|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1638931089
| 9781638931089
| 1638931089
| 3.19
| 887
| May 21, 2024
| May 21, 2024
|
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I pick
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I picked up the book in the first place, once again proving the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can decide what to read next by one.” Then after it arriving from the Chicago Public Library, I learned that it’s the latest title by a new imprint of the small press Zando, in which they asked the delightfully dark and weird Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to hand-pick a series of unknown experimental female authors who deserve more attention, which is an admirable project and one that deserves our support. Then there’s the engaging story concept itself, a subversive coming-of-age tale about a ten-year-old girl who has recently discovered cursing as her new religion, as she develops a fascination for a twenty-something juvenile delinquent who’s been forced by the courts to move into the sort-of co-op, sort-of halfway home where our hero Molly (the “Kittentits” of the book’s title) lives with her zany dad and even zanier housemates, the whole thing set in Chicago where I live, which is always a nice bonus. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a bit of a slipstream alternative history going on here too; in the world of Kittentits, Chicago is about to host a World’s Fair in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the famous one that first put them on the global cultural map, while no such fair took place here in our version of the multiverse. But alas, there were just too many problems in this book for me to be able to get into it in any other way than a purely intellectual, stroking my chin while murmuring, “Hmm, that was clever” way, which perhaps reflects the fact that author Holly Wilson is a professional academe with a PhD in creative writing, which as we were just discussing a few weeks ago tends to be the death knell for the ability to write really engaging fiction anymore. The main problem is that Wilson has written this entire thing in an extremely experimental style, one that omits all quotation marks, is always dropping words you would normally find in real conversations, and really playing up the slang, in order to present this highly stylized prose that’s simply difficult to follow along with; then she marries it to the kind of “quirky unto infinity” milieu that became so big in the popular culture in the early 2000s (think Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.; and let’s not even get started on those fucking Skittles commercials). That’s not bad unto itself, but unfortunately for Wilson, that endlessly quirky style really got played out among audiences by the end of that decade, meaning that she’s not far enough away from those years to present this as a retro-quirky novel but not close enough to those years for readers to be able to enjoy it unironically. Or I suppose I should say “enjoy it in an ironic way unironically,” which is a big part of why this style burned itself out; by the time Postmodernism wheezed out its last gasps before its death, right around Obama’s first Presidential win in 2008 which birthed our current Wokeism artistic movement, it had become so masturbatory and deadpan and self-referential, it was impossible to enjoy it anymore in any kind of simple, unironic way. So, while I applaud Wilson for doing an excellent job at late-period Postmodernism, I have to confess that I simply don’t want to read even a single new book in that style ever again, which made me lose interest in this book quickly despite it actually being well-written (or at least as “well-written” as you can say about a book that’s deliberately trying to challenge readers to put it back down again, one of the biggest problematic side-effects of devoting your entire life to academic scholarly study of creative writing, that the obsessive desire to “out-fancy” your peers results in books that practically scream, “I DARE you to make it to the last page of this novel!”). That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid it, but certainly you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into before you pick it up. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| B0C71Y818L
| 3.41
| 337
| unknown
| Jul 05, 2023
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having
2024 reads, #9. I now regularly read small and fast romance novels designed to be exclusively distributed through Kindle Unlimited, because of having a growing amount of clients in my freelance editing career who write these same kinds of books, and with me wanting to keep up with the latest trends. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my write-ups. Today's book is a perfectly serviceable if not pedestrian omegaverse tale, by which I mean it takes about a short story's worth of plot and marries it to about half a dozen sex scenes, the whole thing written with a new paragraph break after every single sentence in order to pad out the page count; and while that would usually get three stars from me in any other context, I've decided to start giving these kinds of romance novels four stars instead, because "serviceable" is all anybody wants and expects from these Kindle Unlimited romance novels in the first place, just something to help pleasantly kill about four to six hours of one's life without being too incredibly insulting to one's intelligence. I have to admit, I continue to be obsessed with the omegaverse subgenre in romance, because of its goal to bring together what seems like to me two diametrically different ideas that you would think couldn't work with each other, where fans get all the thrills of a violent rape fantasy but all the teddy bears and pink balloons of a normal romance novel, basically by positing a paranormal universe where humans essentially "go into heat" like animals do, thus allowing you to still have Mister Perfect Nice Guy as the male lead character but who also simply can't help himself from grabbing any woman closer than a few feet from him and aggressively having his way with her. (Remember, if a man ever pushes a woman to the ground and then violently takes her from behind, just to later wash her hair in the bathtub, you know you're reading an omegaverse novel.) When it comes to that, this book delivers the fetish just fine, but doesn't bother or even aim to be the tiniest bit better than simply a fetish delivery vehicle, which is why these kinds of books come and go from the Kindle Store in the blink of an eye like the disposable tissues they are. Read it or not with this understanding before you pick it up. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jan 27, 2024
not set
|
Jan 27, 2024
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B0CDF1XZWT
| 4.30
| 91
| unknown
| Aug 21, 2023
|
it was amazing
|
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9798702166483
| 4.26
| 54
| unknown
| Feb 25, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out
I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. Merged review: I'm very proud to say that I helped author Daniela Morassutti get this book into shape as her freelance editor, and I'm thrilled to see it finally out. It's an old-fashioned space adventure story about late-teen astronauts, VERY much in the straightforward, swashbuckling style of Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juvenilia tales, but mixed with Joss Whedon-type soap opera angst over romantic partners, ex-romantic partners and potential new romantic partners. It's delightfully gung-ho, earnest and funny, hitting exactly that kind of crowdpleasing level as, say, a perpetual author guest-of-honor at sci-fi conventions -- not the best or most famous writer but the one who's most fun to hang out with. Although Daniela initially self-published this to start building an audience, she's currently submitting it to bigger places like Tor, Pyr and Orbit, so who knows? Maybe you'll see her at those conventions soon after all! In the meanwhile, I recommend checking this out when you have a chance, a lighthearted space opera where the heroes all proudly wear their white hats. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Mar 09, 2021
not set
|
Jan 07, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1581952155
| 9781581952155
| 1581952155
| 3.77
| 2,452
| 2001
| Jan 03, 2006
|
2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels
2023 reads, #102. DID NOT FINISH. I'm going through a little mini-reading project right now, making my way through as many alternative-history novels I can get my hands on that share the "what if" concept of the Nazis actually winning World War Two. I have to admit, though, that my main interest in this subject is in finding action-adventure thrillers set in this world, very similar to Robert Harris' Fatherland (a murder mystery set in a mid-1960s Berlin full of skinny-tie-wearing Nazis), and that Daniel Quinn's After Dachau is most certainly not this kind of alt-history novel, but rather a slow and boring academic character drama that uses this alt-history setting merely as a gimmick to instead share the pedantic and platitude-filled message of "WHITE PEOPLE BAD!!!!," a particularly popular type of academic novel in the late 1990s when this was first written. Ostensibly it's the story of an employee at a nonprofit in the early 2000s devoted to tracking down as many verified cases as possible of true reincarnation, a career that has so far been almost entirely filled with liars, cranks and con artists, and the story itself hinges around a person he meets who seems to have really gone through a reincarnation, supposedly as first a black woman in the 1940s. It's only then, though, that we discover the big gimmick behind this story -- that it's actually set in the year 4000 AD by our own calendar, that the world reset the calendar back to 0 after the Nazis conquered the planet in 1945 (after the decisive Battle of Dachau that gives this book its name), and that in the two thousand years since, the planet of white people who eventually became the global Nazi Party has managed to successfully kill every non-white person who ever existed, so thoroughly and so long ago that people in 4000 AD now generally believe that people of color never actually existed, and instead were fanciful inventions of fantasy authors like elves, dwarves and trolls are. That's an interesting concept, I admit; but like so many badly written alt-history novels, Quinn's book here is all concept and no plot, with the storyline being basically a 300-page investigation to eventually learn the premise I just mentioned above, then with the story suddenly ending once he learns this information. Instead, the whole thing seems to just be an exercise in reminding people that white people are shit, that they will kill every person of color on the planet if ever given the opportunity to do so, and...uh, the end. That will have its fans, I'm sure (looking up his Wikipedia page now, I can see that Quinn is well known for his radical liberal politics, and I'm sure the usual MFA/NPR crowd ate this book up when it first came out); but as someone who is looking for "Nazis Win The War" alt-history books primarily to read genre thrillers, this snoozer fell flat on its face for me, a book I read the first 50 pages of and then skipped straight to the last chapter when I could see how molasses-slow the story was going to be. Fellow alt-history nerds will want to take all this into serious consideration when deciding whether or not to read the book themselves. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 18, 2023
|
Dec 18, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 3.96
| 30,853
| Sep 22, 2016
| Sep 22, 2016
|
2023 reads, #86. DID NOT FINISH. Marking this mostly just to remind Future Jason that I actually did attempt to read this once. Published three years
2023 reads, #86. DID NOT FINISH. Marking this mostly just to remind Future Jason that I actually did attempt to read this once. Published three years after the election of Pope Francis, this is historian turned thriller author Robert Harris' attempt to show what exactly happens behind the scenes at one of these papal conclaves; but since the internet was so good back in 2013 at actually revealing the real-life information about how these elections happen (thank YOU, 21st century!), you don't actually need to read this fictionalized novel to learn it yourself. And once I realized that, I realized that I didn't want to sit through 300 pages of old men having very earnest conversations, so I quickly turned the book back in to the public library and called it a day.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||||
| 3.49
| 18,282
| Aug 20, 2019
| Sep 05, 2019
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the
2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the Nazis actually winning World War Two; and that got me thinking again about Robert Harris' 1992 Fatherland, one of the best of them all, a murder mystery set in an alternative Mid-Century-Modernist 1960s where a bunch of skinny-tie Nazis in sharp Kennedy suits are preparing to dually celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the war and Hitler's 75th birthday. And that was a reminder that I read that book years and years before becoming a full-time reviewer (literally picked up for a quarter at a random yard sale 25 years ago), and that I've never looked further into the career of this surprisingly interesting journalist and historian turned thriller author. Out of the 15 books he's now published since then, the one I mostly wanted to read was 2019's The Second Sleep, because that's one of the only ones besides Fatherland that scratches my alt-history speculative itch; namely, it's set about a thousand years after a civilization-destroying apocalypse, in which there's been such a long period where humanity's official policy was "never speak of the Science Years" (plus a complete lack of any historical records from our times, because of all of it originally being digital) that humanity has completely reverted back to a society identical to the beginning of the Medieval period, where they believe that this is how society has always been, with humans living in thatched huts and cowering before an angry and judgmental God before He eventually became vengeful and apparently destroyed this mysterious "Cloud" where all the world's information used to be stored. Unfortunately, though, just like my recent read of Daphne du Maurier's 1972 Rule Britannia (my review), Harris doesn't seem to have been able to come up with an actual compelling story to set within this fascinating universe, attempting to skate by on 300 pages of just concept alone; and let me tell you, once the novelty wears off on a "future humans think it's still the Medieval Age" concept, it simply becomes a historical fiction book, as if it was actually set in the Medieval Age, which is not the book I was wanting to read when I first picked this up. And while Harris tries to save the book the same way he made Fatherland so interesting, wrapping the plot around a mystery that's obvious to us modern readers but constitutes a shocking discovery to its characters (namely, when a '60s murder investigation accidentally reveals the Holocaust from twenty years previous, which had been quietly swept under the rug by the Germans after actually winning the war), here the reveal doesn't nearly spark the imagination, as our filth-covered neo-serfs very, very, very slowly come to realize, "OH MY GOD, HUMANS USED TO OWN COMPUTERS, WHATEVER THOSE ARE!!!!!!!!!!1!!" To be clear, neither of these reveals are supposed to be shocking to the readers themselves (and in neither case are spoilers either, which is why I don't mind divulging the information); but why it works in the case of Fatherland is because it's fascinating to picture a world in which the Nazis manage to completely hide the concentration camps from the public, leaving us a group of people who are certainly hard-right warmongers, but who in history's eyes aren't any worse than Spain's Francisco Franco (who held power for 36 years) or Russia's Joseph Stalin (who ruled for 29 years). If the Nazis hadn't bothered trying to eliminate the Jewish people, would they now not be thought of as The Greatest Monsters In The Entirety Of Human History? That's an interesting question to contemplate! What isn't an interesting question to contemplate, though, is, "What would happen if, a thousand years in the future, a group of people who have entirely lost the history of the 18th through 21st centuries suddenly rediscover it, but without the means, training or intelligence to duplicate any of it?" That's instead simply a gimmick, which like a jump scare in a horror movie is good for only a few seconds of legitimate entertainment before the audience goes, "Okay, what else you got?"; and that's why this book is so flat and disappointing, despite it being just as good in quality as Fatherland from 27 years earlier. That would normally get the book two and a half stars from me, being rounded up to three here at the "no half stars" Goodreads, so take that under advisement when deciding whether or not to pick the book up yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Nov 11, 2023
not set
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0316253006
| 9780316253000
| 3.59
| 1,740
| 1972
| Dec 17, 2013
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #84. Like a lot of people, I've only recently become a fan of Daphne du Maurier, through modern movie adaptations of her early hits Rebecc
