Ben Saufley
This would be an unremarkable three-star book that blends into the broader Anglo fantasy genre except that it goes on these weird asides to advocate for monarchy and plutarchy. Nothing to do with the plot, except I guess as an intended red herring? And the primary “anti-monarchist” revolutionary never even says anything that's wrong. But the protagonist still calls her “despicable” and then goes on a small rant about how her rich parents are self-made. It's weird and unnecessary but I guess it is, like, the one thing in the book that stood out. The magic is unremarkable, the villain is generic. Blah.
When I was in high school, a catholic school, I asked my religion teacher (social justice, I think, which is interesting in retrospect because of how so many Christians currently treat the concept as demonic) a question about hell: “if Satan was cast out of heaven for wanting to be greater than God, why would he make Hell a horrible place—wouldn't he want to make it the best place he could?” And the answer I got has stuck with me for twenty years, despite my agnosticism bordering on atheism: “God is the source of all goodness. No matter how good Satan would want to make Hell, Hell would remain a place out of God's light and thus devoid of any goodness.” It's compelling and, frankly, terrifying. And honestly I've never heard it discussed like that again, until one of the stories in this book. The story notes at the end also add some really interesting context to that story.
Arrival was one of my favorite movies in years, so I had to pick up this book, which features the short story it was based on. That story is very different in literary form, but just as good, and the other stories approach that same level of excellence. I especially love the last story, about a scientific advance that allows people not to see beauty and ugliness in faces. Really thought provoking. I'd definitely give it a go.
Highly recommend this collection to anyone and everyone.
I really enjoy Horowitz's writing, and the Susan Ryeland series especially with its book-inside-a-book conceit. But I'm growing more uncomfortable with his relationship to homosexuality. He made Hawthorne, his meta detective written as nonfiction with Horowitz as the first-person narrator, a homophobe, and literally in his book said “I would not have chosen to write a character like this” but uh, he did. And with Alan Conway, whose sexuality is prominent through two books, we mostly get ugly caricatures as well. SpoilerThe eventual villain of this book turns out to be a former “rent boy,” who is apparently not actually gay but performed gay sex for money and is just disdainful of basically everyone around him. It looks like Horowitz once played devil's advocate in a TV discussion, against gay marriage, despite purportedly not actually objecting to gay marriage himself. It's not absolutely damning, but also, like, the devil doesn't need an advocate. So it kind of fits this bill, where I don't think he would see himself as homophobic but he's certainly not doing himself or the LGBTQ community any favors.
I feel like I missed an obvious clue (in retrospect) to JKR's transphobia in the early Cormoran Strike books, and I'm worried I'll be doing the same here if I continue reading these. I don't know, though. We'll see I guess.
It was fine. My biggest annoyance is that about half the book is spent running from the obvious truth that the protagonist is misjudging the situation and she absolutely refuses to consider the possibility. That might be a spoiler I guess but it's so, so obvious the whole time. I feel like it's written that way intentionally. But then... it's just annoying.
I was really excited to check this series out. I enjoy the LitRPG genre as I understand it, and I was excited to see that the “founder” of the genre was from an underrepresented group, which I'm trying to make an effort to be mindful of in my reading.
But only about two chapters in this book were particularly interesting or engaging.
The early hours of playing a new RPG are often full of grind. Sometimes, that's nice because it allows the brain to turn off, fall into a familiar pattern, get that dopamine rush from watching your stats rise. But if you were to simply describe this process to another person, even a fan of the genre, it'd be entirely mind-numbing. Sometimes, a good game spices up that process by adding unique lore, uncommon facets to the magic or other systems. Sometimes that can be enough to make the early hours more than a grind. It can add a layer of joyful discovery. But in this book, that wasn't the case. Nothing particularly original seems to exist in this world so far. It's all quite standard. What's worse, the protagonist is supposedly very familiar with the world, from the game. Not everything is apparently like the game, but much of it is. So why spend so much time on piddling exposition? Few interesting characters are met; almost no world building. Much of it is taken up by actual reading of non-metaphorical repetitive dialog boxes and prompts. It's truly like listening to someone describe their first ten hours in WoW. There's not even much of the characteristic “modern Earth inhabitant meets fantasy world” wit of the LitRPG genre, besides like one “FML” reference.
