Mandy

Hovering in between a 3.5 and a 4.

If I had read this book a year ago, I would've just been meh about it. But because I'm reading this book now, today, in the tail end of 2020 - it hits real hard.

Arthur Leander is an ageing, has-been Hollywood star who one day collapses on stage from a heart attack and dies, just hours before the world starts to end from... a virus. A very rapidly-spreading flu virus that infects and almost immediately kills so many people that civilisation as we know it end within days of the epidemic beginning. Twenty years later, we follow Kirsten Raymonde who is member of the Travelling Symphony, a nomadic theatre troupe that goes around to pockets of people who have managed to carve out a living for themselves in the empty and battered post-apocalyptic world and put on Shakespearean plays for them.

The writing of this book was beautiful, wistful, and asks so many questions that are almost heart-wrenchingly relevant today - shall we say, almost prophetic considering St. John Mandel wrote this in 2014?

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.

... the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before...

Kirsten realises that the Prophet was quoting passages from the Station Eleven comics, and she starts reciting them as well - it could've been a really cool scene where he responds in some way, whether in quoting back the lines at her, or even just eyes widening in recognition, before he gets shot by the boy. It'd be like Kirsten finding out that this really weird, deranged dude is a tenuous link to her past and then having him snuffed out in front of her eyes.

Tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings--mysterious, unknowable things--but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

On a midwinter night, a stranger bursts into the Swan, an inn at Radcot along the Thames, with a dead girl in his arms. She is unquestionably lifeless, but later she takes a breath and returns to life. Our story seems to begin here with the mystery of the drowned girl who came back from death, but in fact we will as much need to travel upstream closer to the source of several stories, rather than downstream to the end of the mystery, before we get to the bottom of this enigma.

This book was written masterfully. The wistful late-Victorian world (I'm guessing) is brought to life on the page, and it inspires your imagination with a particularly muted and earthy colour palette. The fantasy here isn't particularly in your face, it's really just the barest touch, but it's enough to infuse the entire story with a certain charm of the unknown - are certain things merely just superstition repeated by rural farmers who don't know better and which can be explained away with science, or is there really some kind of magic at work here? I'm usually a pretty impatient reader and skim a lot, but this book made me slow down a little and eat up as much of the details and words as I could.



The mystery itself was gripping enough for this to be a binge read for me. It wasn't exactly a thriller, but the core of the story was refreshingly different, centering around a strange little girl who apparently came back from the dead, and who seems to belong to everyone but no one at the same time.

The character work was beautiful too - we are introduced to some of the vilest characters that you will wish to personally drown in the Thames, and also some of the sweetest ones (Robert Armstrong was hands down the best character in this entire novel, closely followed by his pig Maud - I would've cried and thrown this book at the wall if anything had happened to them). You witness how downright disgusting people can be to each other (the way Victor Nash treated Lily White really riled me up) but you also see how much kindness and sweetness some humans are capable of (Robert Armstrong's parents were just... so good. They didn't end up together, and as a result he led a pretty fractured and ostracised childhood and life, but they both did as much as they could by him, and the story went on a much happier trajectory than it could have otherwise gone; same with the way he loved and did his best by Bess).

Overall, a surprisingly beautiful read that promises mystery, romance, and emotions of every colour.

It's not this book, it's me - probably.

This probably should not have been my entry point to Virginia Woolf's works, considering that this is her last novel. Reading this novella made me feel a little stupid because I had no idea what was going on from start to end. I'm also getting intimidated for my plan to read The Voyage Out by her later this month.

A pageant is being organised at Pointz Hall by its crowd of guests, largely upper-middle class folks. The pageant takes the audience through the history of England, from the Middle Ages up to the Victorian era, which wasn't that far away from when this novel was written and published in 1939.

The writing here was almost absurdist in the way it was so, so messy. It flits around from viewpoint to viewpoint, character to character, and then rests inexplicably on apparently random things and situations. The dialogue doesn't seem to make sense, or are always being cut off by other people. Nobody seems to talk straight to the point.

But in a way, I can't help feeling - is it just me? Am I just not approaching this in the right angle to appreciate what this novella is trying to say? I literally had to go search this book up on Sparknotes after I was done to get some help deciphering it. Even though it was a super short and quick read, it felt so dense, like it was a long enigmatic cipher that I couldn't crack.

Hovering between a 3.5 and a 4* for me, this book explored some really fresh new grounds sorely lacking in popular fantasy novels these days. It called back to the Hong Kong gangster movies and dramas that I grew up watching, blending it with elements of wuxia, martial arts, and superhuman abilities.

This book follows the Kaul family, legendary heads of the No Peak clan, in a world where jade is a heavily coveted gemstone, not so much because it's worth money but because they imbue superhuman senses, strength and abilities to those who come into contact with it. The ability to harness these abilities from jade has been naturally specific to the genetics of the Kekonese people, but now, there emerges a new drug that's said to be able to increase this “jade sensitivity” in the non-Kekonese.



This book went from a 4* at the start because of this refreshing new premise that I've never seen replicated in any fantasy book before, but then wavered down to an almost-DNF around the 25% mark, before it picked up to 3* and up after I got past the 50% mark, which was when things really got exciting.

The reason why the book went down to an almost-DNF was probably because of mismatched expectations. I had gone into this expecting the magic and fantasy elements to be very much in the foreground, but this was very much not the case. It was the clan values, the gang politics and intrigues, and the politics between different sets of people that pretty much took center stage here. The magical properties of jade served mainly as a backdrop for all of the above to happen. Most of the time, jade felt more like a magical-realism manifestation of something abstract in real life, like dignity or brotherhood or loyalty. The book centers around jade, but it's really barely a magical system in itself. The realisation of this was what almost made me drop the book.

A quick side note to jade: I really enjoyed that it was so unpredictable. Touching jade typically gives people some kind of euphoric rush of power, but different people in the story have different levels of jade sensitivity, with some being far more susceptible to the addictive properties of this rush, while others are completely dead to it. I like that jade was dangerous as well as powerful. It was a raw, natural element in itself, and entirely out of the control of the people who wielded it. You could just as much die of jade oversensitivity or jade withdrawal, as it makes it easier for you to kill others with the powers it gives you. In effect, it behaved a lot more like a stimulant drug than a magical gemstone.


None of the characters are really 100% likeable in the story, which I'm not mad at. The main characters aren't bad people in themselves, but a lot of them make bad decisions, or react poorly to certain situations. I like that. I find more and more that I'm not into overly likeable main characters, and the fact that these main characters have actual blemishes on their figurative resumes makes me appreciate the characterisation all the more.

Once I got past my mismatched expectations, though, and once I started getting sucked in to the real meat of the book, which is all the family dynamics and gang politics, I started enjoying myself much more. This is especially so after the halfway mark of the book - even though I was devastated that Lan died, because I had thought him the best of the siblings and a cinnamon roll in his own right, his death did really kickstart the action and that was when the book actually started getting gripping for me - I had bemoaned how long the book was in the first quarter of it, but I binged it so hard after the halfway mark that I finished the entire book in less than 24 hours!

Finally, one of the greatest mysteries of my life has been resolved. Namely, why I hadn't seemed to be able to get into Discworld despite everything pointing to it being entirely up my alley.

