Anna

So many great sentences. Weirdly perfect ending for a novel without a plot.

I loved the first book in the series, but this one felt a bit rushed. Loved the main character development but not so much the plot.

I blasted through it, though.

This series is amazing: so preposterous and out there and at the same time so emotionally pure. Those monsters' struggles are just incredibly moving. Every single Mechazon POV panel makes me choke up, and I had to disengage from Electrogor's storyline a bit because it was just too damn sad and dark.

At the same time, this is some of the funniest stuff I've ever read. It self-consciously plays with tropes while maintaining a cast of probably the most multi-dimensional villains since The Wire.

“Tess of the D'Urbervilles, or the Horrors of Patriarchy”

I think this what people consider a “good beach read”.

I could highlight this entire book. Great recap on the basics of web writing and brand voice creation.

Does the job. My highlights here.

It made me feel a little better, though I fully expect panic to resurge on January 20th.

Possibly my favourite unreliable narrator to date — so completely fucked up and hilarious and moving, I couldn't get enough of her voice and her weird filter.

I fear that saying any more than that would spoil this delightful book. My #1 release of 2017 so far and it will be very hard to dethrone.

I'll never be able to think of “the abyss” again without laughing.

The dopest book I've ever read in under an hour.

Rally wanted to like this because I love the story of Joan of Arc but unfortunately I didn't believe a word of this. I'm totally on board with necromancy and genetically-enhanced humans interfacing with walls but Lamarckian evolution? New species forming over a single generation? Humans ‘evolving' through walking over a rocky terrain for a very long time? Get outta here.

I read Sonora while in Phoenix and I tip my hat to the author for how accurately and magically she conjures up the particular feverish weirdness of the Sonoran desert.

Though I feel like I've heard this story many times before, I've never heard it told quite like this. Will keep an eye on this promising author.

Man sacrifices time, life and health for a job. Capitalism renders job redundant. Man sets fire to job.

Weirdly super-relevant reading for this moment in history.

This was suggested to me by someone who suspected I might share some of Paglia's views. Up until now I'd only known her as the weird female edgelord who'd argued her way into publicly supporting pedophilia in order to own the libs.
In a classic case of a broken clock being right twice a day, I do agree with some of her views. Also, her rage is entertaining - she can definitely throw a creative diss even if she keeps going after a handful of the same people.
However, she seems very stuck and resistant to new data about a whole lot of things. Her bizarre insistence that homosexuality is a choice is the main one that comes to mind, but this kept bothering me throughout the book. Also, somehow pigeon masculinity says something about human masculinity? I guess if you're aboard the Jordan Peterson train and also clueless to the existence of penguins, swans, heck really all of the animal kingdom. It gets tiring after a while, like listening to the argumentation of someone who refuses to google. She keeps coming back to numerous straw men that I can only guess are second wave feminist arguments of yore.
Exhausting.

The most unsettling part of this book is how relevant it is. I'm so completely freaked out about the fact that this dude named Giorgio wrote this perfectly apt allegory for the internet culture of the last few years in 1976 Italy.

This interview with the translator is great (though spoiler-filled).

Everyone should read this so we can all agree on who the bad guys are.

It's a scary world we live in.

This book is like a Terrence Malick film, but GOOD.

I'm enjoying this series so much. Vandermeer does a neat trick of implanting the suspicion that the books' reality might have been compromised, in one of several ways, from a very early stage in the story. Here he takes this a bit further still. Everything is unsettling. Yet the compounding of mysteries never feels like too much (think late seasons of Lost).

I'm amazed by the author's skill to answer all my nagging questions without being explicit. It actually felt like I almost figured it all out by myself.

I read the trilogy as a single-edition hardback and I have to say I don't really get why it was released as 3 separate books. Marketing, I guess? This FSG edition is amazing and it felt like a very well-structured, very long novel in 3 parts.

There are so many things I loved about the whole trilogy (the expeditions, the nature writing, the mystery and the hair-raising unexpected details, I could go on) that at times it felt like Vandermeer peered into my head and took some old terrors out as part of his research. I spent years as a kid being paranoid about getting a splinter that would turn me into someone else, like the splinter from H.C. Andersen's tales. Vandermeer made me re-live that horror, bless him.

Wow, I have to say that this Knopf hardback might be one of the coolest I've had — everything from design and typesetting to how the paper feels is amazing. (/technical note)

Can't say I loved the content as much though. It's a great story, and the two male protagonists felt interesting and complicated. The Helen character seemed a little flat for the first few chapters, but about halfway through the book she started gaining more depth.

There's something strange about how Mengestu ignores setting. I'm not a fan of long and overly detailed descriptions, but I like to be able to ‘see' where a scene takes place, even if only vaguely. At times it felt like a book about Africa and the Midwest that was written by an author who'd never personally been to either (which of course is not the case here). There's something about Mengestu's style that just isn't quite my thing. I kept wishing for more dialogue as it's something that he does really well, but the book was full of introspections that felt a bit mundane.

UAWs on EOC is my punk band name.

I can recognise the greatness but I didn't enjoy it. It was a slow, extremely painful read.

The author's legendary aversion to commas imposes a certain tempo, and most sentences require at least two run-throughs before the syntax falls together correctly.

At the same time though, many of those sentences were so wonderful that I re-read them over and over; some of them I must have read dozens of times. This has never happened to me before on a scale quite like this.

There are so many images in Blood Meridian that are absolutely horrific and that induce compassion fatigue and nightmares and that deter from picking up the book again for days. I almost gave it up after the snakebitten horse, and that was nothing compared to what was coming.

I don't know if I can recommend this to anyone; it's hard to handle all this lyrical beauty when it wraps so much extreme violence.

One to come back to when I'm older, wiser and more cynical.

The structure was intricate and the prose sang. I was greatly entertained.

Despite the preposterous plot, the heroine was completely believable. How did Chee do that? Also, fiercely feminist! I loved her so much I might be having separation anxiety. This whole book is one big celebration of female freedom and power and that's very rare and amazing.

I thought I could stomach reading about even the worst social taboos fairly easily but it turns out that an incestuous father-daughter relationship is where I draw the line.



The Sport of Kings is clever, obviously ambitious, at times awkwardly earnest, but very skilfully and artfully put together. I think I “get” it, but the incestuous father-daughter relationship which the author never seems to really condemn, never making anyone pay for that particular crime, making us witness their exchanges, the ‘beloved daddy's and the lack of overall horror of the two people involved, and ending on a “slavery was super bad, and white supremacy is super bad, oh and also, as quick aside, maybe don't groom and rape your daughter? kthx” note still makes the whole completely unsavoury for me.

I appreciate the dedication though.

I found it very hard to resist the impression that the author must have lost a bet that forced him to create a story out of a randomly generated string of words/ideas but Vandermeer is so good, his writing so lucid that in the end it works extremely well.