The story of the world and why the protagonist has been brought there is established in the prologue and then never mentioned again.
The book has no thrust, no real climax, and ends suddenly and unexpectedly. We still have neither a short term goal (besides “level up village”) nor a long-term goal.
The third act starts to introduce some characters and some conflict but it doesn't do anything with it besides a quick skirmish and I guess a sub-boss?
I dunno. I want to say I'll give book two a chance because it's a popular series and it's possible the author learned a lot from book one, but this one was no fun and I listen while running so it actually meant I skipped my run for a while because I the book didn't motivate me to return to it.
Honestly surprised at how moderate it felt. With such a bold title I expected more extreme stances. But it seemed pretty levelheaded and a lot of its points were not specifically related to abolition, but more to the problems faced and the things needed to fix the problem even partially. One could easily read this book and come away with a strong advocacy for reform, rather than abolition. But all the points combined certainly paint a picture of a situation that is very hard to fully address with reform (and in fact it points out a lot of the ways attempts at reform fail). Quick read, full of good (if depressing) examples of the problem we face. Recommended most for people who are new to these issues.
I would expect that I'd have enjoyed this more than I did. It was fun enough and relatively novel, magic and sci-fi in an interesting blend, but I found myself regularly losing interest.
The audiobook is frustrating because at least one character is clearly written as British (or whatever fantasy world equates to British here), with obvious Britishism regularly injected into the dialog—at one point they even pointedly express confusion about “the can” before realizing it means “the loo”—and yet the reader read every character with the same bland and indistinguishable American accent. For such a dynamic and colorful world, the reading was pretty blah. It may have contributed to my disinterest. It wasn't outright BAD reading but it wasn't very good either and ignoring obvious speech pattern cues is annoying.
Honestly from a pure entertainment standpoint, I enjoyed this just fine. It's like average pop music—it hits a lot of familiar notes and wraps up quickly. And that's really a lot of what I look for in a book like this, so I was preparing to give this a three or a four.
But it's apparently some kind of love letter to libertarianism by the end?
This is Lisa Tanchik book one, but it's Nate Fallon's book and despite Lisa having lost a sister to drugs, it spends zero time examining Fallon's bullshit justifications, and ends with a little Rand-ian soliloquy offering one final justification for his actions. It's a bummer because it's a moderately fun cyber-thriller that could have had something interesting to say without much effort.
Fallon didn't have to be a cartoon villain; taking apart the things that at first made the character sympathetic would've been more interesting than simply making him bad, but the book opts for neither.
Obviously, there are moments that the book realizes (and quickly sweeps aside) the real, negative consequences of his actions. And at times I think the author intended to go further there? A few conversations he has weakly imply a deeper criticism. But it never goes anywhere, and on the balance, the book appears to be more reverent than anything.
And also Lisa Tanchik is in this book for some length of time, I guess?
I read this book because Charlie Jane Anders, whose work I've really enjoyed, recommended its sequel. And to be truthful, I still might pick that up at some point. But I'm kind of surprised at the recommendation, in retrospect.
I think I might have liked this a bit more if I had read it rather than listening to the Audible audiobook, which doubled down on the author's very simple, matter-of-fact writing style with a very simple, matter-of-fact narrator. It really stripped the magic from the telling. But the story it told was interesting and generally unlike a lot of the other books I've been reading—not sure how much of that is how unique this book is and how much of it is that I just don't read a ton of magical realism.
Ooh boy it gets very heavy-handed at the end. But I do appreciate how Pullman refuses to pigeonhole his characters and to wrap most things up with a tidy bow—characters who were antagonists early on show some goodness, perhaps even redeeming goodness, and not everybody gets what they want in the end. The wrap-up is full of messaging that I liked but which I suppose I wish were a bit more subtle.