Turns out, I was just reading the wrong books as entry points into the universe, and Mort has finally rectified all of that. I cried laughing at this book and I'm now a budding fan.

Mort is your average, gangly, awkward teenage boy who just happens to have caught the eye of Death himself to become his apprentice. Unfortunately, being the reaper of souls (or at least carrying out his duties while he has his days off) isn't quite all it's cracked up to be when hormones get in the way, as they usually do with teenagers.

The irreverent humour in this book was on point and just hit the sweet spot of all that I enjoy. I laughed so much at this book that even my husband got curious about it and has since put it on his own TBR. It's such a good mixture of irreverence and philosophy.

‘And he goes around killing people?' said Mort. He shook his head. ‘There's no justice.'Death sighed. NO, he said. [...] THERE'S JUST ME.

BEGONE, YOU BLACK AND MIDNIGHT HAG, he said. [...]''Oo are you calling a midnight hag?' [the cook] said accusingly...MAY ALL THE DEMONS OF HELL REND YOUR LIVING SPIRIT FI YOU DON'T GET OUT OF THE SHOPT HIS MINUTE, Death tried.‘I don't know about that, but what about my bedwarmer...‘IF YOU WOULD CARE TO GO AWAY, said Death desperately. I WILL GIVE YOU SOME MONEY.‘How much?' said the cook, with a speed that would have outdistanced a striking rattlesnake and given lightning a nasty shock. [...]

Some jobs offer increments. This one offered - well, quite the reverse.

The plot was excellent, but this book suffered from the weightiness of the prose and exposition.

Sue Trinder is an orphan growing up in the house of Mrs Sucksby, where they get by with petty crimes and selling stolen goods. It's also an informal grooming and gathering place for a number of crooks, the most elegant and big-game of all is one nicknamed Gentleman, who enlists Sue to assist him in a plot he has recently hatched to cheat a lady, the heiress of a hermit book collector, out of her fortune. To do so, Sue has to infiltrate the household and become a lady's maid to Maud Lilly, and convince her to marry Gentleman.

While the story was really good, I think the pacing was a bit off for me. The first arc was all right, it plodded along but it got unpleasant to read at the last part, to the point where I almost DNFed. Then we got hit with the first big reveal. It was a twist which I had called from the beginning, but which I had somehow lulled myself into thinking wasn't possible and therefore had forgotten about, but was surprised to find that I was right all along. That was enough to keep me going though.

The second arc was more exciting for me than the first, or at least the first half of it was. The second half kinda got too lengthy (did we really need like 20 pages talking about Maud's failed attempts at escaping, her going to find Mr Hawtry which landed her in a "house for destitute gentlewomen" and then eventually her going back to where she had begun?). The third arc was the slowest for me and which I skimmed the most, even though so many things were happening.

It's a weird feeling, because the plot twists in this story were really good and satisfying, but there was also just so much filler action IMO. Despite skimming the heck out of the third arc, I still understood the rough gist of what was happening. I can't help but feel that this book would've been way more enjoyable if it had been pruned into 300 or 400-page novel rather than a 550-page one.

Honestly, I'm so confused by this book that I barely even know how to write a review about it. I remember being properly creeped out by an abridged version of this book that I read when I was much, much younger, so I was looking forward to reading the unabridged version this time now that I'm older and much more attuned to 19th C writing than I used to be.But, boy, has Henry James stumped me.This is my third book with an unnamed narrator in a row and I still have a few more coming up. But anyway, an unnamed narrator answers an advertisement to apply for the position as a governess to two young children at Bly Manor. She starts to see two apparitions on the grounds around the place, and then what follows is so... hard to understand that I literally had to Wikipedia the book after finishing it to get an idea of what on earth just happened. It isn't that the plot got convoluted, it's just that James's writing style is so dense and murky - and this is coming from someone who loves, loves, loves 19th C writing!!Are the children evil? Are they not evil? Are they possessed? I have no idea.Who are the ghosts? Was Peter Quint paedophilic? What were their relationships with the children before their deaths? How did they die? Why are they still haunting the manor? I have no idea.And then, the ending. THE ENDING. It was so abrupt and even at that point, I had no idea whether Miles was in cahoots with the ghost of Peter Quint to try and kill the governess - or something?! Why did Miles die??? What did the ghosts have on the children???? Why did she send away Flora for and why didn't she allow children see each other before that? I HAVE NO IDEA. Honestly, it's so hard to write this review because I only had a very thin idea of what was going on as the plot progressed through this book. Suffice it to say that I respect it as a horror classic that it supposedly is, and I'm envious of people that enjoyed and appreciated it a lot more than I did because I really wanted to, but I'm probably not going to revisit this one and I didn't get much of the horror fix I had been hoping for.If you want more haunted houses, I'd recommend Edgar Allan Poe's [b:The Fall of the House of Usher 175516 The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387708966l/175516.SY75.jpg 15570703] and I'm also currently reading Shirley Jackson's [b:The Haunting of Hill House 89717 The Haunting of Hill House Shirley Jackson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327871336l/89717.SY75.jpg 3627], both of which would probably be much easier to understand and would have more horror elements than this one did.

A solid 4.5/5.

This isn't the kind of book that will initially blow your mind when you first read it, there aren't any crazy plot twists, but it's something that will stay with you for a long time after you're done with it, slowly seep into your brain, and resurface every so often whenever you think about life and its purpose.

There isn't much to say about the plot without being too spoiler-ish. The book follows our very blase and nonchalant narrator, Meursault, as he attends his mother's funeral, and then he goes on to live his every day life. We are introduced to his colleague-turned-girlfriend, his neighbours in his flat, and some other side characters, and their drab lives.

On paper, it may not sound interesting, may sound boring even, but there's something so hypnotic and addicting in the way Meursault drones on and on. Nothing ever seems to matter to him. He's unemotional when his mother dies, not even wishing to see her in the casket. He experiences sexual attraction to his girlfriend Marie, but when she asks if he loves her, he doesn't quite know what to say. He doesn't seem to have an opinion for any which way, or to care about much. He goes on and on as he has always does.