2023 reads, #84. Like a lot of people, I've only recently become a fan of Daphne du Maurier, through modern movie adaptations of her early hits Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel that allow us through 21st-century norms in sex and violence to show just how subversive, dark, and downright modern this literary innovator was, often overshadowed in her prose itself because of so much of her earlier work being written way back in the 1930s, at an age when prose was much fussier and more flowery. Today's book, however, is actually the very last one of her career, way ahead forward to 1972 when du Maurier was in her mid-sixties, and with much more modern prose to match; and although that finally allows us to see "du Maurier Unchained" so to speak, it's unfortunately in service of a much weaker story, so is just sort of a tradeoff at best from her early work, that was so hobbled by the mores of the Edwardian Age but that were so delightfully evil nonetheless. This book in fact has been getting a lot of contemporary notice again recently, because her premise here is that one day in the near future, Europe comes together as a single union of nation-states (don't forget, the European Economic Community was already up and in full force in this book's times, precursor to the modern EU), but that after bad economic times, a far-right group takes power in Parliament and convinces Britain to pull out of this proto-EU; then after their economy continues to tank, the right-wing government blames it on "shadowy outside forces," then in secret makes a deal with the far-right government in place in America at the same time, to join together the US and UK into one political entity (literally now known as the USUK), for the purpose of essentially creating a global police state that rules over much of the English-speaking world and about half the planet's nuclear weapons. That's brilliant of du Maurier to correctly predict way back in the early '70s, getting clues for this coming catastrophe only through events of those times like the Nixon administration, the US's gleeful atrocities committed in Vietnam, the CIA's global reach by then, etc., and this book should be considered special just for that alone. And I also like that du Maurier (an infamously beautiful yet aggressive tomboy-punkgirl-flapper-possibly-bisexual type in her youth) continued to be so fiery all the way to the end of her life, seeing the coming storm earlier than most and refusing to lie still for it. The problem, however, is that she doesn't really have much to say about the subject, or much of a plot to hang off this delicious concept; by around page 50, we're now aware of the far-right union and the fascist US troops that have taken over the small Cornwall town where our story is set, but even by page 350 at the end, really the only thing that's happened is that the same stuff we knew about on page 50 has gotten worse, du Maurier's point seeming here to be, "You can't imagine it could happen here, but here it is, happening here! Hah? HAAAAHHH?" Rebecca-era du Maurier would've had the union announced on page 50, the current end of the book only happening one chapter later, then would be right on to an action-packed, surprise-filled plot that takes us to crazier and crazier places from the original conceit. So that's kind of disappointing, that late-age du Maurier either couldn't or wouldn't do that; but, you know, that's often what happens with artists as they get older, as they get to the point where they've now actually told all the stories they've wanted in their hearts to tell, and a slower lifestyle and slower brain combines with this to put out books that are simply okay, instead of insanely great like at their earlier, more youthful height. That easily explains why this book has largely fallen into obscurity at this point, because it's okay du Maurier but not great du Maurier; and except for a handful of authors over the entire course of history, most writers are fated to be remembered by history (if they're remembered at all) through just a small handful of their greatest books, the other ones' existences largely forgotten like has happened with this one. Unless you're doing a completist look at du Maurier's entire oeuvre, you can safely skip this book despite its prescient forecasting of our times, and stick to her most famous pieces like the ones mentioned, or her Hollywood-friendly short stories like "The Birds" and "Don't Look Now." ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Nov 04, 2023
not set
|
Nov 04, 2023
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0877281475
| 9780877281474
| 0877281475
| 3.48
| 1,605
| 1917
| Jun 01, 1975
|
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was wh
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was where Mark Frost cribbed the idea of the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge" for use in the "conspiracy of conspiracies" TV show Twin Peaks he co-created with David Lynch. But alas, while Crowley meant for both this and all his other "Simon Iff, Mystic Detective" stories to be easy-to-read pulp thrillers in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, at a time in his life when he was flat-broke and it was suggested that such easy-reading material connected to his famous name would sell like hotcakes, I don't think he really had any idea how to actually write pulp stories that would appeal to a large general audience, turning in a barely readable book here that's a mess both conceptually and mechanically. I must confess, even with this being not even 150 pages, I still barely made it even a quarter of the way through before giving up in confused boredom, not so much a novel as it is a sneaky way to publish an occultism academic textbook, complete with the pages upon pages of impenetrably dense New Age nonsense a term like that implies. Maybe the hardcore Crowley fan will be able to get through this, but for all the rest of us, this book works better as a concept than an actual reading experience.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| B00ECE9OD4
| 4.03
| 90,979
| Apr 08, 2014
| Apr 08, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the b
2023 reads, #70. This is one of those books that's been on my to-read list for so long, I had forgotten who the person actually is and why I put the book on my list in the first place; and that's always an exciting moment for me as a heavy reader, because it means I can go into the book with completely innocent eyes, knowing not even the tiniest thing about it other than that at some point in the past, there was something about it that made me want to read it. That turned out to be especially good in this case, because this is a science-fiction novel light on action but heavy on ideas, so going into it with no pre-knowledge of the plot was delightful in the same way that going into a Christopher Nolan movie with this little pre-knowledge is. And indeed, at a certain point I actually had to look up the date this novel was published (2014, it turns out), so that I could make sure it actually came before Nolan's 2020 movie Tenet; for while the storylines themselves are vastly different, they're both fundamentally based around the idea of a time-travel cold war, and very specifically the idea of an apocalyptic event happening at some unidentified point in the future, and those future madmen sending people back to the past to ensure that the apocalyptic weapon actually gets invented. As you can guess, our narrator is the Harry August of the book's title, a lower-class rural Brit who is born in the 1920s, lives an unremarkable life, and dies in the 1990s; it's only when he turns five in his next life and all his memories come flooding back does he realize that he's now living his entire 70-year life all over again, seemingly as a re-do completely from scratch. Author Catherine Webb (writing here under the penname "Claire North") smartly has August go through the exact kinds of emotional cycles you would expect someone living the same long life over and over to go through: in his second life, August quickly comes to believe he's insane, and kills himself as a teenager; in his third life, realizing that he's not insane, he instead turns to a life of science to see if he can discover the answer behind his reincarnation mystery; when that fails, he then spends his fourth life devoted to understanding all the world's religions, just to wake up in his fifth life realizing that that didn't provide any answers either. Eventually he discovers (through very clever, byzantine plotting and writing, the kind that will deeply appeal to fans of books like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) that there's actually a whole group of humans who suffer from the same problem as him, and that over the thousands upon thousands of Earth timelines that have occurred over and over they've managed to create a secret organization of sorts called the Cronos Club, where they do things like help "rescue" newly refreshed "ouroborans" (as they call themselves) when they become old enough to remember all their previous memories but are still too young to do something like hold a job or get away from their biological parents. (In one of the dozen extremely clever limits Webb puts on her fantastical conceit here, in order to keep the stakes high, ouroborans only have their previous memories resurface in the year between being five and six years old; so if they happen to get killed before they're five, they wake up in the next life with no previous memories at all, basically wiping them back into amnesiacs.) It's here where Webb really