Goran Lowie
A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE is fantastic, much more fantastic than the description would have you believe. Felt original, well executed, with a big focus on the characters. It reminded me a bit of THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, in that it's mostly about a person trying to navigate the political landscape of a city.
It has a heavy focus on dialogue and discussion, which I see mentioned in a negative way in a lot of reviews here, but personally that was completely my thing. Again I want to make the comparison to THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, a work that didn't try to be action-heavy and that didn't really have to be. It worked for me, personally.
If you like court intrigue, poetry, language, and/or murder mysteries, this one is well worth reading!
Paradoxically, this book is one of Le Guin's most steeped in realism, yet at the same time most escapist. You'll find no intricate explorations of gender here, no examination of anarchism, no search for meaning. Instead, it's the deceptively simple story of a twenty-something guy with a deadbeat job, a mother with abandonment issues, no real prospects in life, finding some kind of escape in this “beginning place”—could've easily been written by Calvino instead, as a part of his Our Ancestors trilogy for example, more magical realist than straight-up speculative fiction. An escapist romance.
A very unique book! Definitely try this if you're a fan of meta books or “mindfucks”.
I really, really enjoyed it. It's a strange one. Probably the most meta book I've ever read.
It's about writing, genres, cliches, books... It's all very, very meta. One of the most interesting aspects, to me, was the exploration of the second person (something you rarely see in books, and for a good reason, I think).
However: definitely don't read this and expect a plot-driven page turner. I would never use the word “exciting” to describe it. “Very interesting” would be more apt, however.
Brave, beautiful, and takes you on a wonderful literary journey. Must-read!
(if any of you reading this are reading this– this book felt in many ways similar to The Stanley Parable. Where Stanley questioned the boundaries of the narrative powers of a game and the relation of player and game, this book explores the relation between book and reader. Both of them use metalanguage to achieve this. And both, sometimes, are a bit cheeky!)
I really enjoyed this book.
I wasn't feeling the first 10% or so AT ALL– In fact, I almost put it down. It felt way too “YA” for me, with none of the things I love so much about Sanderson– great worldbuilding, magic system, plot, ... But then somehow I couldn't stop reading and it was 5 am. Oops.
So: yes, it's very much a YA book, but it's also the Sanderson you know and love. Definitely recommend it!
Really unique series. Managed to evoke a sense of exploration I rarely find in other books, and some parts almost feel like a god-game in bookform. Really enjoyable read!
For the first hundred or so pages, this book is an interesting eco-survival thriller about settlers exploring an unfamiliar planet. It's a challenging world with strange plants and animals, but the story becomes truly interesting when they encounter an intelligent plant species.
I very much enjoyed these early chapters of first contact between the humans and the plants, the attempts at communication and the palpable excitement of the humans interacting with something so alien. Big shades of Stanislaw Lem!
A big narrative shift happens when the humans meet the aliens they've long suspected of inhabiting the planet among them. Suddenly it becomes a kind of reverse Xenogenesis story, where the humans first try to make peaceful contact but soon realize they're a danger to humans and themselves, and decide to imprison and control them. At the same time, the intelligent plant becomes a rogue AI type character with a very bossy personality.
A fantastic book, honestly. Very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
Looked at some of the other reviews on here for the first time, and it's weird to realize that I've always seen Murderbot as feminine/female yet its gender was never specified in the books. I'm seeing all these reviews with “he” and “him” and I was like, surely not?
Really interesting! I'm loving this recent trend of modern retellings of ancient mythology– first Gaiman's book on the Norse mythology, and now Fry's on the Greek. I'm hoping some charismatic fantasy/comedy writer tackles Egyptian mythology next!
Very, very interesting little novella. Somehow packs more in not even 100 pages than most books do in 300.
It's a confusing but intriguing and (in the end) enjoyable read. The album it accompanies is by far my favorite thing JoCo's ever done, and this is a nice add-on.
I wasn't a big fan of The Martian but still enjoyed it. I really, really liked Weir's short story The Egg. With this book, I was hoping it would be better than The Martian– firstly because he wrote it as a novel, and didn't start it out as a web serial, and also because I figured he'd have learned a lot from The Martian and improved on the aspects I didn't like.
Instead, he somehow managed to double down on the things I didn't like and write this confusing mess of a novel, with atrocious dialogue and extremely forced humor (even more so than The Martian). I especially hate the wittyness/snark/whatever you want to call it– it's like having a fucking redditor be the protagonist of the book.
Maybe I'm overreacting a bit or being too critical. Maybe it IS bad but not as bad as I'm putting it here. Either way, if I had to describe this book in one word, it would be “dogshit”.
Felt like your usual Brandon Sanderson non-Cosmere short story like Legion/Snapshot until it abruptly ended. Some fun concepts!
Writing sometimes felt a bit too stilted and it felt more like a bunch of short stories which are only very tangentially related because of vague references to the disappearances (instead of very interconnected like I was expecting) but it was still an interesting read and ultimately I enjoyed the way Philips decided to tell this story.
I liked this slightly more than Binti, I think. It reads like an Africanfuturism folk tale.
Despite its many flaws, Oathbringer reminds us of the sheer scale of Sanderson's work, with a bigger focus on worldbuilding and the cosmere in this book, as well as having multiple big-reveal moments while also setting up so much new stuff. It's the third book in a ten-book series, but it very much doesn't feel like it– It's just as exciting and expansive as the others.
If Sanderson manages to keep this up for the entire series, it might just be one of my favorite series of all time.
Not for me, unfortunately! I liked “Ghosts” and “Jantar Mantar”, but most of the other poems didn't resonate with me much.
Brilliant. I had read most of her big fantasy works, of course, and most of her sci-fi, even some non-speculative fiction– but this book of blog posts and essays really cemented my admiration of her. An astoundingly intelligent woman, whose observations, writings and opinions will be sorely missed.
This really is a peculiar book. It covers a lot of themes I wasn't expecting before I started reading (although I suppose I should have, considering what it's about), it has incredibly compelling characters and, even if it feels like it gets comically depressing sometimes, it manages to find a healthy voice with a good deal of humour.
Certainly an ambitious bildungsroman. It felt like The Goldfinch, except... sadder and gayer? My only problem with it is the insane amount of coincidences in it, but I suppose that can be forgiven.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was funny, heartfelt, and entertaining. (Warning: you will crave bread).
Reminiscent of Sciamma's PETITE MAMAN, in which a young girl befriends a mysterious girl- who ends up being the younger version of her mom. It's a fascinating concept executed quite well, and this book does it even better, only making you realize it right at the end. A wonderful children's novel.
Read aloud with Darla, Lucas and Rich– which is an excellent and most of all very fun way to “read” a play.
Sadly very disappointing. Feels like it tries to handle way too many issues at once and it's not very subtle about them at all. Many of the characters felt one-dimensional (including big characters like Nathaniel). I loved the concept and I understand why Kowal wrote the book that she did (it's a very timely book), but it failed for me.