johnny dangerously.

A baffling and shallow piece on ‘edgy' sexual counterculture. I bought it because I love Naifeh's art, but the writing is putrid, and, yeah, loathsome. The characters are caricatures going through pointless plots that only exist to show their content– pseudo incest, strap-ons, and a trans woman talking to herself in the mirror (how original!). I nabbed this on a deal years back because I loved the Courtney Crumrin books and wanted to see how Naifeh's art deal with more adult subjects, but I couldn't get past how bad the writing was. If you must buy it, focus on the graphics; the writing is only memorable for its equal potential to bore and enrage.

One of the most popular images of Victorian Britain is Dickens' London, peopled with clever beggars and roaming gangs of starved urchins. Dickens based his London on his own research and experience, as well as the research of his peers.

But, ugh, what a downer!

Aren't you tired of hearing about the poor? I mean, who wants to know what a hellish Randian nightmare a an industrial city can become without any social wellfare systems in place? Yes, Victorian Britain was a turgid morass of classism, sexism, racism, homophobia and anti-semitism, but can't we be nicer to those classist sexist racist homophobic anti-semites? They were, after all, leaders of industry! Never mind the fact that some say this is because they were born in an environment that only favored power and privilege; they did great things, because if they didn't, no one else would have been able to!

It's not apologism if they were just a product of their time! Won't someone think of the poor landowner? Who will defend the honor of the judges who sent children to their deaths? Who will speak for the businessman who forcibly seduced his maids? Who among us has the courage to speak favorably of monarchs, nobles, and gentlemen?

Patrick N. Allitt does, and at length.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes vampires, Victorian history, or the history of pulp fiction or pulp horror, because this book covers each topic with aplomb. The premise has more depth than you think: Yes, Dracula is real, and yes, he's married the queen. But Newman hasn't forgotten anyone in his book.

Dracula's real, so doesn't it follow that other grand features of Victorian literature, and history, are real also? Sherlock Holmes can't solve this one, because he's been imprisoned for ‘subversive thinking' by King Vlad. Elizabeth Bathory sits cackling in the basements of Buckingham Palace. And the ripper still stalks the streets.

Kim Newman has a huge undertaking with this novel: To take every piece of vampire lore he can think of, and mix it with everything he knows of Victorian history, and make it all work. And he does! I've never read an alt history novel as good as this one. Newman doesn't forget any of the vast working parts of the engine that is Victorian London, but he doesn't get boggled down by details, either. Everything fits in a seamless background machinery that always feels real, and imbues every scene with vitality and credibility.

Due to back problems, I recently spent the weekend lying down and trying to recuperate, and I chose a fairly easy-to-follow audiobook to listen to. This site isn't for audiobooks, though, so I'll try not to go too far in detail about Marc Thompson's performance (though I thought very highly of it).

These books are very highly recomended, and for good reason. The plotting is tight, and the characterization is interesting and consistent. While some characters may seem similar, they're never cut from the same cloth, and everyone's actions and responses are always unique. The plot always has interesting things for everyone to do, and no one is ever lost or left away from a challenge that suits them.

The prose leaves something to be desired, of course, but I'm not really expecting Proust from a Star Wars tie-in novel. Zahn frequently reuses phrases (‘two heartbeats', ‘what in blazes', etc) and makes word choices that, while it's clear what he means, are inelegant at best (he refers to Han's disregard for authority as his ‘automatic disobedience circuits', for example).

Still, it's the characters and plot that really shines. Zahn does an excellent job shaping the world his characters inhabit, making everything seem like it exists in a sensible yet surreal union that's become emblematic of the franchise. Unlike some other tie-in novels, he doesn't rely on jargon gimmicks to make his scenarios feel grounded, and instead just never forgets who his characters are and what they're doing. If this kind of stuff is for you in the first place, I highly recommend it.

I've never found a Cornwell book boring before, and to be fair, I didn't find this one totally boring either. I just looked down at the time remaining and was aghast to realize there were six more hours of this novel left when so many years had passed and so much had already happened. I want to come back to it some day, but that feels a little doubtful considering I had difficulty telling the characters apart. This has never happened to me with a Cornwell novel before, but the guy's bound to disappoint me sooner or later.

I think a great deal of my fatigue with the book is how much of it feels like a retread of the Warlord Chronicles and The Last Kingdom series. Any novelist who has as large a bibliography as Cornwell will have stock characters and repeated tropes, but in this case, it meant I knew the trajectory of characters before we got there, making the incredibly leisurely pace feel even more sluggish. There just wasn't much suspense, if you are familiar with the way Cornwell likes to write various characters.