earns her book's bona fides as a truly captivating and extremely unique sci-fi thriller, for because of the way these reincarnations work, you can effectively influence what will happen in the far past even though none of these people are technically time-traveling. Imagine our hero, for example, who dies in each existence of cancer in the 1990s; then in his next life, when he regains his memories of the '90s way back in 1925, he can seek out another ouroboran who's currently in their seventies themselves (i.e. was born back in 1850s) and tell them, "Here's everything that happens in the 1990s," information that they themselves can now take back with them in their own reincarnation. Then at that point, they themselves can seek out an elderly ouroboran (i.e. born in the 1780s) when they're a six-year-old in the 1850s, and tell them, "Oh, by the way, here's everything that happens way in the future in the 1990s." This is both a head-spinning concept and easy to understand, and Webb gets a lot of mileage out of it, in one example explaining that through this process, the Cronos Club has determined that the oldest of their kind seem to have first started showing up in ancient Babylon around the year 3000 BC, and that it seems to be roughly one out of every half-billion people who are born with the trait. (She also employs lots of funny Harry Potter-style sly humor when it comes to this subject, such as the stone obelisk the Babylonian ouroborans leave in the desert for future Cronos Club members to find, but how in some of these existences, this backwards grapevine convinces the Babylonians to sometimes leave dirty in-jokes for club members in the 20th century.) Of course, with me mentioning Tenet, fans of that movie will easily see what the main conflict is here in this book, written six years before it -- namely, the ouroborans all know that at some point in the far future, the human race will genocide itself using an apocalyptic weapon, but with each new existence this apocalyptic event is getting closer and closer to our own times, with it first being around the year 2400, then in the next existence it suddenly jumping to 2350, then in the next existence after that it jumping again to the year 2300. I'll let the answers to who is doing this and why remain a surprise (although it's not difficult to guess, once you're introduced to the book's entire cast of characters); but the important part here is that, like Tenet, the book's main pleasure in the second half becomes that of the extremely clever and well-plotted temporal cold war Webb creates, in which one side is constantly attempting to send information about future technology back to the past, and the other side is constantly trying to stop them, but without any of them able to just explode into open warfare because then all the normal humans (or as they're called in this book, the "linears") will declare all of them monsters and wipe out the entire Cronos Club for good (which indeed actually happens in some of the 15 existences we watch here of our titular hero). It's all just extremely, extremely well done, and this is for sure going to be going on my list of Top 10 Reads of 2023 at the end of the year; and so how additionally astonishing to learn afterwards, when finally reading up on Webb and her oeuvre, that the entire reason I did end up putting her on my to-read list in the first place is that she managed the flabbergasting feat of getting her first book published by a mainstream press and it becoming a bestseller when she was only 14 years old. (Of course, it helps that her dad is a veteran in the publishing industry who basically sent her manuscript to an agent buddy of his, but still.) Only 37 as of the writing of this review, she already has an amazingly prolific 23 published books under her belt, and her sci-fi titles under her Claire North name have either won or been finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Award. (She also writes adult fantasy novels under the nom de plume "Kate Griffin," and Young Adult novels under her real name.) In fact, it was during this post-read research that I remembered that it was actually another book of hers entirely that first got me interested in her, the more recent 2021 Notes from a Burning Age, so I'm sure I'll be getting to that one soon as well, since I ended up enjoying this one so incredibly much. I'll be sharing my review of that a little later this winter; but for now, sci-fi fans should for sure not walk but run to your local library to pick up a copy of this, both a trippy and an accessible genre novel of high ideas that will scratch the itch of a whole variety of different kinds of readers. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 16, 2023
not set
|
Sep 16, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 159364020X
| 9781593640200
| 159364020X
| 3.25
| 2,249
| 1903
| Aug 05, 2004
|
did not like it
|
2023 reads, #65. To be clear, my record entry here is for declaring not that I read this book, but rather the book The Turner Diaries by famed white s
2023 reads, #65. To be clear, my record entry here is for declaring not that I read this book, but rather the book The Turner Diaries by famed white supremecist William Luther Pierce (here writing under the penname Andrew Macdonald); and it's a real book and I really read it, so goddamnit, I want it to count towards my total book count at this year's Goodreads reading challenge, despite the fact that Goodreads owner Amazon has banned people from publicly acknowledging that the book actually exists. There's a good reason for that, because the novel is exactly as vile as the stories have it (written in the 1970s and set in an alt-history '90s, it's essentially a 300-page description of an apocalyptic race war that's eventually won by the white people with the aid of stolen nuclear weapons); but still, I have to confess that it deeply disturbs me that a corporation like Amazon can just decide one day that a certain book doesn't exist, never did exist, and never will exist, and that the rest of us are expected to go along with it like obedient little Orwellian sheep. So I suppose this is my own little act of rebellion, to have the power to stand up and say, "Yeah, it's a terrible book; yeah, you should skip it; yeah, Pierce was a horrible human being (among other details of his life, he was married five times, the last three wives all Hungarian mail-order brides, and all five of his wives left him after claiming emotional and physical abuse); but the book does exist, it is an actual book you can download and read, and I resent Amazon's Newthink attempts to pretend that the book doesn't exist and never has." So there, I've now officially done so, and now I can go back to comfortably living with myself.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 26, 2023
not set
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0099086700
| 9780099086703
| B001E52GWA
| 3.76
| 1,799
| 1956
| 1967
|
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 1585676020
| 9781585676026
| 1585676020
| 3.93
| 6,524
| 1970
| Jan 04, 2005
|
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0008272115
| 9780008272111
| 0008272115
| 3.86
| 79,558
| Jan 07, 2019
| Jan 10, 2019
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascis
2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascism meets Hogwarts meets The Game" bizarro emo thriller The Betrayals, which of course I adored (you had me at "1920s fascism bizarro slipstream emo thriller"); but I learned at that point that many of Collins' existing fans actually preferred her debut novel a year previous to that, the Victorian alt-history urban fantasy tale The Binding, so I figured I might as well put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and I just got around to finally reading that this week. But alas, I myself actually considered this a step downward when compared to her newest, although I can understand why people who first became a fan of Collins through the previous book would feel the way they do; for I don't mean "downward" in terms of quality itself, but simply in terms of narrative complexity, and presenting a general conceit with endless depths of complexity. She succeeds in that wildly with her later and more mature novel, by mashing together first an amazingly complicated art form that doesn't actually exist in the real world (a sort of combination of poetry, chamber music, ballet, philosophy, game design, and perhaps a little bit of actual magic); then adding this richly detailed and historic castle-school on a mountainside in the Alps where the art has been taught for millennia; and then imagining this Austria-sounding fictional country at a point in the early 20th century when a totalitarian regime has taken over the local government, but hasn't yet begun its plans for world domination, and want to turn this art form into a kind of nationalist propaganda, very similarly to how Leni Reifenstahl did with athletics in the real world with her Nazi propaganda film Olympia. In The Binding, though, we get a much simpler urban fantasy mythos that's much easier to