Goran Lowie
Unfortunately, it just didn't do it for me. Wasn't a big fan of most of the characters to begin with, but they only got worse as the book progressed (the protagonist & especially Dara, I only really liked the character of Ali), along with some forced romance that just couldn't be salvaged by the pretty great worldbuilding. I really wanted to like this book, and I still kind of did for the most part, but ultimately it just didn't do it for me.
It was okay. Not as good as I was expecting. It's basically two stories in one– the first one pretty emotional/good, the second one pretty weird/out of place. It didn't need to be two stories for me, felt kind of forced and especially the way the two stories connect felt kind of shoehorned-in. If you've never read a Ness book before, don't start with this. If you have and you weren't too impressed, definitely don't read this. But if you loved his other stuff, you might like this. (The writing, as per usual, is nothing but stellar.
Fascinating stuff. I actually picked this up for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but ended up enjoying Pearl and Sir Orfeo more, probably because both Pearl and Sir Orfeo are significantly shorter than Gawain and more readable– especially Sir Orfeo. All three are interesting tales and a remarkable view into the past.
Sir Gawain felt like those old Arthurian stories I've always been told about, Pearl was a beautiful allegory and Sir Orfeo was an interesting take on the story of Orpheus. Worth a read!
Just as good as Blindness in entirely different ways. It's mostly a satire and much darker than the first. Witty, dignified, a master of his craft.
The Binti books are great for a myriad of reasons. It's refreshing to read books from a perspective often ignored. They are about a girl from a tribe on Earth who's been allowed on an intergalactic university and how she experiences this– but really, it could just as well be about a girl from an African tribe who goes to a university in the United States.
It handles a great many themes: culture, heritage, multiculturalism, and what a big, diverse society could could like (and: how it definitely would not be without problems, but just trying to solve those and be open goes a long way!).
Lots of other welcome aspects: LGBT & the importance of pronouns are things that are a part of this novel, but in a casual way. Trauma, therapy, panic attacks, mental health are all normalized.
And all of this in books that are between 100 and 200 pages in length!
I do have some problems with them, especially in this second book: the actual plot itself feels somewhat lacklustre, and because it tries to handle so many things at once I feel like the story is a bit lost. I think this would work better more fleshed out. Especially in this second book, it felt a bit on-the-nose and condensed.
But it's still very much worth reading.
(oh also there's a spaceship in this one that's apparently a living being and it's now pregnant and will birth a baby-spaceship soon or something like that so 10/10 would read again)
In Calabria is a cynical novel. Not the whimsical, timeless mythical tale of a lonesome unicorn that rightly cemented Beagle as one of the all-time greats, instead a cynical tale of a modern-day encounter of a unicorn by a farmer its ramifications. It was a surprising read for me, with the expected beautiful prose, but a story that unsettled me with its realism (yes, I'm choosing to use that word, as inappropriate as it may seem).
This is a book of two parts.
In the first part, people stop dying in one specific country. It deals with the social repercussions, and just the consequences in general of this happening. One of the consequences, for example, is that people really are unable to die– so let's say they try to kill themselves or get their head bashed in or something, they'll still survive. The concept is explored in great detail in the first part. (Some of this might sound familiar to some of my fantasy friends– if you've read Elantris, yes, some of Elantris is very similar).
After this, more interesting developments happen. Death herself announces that people will start dying again, but this time they'll get a grace period of one week before they die, knowing that after one week, they'll be dead. I found this to be such an interesting concept of itself.
And then the ending. Very beautiful. Don't think I need to describe or spoil it– if you've read it, you'll have your own thoughts, and if you haven't, you should just read it.
Great book that makes you think about death, immortality and just life in general in new ways. Absolutely recommend it!
I don't like this book. I really wanted to like it, but I honestly consider it to be one of the worst books I've ever read. Parts of it I definitely enjoyed, but the general story I didn't like at all.I feel like it's a dangerous concept, mostly because it seems to imply that people commit suicide as a kind of revenge or as some kind of goal. There's no doubt that this has happened at some point, but in 90% of all cases there's no tangible list of “reasons”. A lot of parts seem silly and unrealistic. [a:David Foster Wallace 4339 David Foster Wallace https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1466019433p2/4339.jpg] (who eventually killed himself) has a great quote about suicidal people. He compares it to people who jump out of burning buildings. “It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames.” Those weren't my only problems with the book. It's too contrived. A lot of things are just a little too convenient. This is a book that glamorizes suicide. It trivializes life. I think Beth's review about sums up my thoughts on this book:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/202639713?book_show_action=true. Would not recommend to anyone.
Read while in Prague– which didn't actually as much to the experience as I was expecting. A solid debut.
Feels like entire series has slowly/indirectly been building up to what happened in this one. Great book!
Been meaning to read this book for a while since I love speculative fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, and the movie. I was lucky enough to see the movie in 70mm last year, and it really was kind of mind-blowing.
Finally picked up the beautiful Penguin Galaxy edition of this and read it today. It really is great. Complements the movie really well. If the movie is all “show, don't tell”, the book is all “tell, don't show”– and it really works. It's classic big-idea science fiction.
