Ellie
I typically dislike romance and gothic and a variety of this book's featured tropes butttt I crushed all 300+ pages in 24 hours so I guess I liked this one 😁
I mean yes the setup was a bit goofy, and the fuzziness of the worldbuilding & plot logic bothered me more here than in The Starving Saints (my beloved) - like (taking just one example) if a major premise of the worldbuilding hinges on the fall of its major organized religion it feels like a gap that that religion is never called anything but “the church” and has no real impact or visible sequelae on the world... but honestly whatever, hats off to Starling girl knows how to PACE. And her prose is so nice and clear and moves along at a beautiful clip. Really what more can you ask for in a story than to be so engrossed that you are carrying the book from couch to date night to bed with your nose buried in it going “what” and “gross” and “hell yeah” and “oh shit” until the final page. I still don't know what the actual f was going on with the magic in this book but that, to me, is real magic.
Very torn. 5 stars for prose and fantastic setting work, the descriptions of the land and sensory details and depictions of magic are genuinely gorgeous. But the character and events just kind of... happen. Merlin is extremely passive and reactive and even his cool magic just sort of happens to him through no effort or skill of his own. If plot is actions + causality it did not feel like a lot of causality was at play here. Also: a wild amount of sexism / misogyny for a work written by a woman, even if it was truther in the late 60s. I'm a “Merlin is an old murderous pervert” truther because that's literally straight out of Thomas Mallory, but ig she's more of a Geoffrey of Monmouth Arthurian fanfic writer.
Glad I read it because I'm on a mission to consume the entire Arthurian canon (except the gross Cornwell books and that cursed sounding romantasy novel) but I'm not sure I'll continue the series. Rereads of The Once and Future King and The Bright Sword here I come!
I attempted To The Lighthouse a few years ago and found myself unworthy of the task. Coming back to it with the benefit of age and craft knowledge (and owning a paperback vs reading on Kindle! - I increasingly hate reading anything as an ebook), I could not put it down.
With most books I can step back and say okay yeah, I see how the author made this, how they chose plot and structure and built character and their prose choices and so on. But I cannot for the life of me tell you how Virginia Woolf does what she does here. It is magic, magic borne of a lifetime of literary labor and of careful, loving attention to people and their inner worlds. Absolutely deserves its spot at the uppermost echelons (and many would argue the top) of the fiction canon.
Lovecraft, for me, is like Philip K Dick: amazing at ideas, middling at execution. Five stars for the unhinged hysteria and deeply committed mythos of his world-building. Minus one star for deeply purple prose and At the Mountains of Madness being about 50 pages longer than it should have been while he waxed on and on about geometry. Minus one star for (what was even for the time period extreme) egregious racism.
Highlights for me were “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Colour out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror”. I really enjoyed his essay on writing weird fiction at the end as well.
Okay yes this is well-written but do I have beef with this story!!