understand -- that in their alt-universe, what we all know as "novels" actually are a way for people to permanently remove memories from their brain, through the use of a wizard of sorts who can somehow make the memories magically imprint themselves as words on the pages of a blank book. Thus, every novel that's read in their world is actually a form of stealing someone else's memories, and Collins uses this to expand on various kinda obvious social-realist issues and especially ones with a progressive political bent. (The main villain, for example, is basically a One Percenter who sexually abuses his household staff, then forces the girls to have the memories of the events "bound" so they no longer remember the crimes, and then reads the books regularly in his own private library whenever he wants to relive his accountability-free sins, while presumably giving an evil cackle and twisting the tips of his black mustache.) There's nothing wrong with that, and it's easy to see why fans of urban fantasies (especially strikingly original ones with a really unique hook) would go so gaga for this earlier novel, and be a bit disappointed by the follow-up set in such a different world and concerning such a different thing. I myself, though, am primarily attracted to stories by how complex and multifaceted they can be, so I feel the exact opposite about these two books than the "Buffy crowd" (for lack of a better term). The great news here is that both books have their passionate fans, which makes Collins a remarkable writer whose career is worth paying attention to, because I bet she's going to have something even more explosive for all of us with the next one. (She's been spending the last two years participating in anthologies and other short-form opportunities, or at least according to her Goodreads page.) I look forward to that; and in the meantime, I encourage you to check out both of these books, and see which one you might prefer as well. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 08, 2023
not set
|
Apr 08, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062328247
| 9780062328243
| 0062328247
| 3.70
| 11,169
| May 05, 2016
| Jun 21, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #12. I read this on the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, in that his own dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller was partly in
2023 reads, #12. I read this on the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, in that his own dystopian day-after-tomorrow thriller was partly inspired by this one, plus of course I'm just a sucker for dystopian day-after-tomorrow thrillers to begin with. Shriver is a lit-fiction veteran with 18 novels now in her oeuvre, most of which are obscure MFA titles with only tiny audiences; the reason her name may sound familiar is because of the one and only big hit so far of her career, 2003's school-shooter psychological character drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, the winner of that year's prestigious Orange Prize and then adapted into a Hollywood movie with Tilda Swinton that itself was a multiple award winner. Here Shriver is taking on a much bigger subject, which is showing exactly how a prosperous industrialized nation like the US could in fact devolve in the space of a mere decade into a lawless third-world country with no infrastructure to speak of. Shriver has mentioned in interviews that she wanted this to be the most realistic look possible at how such a thing could happen (as one of her characters astutely says in the book, science-fiction is never really about predicting the future, but rather commenting on the present); and so that makes this novel both queasily thrilling and nerve-wrackingly terrifying, in that every single plot development is based on a real thing that has actually happened in real-world America in the last couple of decades, only cranked up one or two notches and with no last-minute reprieve or savior that has (so far) allowed all of us in the 21st century to wipe our brow and give a huge sigh of relief every time one of these issues has reared its ugly head out in real life. For example, the event that starts this crisis is China giving the US a "margin call," suddenly demanding that we pay back the trillions of dollars that the country has loaned us over the years, feeling empowered after recently becoming the official biggest economy (and largest military) in the world; then when it becomes clear that the US neither has the money to pay off its national debt nor even particularly cares about doing so, the rest of the world suddenly devalues the US dollar as its main international form of currency and refuses to accept it as payment for anything, leading to a currency crash and hyperinflation situation much like Germany in the 1920s, where a loaf of bread at Whole Foods costs $20 on a Monday, then suddenly $50 on Tuesday, then up to $100 on Wednesday. Meanwhile, under a far-left administration that happens to include the first-ever Latinx President in American history, the White House is still so obsessed with social-justice issues that they essentially ignore the economy altogether (a very telling moment is when Congress debates whether or not to change all federal government forms to Spanish, since Latinx people now technically make up over 50% of the American population, at the same time that most of America's police go on strike because their government-issued paychecks keep bouncing); and meanwhile, all the upper-middle-classers keep talking about how things are bound to get better if the unwashed, uneducated, mouth-breathing masses will just remain calm, while all the poor people are positively giddy over the destruction of these upper-middle-classers' wealth, most of them not realizing that it will only be a matter of a few more months before all that vanished money will result in basically a collapse into violent anarchy for everyone, a slow-motion "gentle apocalypse" that Shriver deliciously doles out in infinitely clever, infinitely nauseating detail. (And don't worry if you're confused -- another clever detail here is Shriver including a 16-year-old autistic son in our title family who basically acts like a walking Wikipedia, explaining to readers the actual real issues being discussed in this fictional novel, and why taking these issues for granted like we do [for example, why going off the gold standard is actually the worst thing the US has ever done in its entire history] will inexorably lead to the society-collapsing disaster our Mandibles live through over these 400-odd pages.) Needless to say, I luuurved this book, although in a wrist-slashingly depressing way that makes me never want to read it or even think about it again, which of course officially makes me one of those millions of middle-classers with their head in the sand that has helped cause all these problems in the first place. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, as a cautionary tale about all the bad things that can happen under such seemingly innocuous attitudes like, "A prosperous country like America can ring up as much debt as it possibly wants to with no repercussions whatsoever." A tough but great read like this will show you in graphic, infuriating detail exactly what can happen under that kind of attitude, so please understand in advance that you're in for a pretty harrowing tale here indeed. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 31, 2023
|
Jan 31, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0192838652
| 9780192838650
| 0192838652
| 3.37
| 6,002
| 1826
| Sep 10, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatn
2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatnot, and instead turn to a series of very large and intellectually interesting tomes I'll be slowly getting through all the way until next spring and the return of warm weather. Coming later this winter will be my first-ever read of Gone With the Wind, a re-read of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a binge-read of the entire seven-book "Narnia" series in a row, and my first attempt at Gene Wolfe's 950-page The Book of the New Sun; but first for these cold-weather long-form reads, it's the 150,000-word (i.e. Harry Potter-sized) 1826 forgotten "post-apocalyptic" "classic" The Last Man, by Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, long overshadowed by her more famous book but now getting more and more of a serious 21st-century look again, when we take both genre literature and novels by women much more seriously. I purposely put air-quotes around both the terms above, because part of what makes it famous is precisely that it's not considered a classic by any way you measure it; in fact, it was sort of angrily rejected by contemporary audiences in the 1820s when she first published it, a little less than a decade after Frankenstein, as she hit middle-age and her work first started to fall out of favor, along with the other Early Romantics who were dying like flies all around her. And now that I've read it, I'm not sure even if you can properly call it a post-apocalyptic novel, at