But then things take a turn in the second part of the book, and there is much to unpack there, so a majority of my thoughts will be under the spoiler tags:

Meursault kills an "Arab" who had been hounding his friend and neighbour Raymond, who had physically abused the man's sister a few days earlier for cheating on him. He's sent to prison, and we see him carry his non-emotionality over there. Five months pass in prison and he doesn't even seem to feel it, it's all one unending day to him. We go through a courtroom sequence, the verdict is passed, and Meursault is sentenced to be executed by guillotine. This is when Meursault's non-emotional facade finally cracks. He submits an appeal, and when he is sent back to his cell to await the result of the appeal or his fate at the guillotine, is when we see him at his most raw. He ruminates about how the thought of "twenty more years" of life was like "poisoned joy" to him. A chaplain enters, whom Meursault has already refused to see at least three times on account of the fact that he does not believe in God. The chaplain emotionally asks Meursault to reconsider. "I know you've wished for another life," says the chaplain. Then Meursault snaps.[The chaplain] wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me.What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.... for the first time in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself--so like a brother, really--I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.The full force of Camus's nihilism comes through in this impassioned speech, and on some levels I already can relate. The universe doesn't care, the world doesn't care. Meursault's indifference to just about everything in his life only reflects how uncaring the world is. Whether or not he sees his mother in the casket or cries at her funeral doesn't change the fact that she has lived her life and now is dead. What did it matter if he testified to the police that Raymond's partner had cheated on him and that he got away with physically abusing her? What did it matter that he agreed to marry Marie even though he doesn't really care either way about her specifically? What did it matter that he fired four more bullets into the body of the man he had already shot once and was probably already dead at the time?The world goes on as it always does despite his decisions. The world goes on whether or not Meursault is pardoned or marches on to his fate at the guillotine. The world goes on no matter what, indifferently, uncaringly. And even if he makes decisions that affects the course of human society, what happens after that? When human beings go extinct, or when the Earth ceases to exist? The universe goes on, just as indifferently.I guess an appropriate way to end this review is to copy and paste choice bits of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.Mama, just killed a manPut a gun against his headPulled my trigger, now he's deadMama, life had just begunBut now I've gone and thrown it all awayMama, oohDidn't mean to make you cryIf I'm not back again this time tomorrowCarry on, carry onAs if nothing really mattersToo late, my time has comeSends shivers down my spineBody's aching all the timeGoodbye everybody, I've got to goGotta leave you all behind and face the truthMama, oohI don't want to dieI sometimes wish I'd never been born at all

How do you describe P. G. Wodehouse when he is so commonly used to describe other authors? Having read a number of Jeeves and Wooster stories, I'm trying out another series from him that I've not read anything from before, but which takes place in the same “universe” as Jeeves and Wooster, and this was absolutely raging good fun. Wodehouse is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.

Mr Peters, an American multi-millionaire, has lost a precious scarab and he suspects Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle to have stolen it. He secretly puts out a large reward, and it is up to Joan Valentine, posing as lady's-maid to his daughter (and Joan's good friend) Aline Peters, and Ashe Marson, posing as his own valet, to try and retrieve it from Emsworth's library during a house party. Aline is engaged to Lord Emsworth's son the Hon Freddie Threepwood, who has also had a past dalliance with Joan Valentine and has compromising letters with her, whom he hires private detective R. Jones to retrieve. In the middle of it all, Emsworth's secretary, the efficient Baxter, is convinced Marson isn't who he says he is, and is determined to catch him red-handed stealing the scarab.

If this all sounds confusing to you - don't worry, that is the intended effect. Wodehouse is absolutely masterful at creating these situations more tangled up than a ball of yarn that the cat's got at, but then resolving them so neatly and satisfactorily without even hitting 300 pages. His characters go stumbling about, tripping each other up, and the mess only just gets worse and worse until suddenly in the last 50 or so pages, Wodehouse pulls on what looks like a dead knot as if it was going to sink to rock bottom, and it all magically untangles itself. It's difficult to untangle this convoluted of a plot without deus ex machina or employing cheap tricks or shortcuts, but Wodehouse has not failed in all the stories I've read from him so far.

But what's perhaps more impressive than his plot machinations is his writing. Wodehouse is a brilliantly satirical and hilarious writer. Take when Ashe Marson manages to convince Mr Peters to start exercising and diet in order to be healthier, Mr Peters does so but asks Marson to read to him from a cook-book as a bedtime story so that he can vicariously relive his favourite dishes.

In [Mr Peters's] affliction it soothed him to read of the Hungarian Goulash and Escalloped Brains and to remember that he, too, the nut-and-grass eater of to-day, had once dwelt in Arcadia.

Or when George Emerson, in love with Aline Peters, buys food from the nearby village for her because he imagines that her wan and pale looks are caused by the paltry diet that she has suffered to undertake along with her father's new health regime, as a sort of moral support. He buys a commendable quantity of food and walks five miles back to Blandings Castle.

It was [at the Castle] that his real troubles began, and the quality of his love was tested. The walk, to a heavily-laden man, was bad enough, but as nothing compared with the ordeal of smuggling the cargo up to his bedroom. Superman as he was, George was alive to the delicacy fo the situation. One cannot convey food and drink to one's room at a strange house without, if detected, seeming to cast a slur on the table of the host. It was if one who carries despatches through an enemy's lines that George took cover, emerged from cover, dodged, ducked, and ran; and the moment when he sank down on his bed, the door locked behind him, was one of the happiest of his life.

I love it. Irreverent humour is everything I live for and Wodehouse dishes it to us in spades.

I also want to specially commend the audiobook narrator for my edition, Jonathan Cecil, who really highlights the absurdity of Wodehouse's characters and plays them with so much colour and flavour. I'd give an entire star just for his performance!

Interesting and fresh premise that was wittily written.

The unnamed narrator is a priest in some high-ranking special Order that specialises in exorcisms. He meets Prosper of Schanz, the royal tutor who has apparently mastered almost every field imaginable, and notices something special about him - he has a demon in him too.

The writing in this one was refreshingly witty. Demons aren't your regular screeching and screaming monstrosities, but rather sound more like very disgruntled people just trying to find a place to settle down and grumbling when they get evicted by the authorities. “Oh, for crying out loud, not you again.”

About the ending:

I had expected more plot twists, like maybe the POV we have had from the narrator all along was actually the demon that had been (occasionally) haunting him since birth, and that the thing that he keeps trying to hunt down is the actual priest. No such luck, I'm afraid. The actual plot twist, that in helping to make Great Horse for Prosper, the narrator had somehow engineered the mass deaths of the royal famiyl and the tutor, did catch me off guard though, although the novella ended a little abruptly.

Still though, I had a fun time with this one and the writing was really enjoyable. The dark humour was very much up my alley.

4.5/5. Wow. Just wow.

So many brilliant moments in this book. This was sometimes horror, sometimes fantasy, sometimes children's adventure, sometimes fairytale, sometimes magical realism, sometimes surrealism, sometimes allegory, but all times engaging and beautiful to read.

When he just turns seven, the unnamed narrator meets a strange girl who lives at the farmhouse at the end of the lane, Lettie Hempstock. She is slightly older than him at eleven years old, but already seems to know a lot more things than she should. A dead man turns up in a stolen and abandoned family car, and a magical adventure ensue.

Most of this book reads like a fairytale for adults. Like children's fairytales, it gives you a world want to escape to, where problems could be solved with magic, and where there is a vast unknown magical world and system that you cannot even begin to comprehend. But unlike children's fairytales, Gaiman doesn't shy away from showing you how rough the world can get even for children, so you can appreciate the nice, cosy spot you have in front of your fireplace. That nice, cosy spot, Gaiman seems to argue, is in adults retaining a child-like wonder and curiosity for the world.

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

some

universe

"And did I pass?"The face of the old woman on my right as unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at being a person, dear."

Wow, I mean... how did someone even come up with this concept? And then somehow write it such that it was legit sad by the end.

There's really nothing much to summarise with the plot: Gregor Samsa wakes up one day somehow transformed into some kind of venomous bug or beetle. This book is about how this altered state of things affect his own mentality, as well as how his family copes with it.