This has been my favorite of the series so far. It had a bit more of an actual arc. I'm getting the impression that Susan Cooper is really good with words and description, and great at creating some compelling hints at the mythology of her world (it may sound silly but the book titles are just... so good), but not as good at creating overall plot, story arcs. Each book seems to have Will or another kid just kind of bounce around while big things happen to them, which is I think common in children's literature but here those big things often don't even swell to any sort of climax and denouement—they just sort of happen. I had some of the same trouble with the Narnia books. This book, though, broke out of that a little. Having finished the book I have a general sense of what the arc was, what the purpose of the adventure was, etc. I liked it better than the previous ones for that reason, and I'm definitely interested in picking up the next one.
I was entirely prepared to give this book five stars but she totally lost me with the pitch to give up (??) affirmative action near the end. I never really got the crux of her argument there so it's possible I just entirely misunderstood it, but it felt way off base, especially on the heels of a section about how “color-blind” policies will never solve these problems.
Nah, I'm giving it five stars anyway.
Regardless of that concern this is a very, very important book and I would recommend literally everybody read it. It's even got a little dig at Joe Biden, who currently appears to be preparing to ride Obama's popularity to a Democratic nomination, when in fact he's been a big part of the problem for years and years.
She comes at the issue with a level head and does a very good job addressing a lot of counterarguments and proposed half-measures. In that evenhanded approach, she does have a bit where she concedes that society has mostly moved past overt racism, which already feels incredibly naïve in the era of Trump. But you can see where it came from.
Read this book. Even if you feel like you know, you probably don't know just the extent of the systemic injustice at play in the modern justice system and governmental structure. I thought I knew. I did know some things. But man. Read this.
I would never have read this book if it had been presented in what is apparently the American branding which is renamed “Midnight Riot” and features a low-pixel explosion and a silhouetted figure who looks like Vinnie Jones (the protagonist is mixed race and presents as black) and looks just all-around terrible. But I came across the paperback, with the intriguing map illustration and the “Rivers of London” name, and that made me seek out the audiobook (presented as Midnight Riot by Audible US).
It's a fun story, combining elements of American Gods and other magic stories in a detective/crime structure. I'll probably read the next one at some point. So I'm glad I saw the paperback, and not that terrible American cover, first.
I ran really hot and cold on this book. It reads very much like a familiar and kind of insufferable subgenre of literary fiction where white men pine for some timeless golden youth in Manhattan, and I didn't like that. I also didn't like the intro, which immediately flashes back in a disorienting way that indicated to me that we'd flash forward again... but we never did. The flashback was the book, leading back to the present. But by the end, I had been won over. It was pretty interesting and I wanted to know what happened. Which is why the ending, which doesn't tell you what happens, and ends so abruptly I thought something was wrong with my copy, left me cold all over again. I'm averaging this out as a 3. I don't regret reading it; I'm glad I did. But man.Update: something was actually wrong with my copy of the audiobook! There's a whole chapter (1/12 of the book!) remaining. So I'll update this once I'm done.
I enjoyed the story and I appreciate Horowitz's meta approach but just because you're talking about the tropes you're engaging in (curmudgeonly male detective who just happens to be brilliant) doesn't absolve you from engaging in them. And to see this will be a series ... meh. I dunno, man. You say “if I were writing it I'd have chosen a different character.” You did write it. Why didn't you?
I enjoyed much of this book but the middle third of it falls into this really unsettling indoctrinating justification of genocide. Fantasy often walks a fine line with its many races and the wars between them but this one gets pretty brutal and doesn't even examine that, basically at all. It's taken as a given that the actual ethnic cleansing of a race of “tainted” elves from the lands is just and necessary, and it's gross. It's even weirder in a book that is otherwise so centered on kind of hippie principles—it even features the line “there's no such thing as implied consent”, which, great! But that middle section ... oof. I'm not sure I want to pick up the final book.
In just under the wire, probably my favorite read of the year. The framing at the beginning and end of the novel may be heavy-handed but I love it and it justifies itself with all the stuff in the middle. The characters are engaging, the world Alderman builds is fascinating, and the storyline pays off—it's not just an interesting idea that fizzles out in the final pages. It never drags. It's definitely dark in places, but it wasn't totally depressing. I would highly recommend this book.