Adam
I was really disappointed in this one. The first sixty percent or so is solid enough. We've got a locked room mystery, apparent supernatural goings on, travelers' stories about a mysterious Egyptian tomb and its nameless inhabitant, a modern woman who is a reincarnation of, or possessed by, or otherwise under the influence of, an ancient queen who swore she would transcend death. Awesome! I want to know what happens next!
A whole lot of nothing, it turns out. From this point until finally, in the very last chapter, the plot picks up again, absolutely nothing happens. We get an entire chaper where one character attempts, via just page after page of pseudoscientific gibberish, to convince his companions (and, though him, Stoker attempts to convince the reader) that there may be some rational basis, probably involving radium, for the reincarnation of ancient Egpytians in the modern world. We get an entire chapter where our viewpoint character ponders his love for his fiance, and his worry that maybe her being the avatar of a dead Egyptian queen isn't the best thing for their impending nuptials. We get an entire chapter where that same character ponders the implications of the reality of Egyptian death magic for modern religion. We get an entire chapter on the logistics of packing and moving items from one house to another.
Once the plot finally gets moving again, the end of the story is actually not half bad, if extremely ambiguous. I was just so worn down from the grind of a third of a book with nothing going on that I was more than ready for it to be over.
Initially, I had this rated more highly, but upon further reflection, I'm downgrading it a bit. I think I'm landing it on being a book that, despite my enjoying it very much while I was reading it, isn't really very good. Spoilers ahead.
It's fun while it's going on. The story is told in three different decades, the 1930's, 50's, and 70's, as historian Rossi, then his student Paul and daughter Helen, and finally their daughter pursue Dracula. There's a search for the tomb of Vlad Tepes, menacing vampiric visitations, multiple interesting European settings, an adventure that feels half vampire novel and half cold war spy story, a heretical order of medieval monks, an Ottoman secret society devoted to killing Dracula, and lots of mysteries. The problem is, none of it ever really hangs together.
As a prime example, the book spends a lot of time extremely concerned with a series of maps that purportedly show the location of Dracula's tomb. Our protagonists are constantly worried that they might be lost, worried that they might fall into the wrong hands, intrigued by the warnings inscribed around their borders and by the mysterious legend “Reader, awaken him with a word” written on the most detailed one. They spend a ton of time chasing after them, protecting them, copying them, wondering where they came from. Their ultimate significance? Zero. The protagonists arrive at the valley where the tomb is located, not by using the maps, but by following an unrelated lead (someone tells them that they learned the lyrics to a folk song that appears to reference Dracula in a particular valley). As they arrive, one observes that the valley sort of resembles the one on the map, and then never brings it up again. They discover the location of the tomb not by checking where within the valley the maps show it to be located but, again, by following an entirely different lead (they coincidentally arrive just in time for a peasant festival during which a religious icon that appears to reference Dracula is displayed, then break into the basement of the church where it is stored). When you hang a gun over the mantle in the first act, and then your characters spend the majority of the second act talking about that gun, taking it down to polish it, verifying that ammo for it is close at hand, etc., then, inevitably, in the third act, someone will get smacked over the head with the fireplace poker, I guess.
Similarly, Dracula's secret plot turns out to be...lame? Also, incoherent? As far as I can piece it together, it goes:
1) Entice promising academics by giving them, under mysterious circumstances, an old book, blank except for a ‘DRAKULYA' woodcarving.
2) When these academics begin researching any topic related to Dracula, intimidate them, using means up to and including deadly violence against people close to them, until they stop. I suppose we can infer that this is meant as a test to see which among them are really serious about the research, but that's never explicitly stated, or even strongly implied, and, further, it makes no sense, given who is actually chosen.
3) Eventually, one of these academics will demonstrate their worth. That one will then be spirited away to be converted to vampirism and spend eternity...uhhh...cataloging Dracula's library? That's seriously the endgame. Dracula has an extensive collection of antique books and needs help organizing them.
