Kate
This started off very promising, and the site itself is fascinating: nearly 10,000 years ago, thousands of people lived in a single city, in which the houses abutted each other so closely that people entered from the rooftops. They ate domesticated grains, and lentils, and cattle, sheep, and goats. They rebuilt houses exactly on top of the foundations of an older house, for centuries. They buried their dead under the floor of the houses (or alternatively, buried their dead then built a new house on top). They decorated with wild bull horns. They sometimes cut the head off a dead body, buried the body, and replastered the skull to create a new face.
Balter writes about some of this, but he mostly gives biographies of the archaeologists, which feels like a strange focus. At the start, it feels natural. “Ah ok, we're setting up the cast of characters before we can get into the good part,” I thought. But then this continues all the way to the end of the book, which stops so abruptly I was sure my pages had been stuck together, or some other kind of mistake had occurred.
This book is a great introduction to Catahoyuk, and in parts, a great read, but the focus is odd.
Very boring. The kind of thing only a severely emotionally constipated man would like.
Maybe in the 60s the idea of a callous and morally ambiguous spy agency was daring, but my reaction was something like “of course, why are you telling us something we would assume already.”
There was nothing interesting about the prose, and the characters, especially Liz, were wooden, as if Le Carre didn't believe women are people, or people are people.
I read somewhere that a good story should present the protagonist with two immoral choices, and the reader is interested in seeing how the protagonist will behave when pressed against the wall. There are no interesting choices here. Once Alec goes with the plan, he's a passive character and things happen to him. His humanity is supposed to be his downfall, but he's so inhumane to Liz that falls flat.
A fascinating look at what editing Fitzgerald and Hemingway was like. Strangely, my Ebook copy had typos, as if it hadn't been edited.
Sometimes the book seemed repetitive, and there were strange quirks, like using both a person's last name and other times their first name in the same section, making it hard to know it's only a single person being referred to.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway come across as sad immature creatures, and I kind of wonder how they were able to be this way for so long. Did fame mean they never had to grow up?
I didn't finish this one before it had to be returned to the library. What I had read was interesting, but started to get depressing: so many raucous parties and divorces and depression and terrible people (who may have been good writers.) It made it hard to be interested if everyone in the scene seems awful.
I loved Piranesi, but reading this was a real struggle. I first picked it up around 2008 or so, and stopped reading. This time I finally made it through, but I don't get the hype at all. Other reviews compare it to Austen, but it lacks what makes Austen good. Characters in this book don't really grow or change much, and the dialogue between them isn't very interesting or revealing. The pacing was so slow, then lightning fast in a bad way: “oh the climax has already happened, I missed it. “
Clarke does a great job of conveying that Norrell is a fearful, introverted, annoying, unwise, pain in the ass, the kind of elderly man with no sense about people whatsoever. But that part is repeated so unnecessarily often. Austen would have painted the whole picture in one striking sentence and then moved on.
Strange is a much more interesting character, but we never really see the effects of anything on him emotionally. The ending was terrible.
I liked the Graysteels and Flora, and her relationship with Jonathan Strange. That part was clever.
Weird and uneven. The reader is set up with the expectation that something spooky will happen, but if it does, it happens off-screen. Not particularly scary or thrilling at all.
The ending seems to point to Munday being the most savage at all, cheating on his wife while she is dying in the room above. While that's an interesting way to conclude, that particular ending saps any energy from the first section of the book, which is dependent on us being scared for him and his wife Emma. The managing of reader expectations seems to be carelessly done, as if Theroux has contempt for the reader.