I think the novel has an interesting tension in the writing, if not the text. Cornwell is a historical novelist, but there just isn't much extant detail remaining from the British Isles 2000 BCE. It means that Cornwell has more room to fall back on his favored themes. However, this book is about building Stonehenge, something that was probably a religious monument, during a time when there really was no outlet for atheism. Thus Cornwell has to worldbuild a great deal of what the religion of that time even was, and... it's just not something that interests him, if the text is any indication. He is interested in exploring historical detail, and there just isn't enough to give the novel the texture and weight his novels usually have.

I don't regret reading this– listening to Jonathan Keeble is always a pleasures– but I'm fine with putting it down. I may reread the Warlord Chronicles, though, for a better and more satisfying version of this book.

I grew up with the BBC adaptation, which is one of the few adaptations that's better than the original, but the book is still very good. It's a leisurely read– almost everything happens in some post-hoc narration rather than on the page itself– but it's supposed to be a historian's account rather than a melodrama. is it, like, historically accurate? No, not at all, but that's not the point. It's based on Seutonius' writings, writings that Graves himself translated; it's supposed to be biased. This novel is one long meditation on historicity and the role of historians. It's sad that its legion of imitators don't seem to get that. Every single book and show and movie that covers the Julio-Claudians is deeply indebted to this book (or the BBC miniseries) either as a direct descendant (HBO's Rome, [b:The Cicero Trilogy 32310982 The Cicero Trilogy Robert Harris https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1508696043l/32310982.SY75.jpg 52938876], [b:I Am Rome 174146857 I Am Rome (Julius Caesar, #1) Santiago Posteguillo https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1692261636l/174146857.SY75.jpg 95030492]) or as self-conscious flouting of its influence (Sky's Domina, and quite obviously [b:I Am Livia 20874139 I Am Livia Phyllis T. Smith https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441814072l/20874139.SX50.jpg 26171345], two narratives that beat the same dead horse into shoe leather). Honestly, the only successor who seems to get Robert Graves' intention isn't writing historical fiction at all; he's George RR Martin and you might be familiar with his little book series. If only for historical significance, and its contribution to the genre of not just Roman historical fiction but all historical fiction and literature in general (every I, [something] title is riffing off this novel in specific), this book is very much worth reading.

I didn't finish this one, so I am not rating it, but I do have thoughts on the, uh, third of it I did read?

Mostly, a warning: to anyone who is considering this book because it's marked as ‘adult', the adult label here only means the novel makes explicit references to sex (though the sex scenes are themselves not explicit). The novel is in no way written in an ‘adult' manner; it feels like a YA novel in terms of prose, content and plot. I think this is a perfect example of the ‘new adult' label.

This is all a shame, because the book is clearly trying to comment on Robert Graves' I, Claudius, from its name to its structure to its attempts to posit Livia as misunderstood, complex woman, rather than the ultimate villainess (as she is in Graves' famous work). But that is simply too nuanced and complex of a thesis to exist in the self-imposed structures of YA/NA novels. The thing is, well... is Livia's portrayal in I, Claudius sexist? Yeah. Is Livia in I, Claudius an exciting and enticing character to read about? Hell yeah.

The same cannot be said of Smith's Livia, who feels like every other destined-for-greatness-but-stymied-by-the-patriarchy female YA protagonist. She's just kind of bland. The themes are bland. The whole thing is bland; it feels incredibly rote even though the premise shines with potential. This is, ultimately, why I stopped reading, even though theoretically a book with this premise should be like catnip to me.

P. Craig Russell is one of my favorite working artists, and I'll sing his praises until I'm hoarse. He has a particular skill with prose adaptations. This book, while markedly different from the film adaptation, is no less successful, and in some arenas moreso.

An imperfect, but thoroughly promising read. The premise is intelligent without being zany– this series could easily be a gag-a-minute boner joke festival, and yet the series is instead a thoughtful and uncompromising look at the awkward side of sexuality, while simultaneously being a pretty grown up take on the superhero genre. (I say ‘grown up'– as in mature– rather than ‘gritty'– this series is no Christopher Nolan, and all the better for it. It never takes itself too seriously, which is wonderful.) Funny, interesting, and with lots of fascinating characters, this volume is a promising preview of a strong series to come. The volume itself isn't the strongest, but I see potential in it.

