Josefine

Basically my personal utopia. Humans live in harmony with both nature and each other, technology has been re-evaluated and culled down to what actually makes our lives better, and people follow a profession that fulfills them. Also, as a tea fanatic myself, the idea of tea monks is awesome.

This is definitely the kind of feel-good book I needed right now. Though that doesn't mean there's no conflict! I really felt the personal struggle of the main character.

What's keeping me from giving A Psalm for the Wild-Built a 5/5 is that, to me, it was lacking the special it-factor. I don't have anything in particular that I didn't like, but at the end of the day, there also isn't much that I found to be outstanding.

Absolutely a lovely read that I would recommend to basically anyone, though.

Note: I did not finish this book; I dropped it after around 80 pages.

Even though I can appreciate what it's doing, I find it difficult to recommend Herscht 07769.

I think it's the kind of book that only really works for a very specific kind of person in a very specific kind of mood. Namely, someone who wants to read a deeply exhausting (in terms of style) and depressing (in terms of themes) novel.

In addition to that, I've got two major problems, one of which is more personal, the other is not.

For one, I am currently very much disillusioned with anything relating to politics. I am especially disappointed in and anxious about the rise of facism globally. This book directly addresses this issue.

This could have been a way for me to reckon with these feelings, but instead, I just felt a deep dread.

Secondly, I did not like the prose. While it was surprisingly easy to get used to, I don't see how this Herscht being written in a single sentence actually adds anything to it.

I could have seen an argument if the book was written like a stream of consciousness of the main character, which it often is. However, we also quite frequently get PoV's from different characters, which makes the experience very jarring and exhausting.

Additionally, the author (or translator) has to resort to a few tricks in order to make the prose work. As these are repeated quite often, the writing gets pretty repetitive. I can imagine this being better in the original language or something like German, but alas, I read the book in English.

Absolutely wonderful ideas and story. I found the way this is written quite fascinating, as Ted Chiang utilizes unexpected uses of tense in order to communicate the core "gimmick" (which I won't mention to avoid spoilers). I love to see a medium used in a way that would be impossible on other mediums.

Which brings me to the film adaptation, Annihilation. For some context, I saw Arrival before I was even aware of this Novella and it's one of my absolute favorites. Thus, comparison between the two was inevitable.

While the two versions are quite different from one another and I'd definitely recommend both, I think Arrival is the better version.

Story of Your Life has, at least to me, a pretty large flaw: it is way too interested in the nitty gritty of linguistics. While this was a really interesting insight and perspective, it also distracts from what I actually enjoyed about the Novella. Namely, cooperation in the face of an alien "invasion", the aforementioned gimmick, and its repurcussions.

While Acceptance didn't hit as hard for me as the previous two books in the series, I still loved it. I can definitely see how it could be the favorite entry for many people, as it is much more plot driven than the others and wraps up the trilogy quite nicely.

However, I personally much preferred the focus on a single main character in the previous books. Maybe I just read too much epic fantasy at this point, but I found the constant switching between PoV's to be pretty annoying.

It felt like the pacing hit a bit of a brick wall every time we got a switch -- which I can't actually back up with any examples because VanderMeer doesn't actually waste time with recaps at the start of new chapters. Thus, this must be more of personal preference thing, especially since I usually only read at maximum a chapter a day.

For me, it probably would have worked better if the stories were told one after another, rather than in parallel. But then we'd be talking about a very different kind of book. And I must admit that it's really cool to see such a radically shifting structure in a series.

Other than that, I honestly have only good things to say about Acceptance.

It delivers just the right amount of resolution to be satisfying whilst still keeping the mystery of Area X intact.

The character development and payoff from previously introduced characters was also very good, though VanderMeer did Control a bit dirty, even if his development is justified.

I absolutely loved Saul's PoV. The casual gay/lesbian representation in these books is really nice to see.