least not in the genre-thriller way we largely mean it now when we use the term ourselves, which is why that's getting air-quotes too. It's still super-fascinating, though, for what it is instead is Shelley talking about all these Early Romantics she spent so much of her youth around, and who had all recently died in a very short period, leaving Shelley essentially alone in the world -- not only her husband Percy, but her sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, her child William, and the charming asshole George Byron who held their whole circle together, otherwise known as Lord Byron. So in other words, the "last man" of her so-called speculative proto-sci-fi novel is not the lone survivor of the futuristic plague seen in her book; it's Mary herself, and this book is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what it was actually like to live within such a group of people, with just a few showy genre details stitched on to nominally make it a sci-fi story. So in this, it's really important to keep two things in mind about the world as it existed in the 1820s when Shelley wrote this: first, her father-in-law, the politically powerful father of Percy Shelley, had forbidden her from ever writing a memoir about her time with his son; and second, the entire post-apocalyptic "last man" trope of proto-sci-fi had already been around for over 20 years at that point, ever since the unexpected explosive bestseller The Last Man by French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville in 1805, which had suffered so many cheap ripoffs in the decades after that the "last man" trope was actually kind of a joke by the 1820s, even to the point that there were now popular parodies of the genre. That's why contemporary audiences angrily rejected the book when it first came out, because they took it all at face value and rightly concluded that this didn't hold a candle to the other, much more thrilling "last man" post-apocalyptic melodramas that had been published over the last 20 years. But we now 200 years later can clearly see it as yet another proto-example from the literary world, this time the prototype of the modern autobiographical novel, where Shelley is actually trying to record what her time among the tragic, often infuriating Early Romantics was like, and as such uses the "last man" trope only metaphorically to declare her the last among her artistic peers to still live and write new work, one of the only people who actually got to live long enough to approach it through the wiser filter of middle-age, and therefore has more complex and nuanced things to say about it than any of them did when they were in their passionate twenties. It makes sense, after all, once you learn that she had been forbidden by her father-in-law from publishing a "true story" about her time with Percy, Byron and the rest; but this was the early 1800s, after all, not long after even the novel as an art form had even been invented, and when it was still largely considered silly rubbish only good for women and children by the exact sober, older white men like Shelley's father-in-law. Of course Shelley could get away with couching her memoir of these times within a so-called science-fiction melodrama, especially a trope that had already been around and trendily popular for the last 20 years, because readers literally weren't sophisticated enough yet to read something like The Last Man and say, "...Oh, wait, she's actually talking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, isn't she?" But sheesh, what else can you say about a character named "Lord Raymond," who is described as looking exactly like Byron, who in our late 21st-century setting of future England is a charming rogue asshole who wants to see England return to a state of monarchy, after the country fully converts into a secular democracy like the US in Shelley's "past future" timeline. Or what about his complicated, almost sexual relationship with who is supposed to be the current king of England if he hadn't abdicated, one Adrian Windsor who just happens to look exactly like Shelley's real-life husband Percy, who is 100% on the side of the rational Republicanists and has an antagonistic yet almost sensual relationship with Lord Raymond, who's trying to achieve the exact opposite thing and bring back "rule by the righteously ordained?" So if we use all this as proof that what Shelley was truly trying to do here was actually write an autobiographical novel about the Early Romantic inner circle she was a part of, that actually makes this quite the interesting book, and especially in the ultra-complex, ultra-nuanced way she portrays her version of Lord Byron here, very easily the true protagonist of the book even though it's supposed to be a sweeping ensemble drama where the abdicated king is just as important, as is his Shakespearean mother who schemes with Lord Raymond to bring back the monarchy, as is another dozen characters based here and there on actual figures from her real-life circle in those years. Shelley's the only one left alive at this point in real history, after all, so she can say whatever she wants to about these people; and it's clear that, just as we think about him today 200 years later, Shelley clearly found Lord Byron to be the most complex and mesmerizing person of their entire circle, and largely devotes her ensemble drama here to examining the detailed ins and outs of his character in particular. And like we've often been discovering just now in our #MeToo years, one of the things making this book worth revisiting here in the 21st century is that Shelley's post-death brutally honest assessment of Lord Byron is of a real MeTooer type -- charming and seductive in a way you can't tear yourself away from, but that you can easily see right away is damaging and too intense for your well-being, the kind of person to both build up a fervent circle of true believers and eventually resign with disgrace from that circle (if they live long enough, that is, which in the case of both the real Byron and the fictional Raymond was not the case), much more honest and sophisticated an examination of this type of "intelligentsia bro" than the traditional "Byronic Hero" that grew together during the Victorian Age. Unfortunately, though, I find myself once again paraphrasing Homer Simpson talking to Ricky Gervais when it comes to me discussing a novel from the Early Romantic period: "Lady, you take forever to say nothing!!!" And that's another reason you can see why contemporary audiences might've angrily rejected this book when it first came out, because for a post-apocalyptic thriller, it's slow as freakin' molasses, and I have to confess that I didn't make it all the way to the end of this thousand-page book before I had decided that I at least had read enough to write a measured and informed review. That review, as you can see, is that it's well worth your time to take on, at least the slow and extra-long first act which is where most of the character-building of these thinly veiled Early Romantics take place, before a second and third act that crank up the genre tropes considerably. (Also, be aware that Shelley didn't even bother trying to think of cool sci-fi what-ifs; the most cutting-edge thing anyone does in her book is travel long distances by hot air balloon.) In it, you'll get a more refreshingly honest and complicated look at these "world's first whiny hipsters" of Shelley's generation than perhaps you've ever seen an actual member of that generation talk about themselves before; and understand that if any of them had managed to live beyond their mid-thirties, like Shelley turned out to be the only one to do, all of them might have had a quite different attitude about this "age of the tortured romantic artist" that still very much exists to this day, even while seemingly getting snuffed out more and more by our rapid transition into our current Woke times. You may not last the entire book, but even the first couple hundred pages are well worth the time to read, even if you Wikipedia the rest of the plot; and Shelley in general deserves to be remembered as a towering pioneer of her age, and not just a one-hit wonder for Frankenstein in the style of, "Isn't it nice that Percy's wife got to do something too?" These books and others show exactly why, so ahead of their times that we're only catching up to some of them now. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Nov 20, 2022
not set
|
Nov 20, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 006283813X
| 9780062838131
| 3.49
| 12,584
| Nov 10, 2020
| May 18, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #38. One of the things I'm coming to realize here in my fifties, when I now have (according to Goodreads) a total of 2,500 books I've read