While Fraction and Zdarsky are no slouch when it comes to comics, something about the formula seems a bit unsure, a bit forced, at times. Maybe it's the unclear way the narration moves forward: the narrator is sometimes in the panel as a flashback is happening, sometimes not, sometimes wearing distracting costumes, sometimes narrating past events in the past tense, sometimes the first tense, etc. Maybe it's the way a lot of the techniques used to tell the story feel a little gimicky– this series is already larger-than-life, it doesn't need characters who are ultra precious and educated, meeting over a discussion of Nabokov and having incredibly quirky speech patterns. But something leaves the series feeling a bit... faked, to turn a phrase.

It's not bad. It's just the sign of a fledgling series finding its wings. When Fraction stops the gimickry and actually writes, the series soars. The scene where Suzie breaks out into a stunning rendition of [song name redacted], except all the lyrics are blotted out with sticky notes because they couldn't get the distribution rights, shines as a moment of surrealist charm because Fraction doesn't try to make it precious, and it would have been unnecessarily so otherwise. (The question of whether Fraction ever really tried to get the rights to print the lyrics in the first place– which would have made a very boring and overlong scene of Suzie singing to the reader in a soundless medium– or decided it would be best to only reference the scene indirectly through fourth-wall-breaking antics, is a question for another time.)

All in all, I look forward to more from this team and the series they're creating. I look forward to watching it find its footing, so it can be the best lil' sex machine it can be.

Straight up, this is one of my favorite books ever, so I'm invariably going to be more than a little bit biased when discussing it. I think it's gorgeous. A fantastic example of economizing the plot until only the essentials are used, the story never feels sparse or minimalist. The plot zig-zags at a leisurely pace, but neither does it ever feel slow or rushed. It's a true classic. I'll stop before I get ahead of myself. This book is absolutely wonderful, and that's all I can really say about it without revealing too much.

I had serious emotions about a comedy title? A Marvel title? A comedy Marvel title that, mind you, broke a lot of my personal rules about what a comic should be.

Generally, I'm pretty much against nazi-plots and concentration camp imagery? But here it works, largely because the gravity of the situation is never forgotten for the sake of a joke, and because the horrible absurdity is mined frequently for the sake of... jokes. I can't explain it. I think it's because this comic really... thinks.

It thinks about what it would be like in that situation. It thinks about what kind of reactions that would garner. It thinks about the psychology of experiencing that kind of trauma. It never relies upon expectation, and it uses jokes to cope with the horror, rather than take away from it.

This is a good book. This is a great comic book. I highly recomend it.

This is a great introduction to the character, and the universe he inhabits. I say this as a lifelong DC fan who grew up totally ignorant of Marvel: if you're curious about how the other half lives, Deadpool is a surprisingly good way to navigate those foreign waters.

How do we heal? And what facilitates healing? And, if we can answer that question, what causes pain and suffering, and who is responsible for those wounds? Using the background of WWI and a bevy of historical domain characters, this book seeks to answer those questions, and honestly I think it does a fine job. It's certainly, along with its two sequels, one of my favorite books I've read as an adult... or, ever. You could justifiably say I'm biased, but I think it's a modern classic. The quick and easy prose only speeds it along, making it a slick novel to read that's nonetheless deeply feeling and contemplative. Five stars isn't enough, frankly.

If you are looking to research slavery in Ancient Rome, and want to read about how slavery and imperialism are good things, actually, when you, like, really think about it, this is the book for you. A pro-colonial, pro-slavery apologia of imperial excess, this book is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I talk about how a lot of UK writing on Ancient Rome treats the Romans like they were direct antecedents of the British Empire (which was, of course, a good thing). I imagine this idea was more popular in a pre-Mussolini world (the book is from 1929), but that's no excuse.

This book is only useful as a testament to the way people used to think, convulsively twisting fact into fiction so they can better lick the boot of an uncaring imperial polity. Nationalism at its worst, this book is a relic of an era that I only wish was more bygone.

If you want an actually thoughtful, well-researched look into the history of Roman slavery, I highly recommend the works of Jerry Toner, who is both a better historian and a better writer.

Pretty solid, but lacks analysis in several key places. While names and dates are interesting, there's little gathering of facts per capita. It's just all kinda laid out there, which is cool for historians intending to use this in research. However, I am not a historian; I want summaries and hypotheses.

