Alexa

I don't think I will ever understand why the point of view of so many classic novels is placed at such a distance from the subject of the story. I think it was the reason I found [b:Dracula 17245 Dracula Bram Stoker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387151694s/17245.jpg 3165724] so profoundly boring. At least [b:Frankenstein 35031085 Frankenstein Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498841231s/35031085.jpg 4836639] is told from Victor Frankenstein's perspective, even if it is within the pretense of him telling someone else. When The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde began, I was willing to humor the point of view, even though it does seem to be designed to be as uninteresting as possible. Banality can in fact be quite striking when placed as a backdrop to the extraordinary, and the presence of the rogue and demonic Mr. Hyde is quite extraordinary. At first. Though the story of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde has been rewritten mythologically in our culture as one of the duality of good and evil, it is in fact more about restraint and lack thereof. Dr. Jekyll, by his own admission, does not manage to rid himself of his unearthly desires, but rather gives himself a means for indulging in them that does not damage his reputation. Edward Hyde is less an alternate personality and more an elaborate disguise. The problem arises when he can't take the mask off. Whatever proclivities Jekyll has that he uses Hyde to enact are never elaborated on. I suppose that's the point - when we are told Hyde is evil, but Jekyll was simply “wild” in his youth, we're supposed to come to our own conclusions about what that means Edward Hyde is running around doing. Not going to lie though, it is mildly disturbing to think that whatever Jekyll wants to get up to so baldly but doesn't want to get caught doing, he's willing to to experiment on himself with dangerous chemicals in order to get away with it. Hyde's not the one that bothers me. It's the upstanding scientist whom everyone thinks is swell but in secret wants to....I guess you can just insert your personal evil here. It makes the good doctor far from sympathetic. His scientific advancements are less spooky and more like the predecessor to rohypnol.In short, this novella is more like a building block than a particularly good story in itself. It's no wonder that it has inspired movies, tv shows and books galore. By the time the story devolves into droning letters (much the same way Dracula does), its pretty clear why so many of those adaptations take the original story as inspiration, rather than direct source material. Ah well. At least I can say now that I read it.

There are classics that are impressive for being the first of their kind and still standing the test of time, and others that make you so happy for how far a genre has come. Neuromancer is the latter for me. Gibson here seems more invested in cramming in as many made-up techie-sounding words into a sentence rather than building anything interesting character or story-wise. I love cyberpunk because I love the interaction between man and machine, but while Gibson drops cybernetic terms left and right, there's no real cultural, biological, or personal significance to any of it.

The prose has no rhythm, no allure. The character interaction is so stilted its laughable - the main female character, Molly, is such an obvious 80s action girl fantasy, who of course immediately jumps on the dick of this depressed drug addict, Case. I couldn't really tell you much else about what anyone did because I could not focus on any of it between all the random tech lingo and uninteresting plot. Oh right, and all the white people hanging out in future Japan. eye roll

Cyberpunk, and sci-fi in general, has come a long way since Neuromancer. I think I'd rather keep going forward than look back.