2022 reads, #38. One of the things I'm coming to realize here in my fifties, when I now have (according to Goodreads) a total of 2,500 books I've read over the course of my life, is that mostly what I'm on the lookout for anymore is simply stories that are unique, startlingly unique, and that sound like no other stories I've read before. That's why I was so excited this week to read through Bridget Collins' newest, The Betrayals, because it's not only extremely well-done, but is literally unlike any other book I've now read in my life. Like the best of New Weird literature (which is how I would classify this hard-to-categorize book), it just plunks us into the middle of our situation with no explanation of what's going on; it's only as we read further and further that we realize that we're supposed to be in an unnamed country that sounds very similar to Austria in the late 1920s or early '30s (the citizens are obsessed with French language and culture, yet the nation is filled with German-style beer halls where radical political activists meet), and that a Nazi-like fascist party has recently taken power but has not yet started its campaign for world domination. (In an interesting twist, people of a certain religion are being persecuted and whisked away here in the middle of the night, just like the real Nazis, but in this fictional case it's actually Christians and not Jews.) The Hogwarts-like castle/school up in the far mountains where most of our story takes place, then, is supposed to be a sort of haven from all this modern chaos, an Oxford-like space that hasn't fundamentally changed in a thousand years (both students and professors still wear monk robes to class, for example), and where the one and only subject being taught is what they call the grand jeu, French for the "Great Game," which Collins cleverly never fully describes but hints is a combination of music, dance, philosophy, debating and religion. Like Richard Wagner's bombastic classical music in real-life Austria in the 1930s, this artistic expression is considered part of the "national culture" of our unnamed country, with the newly minted fascist government in charge trying to politicize the endeavor and putting more and more pressure on the school to get on board with it. Whew! Okay, so that gets you to page 1 of the novel itself; for far from this being any kind of spoiler, what I've just described is merely the backdrop on which our actual story itself takes place, which has to do with the complicated relationship one young and rapidly rising administrator in this fascist party has with not only the grand jeu and its school but the political party itself, coming off as a sort of fictionalized Albert Speer who is happy to use the party for his own gain but feels morally troubled about the harsh ethnic-cleansing edges of their policies, and who had some sort of terrible thing happen to him when he was a celebrated student at the school himself, who most had thought would go on to a professional career as a game designer but who abruptly joined this fascist party right after graduating for reasons most can't figure out. That's what our story is mainly about, understanding through both present-day scenes and a full half of the book in flashback what exactly happened to this promising game master to make him eventually turn his back on the pursuit, and how this will affect him as an adult now that he's been dispatched against his will back to the mountain fortress/academy to serve as the party's in-house spy. And that, needless to say, is equally fascinating and unique as the background, but is best saved for a surprise which is why I won't mention any more. What can be said, though, is that the betrayals of the book's title are many and varied, with Collins delightfully dancing her nimble literary fingers on top of all kinds of issues that have to do with the subject -- romantic relationships (both straight and gay), political devotion, one's promises to their own younger self, and all kinds of other interesting, unexpected nods here and there. It's utterly captivating, as long as you can get into the spirit of it (I saw many other Goodreaders who instead just found it too confusing and gave up, and admittedly you have to have some patience and a natural love for speculative literature to fully get into this), and most importantly is utterly, completely unlike any other book of the 2,500 or so I've now read, which in this day and age is always worth celebrating just on its own, even more so when the book turns out to be great like is the case here. A novel that will easily make my "best reads of the year" list come December, it now strongly has me interested in going back and reading her debut novel as well, the similar alt-history speculative story The Binding (apparently taking place in an unnamed nation that feels vaguely like Victorian England). As always, check back here later in the year for my review of that, but for now get yours hands on this captivating latest as soon as you can. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jul 17, 2022
not set
|
Jul 17, 2022
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 9187222671
| 9789187222672
| 9187222671
| 4.43
| 6,012
| Dec 01, 2017
| Dec 01, 2017
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #22. Earlier this year I checked out two library books by Swedish illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions
2022 reads, #22. Earlier this year I checked out two library books by Swedish illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions of "future trash" have been popular viral hits at the various social networks for an entire decade now, and whose debut book Tales from the Loop (my review) blew me away once I learned that, far from being a futuristic story, his paintings were meant to illustrate an abandoned Cold War Scandinavian research facility that never was, and that the story itself is actually a tender childhood memoir by an adult in the 21st century looking back at his 1990s youth spent among the decaying robots and half-collapsed maglev ships. Now, months later, I've finally gotten around to reading the other book of his the Chicago Public Library owns, and it blew me away all over again, and once again because the story accompanying the paintings was completely unexpected and much better than it has any right to be. This time a more straightforward thriller, it tells the tale of an apocalyptic event that happened soon before the events of our own book, nebulous in nature but having something to do with virtual reality goggles, an Apple-like all-consuming tech giant, and the systematic environmental collapse of America's west coast (whose landmarks Stålenhag cleverly renames just to make things even more surreal; so in the world of The Electric State, for example, the state of California is actually known as "Pacifica"); and we are basically following a teenage girl and her robot companion as she attempts to navigate the dangerous back roads of a now fully anarchic Southern Pacifica (think Los Angeles) to hopefully find a refuge she's heard rumors of near the north end of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Like Tales from the Loop, the written story here is just as important and just as impressive as the overwhelmingly beautiful paintings that accompany them; and in fact the one and only complaint I have (and it's not really much of a complaint at that) is that it's difficult to read an entire novella's worth of text when holding a giant oversized 11 x 17 book like the format this hardcover was first published as. Other than that, this was just as profound and moving a storytelling experience as his other book was, and I have to admit that Stålenhag is one of the only 21st-century artists I've come across whose original work I would love to collect (and that I bet is nearly impossible to do so, because he's become so hugely popular among the online crowd over the last decade). Do yourself a big favor and pick up any of his books when you have a chance, this one recommended just as much as any of the others. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 10, 2022
not set
|
May 10, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1999797493
| 9781999797492
| 1999797493
| 3.66
| 178
| May 01, 2020
| May 01, 2020
|
2022 reads, #25. DID NOT FINISH. This alt-history novel has an irresistible premise, which is why I picked it up -- what if, near the end of his life,
2022 reads, #25. DID NOT FINISH. This alt-history novel has an irresistible premise, which is why I picked it up -- what if, near the end of his life, Beethoven had had an opportunity to travel to America in the 1830s, to attend the premiere of a new piece specifically commissioned by a chamber music group in Boston? But alas, author Paul Griffiths (who's actually more well-known as a music critic than a novelist) writes the whole thing in a deliberately artsy, deliberately pretentious prose style, one specifically meant to hold the audience at arm's length from the actual story taking place, so not only like we're reading a Wikipedia entry on the subject but like we're listening to some hoary old professor actually read that Wikipedia entry out loud, inserting his own snotty little comments at the end of each paragraph and sorta wandering off Alzheimer's-style into a whole series of digressions that have nothing to do with the story itself. I stuck in there for 50 pages, but even at that point I felt like I was floating on top of the story and looking in, instead of actually being fully immersed within the events taking place; so at that point I officially gave up and turned it back in at the library. Your own results may vary, but caution and low expectations are recommended nonetheless.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 10, 2022