Firstly, why is it that so many ‘classic' novels (or fine at least the N of 3 comprising TROTN, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina) take as their entire premise ‘Women Only Want One Thing And It's Disgusting (romantic love that uplifts their position on the social ladder)' (by the way basically the only thing a patriarchal society allows them to want at this point in history) and then punishes said women by having them kill themselves when these ambitions are inevitably thwarted? Like yes, this is a modern reader's critique of a radically different historical context or whatever, but 1878 is late enough in human history that we can recognize that women probably have other ambitions and desires than this (Thomas Hardy was a late contemporary of and even met Virginia Woolf, it wasn't exactly medieval times) and as I plow my way through the ‘classics' I'm tired of reading about yet another shallow manic pixie hot girl who can only think about fantasy lovers and ~* Paris ~ and will throw herself in the river / in front of a train / into a bag of arsenic when she can't have them smdhBut. OK. I was willing to forgive the gender dynamics of the plot because of cultural context and age. Until. UNTIL. I get to THE most egregious footnote I have ever read. (And I've read Infinite Jest! All the way through!)So at the end of the story our emotionally sensitive if boundary-unaware chad Diggory Venn is granted a happy ending with his beloved / the object of his well-meaning stalking Thomasin Yeobright, to which is appended a footnote that reads: “The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn ... But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent. Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.”DUDE. that is INSANE. on so many levels! Number one. You are *republishing this book as a novel. If you didn't like the ending you wrote for serialization you could just...change it?? It's literally a chapter. Number Two. Frankly unhinged to gaslight readers into nullifying the entire experience of the ending they have just read (the ENDING~! the most important part of a story!) by suggesting that that ending is somehow insufficiently ‘artistically austere' when that is the ending YOU provided. And Number Three. If you are so ‘artistically austere' as to level this implied critique @ readers mayybe you wouldn't have written a happy ending for ‘circumstances of serial publication'? (I mean I personally think this whole argument is silly, and that it's valid to accept that art coexists as commerce, and sometimes compromises are made and that's okay if the author decides it's okay, but if you're going to make that compromise you can't have it both ways and get on your high horse about it afterward). This feels like such a massive middle finger to someone who just read 350 pages of your novel only to say “btw this ending isn't real or artistically high-minded, and no I'm not going to provide you with an alternative you just have to Imagine a sadder one for Art ok”. Thomas Hardy might have been a great writer but I think he's fully lost me as a reader on this one.
(Pros: yes it is well written, yes I enjoy Promethean and Titanic allusions, and yes Eustacia has some real banger lines that I enjoyed texting to people with no context given.)
I bought this book because my fave book store employee heard me complaining about Becky Chambers and told me I might like this one more than her other stuff and as always Lara @ SQBG was right!!
This story still had some of the politics-on-the-sleeve/unsubtle/sentimental/techno-utopian vibes that I dislike in her writing, but the structure was compelling, the somaforming concept was neat and well deployed, I appreciate her keeping to the novella form given the content, and I found myself feeling Feelings so I guess I don't hate Becky Chambers now.
Novels, like so many worthwhile things in life, cannot be measured or defined on a single axis. There are novels in which the quality of the writing is mediocre but the story fantastic (hello, Dungeon Crawler Carl!), and then there are novels in which the prose absolutely shimmers with brilliance but the story leaves the reader wondering “... so what?” Madame Bovary is (IMO) clearly in this latter category.
(spoilers ahead but it's been 170 years at this point so the statute feels like it's probably expired)
I picked this book up after a lifetime of avoidance because I was reading a craft book that quoted Gustave Flaubert as saying that he would “rather die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second,” which I thought was pretty metal, and I desired to experience some of these perfectly ripe sentences for myself. And the sentences ARE ripe. They are RIPPING. They contain such gems as “She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins” or “In [the men's] unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused—the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women.” And on and on and on. These are TURBO delectable full-throttle sentences filled with insight and restraint and mastery of The Form (and that's even in translation, I can't imagine how tasty this prose would be to read in French).
And yet. This story. Is boring. The plot is aimless. The characters are shallow. Emma is lowkey an airheaded cool-girl who read too many Sarah J Maas novels and resents her dumb husband for not being an immortal fey warlock or having a good mustache or whatever. (I get that there is more layered critique of the bourgeoisie in here but that's pretty much how it reads to me). This book famously took major heat for its ~spicy~ adultery content at the time of its release, but for all Emma's adultering there are zero stakes. Nobody ever finds out or cares until the very end and it hardly matters bc poor Charles was pretty much dunzo at that point anyways. The double standard women are held to in society is acknowledged but not meaningfully explored or treated with much empathy, which makes his mining of Emma's predicament as the ENTIRE PREMISE of the book feel shallow. I'd like to say Flaubert has a low opinion of women, but honestly based on this book it seems like he has a low opinion of everyone. (Except himself. Apparently his preferred beta feedback process was to read an entire novel draft aloud to his friends over the course of MULTIPLE days while allowing ZERO commentary until the very end. WILD.)