I'm hesitant to mark this down as ‘Victorian', since the title is misleading; it deals exclusively and entirely with the lives of American women in the 1800s. Some people consider that the ‘American Victorian Era'. I consider them mad, maaaad I tell you. (I dislike naming any period of American history after a monarch, for my own priggish political reasons.)

That is my major complaint with the book. My minor complaint is how overly detailed it sometimes gets, turning vibrant prose suddenly dry. But beyond that? This book is excellent and highly recommended, even if you're like me and not someone hugely interested in the period it covers.

I like best how well it acknowledges the greater factors pressing on the lives of women. It never turns away from acknowledging the pervasive influence of sexism, racism and classism on the life of Americans past. That is the book's greatest strength, and it cannot be understated.

I don't hate-read things. If something is annoying me, or boring me (or both, as this book did), I give up. Yet reading this became a weird compulsion I had to pull myself from, because I really, really wanted it to become good. It has promise! The worldbuilding is excellent. But it's just not enough.

I could go on and on and on about every little thing that annoys me in this book (and I partially have in my notes on the kindle edition of this mess), but I'll suffice to say this: What is the fucking point of all this pseudo philosophy if you have nothing to say beyond your own tired genre conventions? I'd take sparse, Sandersonian prose any day over a book full of long-winded purple prose and nothing meaningful to say beyond ‘what if my protagonist was actually.... a bad guy?'

But not, you know, bad in a way that actually inconveniences him. Or is condemned by the narrative. (Yes, I know he spends several years 'on the streets' living as a poor beggar and a thief, something I would have richly enjoyed if the novel didn't go out of its way to make it clear that Hadrian finds this infinitely preferable to living in the lap of luxury because only in poverty is he, get this, actually free.)

Ultimately, your worldbuilding can be immaculate, but your book will still lack texture if the characters inhabiting it are all dull as dishwater. I could tell immediately who the ‘good' and ‘bad' guys were. Putting aside the fact that a novel with ‘grey' morality should not make characters so obviously, borderline-pantomime good and evil, they also shouldn't be obvious. If a character is nice to Hadrian? They're good. If they aren't? They're bad.

The prose tips its hat again and again to the idea that the main character is melodramatic, and he is, and that's fine. What it doesn't seem to be aware of is that the book is itself a melodrama. The action is meaningless, there is no almost tension, and all the characters are bland cyphers set on a stage to accomplish nothing, say nothing, and achieve nothing. What does this book accomplish, beyond vague science fiction homages, worldbuilding exercises, and (most importantly!) making sure the audience knows the main character is always right?

In retrospect, I think I kept reading this long because I desperately wanted to see a comeuppance; I wanted the promise of the first page, that the hero would become the villain, to be fulfilled. But at over 60% and 400+ pages in, it becomes painfully clear that this book is utterly uninterested in achieving the same moral complexity as its most obvious of influence. Paul Atreides is the dark messiah, a man who enables the murder of billions and weakens the cause of freedom on untold planets. Hadrian Marlowe is an idealistic teenager in a totalitarian universe who never, ever has to learn anything or be wrong. I can't care about what he does, did, or will do, because ultimately he is completely static

I fully admit to skimming this for chapters relevant to my interests (I don't care about Greek history right now), so I can't give a comprehensive analysis of the book's merits and failings. I will say that the chapter on Roman slavery felt like an afterthought and was largely under-researched. I can't tell you if that's indicative of the general trend for other parts of the book; I know comparatively less about rich Romans. I will say that the book citing the Satyricon as though it were historical fact, and treating the Augustan slavery ‘reforms' as though they were actually carried out, bodes poorly.

This is an excellent book with one fatal flaw deep at its heart, but I do think it's a necessary read. While the ideas the book relays shouldn't be new to anyone who pays attention to the current corporate landscape, the exact details of corporate intrusion into our lives are definitely worth knowing, and they're related in a simple and easily understood fashion. The book is at no point overcomplex, except perhaps when reporting on subjects that are themselves purposefully obfuscated, like when they go into the twisted morass of music listening law.

The thing that keeps this from being a truly 5 star experience, a real ‘everyone needs to read this!' knee slapping call to arms, is the way the book focuses only on artists. Artists are unimaginably abused by our current megacorp dystopia, and I think they should get their due for their labor. I think the book should mention them, and it does. But it focuses on them to the exclusion of people whose experiences with corporate abuse are far more devastating in consequence and scope. It's easy to take advantage of artists, and so Giblin and Doctorow call them the canary in the coalmine of these antics, but I think what artists really are in this situation are the most easily visible people being taken advantage of.

