Chuck
I couldn't actually finish it. It's been sitting in my queue forever. I even abandoned it, felt guilty for abandoning such an easy read, picked it up again, and read for about 30 pages before I realized I'd already read those 30 pages a month ago. I can't really blame the author; they had the thankless task of writing a bridge novel where nothing of substance could actually happen, but it's amazing how much nothing happens in this book.
This felt as if it was more fun to write than it was to read. You could tell it was exhaustively researched even without reading the various afterwords and annotations, but I'm kind of glad I'm not more literate, so many of the references passed me by completely. So much of the book is filled with name-dropping fictional and non-fictional characters, and it always felt more distracting than organic. Unlike “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which used the same conceit, the characters seemed to be used for surface-level name recognition more than real narrative function.
Also, it felt distractingly crafted to be the start of a series instead of a complete narrative. The introductions seemed to go on interminably, but the story finally got really engaging with the introduction of a Chinese vampire. But that entire storyline just petered off as anti-climactically as possible, suggestion that Newman was hoping to introduce a spin-off series. And the novel on the whole just seems to leave its characters, reluctant to draw any of its stories to a conclusion.
I can't be too critical, since it flowed well and did have an engaging middle section, but it ultimately felt like an exercise more than anything else. It never quite settled for me as a satisfying alternate universe story, since the premise suggested a lot more upheaval than was actually shown. (The book simply wanted to have Victorian London + vampires, but having Dracula and his Carpathians actually take over the country to the degree that the book suggests would've made Victorian London unrecognizable). And ultimately, there was no “soul” to it — I don't feel any connection to any of the characters, and I don't believe it had much to say apart from plot.
I suspect this is an unfair review, mostly because I wanted the book to be something other than what it actually was.
I loved this book not just for delivering everything I wanted out of an old-fashioned whodunnit, but also for being a virtuoso performance by an author delivering a defense of the genre that's never defensive, didactic, or self-conscious.
What impresses me the most is that there are a hundred ways that this could've ended up insufferable or even just disposable. Descriptions of the “nesting doll” murder mystery-within-a-murder mystery made it sound like the literary equivalent of the “Scream” movies: self-aware meta-interpretations of a genre that work perfectly well, but don't end up “saying” much of anything apart from “we're all in on the joke.” But Horowitz includes an implicit defense of whodunnits while acknowledging the criticisms of them. He acknowledges that they're the literary equivalent of comfort food, then challenges anyone to explain why that's a bad thing.
Horowitz changes voice frequently throughout the book — not just for the two mysteries themselves, but for different characters throughout both stories, and for excerpts from other novels. There's never a sense that the inner mystery is “simple” or somehow less literary than the outer mystery, just that they have different voices. And what's more, he includes lengthy examples of BAD writing, a crutch often used by insecure writers to make their “real” writing seem more accomplished by comparison. Here, though, they're an implicit defense of readable, unpretentious writing and clear, confident storytelling.
I do wish that I were in a book club or something, because I can't shake the feeling that there are clues I still haven't identified, and threads that were left hanging. The downside to such a meticulously-constructed puzzle box is the sinking suspicion that there are always layers of the puzzle left unsolved.
I didn't see the movie version of this until I was an adult, and I really disliked it. After reading the book, I have more sympathy for the filmmakers, since it sure SEEMS like there's enough imagery in it to make for a great movie. But in reality, everything that makes the book great is unfilmable — it's all the passages where Bradbury rhapsodizes about youth in small town America; or explains the sense of indescribable loss that comes from being reminded of your age; or sets the stakes for a tense scene not just as the fate of a young boy or his middle-aged father, but a battle between good and evil that goes back for millennia.
I was surprised to see in Bradbury's afterword that the story spent so much of its life in the form of various screenplays, since most of its essence seems to be in Bradbury's flowery descriptions (which were at some times overwrought, which along with some period-appropriate but still unfortunate sexist mentality, are my only complaints about the book).
This is a wonderful book! The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because the voice of Middle America in 1950 finally overwhelms everything in “The Silent Towns,” when Bradbury's attempt to be light-hearted just comes across as mean-spirited, misogynistic, and fat-phobic. Knowing what I know of Bradbury, I'm skeptical he intended any real malice behind it, but it's the part that aged even worse than any of the analog technology, or the assertion of canals and atmosphere on Mars.
The rest of it, though, is a fantastic collection of prose-as-poetry from someone who has little interest in real science fiction or futurism. It's ultimately a story about America from someone who is still optimistic about the promise of America, even though he's pessimistic about humans' ability to realize that promise.It reminded me, strangely and a little sadly, of Epcot — an old-fashioned optimism and faith in humanity that we've lost.