So yeah it's a classic, yeah it's a masterpiece, yeah we wouldn't have Virginia Woolf without it (next on my list of classic summits to climb!), but idk if I enjoyed the story or would recommend it other than as a craft example? I'm gonna throw out an arbitrary and meaningless 3 stars for the aforementioned sentence quality + how ground-breaking this type of literary realism was at the time and sail back to my Lesbian Roman Empire in Space novels or whatever. Maybe if they'd had those back in 1857 Emma would have turned out all right 🙏
JCO is a monumentally disturbed person (admiring). The Corn Maiden in particular is one of the best and most structurally bold short stories I've ever read. Beersheba was also incredible and will haunt me for a dang while. Oates has a willingness to delve into the darkest shamefullest most psychologically gruesome aspects of human nature in a way that would be unimaginable in a writer of lesser skill.
That said, I think these stories would be better encountered one by one, sprinkled throughout a lifetime of reading, as consuming them all together induces a suffocating, nauseating sense of building dread in the reader that makes them deeply unpleasant to read even though that IS the intended effect (and one she achieves masterfully). The unique style of prose also gets repetitive and a bit exhausting after a while (so many frags! So many internal monologuing asides! Such italics! Much emdash!).
Anyways—people often say JCO is undervalued as a Pulitzer contender, but I think she's undervalued as a master of the horror genre. Her horror just looks so REAL people read it as lit fic. Now THAT'S impressive.
Super fun and imaginative craft book with some useful nuggets of insight 💝 For me this surpasses even Ray Bradbury's craft book in serving as a reminder of the unbridled imaginative joy that the act of fiction writing (particularly speculative fiction writing) represents. I'll definitely be rereading.
Either it has been too long since I read POTOT, I missed a third book in this series, or both, because the structure of this book made no sense to me.
We drop in with one character whose entire story is over? And now it's just reconciliation between her and her lover who I don't know or care about? And then the second half is about the Donmata but after all the build around her storyline it just ends with absolutely no plot resolution? What?? Like even if this is a prequel I feel like it should stand alone as its own novel and it ... does not.
The best short stories according to this guy maybe but not according to me !!
Sadly the literary world continues to be dominated by territorial genre line-calling and a collection of “lit fic” is never going to be inherently interesting to me because these stories are all realism which I find literarily uninteresting. Life is weird and therefore fiction should be a little bit spooky.
The list of publications accepting short fiction was a nice touch though.
what a wEiRrRrrd book (affectionate)
Ethan Rutherford has an absolutely sick sense of rhythm. Like this is actually some pretty wild prose, it feels more like a prose poem than a novel to me.
The story was fine, a more metaphysical / psychedelic variant of Dan Simmons' The Terror, but the writing kept me up late reading so I guess I liked it??
I have wildly mixed feelings about this book.
The scope and conceptual setup are awesome, and I found myself really enjoying North's prose. They particularly excel at cultural worldbuilding details, and I was often struck by their remarkable ability to envision a different kind of culture or consciousness in the many alien races that people the novel.
That being said, there were a number of things that really irked or distracted me. Those included, in no particular order: constant switching of tenses within a given scene (and not in an intentional, Making A Point About Time And Flexing That Tense Has No Power Over Me Joy Williams-esque way), long digressive passages, inconsistent usage of whitespace and asterisks to separate scenes with no apparent difference between them, NUMEROUS typos (I spotted at least THREE, Orbit what are your editors doing), and what I found to be a deeply distracting choice to use a variety of pseudopronouns without having them to matter enough to the narrative to justify their existence.
[A digression on the pronouns thing: I am a huge fan of science fiction that inspects gender identity and arrives at meaningful conclusions from that inspection (Left Hand of Darkness and Ancillary Justice being my favorite novels on this front), but in this book it felt to me more like a sort of hand-wavey desire to Make A Statement about how binary gender is a human conceit without having it matter to the plot at all, while throwing out all sorts of random pronouns that are not contextualized and often never seen again (the exception was the hé/hím character, whose pronouns made sense in the context of the universe and had some relevance to the story and the character's arc – I actually really liked that conceit of a sort of toxic ür-gender assignation and shall henceforth be known as shé)]
The plot and themes also felt overly moralistic to me - the whole thing basically came down to (thematic spoiler alert) “love is the most important thing in the galaxy but also there are many ways to love”, which is verbatim stated by multiple characters at various pivotal points. I feel like the same message could have been effectively conveyed by subtler means.