The book talks at length about breaking corporate chokeholds– monopolies– but it talks about doing it through legislation. It mentions the COVID pandemic but not the riots. The book points to artists and how they've been abused, then blithely mentions production line workers wearing diapers and Amazon striking. The book's use of artists as its focal point is meant to show how corporate abuse could spread from just artists and eventually abuse you, but in using artists, the implicit you is presumed middle class. Purposefully or otherwise, the book excludes the people who were alienated from their labor far, far before any musician: the people who staff Amazon warehouses, automobile factory workers, the lower middle class and working poor. The book's diligent focus on legislative fixes to the problems of corporation totally ignores the importance of riots and radical action, and the book only briefly mentions strikes and labor unions.

The final passages of the book talk about how it's a big task to take down corporate greed (it is) but how we should take heart, because their control is so self-entangled that any strike against them weakens the whole. But the book forgets that the people, workers, the disadvantaged, everyone who is preyed on by corporate capital, are also a whole. We have to protect our own, even if it scares white upper middle class economists.

This is not an incitement of Giblin or Doctorow's priorities or an attempt to guess at their class status; I am not casting aspersions on their motives in writing this book, nor saying the book is useless. I think their best intentions are in this book, and it's truly an informative and important read. But it is blinkered in its scope, and that, again, weakens the whole.

I really wanted to finish this novel, but I became way too sickened by it at the 50% point, which is where the famous rape takes place. Not because of the rape itself– I know about Artemisia Gentileschi's life and I knew what I was getting into. No, what put me off was the incredible historical inaccuracy, all to push a really stupid point.

The book really wants to push this reductive men vs women angle, at the expense of every character except Artemisia herself, and perhaps her rapist Tassi. It belittles her father Orazio and is entirely incorrect on the way that the culture surrounding painting in Baroque Italy operated. I was not an expert on this subject before I read the book, and I don't consider myself one now. These are all things I learned from cursory research, which the author either ignored or didn't find in the first place.

It was not considered scandalous or disobedient for a woman to paint a nude woman. Why would it be? It's not like lesbianism was a popular subject– it doesn't even arise in what I read of the book. If you look at Gentileschi's work, it's full of nude women, often depicted in erotic poses. This was because a woman posing for a woman painter was considered more proper, and less like prostitution, which is a commerce that, according to Italians at the time, operated between men and women, not women and women.

There is a scene where Gentileschi decries Caravaggio's Judith as being too sexual– after all, we can see the shape of her nipples through her dress. Yet to accuse Caravaggio of a prurient interest in women is frankly hilarious; Gentileschi's work has far more naked female skin than Caravaggio's! Caravaggio's sexuality is famously debated over, then and now, because Caravaggio's favorite subjects are young men in various states of undress.

The book goes on to decry paintings showing too much nudity, as though nudity equals sexuality– something the book itself wants to address in scenes where its heroine champions her right to study the body and anatomy! And yet it still falls back on lazy stereotypes that evil men draw sexy paintings while good girl Gentileschi paints morally pure Art. It seems totally unaware of the fact that the viewer brings their own interests to the work, as in any art form. There's a scene where Gentileschi is horrified that a man might find her Susannah and the Elders painting sexy, and yet previously she bemoaned how other artists cavalierly depict female nudity. It's okay when she does it, but not them.

The book makes Gentileschi's father, Orazio, into a bumbling idiot with no talent, even though several years after the events of this book take place, he becomes a noted patron of Queen Henrietta Maria, the woman after whom Maryland was named. Orazio also scorns Caravaggio multiple times in the book, saying his interest in light and shadow is passe and that his work is gruesome– when in reality both Orazio and his daughter are considered Caravaggisti. The book also depicts him as unable to appreciate his daughter's work, when it was a matter of record that he boasted about her talents.

It does all this to further the idea that Artemisia was ahead of her time, that the establishment (men) couldn't understand her, and that she had feminism all figured out before it had ever been invented. The book depicts Artemisia as right at every turn, about everything, too talented to be properly understood, and with goals that are incomprehensible to her male contemporaries– all things that are entirely untrue, even inside the novel itself. A huge amount of fretting is spent depicting how Artemisia isn't free, how she can't go wherever she wants, how she is constantly chaperoned, yet her rapist attempts to assault her when she is without a chaperone. The book puts this down as a weird irony, and no more is said on the subject. The book's internal logic is broken.