I think I should've read my friend Rain's review first, because it was accurate: this starts out as a really intriguing and original concept but then quickly turns into just another story about zombies. It was pretty well-written, but I was almost never surprised by any of it after the initial setup. I'm very glad I chose the audiobook for it, since the narration by Finty Williams was excellent, and she was a surprisingly perfect choice for the material. Her voice is similar enough to Dame Judi Dench's that it felt like several hours riding through Spaceship Earth, if Spaceship Earth were about zombies.
I think this book is a work of genius and instantly made Chiang one of my most respected authors. Reading it made me feel like when I'm having a conversation with someone clearly smarter than me, and right as I'm able to make myself feel better by saying that they're just “book smart,” they reveal themselves to be more creative and perceptive as well.
The main reason I didn't give it 5 stars is unfair; the stories worked too well on me, so each left me feeling sad or unsettled in a way I couldn't shake for several days. I still don't understand “Division by Zero” at all, for instance, but it left me feeling shaken for reasons I don't understand and can't explain.
It's a classic and it's easy to see how influential it was and how intelligent it is, and it's refreshing to read actual science fiction after spending a lifetime surrounded by science fantasy. But man is it dry and corny! The science is probably timeless, but the book feels like it must've been dated even when it was written.
This was engaging and well written, and very well performed by Jeremy Northam on the audiobook. At the start, I thought the book was pretty unremarkable and a bit predictable, and the protagonist was so thoroughly unlikable that I was eagerly looking forward to his horrific death. But a the story went on through all the seemingly inevitable motions, I realized I'd started to empathize with him and feel the same sense of miserable dread. This wasn't the fun and spooky ghost story I'd been looking for, and it wasn't action packed, but it was extremely effective at drowning me in mood.
Oof. Philip Glass would say this book was too repetitive. I've only tried two of the Dresden Files books (it was recommended that I skip the second one) but I think they're not for me. I figured they'd continue to be super corny and dated but imaginative and fun, but then this one stopped being fun about a quarter of the way through, once it became clear the story was just going in frustrating circles. I've listened to the audiobook for both, and James Marsters does a fantastic job, almost enough to redeem them (even if it's annoying how he pronounces “rune” and “drown”), but not quite.
This is a very sad and quietly brilliant book that serves as a biography of Kupperman's father as well as a more subtle exploration of their relationship. It's full of perfectly rendered moments that can be funny, frustrating, or heartbreaking, but it never descends into maudlin sentimentality. I think the real genius of the book is how the personal story drives the biography but doesn't overshadow it; Michael Kupperman gradually learns that he won't get the answers he's looking for, and the divide between himself and his father will only be crossed with empathy.
I love almost everything ABOUT this book — a non-white hero, an emphasis on introspection instead of battle, a non-traditional hero quest, a novel and coherent take on how magic “works” and the power of names — but I just didn't enjoy the book itself. The pacing was odd, with long sections of build-up to resolutions that just suddenly happen, because magic. I'm happy that this book exists and is such a highly-regarded classic; I just didn't get anything out of it, and I doubt I would have even if I'd read it when I was the target age.
I feel like maybe if I'd read this in 2001, it would've blown me away. Now, it all seems familiar, probably because by now it's become a “famous” book. And because all of its core ideas about gods and faith and belief have been explored repeatedly in some of my favorite books, like Small Gods and Good Omens. It also seemed that there were several revelations that were supposed to surprise me throughout the book, but almost nothing was genuinely surprising.
There's probably a metaphor built in, about the “aura” around this book building up over the years and developing some kind of power on its own, beyond the quality of the book itself. I'm still a big fan of Gaiman's, and still consider Good Omens to be my favorite novel, but reading all the supplementary material in the 10th anniversary edition (which is already 8 years old at this point) has tempered that a little bit. A lot of the conversational writing that I found incredibly charming in the late 80s now comes across as affectation. I definitely liked American Gods, but I can't help feeling like it's gone past its read-by date.
Kind of tedious.
I like the premise, and I like the idea of modern takes on what's essentially a Lovecraft story. I like that the book has a predominantly female cast with only two male characters of note. I like the idea of an unreliable narrator, and I like the subtle way that the nature of her unreliability was handled.
There were only a couple of instances of her being outright deceptive, but ultimately the unreliability comes by virtue of her realizing that she's not as introspective/self-aware as she'd always let on. It's a really interesting and mature idea that a lifetime coming across as terse or guarded isn't a result of being in complete control, but just the opposite.
