I made it to page 155. And I had the book in my hands, and I realized I was angry. Why am I angry? I asked myself. And I realized I was angry because the writing style of this book is manifest pain. And I could be doing any number of other things that weren't manifested pain.
Lots of people love this book, and I was determined to give it a good try. After I decided to stop, I wiki'd the plot. And yep, great plot, sounds fantastic and a whole lot of fun. Maybe in a few years I'll retry, or maybe I'll give it a shot on audio sometime, but for now I'm just gonna watch the movie and respect that while some people absolutely loved this, for me, it's an example of a wonderful concept ruined by sluggish, boring writing. Can we pay, like, Andy Weir or something to rewrite this book?
Books that are intentionally trying to be funny are usually a miss for me. I still read them, though, if I'm a fan of the supposed funny person. I guess I like pain or maybe I'm optimistic or maybe I like having a better understanding of said funny person. But there are only few exceptions where funny book is actually funny.
This is one of those times.
I listened to the audiobook, which was brilliant. Each story in this book was funny, to me personally. Some were laugh out loud funny (the Interview filming, the Tom Cruise meeting, the Nicolas Cage misunderstandings, the Kanye West stuff), and others were merely amusing, but I was entertained the entire time. I rarely think comedy books should be longer but this one should have been. I hope he does another.
Ah, the name of the wind.
It's hard, when you skip a series that is so well known in one of your favorite genres, for years, because it's almost impossible to not hear tons of opinions on it, and that will inevitably shape your experience.
I struggled with what to rate this, because I was consistently underwhelmed by it. So why did I rate it 5 stars? Because it deserves 5 stars.
I hear three constant things about Name of the Wind. Rothfuss' prose is incredible, the series sucks because Kvothe is a Gary Stu/unreliable narrator, and the series is the greatest thing ever. I found the first to be true, and the second two to be false (in my opinion).
Firstly, I listened to this on audio, and that was a mistake because the prose is gorgeous and it is really hard for me to latch onto phrases in audio form. I will definitely be reading this physically at some point.
I don't understand where people calling Kvothe a Gary Stu comes from, he has a ton of flaws. He just also has hyper competences at some things. I can understand those things annoying you (particularly the beginning, where he's a kid and just learning a ton of shit super quickly and never forgets any of it even after not thinking about any of it for years after), but calling him a Gary Stu is willfully ignoring all the shit he does wrong. He's also not exactly an unreliable narrator, because many times he talks about unflattering things he did or how he wishes he did something different, or he talks about how he let some legend about him persist (if he was trying to make himself look better, he would just say, “yeah, that happened”)
The plot was meandering, and pretty bare bones, and Kvothe as a character I never particularly liked that much, although there are aspects that I really liked. At no point did the plot really kick into an overdrive where I was wowed, like in any of my other favorite fantasy series.
But that said, I was engaged at every single goddamn second of this book. I was not bored for a moment. Rothfuss is such a gifted writer, I cant believe it. I had thought, based on people's comments, he was going to be dense like Tolkien's (also beautiful) writing, and was prepared for a slog. But it's instantly readable, engaging, and thought provoking. Truly one of the best.
The worldbuilding was also pretty good, although it could have been better. We didn't get a lot on how the magic worked, or the layout of the overall world, but I imagine this is all expanded upon in Wise Man's fear and the eventual, perpetually delayed, Doors of Stone.
I can say that Name of the Wind was not what I was expecting. I don't imagine I will ever consider this one of my favorite series (but who knows, maybe book 2 will convince me!). But this book will stick me for a long time and I would recommend it to anyone who was trying out some fantasy.
Wow, this book improved upon The Poppy War in every way! Kuang's prose, sense of tone, plotting, and characterizations went way up. I was riveted the entire time by Rin's journey, the plot, the supporting characters, and the worldbuilding. I am a huge sucker for “people find out about more technologically advanced societies”, and watching Rin discover more about Hesperian culture was great.
Lots of dark things happen in this series and Kuang displays such a maturity in dealing with them. Another thing I love about this series is the male/female friendship is done very well. It's so rare for m/f friends in media to admit to loving each other and actually saying it out loud to each and risking their lives for one another without there being some sort of “bUt oNe oF thEM is aKUALLY in LUV”.
Rin is such a well-written character, one of my favorites ever. I absolutely hate almost every decision she has ever made, and yet, I root for her to get justice, to get revenge, to save the nation. This is so hard to pull off because if I was around Rin for more than 11 seconds, I would probably kick her in the shins.
That said, I do have one minor problem with this book, involving characterization. I'll mask the issue so that people who haven't read it aren't spoiled but people who have read it will know what I'm talking about:
Character A is incredibly upset at Character B. Character B did something unforgivable. Character A spends a portion of the novel not speaking to Character B. They have a brief chat discussing their reactions to trauma, and then they are friends again. Not long after, Character A has to make an INCREDIBLY LIFE ALTERING SACRIFICE to help Character B. Character A does it immediately, without hesitation, without knowing the risks/rewards, and with Character B protesting that they do it at all.
This just didnt work for me at all. As great as Kuang is at characters and dealing with their trauma, this definitely felt like “I need X to happen, so they're just gonna forgive each other immediately” and I hate that. I understand that for the story to go where Kuang needed it to, event X had to happen. But the journey of forgiveness or maybe the decision to make the sacrifice should have been done over a longer time/with more depth. It was such a series-altering and life-altering decision and I couldn't believe character A would do this so quickly.
But that said- I thoroughly enjoyed everything else. I cannot WAIT to dive into book 3.
This was a pretty good, short novel that was enjoyable the whole time. The narrator was good and it felt different enough from King's other recent stuff but similiar enough to be comfortably King. I also enjoyed the IT references. I hope King returns to this character because it really did feel like a waste to be done with him so fast.