The book starts off being absurd and comical at the beginning, but in the second and third parts of the book, when the Samsa family has to rally around the beetle-that-used-to-be-Gregor, that's when you get some amazing moments.

Take when his mother, Mrs. Samsa, is thinking about leaving his room furnished as it always was so that “when Gregor returns to us, he finds everything unchanged and can forget the intervening time all the more easily”, despite the fact that as a beetle he would have actually preferred having an emptier room to scurry around in. Or when his family try to feed him, but giving him human food which he could not appreciate.

The end result is a deeply thought-provoking work that can be read as an allegory for so many things.

The subtitle of this book should be: An essay on how many times you can flip-flop between two factions before your head gets chopped off and stuck on a pole somewhere.

We all know the famous Wars of the Roses, which came directly before the equally famous reign of Henry VIII and the other Tudors. But history, and in a large part Shakespeare's plays, have simplified the event into a (relatively) simple conflict between the two warring families of York and Lancaster, represented by the red and white roses respectively. Dan Jones sets out in this volume to prove that the Wars were actually far, far more complex than that. Oh, and if you have trouble keeping track of Roman numerals and of a million and one Henrys, Edwards, Richards, Elizabeths, and Margarets, you're in for a ride - no, but I'd recommend that you at least keep a character cheat sheet with you while reading this book.

One might wonder why the book starts in a seemingly unconnected time, some decades before the actual conflict begins, with Henry V on the throne, but I think Jones's point here is to draw a line between how some seemingly minor event occurring many decades prior (e.g. Henry V's widow, Catherine de Valois's second marriage to a relatively unimportant and unknown Welshman, Owen Tudor) to the major event that it will precipitate later on (e.g. Owen Tudor's grandson by Catherine, Henry Tudor, ostensibly ending the Wars of the Roses and ending up as King Henry VII). The butterfly effect on full display here.

As you might expect from the title, this book is chock full of military strategy, battles, treachery, uprisings, and a ton of violence. Still though, I found myself a little bored in the first half of the book when it concentrates mostly on Henry VI's ineptitude, and the power struggle between Richard, Duke of York, and Henry VI's wife, Queen Margaret of Anjou. There were so many Somersets, Buckinghams, Warwicks, Suffolks, Norfolks that were cycled through not just in terms who these noblemen are (their titles passed from father to son very quickly because they kept getting killed in battle or executed for treason by someone or other), but also whose sides they were on (even I couldn't tell you that right now, just assume that they have all at some point been on either side and have flip flopped at least once, if not multiple times). I skimmed through some parts of the book because there was just so many times I could read about yet another battle, but I paid attention to who won and who got his head cut off so that I could still broadly follow on the political action.

The most exciting parts of the book for me was after Edward IV, son of Richard Duke of York, took the throne and married Elizabeth Woodville, against the advice of everyone he knows. Even his most trusted advisor and ally, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, who was also nicknamed the Kingmaker because of how he had been instrumental in bringing Edward and his father to the throne against Lancastrian opposition, eventually flip-flopped over to the Lancastrian faction after this act of defiance. This was, to me, the meat of the book. It was fun seeing how Edward struggled to hold on to his newly claimed throne against his predecessor, Henry VI (of Lancaster), and then later how he even condemned his own brother George, Duke of Clarence, because he was an annoying upstart who had already led two rebellions against him.

I'm also slightly more familiar with this time in history because of the very (in)famous Richard III, who was Edward IV's younger brother. He remains an enigmatic figure for me, previously a stout-hearted and loyal commander with an almost hero-worshipping attitude for his brother the King, Richard III is remembered by history to become some kind of misshapen villain in his later years, usurping the throne from his young nephews after Edward IV's death, locking them in the Tower of London and purportedly arranging for their mysterious disappearance. Thus, the legend of the Princes of the Tower was born.

And yet, how much of what we know about this period was influenced by Shakespeare's plays? How much have we actually bought into the Tudor propaganda that has persisted since then? I remain intrigued by this period simply because so much of it has been “taken for granted” because of those plays, like Edward IV's bravery, Richard III's villainy, Richard II's tyranny, and Henry VI's incompetence. It's like someone painted a picture of what they wanted us to see and pasted it over a a slightly more accurate photograph, and we have grown so accustomed to this picture over the past four centuries that have passed since then that we are only now just starting to peel back the layers to uncover more historically accurate information beneath.

Tentatively on hold at about page 57.

This book is kinda urban fantasy/horror and while it has some interesting ideas, I'm not really in the mood for that genre. Modern, gritty, urban London is not really the kind of setting I gravitate towards in books. The structure of the book is also such that you see how Slade House basically kidnaps and swallows up people every 9 years, and while I can get why it's that way, it also means that you don't have a consistent narrative - it's almost like a bunch of short stories centering around the titular house. At where I'm reading, we already kind of see how 13 year old Nathan Bishop got kidnapped and had his soul?? eaten?? or something by the creepy siblings who run the house. I don't know if there's probably more to it than that (there most likely is), but at this point I feel like I already know the mystery of the house and have no burning questions to answer about it to drive me on to the end of this really short book.

Victorian mysteries are really something else and this book does not disappoint. Mysterious disappearances, secrets borne by everyone all around, deceit and death, you've got it all here.

Everyone wasn't too surprised when Sir Michael Audley of Audley Court proposes marriage to a lady not even half his age and who worked as a governess at the local surgeon's family, primarily because said lady was charming and lovely beyond words. The new Lady Audley is the belle of the county and never fails to be the star attraction of any party, gathering, or event that she attends. Sir Michael's good-hearted, if insouciant, nephew Robert Audley pays his visit to his new aunt with a friend, George Talboys, who he's newly reconnected with, and who has just fresh come off the boat from Australia. But then George Talboys suddenly and mysteriously disappears, and all signs seem to point to something terrible having happened to him. At the center of that horrible enigma seems to be the charming Lady Audley.

The titular secret that Lady Audley carries is not very hard to figure out - you probably would have guessed it within the first 5-10 chapters. But there's something very masterful in the way Braddon builds up that mystery, shows you probably just about 90% of it and keeps you hanging for that last 10% all the way up to the end. At some point around the the first arc of the book, I had wondered, “Why would I bother reading this if I already know what the secret is?” But oh, it was worth it. I binged this book in about 24 hours (including my sleep time) because it was just so gripping and kept me at the edge of my seat - even though I had a feeling I knew what the secret was.