In the end, the feminism in this book is reductive, second wave at best, terf-y at worst. The motif of the Hermaphroditus figure appears as an attempt for Artemisia to grasp at breaking the gender binary, and there's a lovely scene where she draws a man in a dress to try and better understand gender taboos. This scene is rendered obsolete by her later using the story to scare away a potential suitor. Breaking the gender binary is fine when she's in control of it, but the bodies of nonbinary / trans / gnc people are also useful as a medium of disgust and horror.

I read historical fiction so I can go back in time, and see the morals and cultures of a past era. I don't read historical fiction to learn historically fictitious tales about how everyone was wrong except one woman who has an entirely anachronistic view of the world, presumably from birth. It's boring, ideologically reductive, and incredibly uncreative.

I'm afraid this is will be the best book I'll read all year, which is frightening because it's so early in the year. And yet, I can't see something else surpassing it.

This book blew me out of the water. I've never seen a social critique so apt, yet set in a fantasy setting so devoid of our current culture. I've never seen worldbuilding so in-depth yet so thoughtfully in-sync with the themes of the book. I've never seen such complex characters who felt both authentic to the totally fictional cultures and struggles created for them, yet completely understandable and sympathetic to the reader.

It is, in short, a masterwork.

It's not a light, happy masterwork. This book is dark, depressing, about how imperialist structures like racism and sexism and homophobia live inside us all and in turn destroy us all, not just ‘us' as individuals but ‘us' as in our society and the bonds we make within society.

Without going into too much detail, there are two central metaphors in the book: the bounds of society and what they mean, and cancer. Both are incredibly apt. There is a huge amount of discussion dedicated to what family and culture and society and obligation mean to every person and every culture and every person within that culture. There is a huge amount of discussion dedicated, as well, to the nature of cancer, tumors and radiation, and whether or not these are actually a force for good or evil. The metaphor is clear: this alien thing lives inside you, contributing nothing, slowly killing you and those around you, as it slowly and painfully separates you from others and keeps you sick and unable to contribute to the society around you. A tumor only infects one person, but it affects everyone. The book is in places disgusting, gory and painful, but the kind of exorcism that we as readers need, especially in the current political climate.

Which is to say, if you don't want politics in a fantasy book, this isn't the book for you. Yes, this book is a fantasy, but it's also very, very, very real. Baru and her struggles mirror our own in a way that can't be understated. The characters in this book use different words, have different cultures, and different concepts, but they're going through the same struggles we are now.

I once took a film course in college, and one of the lessons that stuck with me the most was the idea that ‘all movies made durring wartime are inherently war movies'. While obviously not film, this maxim applies here. This is not a book ‘about' the current political climate, but it also undoubtedly, inarguably is. I'm generally reticent to make wide sweeping generalizations about the nature of people's understanding of books and films and the like, but I'll make an exception in this case: If you don't think this book is about where we are now as a culture, you've missed the entire point.

In short: If you want the best written political fantasy I've ever read (and I've read quite a few), with fantastic and thoughtful forward motion, pacing, worldbuilding, characters, and nuance? Get this immediately. It may make you feel sad, or uncomfortable, or scared, or frustrated, or uneasy... but if you're living in the world we are now and you don't already feel those things? You're not living in Baru's world anyway.

2025 Reread: Since I read this during Trump's first term, I figured I'd reread it during the second. The first time, I got really weird about it! I was kind of going through it. I'm not gonna pretend I'm not going through something right now, but at least I have more perspective.

Some very dramatic whinging aside, I do think this is an excellent novel, a pure distillation of what fantasy is capable of when you put aside comfort food, shallow moralism and anxious Puritainism. (If you like those things, cool! The entire publishing industry does. Go read that stuff and leave me alone.) I think this book is a masterpiece on a craft level, from the worldbuilding to the tone, the themes, and much of the prose. In terms of pacing, it's kind of stretched out, and it ends on a hell of a cliffhanger. I don't personally mind it, but I can acknowledge this is because the book is so extremely special interest content for me that I can't be completely objective.

From this series' interest in eugenics, class, corruption, forms of government, cultural anthropology, technology, inequality, economics, Enlightenment-era ‘science', and ‘magic' as a cultural phenomenon... look, I understand intellectually why people don't like this book or this series, but I can't quite ‘get' it emotionally. One of the best fantasy books of all time for me personally, topped only by the sequel. If the 4th book never comes out, I'll be content, because Monster and Tyrant are truly everything I could ever ask of the fantasy genre.