James
Cute and slight at best. But I found this 150 page novella about robots who start a noodle shop mostly annoying.
For one, it uses the language of civil rights (slavery, segregation, discrimination, voting rights, property rights, etc) not within science fiction as a metaphor for today, but to argue that the civil right battles of today and recent history will next be fought for AI. It’s kind of a gross appropriation. A Silicon Valley engineer is a general in the Californian Revolution for independence? Yuck. The definition of a person, meant to include all AI beings, is also wrong headed. “If you could talk and feel, then you were a person. Period.” Sorry to all of the people who can’t talk, I guess? Turns out ChatGPT is more of a person than you are.
There’s a lot of language like this too, where the prose resembles a terminally online twitter user in 2016. It stops short of hand clap emojis, thank goodness. Still, these robots talk like chirpy millennials trying too hard to use gen-Z slang (“robot rizz” anyone?). Why do robots talk and text this way in 2060 or something? Why are all of their references popular culture up to 2020? Don’t worry about it. They’re just here to be every trendy social justice metaphor you can imagine: they’re immigrants, they’re ethnic minorities, they’re trans, they’re non-binary, they have (in a hard to read clunky sequence around a large memory file being “such a heavy burden literally to carry”) ptsd, and they’re gonna overcome it with their can do attitudes and online slang. I’m all for well told stories for those communities, especially in genre spaces where imagination can really run wild. This isn’t it.
In the end, the story boils down to owning some online trolls. I was mostly longing for everyone involved to log off for a bit.
Kuang's novels (well, I've only read this and Babel) are so messy but interesting. This bills itself as a love story, and although there is a traditional romance, I liked this best as a very complicated love story to academia. It would be unfair to read too much autobiography into Katabasis as well, but at times it also feels like an exorcism. Here are all the things she loves, hates, and loves-but-shouldn't in her other life. And I do like how life affirming this descent into hell becomes.
Katabasis also feels like a second draft. Better than a first, for sure, but with clumsy prose, janky world building, and contradictory character motivations. It's all stuff that could be smoothed out, but there were probably deadlines to meet (and other ones being missed). I won't make a list, but one that bothered me was the timeline with the Kripkes and Alice. Late in the book it's mentioned Alice once saw Magnolia Kripke as a college student. But beforehand, it's said they've been dead for at least ten years. So how old is Alice as grad student? Stuff like this is littered through the novel. Sometimes it's hard to tell when it even takes place (a list of metal bands suggests the 80s, but WWII is also mentioned a few times as more recent history). It's definitely not set in the 21st century, but it's not clear why this is a period piece as well as descent into hell. The feeling becomes like some ideas that should've been smoothed out in drafting were left as detritus, contradictory bits. I suppose you could say thats meta, given the landscape of hell herein, but I get the impression more that Kuang couldn't be bothered with details like that. Not when there were some sick jabs at academia or references to philosophers to be made. At least a good amount of the jabs are fun.
Very readable, and impressively capture the kindness and ugliness that can exist in one person. There's also some great stuff around language, truth telling, how we perform for others in what we reveal to one person but not another, and how all of this can still be an honest portrait of a human being.
The first half of A Far Better Thing had me once again impressed with Parry's prose, but I was prepared to note this as lesser than The Magician's Daughter. It was just so unrelentingly sad.
Then, in the last third when I realized what Parry was up to, the book went from sad to quite moving. I find the way this is anti-re-enchantment fascinating, at least a kind of re-enchantment that looks for a kind of fairy magic to re-enter the world as a fix to modernity. As the title promises, this novel provides a vision of a far better thing. To say more would be to spoil things. I will just say that I found this a rich novel on every level.
Special and annoying in nearly equal measure. Some sections were quite moving. Other times it was just corny. Cahill even critic-proofs his novella by giving the Fox a speech on the value of middling art (and perhaps he would say that special and annoying are perfect for the Fox's story anyway).
Sometimes the spare prose evoked Le Guin. Then the dialogue would be very silly and anachronistic. The quick story telling would fit the mythic genre, and then Nesi would react in ways that were not earned because there wasn't enough development.
So it's worth reading, and I'm rounding it up to four, but this is the epitome of a three and a half star book.
I enjoyed this short story format, where the stories were interconnected in varying degrees. Two main families emerge (Buzz, Amy, Nick, and Liza in one, Helen, Shelley, and Mia in the other), and there's some satisfaction seeing their stories continue on beyond their focused one. Especially with Nick and Mia. As with her novels, Millet writes moments of profound kindness and sadness in equal measure. Another review on here called her cynical (positive), but I don't think that's quite right, even if hope is an ambiguous and just out of reach thing.
My one critique is that Millet has a prose tic that is quite distracting once you notice it. She will start a paragraph with a two clause sentence. Then she writes a shirt sentence. With a second fragment clause following.
It's the narrative voice in almost every story in the collection. With a thought. Just dangling at the end.
I think it's a rhythm that gives the stories a feeling of fragmenting thoughts, the way we often think. But it's everywhere. Eventually distracting.