Lady Audley's characterisation was stellar. She's exquisitely Machiavellian and only gets more and more intense with every chapter, as Robert Audley doggedly takes step after step towards the end of the mystery. There was an entire chapter that I had to skim because her machinations got so unbearably uncomfortable to read (This was the part where she shed some crocodile tears and tried to convince Sir Michael that Robert Audley was insane just so she can discredit him before he could tell on her to her husbandSpeaking of Robert Audley, I'm not entirely convinced that he doesn't have some latent homoerotic tendencies over here. When his friend George Talboys disappears, Audley is observed by the other characters in the book to have altered considerably, becoming moodier and unhappy - and this was before he even realised he had a mystery to solve. Audley harbours some really intense feelings and affection for Talboys which I'm not convinced is entirely platonic in nature. In fact, in the end he falls for Clara Talboys because she so much resembles her brother. It's almost like everytime he looks at her, he's reminded of George and therefore convinces himself that he's crazily in love with her. Anyway, he was also characterised beautifully, with a convincing transition between the insouciant, lazing gentleman to one that rushes about the entire country seized by some frantic energy trying to find out and avenge his lost friend.Spoiler review for the ending:I thought everything wrapped up a bit too perfectly tied up with a bow, with everyone ending up happy and Lady Audley ending up dead (but apparently having been kindly treated in an upstate asylum). I was really just kinda waiting for someone to accidentally stumble across George Talboys's body in the lime-walk, or for Audley to have arranged for someone to haul that decomposed corpse out of the well, which would have driven this book into Victorian gothic territory. But nope, I was pretty caught off guard by the fact that George Talboys actually managed to save himself! Not only that, but Audley didn't even have to travel to Australia in search of him, as he had planned - he basically just went home one day (very conveniently after the entire mystery is cleared up) and Talboys is there waiting for him, because he had actually gone to New York instead and came back after he decided he was too lonely there.In fact, I would've even liked it even more if Braddon pulled a fast one on us, and we had Dr Mosgrave right at the end tell us that it was actually Robert Audley who was mad all along (which I thought was actually going to happen during that chapter), and who had dreamed up and hallucinated all these things. Or that it had been him who had actually murdered George Talboys. I know it sounds out of this world (or more in line with Agatha Christie) but it's not unheard of in Victorian mysteries, like with Wilkie Collins. Heck, even Jane Eyre had some crazy plot twists.I was a little disappointed by Lady Audley's real secret, which is that her mother was apparently "mad", never mind the disturbing Victorian notions of mental health. It just feels like an all too convenient and cliched plot twist, and I would have preferred something a bit more out of the way and weirder than that. I thought that maybe Lady Audley had in fact murdered her mother.Despite that the ending was a bit overly neat, though, it didn't require a huge amount of suspension of disbelief so I was generally satisfied.Overall, this was a very enjoyable and gripping book that I thoroughly enjoyed and which embodies all the beauty of Victorian writing that I rarely see being emulated successfully in more modern and contemporary books.

I bought this audiobook at an Audible sale some time back and only started on this one because the book I was currently reading had no audiobook available. I was so pleasantly surprised that this turned out to be a way better cosy mystery than the one I had originally been reading.

Major Heathcliff Lennox is a war veteran set to return to spend Christmas at his uncle's place at Melrose Court. Just before he sets off, however, he finds a dead man on his doorstep clutching a note with an enigmatic Countess's name written on it. Imagine his surprise when he reaches Melrose Court and discovers that the said Countess is in attendance! Murder happens, chaos ensues, and Lennox (because he hates to be called Heathcliff) finds out that he's not too bad at investigating mysteries after all.

This was an enjoyable and engaging blend of Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse. The writing flowed well, and the humour worked (imagine if a more intelligent Bertie Wooster started solving mysteries). Most importantly, the mysteries tied up pretty well together and while mostly formulaic, there were still some plot twists that caught me off guard. Still, though, cosy mystery is a genre where sometimes being formulaic can be a good thing (hence the word ‘cosy'?)

Also I want to give a shoutout to the narrator of the audiobook, Sam Dewhurst-Phillips, who did a fantastic job at voicing all the different characters in the mystery. He breathed life into all of them, from the Bertie Wooster-ish quality of the main character, down to the pottering old butler Cooper whom you can't help feeling endeared to even though he barely has lines in the story.

Overall, a great entry into the cosy mystery genre with a slightly unique attitude of injecting Wodehouse humour into Christie-esque mysteries. I would certainly consider continuing the series.

Man, this was a weird read and not exactly as cosy as I would expect for a cosy mystery.

After busting a cocaine syndicate, Phryne Fisher is now fully established in business as a private detective at 221B The Esplanade in Melbourne, Australia. Her reputation amongst the high-society ladies in Melbourne grows as she is beset by Mrs McNaughton, who asks for her help to intercede between her son Bill and her husband William, who both have awful tempers and are often at each other's throats - she believes Bill intends to kill his father. Indeed, when William McNaughton's body turns up with a crushed skull one day, Bill is the prime suspect. Then, there is the case of little Candida Alice Maldon who vanishes when out buying sweets.

The writing was generally all right, if a little too descriptive at time where I felt the need to skim over certain passages even though this was just a 200+ page book. This was particularly so during the last couple chapters, when we just want to know the ending of the mysteries, but there were still so many unnecessary details and sequences and conversations between the characters.

This book was clearly written with a very feminist agenda. Almost all the female characters in this book are somehow outstanding or independent or just better. There's Phryne, obviously, and then there's Dot, Amelia McNaughton, Candida Alice, and the briefly mentioned WPC Jones, Klara, and that lady in the Egyptienne gown whose name escapes me right now. It's not to say that all the male characters in this book were bad, but it's clear that there was some agenda going on here.

Phryne's promiscuity continues in this book, which I have no problems with, but I found it a little odd and slightly disturbing that she quite immediately seduces Paolo, whom she knows is Amelia McNaughton's lover. Although she had already gotten it from Amelia that she doesn't mind or care that Paolo sleeps with his models, Phryne had never actually talked about sleeping with him when she was talking with Amelia, and it seems *very* strange to go directly from a conversation with a woman you've just met and who you've just started to sympathise with and admire, to interrogate her lover but end up seducing him on a whim and sleeping with him. I also didn't really quite like Amelia's relationship with Paolo anyway, and was shocked that Phryne said that "he loves her truly" to Bill. He basically just looks at Amelia as if she was another sculpture to be captured, and loves her body for its proportions and how it "won't sag" like other women's. What?! That was super gross and disturbing. I was even grossed out by how, at the very ending of the story when Amelia picks up the rocks on the ground, Paolo tells her not to because she'd "spoil her fingers". Oh my god.

What is even more disturbing is this underlying theme of paedophilia in this book. I've always thought that the Phryne Fisher books were a damned spot darker and grittier than the TV series, but this really caught me by surprise. First, we have William McNaughton having sexually and physically abused Amelia McNaughton as a *child*, even though he is her biological father. Then, we have the child molester (aka paedophile) Sidney Brayshaw who basically thought about kidnapping Candida at first because he had wanted to probably do unspeakable things to her, but for some reason was deterred just because she had vomited on him at first. And what I found most disturbing of all is that Phryne actually agreed to send to him Klara, a lesbian who dresses up as a pre-pubescent girl to satisfy paedophiles who are about to be executed, in exchange for his silence regarding Mike's involvement in the kidnapping. What?!?! I don't mind darker themes, and I know these are realities that happened during this time period in the 1920s which aren't usually dealt with in books written in that era, but I felt like these were just too casually peppered into the story and never quite dealt with as seriously as they should be.

