Ben Saufley
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.
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.
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.
I loved The Paper Menagerie—one of my favorite books in recent years. It was full of life and really fascinating ideas and characters. I didn't feel the same about The Grace of Kings, which felt, for large swaths, like a summary. I only really settled into an understanding of the main characters and the thrust of the novel in probably the second half of the book, and even then many new chapters started by introducing characters, spending a while telling their back story, and then having them pop into the “present” timeline just to vanish for one reason or another. By the end of the book, it had established a rhythm and had focused more on the lives and stories of a few primary characters, and I enjoyed that. But I'm giving it a 3 because much of the book was spent summarizing great historical events and jumping around a bit confusingly in time, and not focusing on the human elements of the story.
After having just finished [b:Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition 22827628 Midnight's Furies The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition Nisid Hajari https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407814080s/22827628.jpg 42381651], I was interested to read this book, which was discussed as a kind of compliment to that book—Midnight's Furies being a more historical overview, Indian Summer being a bit more of a personal story. I think I enjoyed this book more than that one, for that reason—but I also found myself a bit more engaged here because of the personal stories woven into the history, where Midnight's Furies at times felt like a long list of incidents of sectarian violence and while I liked that book and felt like I got some idea of the course of the history from it, this book helped me anchor these events in time a bit by connecting them a bit more to the personal stories that shaped them. Both books focused more on Nehru than on Jinnah, on India more than on Pakistan, so I'm curious to find a book that focuses more on the latter, because I feel like while both books appeared to work to be impartial, I only ended up with mostly one side of the story.An interesting subplot of this book was the light with which the author clearly viewed Gandhi, which was a lot less favorable than my (admittedly very broad) impression. He didn't believe in germ theory and was (by this account) very weird about women! Interesting stuff, even if—as with all nonfiction—it only presented part of the picture.
One of my favorite genre books in a long time. Such an interesting world, magic system, political structure. It's not particularly literary, focusing more on characters, dialog, and plot than on evocation or atmosphere, and honestly a bunch of its pieces are standard fare for YA with a female protagonist (I don't know if the author considers this YA but it shares some traits regardless: outcast, “broken” girl is suddenly very important, torn between two boys, etc). Yet it still does a really great job fleshing out this world. I'm really looking forward to the next one.
Entertaining and competently written. Hugely formulaic, built on tons of familiar tropes, beginning to end, but well-enough put together. I might listen to more. Early on, the freed slave gives this small out-of-nowhere Ayn Rand rant about the value of struggling to survive that almost made me put down the book. But in the end I didn't get a ton of that—in fact I got some stuff that was at times quite contrary to it—so I'm happy to have finished it. I might read the next one.
If I'm being honest, this one is getting an extra star for “I'm clearly too stupid to understand this.” I didn't really enjoy it. Nakata's storyline was interesting, although it never really amounted to anything concrete. There was a lot of “he didn't know how he knew; he just knew” which in real life is an interesting phenomenon, but in fiction just feels like a cop-out. And when it all came to a head, there was clearly a metaphor or some kind of symbolism that I just missed entirely. Kafka's storyline, meanwhile, was full of horniness and potential incest and mostly just made me uncomfortable. Also a bit of what I would consider to be mishandling of a trans character.I loved [b:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2195464 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473397159s/2195464.jpg 2475030], and the writing style here was in a similar vein: relatively sparse and matter-of-fact, which I appreciate (though some of the sexual scenes were made all the more uncomfortable by it), but I just didn't really enjoy or, I think, understand this book. I've been told I should try [b:Norwegian Wood 11297 Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386924361s/11297.jpg 2956680], and I've always heard good things about [b:The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327872639s/11275.jpg 2531376]. So I'm not sure I'll give up on Murakami after this book. But it may be a while before I attempt another one.
An interesting book. Definitely a distinct world among much of the YA fantasy I've read, and I appreciated that. I could've done with a bit more character development, and at times a bit more description of where we were, what was ... actually happening. The prose got pretty flowery in places—sometimes, it worked, but sometimes it took me out of it. A lot of kind of extravagant descriptions that failed to actually give me a visual picture of a person, place, or thing.
I liked it, but I didn't really finish the book feeling like I wanted to return to the world and characters, because I'd only just started getting to know them when it wrapped up.
I bought this immediately when I read that Neal Stephenson said, “Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet.”
That may have jacked up my expectations too high.
It felt a lot like a lot of other books I've read in the genre. The contemplations of autonomy were really pretty interesting but far from the focus of the book, which was entertaining enough and had pretty standard implications regarding capitalism and tech, but didn't really hold much emotional weight or any particularly new and compelling information. I'd have liked more examination of any one single theme the book had.
Entertaining. Just about everything I expected from it. My wife and I had the mystery roughly figured out from maybe the midway point, maybe a bit before that, but I can say we were never confident that we were correct, which is just about all you can ask of this type of thing.
We were listening to it on Audible, which has four different voice actors for the four main characters, and we constantly had to pause to sort out which character was which. It was a while into the book before I realized I was confusing two or three of the dudes, and for a while I was forgetting which one had said which earlier on. I think that's just... high school drama, right? The names all blend together when you're hearing it secondhand.
Man, I was really interested in reading this book and I did not enjoy it. It reads like a fever dream, and not in any sort of compelling or intriguing way. The heavy, invented colloquial speech is distracting. The plot is not ... really a plot, it's more of a montage of scenes. I found myself moderately interested in the flashbacks to Roland's childhood, because things actually happened there and there was a bit of an understanding of the world he lived in, and there were real secondary characters. Just about everything in the present was hazy and disjointed, void of character or place, and building up to a climax that really wasn't. This is only my second King book (the first was [b:11/22/63 10644930 11/22/63 Stephen King https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327876792s/10644930.jpg 15553789], which I really enjoyed even if I felt the ending got away from him), but my experience with this one was wildly different from the last. I think this book was written much earlier in his career and was maybe more experimental for him?The good news is that this is one series that I don't find myself compelled to finish. I have too many series to read already.
I still really like the world Weeks has built, but I had several issues with this book:
The most glaring is that there was no real overarching plot – it's just a book to, presumably, get you from book three to the final conflict in book five. A lot of stuff happened, but as a book on its own it had no real arc. I don't hate just spending some time in this world, but when it was all over, I was left feeling a bit disappointed.
The other thing that bugged me was the overwhelming horniness of the first two thirds. You'd get a chapter of plot and then a chapter of male desire. I understand that some of this stuff served the plot to a limited extent, but the amount of breasts discussed, and the volume of women throwing themselves at men just became tiresome. It made me think of that meme about “men writing female characters” (Google it). And it was disappointing because much of the rest of the book was really fun and interesting.
The plot has still got me hooked, though, and there's one book left. I'll definitely pick it up when it drops.