|
May 10, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0553565079
| 9780553565072
| 0553565079
| 4.16
| 57,462
| Apr 1993
| Feb 01, 1994
|
did not like it
|
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So here as we reach not the last of the '80s and '90s "bridging" novels that Asimov wrote at the end of his life to bring together his famous '50s trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," but indeed the very last book Asimov himself wrote from start to finish before dying in 1993, I thought it'd be worth taking a little time and really asking ourselves if these bridging novels were even worth the effort, given that they've turned out even just 40 years later to be such lackluster reading experiences (and spoiler alert, that was indeed the same case here, such a disappointing read that it almost is not even worth recapping). To understand why Asimov did this, you have to understand the similarly titled "Future History" series by his friend and peer Robert Heinlein, who wrote an entire series of short stories and novels primarily in the '60s and '70s that were all set along a single persistent 300-year storyline, just that he wrote the actual stories out of chronological order; they've lost a lot of name recognition over the decades in a way that Asimov's "Foundation" books never have, but it's important to remember that in 1966, when the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention decided to name an honorary Hugo Award after "Greatest Sci-Fi Series of All Time," Heinlein's Future History came in second, beaten only by Asimov's own Foundation series. If you look at these three unrelated '50s series of Asimov while squinting and sort of half-frowning, you can sort of squeeze them together into one unified storyline, spanning not Heinlein's 300 years of the future but instead an entire 22,000, to an eventual populated Milky Way galaxy containing thousands of inhabited planets, where Earth has become the stuff of myth and legend, and where the main crisis is that the all-encompassing empire that has run the entire galaxy for the last ten thousand years is on its last gasp, and the only person who knows is an eccentric history professor who comes up with an intellectually clever way to help humanity prevent its own destruction despite itself. But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books. That's where these eight books from the '80s and '90s came from, a desire to write all the twisty, exposition-heavy roads that lead from one trilogy to the next, and then attempts no less at taking the very last book and somehow trying to tie it back to the first book set 22,000 years previous. That's ballsy, to be sure, and it officially brings Asimov's timeline to an inarguable "megaseries" status, a great thing to leave behind for all of us in the future to think of as a single, monumental work from this genre pioneer and once massively popular author. It's impressive to be able to say "Asimov's Future History," and he deserves credit for devoting the last decade of his life and the last of his physical health to accomplishing this busy feat. But, as my almost exclusively disappointed reactions to the books have made clear, they've all been profound letdowns as actual reading experiences, franchise-propping scaffolding that exists for almost no other reason than to pass along story beats, and that really feel like the work of a worn-out old man who had nothing left of interest to say. That by itself is tragic enough, but another bad thing these bridging novels deliver, that wouldn't have existed at all without these books existing, is Asimov's increasingly adamant refusal as an old man to ever look back at his old behavior or writing, or to ever think that an apology or at least a rethinking was in order. In fact, Asimov expressly used these last novels of his career to defiantly still engage in the exact behavior that his increasingly younger critics excoriated in his books, such as the subsumed racism of '50s-style "PG-rated" slurs like "boy," and the out-and-out sexism and sexual objectifiction of every female character. He didn't need to do that -- even if he wasn't going to be progressive enough to acknowledge his critics and change those references, he could've easily just stayed neutral on the subject -- so to purposely put them in is a legitimate "fuck you" from Asimov at the end of his life to the people who eventually became the "woke crowd," and who would eat him alive if he happened to be alive and in his nineties and still trying to publish now, like poor old creepy Woody Allen. So where do we place these books? As the excuse that brings you and I together in this megareview of his megaseries? As a real mistake that left a bitter aftertaste to Asimov's career right when he should've been getting lionized? Good for several more awards and another several million into the Asimov estate checking account before the check-writer finally croaked? All of the above? For me, I like to think about how complex and interesting someone like Asimov's career was that we should still be caring about the arguments 30 years later; flawed to be sure, and sometimes very deliberately and not just a "sign of his times," but also impressive and prodigious, and that laid such important groundwork in the legitimizing of science-fiction that he simply cannot be ignored. Hell, there was a brand-new adaptation of "Foundation" on Apple+ just this last spring; I mean, a shitty and unwatchable adaptation, make no mistake, but there's something amazing to be said that people are still willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on his stories. So if the bridging novels are what's needed to tie together the historical importance and lasting power of these three original '50s trilogies, then I suppose that's not necessarily the worst thing, especially since after you read them all for the first time, you never have to reapproach the bridging tales ever again for as long as you live. And that finally brings us to the reason I started this megareview in the first place -- because Asimov's original '50s "Foundation" trilogy was the first adult science-fiction I ever read, some of the first adult fiction that I had ever read at all, tied in closely to my nostalgic memories of being in my grandparents' house in the '70s and '80s and peering through my dad and uncle's old '40 through '60s sci-fi collection on the musty back shelves of the guest bedroom. I started reviewing the first Robot novel two and a half years ago precisely because I wanted to get to the point that I'm at right this moment, entering the original "Foundation" trilogy I loved so much as a teen and seeing how it now not only stacks up against the rest of the "Future History" megaseries, but also how it stacks up against time. We'll be talking a lot more about that in the next review, for 1951's Foundation which started them all, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again next month for that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.19
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.41
|
really liked it
|
Jan 27, 2024
not set
|
Jan 27, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 22, 2024
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 09, 2021
not set
|
Jan 07, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
Dec 18, 2023
|
Dec 18, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.96
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.49
|
liked it
|
Nov 11, 2023
not set
|
Nov 11, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.59
|
liked it
|
Nov 04, 2023
not set
|
Nov 04, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.48
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
Sep 22, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 16, 2023
not set
|
Sep 16, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.25
|
did not like it
|
Aug 26, 2023
not set
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.93
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
||||||
|
| 3.86
|
really liked it
|
Apr 08, 2023
not set
|
Apr 08, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 31, 2023
|
Jan 31, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.37
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 20, 2022
not set
|
Nov 20, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.49
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 17, 2022
not set
|
Jul 17, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.43
|
it was amazing
|
May 10, 2022
not set
|
May 10, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
May 10, 2022
|
May 10, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.16
|
did not like it
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
Loading...