Thoughts regarding the ending:

For most mystery novels of this genre, there's usually some kind of twist at the end, or at the very least the culprits are one of the characters that we've been following through the entire novel, which gives you some sense of satisfaction, like you *could* have figured it out along with the detective in the novel. Not in this one though. We find out that William McNaughton's death is a complete accident because he tried to chase away some kids playing on his estate. Then we also find out that Candida was just randomly kidnapped by three people who we have never met and will never meet after they each go on their respective paths when the kidnapping is foiled by Phyrne.Not only that, but one would expect that if two mysteries were presented in the same book, they would somehow be related to one another, and that we would discover the connection near the end when the resolution takes place. But here, we are once again foiled by this book. The mysteries have almost nothing to do with each other, aside from the fact that Candida's dad, Henry Maldon, is a fellow pilot in the same flying club as Bill McNaughton. Otherwise, no characters in one mystery figure at all in any kind of significance in the other mystery.Lastly, the mysteries wrapped up far too cleanly and unrealistically. For the main mystery of the Willian McNaughton death, Phryne lets Amelia McNaughton arrange some party for the street children that she takes under her wing, she explains the answer to the mystery there - that Mickey, one of the children, had let go of a rock on a rope while they were playing in the trees on the McNaughton estate, and that rock had swung down and smashed William's skull. Mickey bursts out into tears, but is simply stoppered by Bert who "thrust a huge toffee apple into the gaping maw". After that, everyone is just happy and nothing happens to anyone because the death is ruled as an accident. Mickey goes on partying with everyone else as per normal.What?!This is considering that this party was also attended by the detective-inspector in charge of this case, and his subordinates!!! Everyone is just happy to take that solution and have absolutely no repercussions for anyone. We're expected to just be happy that no one is going to take the fall for the murder simply because McNaughton is such an odious man and deserved to die. WHAT?! I mean, I know that Sherlock Holmes had some endings where the victims were truly horrible people, but even then there was always some consequences for their murderers, somehow.Then when it came to Candida's kidnapping - I was truly bewildered that Phryne basically gave one of the kidnappers money, asked him to leave the place and start a new life somewhere else. Sure, he was one of the compassionate kidnappers and actually helped to protect Candida rather than hurt her, but come on wasn't there a better way to wrap this up than simply just letting him walk away into the night?! And it was really convenient that his wife got double-crossed and shot by their accomplice (and pedophile) Sidney Brayshaw.

Historical fiction based on the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, but with some modern sensibilities and drama thrown in.

This was actually generally enjoyable if you make allowances for the fact that the writer isn't trying to present a 100% historically accurate account of Eleanor's life. Often times, we see her inwardly questioning religious tenements which would be pretty sacrilegious thoughts to have in her day, openly denouncing misogyny and, while she doesn't exactly advocate women's rights exactly, she has thoughts about how women are treated back then which sounded more like the writer's 21st century observations on medieval society than thoughts that the real Eleanor of Aquitaine would likely have harboured. But if you put all these aside, and just treat this as a sort of slightly modernised, dramafied, almost soap-opera version of the life of Eleanor, you might enjoy it as I did, seeing how I breezed through all 470+ pages of it in just 2 days and I wasn't even hurrying myself.

Generally, the characters exhibited broadly realistic vibes. Eleanor herself is not portrayed to be some kind of medieval suffragette warrior or feminist, but a woman who had to live, survive, and thrive within the sphere and social roles that she had been born in. I enjoyed reading her POV, but I felt like I didn't see her grow, develop, or regress as much as other characters like Louis of France and even Petronella, her sister. For Louis especially, I enjoyed how the author managed to really draw out the character descent from shy, pious, and generally pleasant young prince to this cruel, tyrannical, and misogynistic religious zealot. I ended up *really* despising him by the end of the book, but also really interested at how the author developed him that way. With Petronella, Eleaonr's sister, I felt that the author did her a little dirty. Very little is known about Petronella of Aquitaine, as far as I know (and I'm no historian), but I thought her swinging between loving and comforting sister to throwing spoilt tantrums, unfairly blaming Eleanor for everything and going a little mad with her husband, Raoul, seemed to be more modern soap-opera than really what I would probably expect a medieval royal lady to do. But who knows, eh?

The plot does not shy away from some rough realities of medieval royal society and politics, particularly when it came to teenaged marriage and sex, marital rape, and how women were very easily made the scapegoat for every bad news that came with child-bearing. Can't get pregnant after years of marriage? Wife's fault for being barren. Gives birth to a healthy daughter? Wife's fault because “her seed is too strong”. Miscarried a baby boy? Wife's fault because “she displeased God”. All of this was particularly triggering to me, but I guess it's probably just the way of life back in that century, perhaps. I also think the author deliberately wrote it in such an aggravating way to really emphasize the inherent misogyny of medieval societies - whether that's a good or bad thing, I have yet to decide.

Another bit I particularly enjoyed was when Henry of Anjou (later Henry II of England) and Eleanor of Aquitaine first meet: Eleanor is nearing the annulment of her marriage to Louis of France, and both Henry and her know that they are potential marriage partners. This could've been a full-blown romanticised rose-tinted scene where Henry is dumbstruck by how ~beautiful~ and ~elegant~ Eleanor is, and she would in turn also fall head over heels for this well-built handsome young man and it's going to be like he swooped in like a hero and saved her from that disastrous first marriage. In fact, the book doesn't go down that tired path, thank goodness. They certainly are attracted to each other, but also wary at the same time - it's no coincidence that the author chose to have them play chess at their first meeting. Henry never loses his mind over Eleanor, and neither does she him. There are long conversations about Eleanor considering her suitors before deciding that uniting Aquitaine with Anjou and later England would be of the best political advantage to her realm. They both know that the marriage was a political one, the decision was made in a cool and calculated manner, and they both make no pretences about it. It was just a happy bonus that they both were also attracted to each other at the same time. We are also shown that Henry has a mistress *and* a baby son before he marries Eleanor, which is fairly true to life and doesn't shirk away from the very common reality of marital infidelity (mostly on the husband's part) in order to pursue a romanticised beginning of their marriage.

Why did I give it 3/5 stars? While I enjoyed the book quite a lot and appreciated a number of aspects about it, it didn't exactly blow me away and the some anachronistic details in it were a little too jarring for me. Would I continue the series? I'm in two minds about it because I do enjoy the writing style and would want to continue just because of that - but I also happen to sorta kinda know broadly what happens in the rest of Eleanor's life and have a feeling that she might experience the same kinds of frustration in future books as had happened in Book 1, and I'm not really looking forward to reading more of that. Otherwise though, this author's writing style is a great and engaging gateway to finding out more about these fascinating historical figures and I'd definitely check out more of her other books.