Where do I even fucking start? Gideon the Ninth is a barn burner, and what I mean by that it will burn up your mind like a house made of straw and gasoline.I'm not really sure how to summarize the basic premise of this book without going exorbitantly in depth - depth which this novel, mind you, doesn't really bother with most of the time. But here goes - Gideon Nav is an indentured servant, a foundling raised since she was a day old, to the House of the Ninth, Keepers of the Locked Tomb, creepy fucking nuns in death's head face paint who can raise skeleton servants from bits of bone. This is a world of necromancers - and space travel. And swords. Don't think about it too much, just go with it. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon's nemesis since childhood, is called by the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, along with the heirs of each of the other seven houses, with their cavaliers, to stand the trials to become Lyctors, achieving the pinnacle of necromantic ability and serving the Emperor directly. Nonagesimus' assigned cavalier is a wimp, so she wants Gideon, who just so happens to very good with a sword, just not a rapier. Once they arrive at the First House, the “trial” they realize is a riddle wrapped in a experiment spiced with a whole lot of what the fuck.The reason why I hesitated so long on reading this book, despite the glowing reviews, is basically because of all of waves hands that. Adult hard science fiction and high fantasy, aside from often being very obtuse and big on new vocabulary, also frequently has an...ickiness about it. It often detaches itself from the body and the head's of its characters in lieu of creating vivid and complex settings, so much that the characters feel kind of like meat puppets that terrible things keep happening to. But Gideon the Ninth is wholly committed to its characters, in a way that most authors would not even attempt. It is so grounded it is subterranean. Gideon, reluctant cavalier, lover of comic books, dirty magazines and her longsword, is deliciously irreverent. This is like if someone took, I don't know, Game of Thrones or The Witcher, whatever courtly and swordly story suits your fancy, and mixed it up with Army of Darkness. Both in content and tone. There isn't actually a character with a chainsaw for a hand, but if there was it would not be out of place at all.Tamsyn Muir is doing her thing here. I was not at all surprised when I read the acknowledgements and saw that one of her Clarion instructors and mentors was [a:Jeff VanderMeer 33919 Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522640540p2/33919.jpg], because what I kept thinking as I reached the third act of this book is that I so wanted to read the next book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The reason being is because Muir writes on an edge between body horror and cosmic horror, that also overlaps with VanderMeer's New Weird. It's just absolute flesh chaos, at points. It's not just gore, its magicians using their own bodies - flesh, bone and spirit - to become terrifying weapons. It's unsettling in a way I did not realize I could be unsettled.Muir is also breaking a lot of story telling conventions, not really bothering to tell you the whole plot or the whole setting or how anything works. There are whole chunks of narrative that are just not there because Gideon wasn't there, or just wasn't terribly interested, and you just gotta roll with it. Muir puts a lot on her plate - nearly sixteen primary characters, a complex magic system, an interplanetary conflict, not to mention individual cultures, prejudices and fields of study for each of the Houses. There are a couple moments where the story buckles under the pressure (that poor continuity editor), but most of the time I didn't even notice what I didn't know, because I was having so much fun.Because this book is so much fun. Like I said, it's rooted in its characters and great character moments. The fact that Muir created such a unique an interesting cast is incredible. The fact that she so completely unafraid to make them irreverent, hilarious and utterly vicious has my head spinning. Gideon and Harrowhark are a fractious, charming and heart-breaking pair. You know as soon as you see how many different ways they say they hate each other that they mean more to each other than either of them will say. And on top of it all, you have some bad ass duels, epic monster fights, and a bunch of necromancers being unapologetically nerdy about raising the dead.Gideon the Ninth is a hell of an accomplishment. You can still tell its a debut novel though, as you can feel Muir testing things and experimenting as she goes, so technically I'm giving this 4.5 stars, but for Goodreads that's a 5, so who cares. This book is snarky, brutal and bat shit crazy.

This was lovely. I know that's not the first word that comes to most people's minds when they think of The Hunger Games, but to me it applies. To me, it was a small, intimate story told on a grand stage.

Its a shame that Twilight is mostly seen as Harry Potter's pop culture rival, mostly because of timing and that its the only other book series that created even remotely the same kind of phenomenon. But The Hunger Games feels far more in HP's league, as it is a tightly-wound, sophisticated story, expertly packaged for young people. Which was refreshing, and also kind of threw me off, as most YA authors seemed to dumbing down their content in order to appeal to the teenage mindset, instead of just simplifying their sentences and story structure (Not gonna lie, I was kind of blown away by the amount of exposition this book has. Its a bit like being handed floaties when you've been doing laps in the deep end for an hour), which has created a market of vapid, overly verbose work. HG is as simple and straightforward as the games it is about; it may be rough, but there's enough hand-holding (literally, as well as figuratively) that the marks aren't too bad. I've heard some people complain about the violence, which completely boggles my mind. I know I'm desensitized - seriously, look at the books I've read - but this is by no means graphic. What it is is sincere enough to play it straight. To do otherwise would be a disservice to great characters and relationships Collins created.

It's probably obvious by now what kind of protagonists I like. I like my heroes focused, with uncluttered motivations and no fear of getting dirty. Katniss Everdeen is Will Perry is Ellen Ripley. I should probably start including this in my online dating profiles. I like that Katniss stays simple even when her situation is complicated. Her whole life has been based on survival, and that's not something you can turn off - nor should you - when someone puts you in a pretty dress. I love her - and really, the whole book's - fixation on food. Her meals, whether they be scarce or plentiful, are practically characters all on their own.

But Katniss isn't hard, and in a way she's suprisingly unguarded. She seems to understand how easy it is to lose people, so she doesn't let relationships go to waste. She allows herself to bond with people she views as good, even though they're part of a system that's trying to hurt her and the people she cares about. She's not afraid of her emotions, only wary of how people will see them. And she never really learns how to play politics even though she has to, even when she puts on a performance effective enough to fool the Capitol audience.

I like that there were several different stories going on and we as readers are only privy to one. It makes me very curious as to how the movie is going to come out. Maybe I've watched too much reality TV, but as I read, I found myself also writing the Capitol's commentary, anticipating where the crowd's oohs and aahs would be. Was that just me? Seeing that at work in the movie theater I think will be amusingly metatextual.

This is a solid four stars for me because while I loved the story, the writing consistently had me thinking “This is totally written for kids.” As such, it wasn't as impressive as it could have been, but it was quite nice.