Like many other people, I've always been fascinated when hearing stories about EVE online, when something really big happened occasionally and it always sounded amazing, but I would never actually play the game myself. Still, I really wanted to know about some of the things that happened in it: history, wars, feuds, ...
I found this book. I loved it. It does exactly that: details the early years of EVE Online, giving you a chronological overview of how the game evolved, how alliances were formed, the many wars that happened, ... It's kind of thrilling and I love that this all happened in a fucking videogame.
Still– maybe I would've liked for the book to be longer, for him to go more in-depth, and the book DESPERATELY needed an editor. The things it describes are so cool, but the actual writing is so-so.
I remember starting this immediately after finishing the first book a few years ago and just not liking it. This was completely different! Where were all the characters I'd loved so much in the first one? I dropped it because I wasn't really feeling like reading it, but finally picked it up again today.
It's easily just as good as the first book. An overwhelmingly optimistic character-driven book of identities. Loved it.
This was one of my favorite series when I was younger and on a re-read, it holds up way better than I remember. The setting and idea is fantastic, the worldbuilding is shoddy yet kind of brilliant– the protagonists are unconventional and it just feels very unique. Feels like a YA version of Senlin Ascends at times.
The first line just sets things up perfectly, too:
“It was a dirk, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”
Closing lines:
"You aren't a hero, and I'm not beautiful, and we probably won't live happily ever after," she said. "But we're alive, and together, and we're going to be all right."
A joy to read; McKillip's hallmark lyrical prose coupled with a fairly simple story, slowly unraveling without any obtuseness you sometimes find in some of her works. One of her all-time greats for me, a slow-burning mystery resonating as firmly as some of her more famous works.
I think it's a bit of a mess– I loved reading the book and would definitely recommend it to people I know, but it's not perfect. It felt like a mix of dystopian classics (like 1984, We, Brave New World, and what have you, but simpler, more in-your-face) with generic Young Adult. It has all these great themes which I love yet it's filled to the brim with YA-clichés and romance. It's a brilliant book– for its audience.
The worldbuilding is fantastic. The characters were fleshed out and relatable. The romance felt realistic and real, and while the book felt a bit slow at times, it's a quick read.
The concept is great and the execution is not what I was expecting. It's worth a read.
It has a little bit of everything. Loved it, definitely a must-read for any fans of Brandon Sanderson!
I can't help but feel somewhat disappointed. I loved it from the start, but then it kind of lost steam and wasn't nearly as funny as it was in the beginning the longer it went on. I don't know. I love Gaiman and I've read some Pratchetts (but wasn't exactly WOWed by his discworld books) but this, while still a good and pretty funny read, wasn't anywhere close to what I was expecting it to be. I've seen it praised like crazy for the past few years, and I know it's been popular for ages, but... that was it?
I loved the concept! I loved some of the jokes. But ultimately, I feel like it was missing something. Maybe that's my fault.
I first read this book three months ago, after reading the entire Mistborn series. Now, after having finished every single work in the Cosmere except for White Sand, it makes even more sense and is even more enjoyable. It offers a beautiful insight into the Cosmere and a kind of “behind the scenes” view of Mistborn. It's perhaps the most meta-cosmere book yet.
I pushed through about 25% of this but just had to give up. I really wanted to like it, too, since I loved the recent “adaptation” by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Sadly, this reads like a super dry textbook you'd get in some history class in the 50s in the US. I don't know how Stapledon managed to make a topic like this so mind-numbingly uninteresting, but he managed.
DNF at 26%!
Third review, rating unchanged, 4 years after my first re-read. I've been craving another re-read for many years now and finally relented, intending to re-read the entire series and finally read the last Earthsea novel I've been saving.
This remains my all-time favorite book (series). In the past few years I've read hundreds of books of varying form, quality, setting and style; yet never have I been able to find anyone like Ursula K. Le Guin. She was truly one of a kind. I found it funny to re-read my first review now, simply one sentence: “Beautifully written but lacking in pace.” On this re-read, I found the pacing to be perfect, not a moment wasted.
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“This convention was and still is so dominant that it's taken for granted—“of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.
But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory.
I didn't and don't think this way; my mind doesn't work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting—danger, risk, challenge, courage—to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.
Or does might make right?
If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don't play war games.
To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn't the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.”
Three years after reading this for the first time, I found myself drawn to it again. By now, I've gone through most of Le Guin's bibliography, completely falling in love with all of her writings, but it's the first time I revisited this.
Rarely has a book enamoured me like this. What impresses me the most about her work, and this book in particular, is how she doesn't waste a single letter. She manages to put so much in this book of only 200 pages. I don't know many writers (perhaps Calvino?) who are this expertly capable of packing such great information, atmosphere and value in such few words.
I am impressed by Earthsea's richness and depth. On a re-read, I loved the ending even more than the first time I read this.
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Previous review, 4 stars:
“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
Beautifully written but lacking in pace.