DNF'ed at ~25%.

i remember DNFing this book a few years ago but i decided to pick it up again since the ratings on GR is unusually high over more than 30k reviews. but wow, i was really struggling to get through it. this is also coming from someone who regularly reads mass market paperback romance novels, and especially those set in the Regency era. for these specific niche of books, you need to read it with a whole tumbler of salt sometimes because obviously historical accuracy or social commentary is not the order of the day - that's fine. what i had issues with in this book, however, is just how annoying the characters are, how stilted the writing was, and how contrived and unrealistic the plot elements are.

i really really didn't like Marianne even though i barely got to the quarter mark. Marianne is obviously being set up to be your typical “not like other girls” Mary Sue:

For being twins, Cecily and I were remarkably different. She excelled me in every womanly art. She was much more beautiful and refined. She played the pianoforte and sang like an angel. She flirted easily with gentlemen. She liked twon life and had dreams of marrying a man with a title. She was ambitious.My ambitions were quite different from hers. I wanted to live in the country, to ride my horse, to sit in an orchard and paint, to take care of my father, to feel that I belonged, to do something useful and good with my time. But most of all, I wanted to be loved for who I was. My ambitions seemed quiet and dull next to Cecily's.

you just know that some man or other is going to choose plain ol' “so beautiful she can't even see it” Marianne over Cecily despite all her explicit beauty and glamour. man, this is an insult to actual Regency novels from that period, where even though some characters may be broadly painted into “the homebody” and “the socialite”, they are never as black and white as it seems in this book.

but then the writing becomes really stilted (what the heck is “twirling” and why is Marianne obsessed with it? is it really just turning yourself round and round?) and weird. it becomes worse when Marianne's grandmother very randomly announces that she is going to disinherit Mr Kellet, her nephew, and make Marianne her heir. we are not given an explanation why, except a vague sense that we just need to have Marianne as a secret heir to a vast fortune to get the romance plots into play.

and yes, the grandmother asks her to keep it a secret for... no reason? just because the grandmother isn't convinced that Marianne wouldn't disgrace her as her heir? idk, everything seems so contrived. you just know that this inability to tell anyone that she's inheriting forty thousand pounds is going to be the thing that resolves the central conflict near the end of the novel.

the writing was also so... unappealing somehow.

I pressed the locket close to my heart and felt a greater surge of hope. Surely my mother's portrait had magical powers over my heart. Perhaps over my stomach as well, for I soon felt it calm and settle.

what?!?!?! i mean, of course she has a locket that holds the only picture she has of her dearly departed mother, and of course she loses said locket early on in the book. she'll probably find it again some time later for yet another contrived plot element.

i would go on about this but honestly i think i should spend more of my time on things that actually make me happy. i rarely give books 1 star but i really did not enjoy this one and am deeply bewildered that its rating is so high on GR.

this book is not really about dinosaurs.

this was an amazing book and i'm so glad i've read this. i'm sure i'm not alone in having the 1993 movie as a firm (and horrifying) part of my early childhood. i'm not really a huge fan of dinosaurs or horror or sci-fi, so i avoided this book because i've always imagined that it was some kind of movie-to-print adaptation. i literally only found out this year that it wasn't, and i'm so so so glad that i read it. i'm also really happy that i went into it only remembering certain key scenes from the movie but otherwise not really remembering much of the details.

John Hammond is your eccentric old rich white guy who doesn't seem to have grown past his childhood, and the only thing that he has gained in the 70 or so years that has passed since he was a child is a healthy capitalistic greed. so he decides to use his money to buy Isla Nublar, a remote island within Costa Rica territories, and aimed to turn it into a dinosaur themed park, genetically cloning dinosaurs from their blood in prehistoric insects fossilised in amber.

“Donald,” [John Hammond] said, “Believe me when I tell you that everything on the island is going forward as planned. Everything on that island is perfectly fine.”

(VO: it wasn't.)

this book delivers on the thrills and violence which the entire movie was made out of. although i knew broadly what was going to go down, i was still kept on the edge of my seat at 3am in the morning, unable to stop listening to the audiobook because i just wanted to know when that T-rex was gonna pounce. but if the book had solely been just all about the adrenaline-pumping action scenes, i would never have picked it up at all.

when reading this book, it's important to remember that it was published in 1990, just when the world was just starting to embrace consumer technology on a larger scale. Internet wasn't a widespread thing back then, but more and more electronics were invading every aspect of the average person's lives. you can see it in the way Timmy, the young boy in the book, is made fun of by Lex, his younger sister, and his dad for liking computers more than sports, and how he, an 11 year old boy, eventually saves a few lives by making educated guesses on the park's control system and restoring power to the Safari Lodge which electrifies the skylight and in turn kills the raptors that had been snapping away at it trying to get in.

but at the same time, the book is extremely critical of humanity's, and particularly scientists' increasing hubris with technological advancements, and that is mainly delivered through all the lectures and long monologues of Dr Ian Malcolm, a mathematician specialising in chaos theory who had been steadily disapproving of the park from the get-go. he criticises John Hammond for thinking that he could make animals completely foreign and unstudied in all of human history, and that they would all behave in ways that they could predict just because he wills them to.

“We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about it. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
(Ian Malcolm)

i don't think Malcolm was anti-technology per se, since he is described as being one of the hip new school of mathematicians who embrace computers as part of their field. it feels like he's against the human indolence that technological advancements brings about. when we rest on our laurels and think that everything is “under control” because technology gives us a nice, logical, predictable algorithm that helps us predict the future, and we very quickly and conveniently forget that nature is never as predictable as technology would think it is.

i think this whole book was a long rumination about how human nature is going to eventually destroy itself with the vicious cycle between the increasing conveniences and efficacies of modern technology, and the increasing arrogance and laziness that it generates in human beings. Jurassic Park is a cautionary tale of that. so while, of course, dinosaurs feature heavily in this book, the idea and consequences of cloning them in order to serve as a money-making, controllable enterprise for human beings to consume as entertainment is really the vehicle to drive that message across.

this book is really hard to write a review for because much of the time i felt like i was sort of skimming over the surface of something that could've been really juicy or impactful, but never really quite dipping through and giving me that oomph that i was waiting for up to the last page. i know that the English people are stereotyped as being very reserved, reticent, and bury an ocean of emotions underneath a placid surface - this book seems to embody that image exactly, down to the very ending.

Mildred Lathbury is a “spinster” at just slightly above 30 years old who finds herself enthralled by her new neighbours/flatmates, Rockingham and Helena Napier. she suspects Helena Napier, an anthropologist, to be attracted to a fellow anthropologist, Everard Bone. to complicate things, Mildred's close friends, the pastor Julian Malory and his sister Winifred, have their lives turned upside down by their new flatmate, the fashionable and enigmatic Mrs Allegra Gray. a lot of criss-crossing interactions and attractions ensue.

having devoured a lot of 18th and 19th C English literature that centers mainly around the domestic or neighbourhood society, the everyday life and the gossips of people's relationships being the main action of the day, i feel like i'm in a generally good position to appreciate this type of plot, although i can absolutely understand why a lot of people might find it just straight up boring.

i think the main issue with this book is that it kinda just dips its toes into various things but doesn't really quite take the plunge. there's just a bit of social commentary, but not really. there's just a bit of satire, but not really. there's just a bit of romance, but not really. and even in the ending, i was expecting at least some full-blown confession from Everard Bone, or *at least* some kind of well-rounded ending but NOPE, we just kinda have Mildred vaguely agreeing to help him out with his academic research, and it's a super vague indication that it's likely they're going to end up together even though he never once explicitly said anything along those lines.

while this wasn't a hard book to get through, and i was interested enough to know what happens at the end to keep up with the book all the way, when i was done with the book i felt like i had been left high and dry. i had a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction by how a lot of things were portrayed and resolved.

i still gave this book 3 stars though, because the characters were just vivid and humourous enough that i laughed out loud sometimes. the writing was just that bit satirical enough that i smirked to myself sometimes, especially when it comes to Mildred feeling a little despaired about being known as the lady who always had tea prepared when a crisis happens. the plot and the set-up were generally good, it's just that i felt like it was never pushed past a critical point in order to deliver the most impact on the reader, and it was a bit of a missed opportunity.