But the stories are quite good.
I understand this book's reputation, with some great fantasy sequences, a compelling main character, and enough mysteries to tease you along. In fact, the first four hundred pages or so are really good. Unfortunately, it stalls out hard once Kvothe gets settled into the university, becoming endlessly circular with his money woes. The romance is also pretty boring, with Denna not being compelling enough, and the story not really moving, just going in the same circles as everything else. Based on Wise Man's Fear's reputation, and the unlikelihood of a third book, I think I'll stop here.
The art is often beautiful in this part-memoir, part-essay, but I found myself longing for more character, more storytelling through the form. Most of the time, this is a series of technically well-crafted images paired with somewhat clinically written blocks of text, leaving me feeling distanced from Sohini's story. One clear example of this is how she appears throughout the pages but her facial expression is always the same: carefully neutral, observant, and thoughtful, no matter what the text is telling us. This is an interesting read and nice to look at, but I always wanted more.
A Portland woman, 37-weeks pregnant, is shopping at IKEA for a crib. Then the big Cascadia earthquake hits. Now she needs to get home.
It's a great hook for a novel. I found this quite moving in parts (the school scene), sad, and basically all of the intrusive thoughts you can have as a parent living in a disaster zone in the age of climate change.
It's not perfect. Annie, the lead character, doesn't have any friends or community besides her husband. Maybe that's intentional, but the lack of friendship isn't reflected upon in a pretty reflective book. She's also quite self-centred in a stereotypical millennial way. I'm mostly okay with that since it's okay to have unlikeable characters, but I'm also a little tired of the entitled 30-something struggling artist trope. Finally, the ending isn't exactly the catharsis readers might be expecting, but I didn't mind too much. This is Annie's story, and a snapshot of this horrible day, so I respect Pattee's commitment to that and refusal to sentimentalize the end.
But man, what a hook, and it's executed quite well overall.
I liked Mina as a very active protagonist, and the story is quite lovely in parts. The prose is a bit overdone throughout, with Mina spelling out questions and emotional states a bit too explicitly in a way that doesn't feel true to her voice otherwise. Basically, it's a YA thing that took me of of the story too often.
Thought 1: In which Morgenstern gets really extra about writer's block.
Thought 2: A pretty good adaptation of Coleridge's Kubla Khan.
Thought 3: I like this more than The Night Circus. The protagonists are more active and aren't quite as self-obsessed. The whimsy relies a little less on hand waving vagaries. There's still a magical kitchen that provides the best food, alcohol, and clothing ever, but the effect is more unnerving. There are still some of the same issues of being overstuffed and hand wavey, but at this point it clearly just comes with the territory. A fun, if occasionally frustrating, read.
Very well written, and there's a lot to like about the scale of imagination. Many things also bothered me about The Night Circus, so it's a testament to the quality of the writing that I'm still rating it positively.
Much like the illusory, dreamy circus it takes place in, there just isn't a lot there. Celia and Marco are passive, thinly developed characters, so I didn't really feel invested in their romance. Their singular focus on each other almost makes them the book's antagonists, considering the toll they take on others. There's a mention of the duality being between chaos and control, and if that's the case, a little more chaos would've been nice. Instead it all just seemed like control and control, with the rules kept vague enough so that you never really know what the stakes actually are for nearly the whole book. And the circus itself starts to ever only feel half described, like a lot of the tent ideas are half sketched out but then the rest is hand waved away under the guise of being dream-like.
These sorts of classless utopian fantasies also always rub me the wrong way. What I mean are books that have worlds where everyone is so wealthy money isn't an object, so the reader is given a window into having unlimited houses, unlimited travel, the fanciest train, the best food, the most decadent wine, etc. Every important character is highly interesting, witty, an expert in their craft, and beautiful. If there's a villain, it because they're a bore who doesn't understand how special the special people are. In The Night Circus there's not a villain, just a mean dad who literally disappears from the story and a mean sister who has no human quality other than being mean. Meanwhile the fantasy world is totally frictionless, and even those who suffer because of the circus are very forgiving to those who cause them pain. After all, the instigators couldn't help it, right? You can't get truly angry at the specials, only wistfully sad at the cruel fate they're caught in. I get the appeal, but it's also kind of tedious and gross. It's not a fantasy that celebrates humanity; it's a fantasy that longs to be part of the billionaires.
As I said, it's a testament to the quality of the writing itself that I still liked the book well enough, in spite of these issues. If I could give half stars, this would be 3.5/5.
A lovely book, although it's all vibes rather than plot and character so you'd have to be in the right mood. The earth, and life on it, is both a blip and unique. Time stretches into the billions of years and is contained in a single narrative day. Humanity is all of the earth below the station and the six astronauts within. Countries are artificial, the earth borderless, but the names of nations are necessary to describe the beauty of the sun illuminating Japan, Arabia, California, and so on, as the station moves through its 16 orbits in 24 hours. And every day within that day is repetition (as the prose itself reflects), but each one is special. You get the idea, but I'll end with a quote from page 194:
“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.”