I also found the characters somewhat lacking. An immortal, alien/'altered', SF-neurodivergent-coded character is of course a challenging one to write in a way that resonates with most readers, but I found myself largely uninterested in pretty much anyone in this story, and was only interested in the protagonist for their super dope darkness powers (which were! indeed! super dope and well written !! I wish there had been WAY more scenes of them disintegrating into darkness and pulling out people's organs RIP) which they sadly spent the entire story denying and evolving past and whatever. I feel like there is a RIPPING science horror novel hidden in the bones of this rather fable-istic plot about diversity and life-affirmation and whatnot that I would have looooved to read (I say this as a person who does ofc genuinely believe in the value of love and diversity and opposes planetary genocide via blackship and whatnot, but I don't need to read a book to convince me to take a moral position on those things, I want to read a book to be frightened and challenged and entertained).
Anyways: complicated feelings! But I DID read it voraciously, and I would definitely read more of their work in the future so 🤷🏻♀️ So it's a high 3 for me, I respect the effort and would love to see this writer write something more dark and edgy XD
when I say this book is a MASTERPIECE – !!!! (be forewarned, long ramble ahead:)
I genuinely don't know if I could articulate or describe its genius, and as someone who read it with ZERO knowledge or context of the story I highly recommend experiencing it that way. But I will say that, while I was initially reluctant to get into it because of the style, I was soon physically attached to this book in a way I can never remember reading something. I was carrying my Kindle all around the house laughing and groaning and literally screaming because I could simply not put it down. It's brilliant. Genius. A bona fide masterpiece. So dark and funny and stunning and structurally outrageous. It's like a magic trick. Like all masterful endings, when the end finally comes it strikes you as at once shocking and inevitable. Like it didn't have to end this way and could have ended no other way. And the prose and the insights and the commentary about ART, my lord. Exquisite. Not to mention more quotable than freaking Nietzsche.
I wish I could articulate some of her core theses, or my feelings about them, but I am not one-hundredth the writer or philosopher Iris Murdoch was, so I won't attempt it. I'll just say that the thing that most struck me of all of her themes is the simultaneous dignity & indignity of the human condition. She portrays (and explicitly expounds upon) the essentially narrow, selfish, primal, anxious truth of our humanity, while simultaneously admiring our creative and artistic urge, the lofty desire to make art and meaning of our squalid pathetic solipsistic little existences. It reminds me of Joy Williams's belief in the “anagogical level” at work in all great stories (and, by extension, humanity), this idea that even in the our most base human existence we are reaching, stretching, laboring upward toward an invisible and unattainable sense of grace made even more profound by the lowness of our eternal position.
While I was absolutely bowled over by its brilliance, if I had to level one critique against this novel it would be that it felt quite long and digressive, especially the many scenes of two people dialoguing back and forth with maximum histrionics & grandiloquence. That IS an intentional part of her style and I wouldn't change it necessarily, but I did find myself skimming some of those exchanges because I found them a bit boring and/or (due to the magnificent wretchedness of every character) quite painful to read XD But look who am I to critique Iris Murdoch, she is clearly a genius and the fact that I'd only been vaguely aware of her in relation to authors like Steinbeck or Pynchon or what have you goes to show that the popular literary world is absolutely rotten with sexism or poor taste or SOMETHING because this should be ESSENTIAL CANON READING
Solidly enjoyable science fantasy. My hopes were probably overly high due to the Arthurian branding and Lev Grossman blurb (Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword is THE Arthurian retelling) but it's a fun conceit and Sloan's prose is elegant and pleasurable. The genre/tone was just a bit too whimsical for my taste, probably. I enjoyed it and likely won't think about it much ever again.