“The circus arrives without warning.”

the reviews i heard of this book were really divisive, and i remember dropping this about 2 chapters in when i tried it a few months ago, so i went into this expecting to have a hard time finishing it. boy, was i pleasantly surprised to have enjoyed myself as much as i did.

The Night Circus, at its heart, is about a circus in which we see our main characters, Celia and Marco, play out a magical competition that they were both forced into participating since they were children. i can't really say much more than that without spoiling, but the writing was beautiful, the romance was (surprisingly!) good, and the story was satisfying.

i've heard at least two different reviews of this book call the writing “atmospheric”, and at the time i had no idea what it meant. i think i understand a little better now. for at least the first half of the book, you are just kinda swept up by this whimsical, enimatic, ethereal prose that perfectly illustrates not just the titular Night Circus in particular, but also the whole setting of turn-of-the-century England and America. i think when the plot actually picked up speed around the halfway mark of the book, it actually caught me by surprise.

the ending of the story of the book was a little meh to me, but i particularly enjoyed the post-ending aftermath, especially when Widget begins to tell the entire story of the Night Circus to the man in the gray suit, and begins with the book's opening sentence, "The circus arrives without warning."

i have a lot of things to say about the romance in this book, which i shall put under spoiler tags soon, but a quick and dirty spoiler-free summary is: i can absolutely get behind the main couple's beginning, but kinda wish that the romance was kept a little more toned down for the second half of the book. more elaboration with spoilers:

ok, so i loved it when Celia and Marco had their first ever conversation after that party at Lefevre's house. on paper, their backstory was really cliche, the whole thing about opponents becoming lovers, but in the story i thought it was executed really well. it made a lot of sense, that these two people who were forced to be fixated on a nameless, faceless rival for most of their lives in a competition that neither wanted any part of, would find themselves falling head over heels in love with the object of such fixation when they finally meet, and when they also realise that the other person has the same disinterest in winning whatever competition they were forced into participating. i loved it! i didn't find it insta-love at all, because they were "interacting" with each other all along through their magical feats, and i can absolutely see why it would be so easy for them to fall for each other.what i didn't like as much was kinda after that when the story just became a bit too romancey for me. like i don't mind if they were the most romantic couple but i just didn't want to see it so much, it was a rather jarring distraction from that soothing, ethereal illusion that was the rest of the story. so i kinda felt like the second half of the book wasn't as wispy and beautiful as the second half was, because we actually have like this romance drama going on.

all in all though, i really enjoyed this book a lot more than i thought i would've, but i can definitely see why this had so many mixed reviews. i think the book is best enjoyed if you treat the author as an illusionist painting pictures and building whole environments in your head in which a story can play out, rather than just giving you a story plain and dry.

I'm not feeling this book so far at 35% in. the magic system is really fun and all, but i'm not super engaged by the story, and i also kinda predicted that big reveal about Gavin and Dazen having swapped identities in Ch 34, so it wasn't super surprising for me. i'm DNFing for now at Ch 36. i won't rule out picking it back up again, but i have too many books to read this month to press on.

wow... a master class in how to concisely illustrate a grotesquely beautiful character descent in just slightly above 50 pages.

the unnamed narrator begins the story in an optimistic tone, having moved into a beautiful house rented for 3 months by her husband, a physician. it's not explicitly stated, but there are hints to say that she's been prescribed a “rest cure” which was apparently a thing from the late 19th century (when this novella was written) to cure some “slight hysterical tendencies” and a “nervous condition” after the birth of her child. the idea isn't as relaxing as just lounging around a resort. she's basically made to keep to her room and not do anything for herself, so she can only stare at the yellow wallpaper in her room day and night, and which eventually becomes the focal point of her mental unravelling.

this was just the right amount of creepy and sad, and was beautifully written to top it all off, and just goes to show that you don't need page count to deliver an impactful and memorable story.

i grew up on TV adaptations of Jin Yong novels, but i've never actually read the source material of any of them. Legend of the Condor Heroes is not the most popular story to adapt, but it's a good place to start for me because it's really chronologically the beginning of everything else - all the other popular Jin Yong stories are almost like sequels and take place generationally downstream from Legend.

this is the first official English translation of a Jin Yong novel and while i can read Chinese, i found it difficult to understand the complex writing style the the original books were written in, so i was really excited for this one. overall, it was enjoyable, but a few things put me off - mostly to do with the translation work, unfortunately.

Skyfury Guo and Ironheart Yang are fellow patriots of the fallen Song dynasty, who are trying to eke out a humble living in a rural village while biding their time to rebel against the reigning Jin empire. they're sworn brothers, so when their wives get pregnant at the same time, they agree to name each other's unborn child, who eventually turn out to be Guo Jing and Yang Kang, the real main characters of this entire series. shit goes down, and the families are separated. Guo Jing grows up in the steppes of Mongolia, in the retinue of Temujin, also known as Genghis Khan, no less. he learns horsemanship and archery from his Mongolian tutors, and martial arts from a bunch of famous martial artists called the Seven Freaks of the South. unbeknownst to him, he is actually the subject of a bet that the Seven Freaks have placed with a Taoist that they had met years before, Qiu Chuji, and is being trained to defeat Qiu Chuji's protege when he turns 18.

a huge thing i noticed almost immediately in the opening few chapters is how much more violent the book is compared to the TV adaptations that i grew up in. the story pulls no punches when it comes to just how gruesome and ruthless the martial arts world can be, whereas this is mostly censored and sanitised to be family-friendly in the TV shows. this is great though, and gives me more incentive to continue reading the source material.

i had issues with the names of the characters - why were some translated and some not? Skyfury Guo is also known as Guo Xiaotian in the original novel; “Skyfury” is a very literal translation of the characters “Xiaotian”, and it seemed unnecessary to make that translation. it was also jarring because so many other characters did not have translated names, like Guo Jing, Qiu Chuji, Wang Chuyi, etc. it seemed almost like a random decision on which characters got their names translated and which didn't. i wish it had been more consistent in that aspect.

i has issues with the way the book was translated. this is a long epic story that has captured the attention and affection in Chinese pop culture since the 1950s, along with other Jin Yong works. my dad said he made it a point to rush home and listen to the radio drama of Jin Yong novels broadcasted at a certain time every day. it was the 50s and 60s equivalent of a soap opera almost. it's meant to be mad exciting and keeping you at the edge of your seat. the fact that Jin Yong novels are still continually being adapted for TV till today is testament to the undying popularity of his works. but the translation in this one fell a bit flat for me. i found myself getting bored towards the second half of the book, and started skimming really hard in the last third.

but as i've mentioned before, Jin Yong's writing style is really complex and i can only imagine how nightmarish it must have been to attempt to translate it, so for that i have to give Anna Holmwood kudos. although the translation wasn't as exciting as i may have wanted, i can still appreciate how much effort it took to even get it to this decent standard.