Basically I wanted to like everything, but the narrator is SO flat that everything just falls flat as a result. Even at 200 pages, it feels overlong. I honestly think 1990s Stephen King could've covered all this material in about 30 pages and it would've been just as satisfying. Things that I think should've been major bombshells were underplayed, and minor revelations were stretched out as if to oversell their significance. All the questions left unanswered don't feel like intriguing ambiguity so much as threads left dangling.
It feels like this should've been one book instead of a trilogy, although I doubt I would've finished the book if this had been the end of Part One.
I kind of wish I'd read the research for this book instead of the book itself. All the stuff surrounding the main story is fascinating – voodoo magic and life in the Caribbean towards the end of the Pirate Era – or at least exhaustively well-researched – all the sailing and nautical stuff. And the idea of mashing up magic and pirates is such a great one, obviously, that it inspired games and movies. But the story itself just kind of devolves into genre fiction.
And it's jarring (at least in 2014) to see such a lousy damsel-in-distress role for the only two women characters, even after obvious attempts to turn the women into Strong Female Characters. Plus he has this weird, petty hatred of overweight people – any description of someone weak-willed, corrupt, or foolish invariably mentions how fat he is. Or “mincing,” which is a whole different kind of unfortunate.
With so many really solid images, a fantastic setting, exhaustive research, and interesting details, I just wish the book hadn't been so neatly tied up and so completely predictable.
I've been a huge fan of “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handey for decades. (From “Michael Nesmith's Elephant Parts,” before SNL, to prove I'm old-school). Trying to stretch that thing out to novel length works about as poorly as you'd expect. There are a few funny moments in here, but the bulk of it is repetitions of the same joke.
It's a quick, easy read, though, which is good for somebody with my short attention span.
This was recommended years ago while I was working on a video game about time travel. And it's pretty much exactly what you'd want from a time travel story: just enough fake science to make things interesting, but not so much to make everything tedious. Plus it's clear the author loves the setting and time period, to say nothing of the book's namesake.
It's more Victorian comedy of errors than science fiction, although there's plenty of both. And I would say it's slightly too long, even if it hadn't taken me several years to get through it – several of the concepts and character definitions are just repeated instead of being explored in more detail, and one of the “big reveals” is blatantly telegraphed at least two chapters too early, making the characters seem a little dense. Overall, though, it does a fantastic job of feeling simultaneously contemporary and old-fashioned, and both unsentimental and heart-warming.
It was engaging enough for me to read it quickly, but I ended up disappointed I couldn't like the book more. My biggest problem with it is that it's too self-conscious – full of dismissals and qualifications to show that the author really is in on the joke, honest! Sure, it's just a bunch of vignettes loosely tied together, and yes, plot threads are left dangling. That would've been fine if he'd just been confident enough to write a modern comedy/horror story with some Lovecraft monsters thrown in. Instead, it keeps jumping in right as the story is becoming engaging, and it reduces itself to standard disaffected Internet blog writing.
I liked it; the only reason I wouldn't rate it higher is because the characters end up feeling a little slight without having the advantage of being revisited across multiple books, as with the Discworld characters. I think it'd be impossible for Terry Pratchett to write a bad book; it's just that some have more impact than others He seems to write insightful or eloquent passages even when he's not trying every hard.
One thing I live about Nation in particular is how Pratchett is able to make perfectly clear his reverence for science, without feeling the need to dismiss spirituality. It's rare to find a writer who's so forceful a proponent of rational thought but also approaches faith and belief as having personal value. I wish that we were all able to be so focused on finding a common ground and being positive – unafraid to call out arrogance, social climbing, manipulation, and just plain evil; but not so quick to label anyone who just doesn't have the same beliefs as us as being against us.
Just an amazing book. I was a little disappointed that my favorite scene from the movie wasn't in the book, but was a Coen Brothers invention. At the same time, I was impressed by how faithful an adaptation the movie is – the added scene(s) fit perfectly, and the small bits and characters that were removed aren't missed.
One of the best aspects of the movie was the dialogue, the clever back-and-forth with occasional lapses into the surreal. Not only are all the major exchanges lifted directly from the book, but as it's a first-person narration, the book has that same quality of voice on every page.
It's an interesting concept (Dashiell Hammett style stories in a London filled with ghosts, zombies, and loup garou) but the book's tics and affectations make it too annoying to be excellent. The main character is frustratingly dense, failing to make the most obvious connections, but all the while talking down to the reader as if he's a grizzled expert. And Carey has the maddening habit of using an expression and then apologizing for it as hackneyed or corny.
There's enough here to have me interested in other books in the series, and the plotting of this one was compelling enough to keep me engaged, but I can't help but think how much better it could have been.