So...what? And why? In the earliest timeline, Rossi receives one of these little books, gets pretty close to finding the tomb, has his mind partially wiped by Dracula for some reason, and gives up. In the middle timeline, Paul is given his book, tells his academic advisor Rossi about it, Rossi admits that he once pursued this quest as well, and then Rossi is more or less immediately abducted and taken away to organize Dracula's card catalog. What the hell, Dracula? Did you forget about Rossi in the intervening twenty years? Did you change your mind about him? Was saying, “Oh, yeah, I used to research Dracula too” the final test?
Further, how is Dracula managing all this book distribution, grad student intimidation, and abduction? Is he zipping back and forth across the Atlantic himself to do it in person? Does he have a network of minions? We only ever meet one minion, referred to as the Evil Librarian by our protagonists, and this guy constantly shows up no matter what continent we're on. And what's his deal anyway? He's explicitly not a vampire, since he walks around in broad daylight, yet he bites Helen, to apparent supernatural effect. He sometimes seems to be working for Dracula, sometimes at cross purposes with Dracula, as he's angry that Rossi was chosen instead of him. Why does Dracula even need Rossi when this dude is ready and willing to be his librarian of the night?
Finally, less a complaint and more just something that amused me, is the fact that the entire story is told as a series of conversations Paul is having with and, later, letters he has written to, his daughter. Incredibly long, exhaustively detailed conversations and letters. I assume we're just sort of supposed to imagine that she starts reading a letter, then our mental image gets blurry and fades to Paul's first person perspective, and that everything we see there isn't explicitly in the letter, but I prefer to imagine Paul laying out in excruciating detail for his daughter the exact content of every meal he ate on a trip he took twenty years ago, along with every horny thought he ever had about her mother.
I bought all five collected volumes of Smith's stories a couple years ago and have been making it a point to kick off my fall reading with one of them each year. I liked this one less than the first two, I think because it's heavy on his sci fi stories, which I don't find as interesting as his more fantasy based stories. There are some really great stories in here. but also some that are just a slog.
I have no idea how to even rate something like this. I would never have read it not for the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast. First and foremost, it's terrible. Absolutely terrible. But it's so thoroughly terrible in such a naive way that it ends up being sort of charming, in the same way that something like The Eye of Argon is charming. So, 1 star for the book's actual merits, and five for how hard I laughed reading it, averaged to three.
I'm very divided on this one. I'm rating it a three, as the average of maybe a four for ideas and a two for execution. The core concept of the book is solid, I dug the framing device of making a documentary, the use of a sixties slash seventies cult gave me oddly nostalgic vibes, the old friends are awesomely creepy, and the bits where the characters encounter them are satisfyingly scary. Unfortunately, though, actually reading it is a bit of a slog. I think there are just too many repeated beats. Kyle and Dan travel to a new location, interview an ex-cultist, learn essentially the same information, encounter disturbing signs that they aren't alone, argue about whether to continue working on the documentary, then Kyle gets attacked at night, over and over. There's very little forward momentum until maybe three quarters of the way through the book.
Also, at one point, an American character refers to a flashlight as a torch. Unforgivable.
One of the strangest and most interesting things I've read recently. Most of the book is an expanded and somewhat different account of the first section of Dracula, with Harker trapped in the Count's castle. That part is a fun read, with a lot of creepy detail, and a fun alternate version of the original story. After that, it appears that Valdimar was working from an outline, rather than an actual finished novel. This part of the book drops the conceit of presenting itself as a series of journals, letters, etc written by the protagonists and becomes a third person narrated list of plot points with very little connection between them, like a breathless grade school kid relating the plot of a movie they saw. It's actually sort of funny to read. Lucy (Lucia in this version) is introduced on page 224, is dead by page 236, it's remarked that Arthur believes she is rising from her grave at night, and no one does anything with this information. My favorite is the last chapter (‘The Count Killed'), which is all of two pages long and in which Seward disappears, is rescued, and goes mad, the asylum burns to the ground, he and Morris are injured, admitted to a hospital, and released, the group discovers Dracula's resting place, breaks in, and kills him (he briefly pops up when they discover him, with the narrator helpfully noting ‘...it was sundown!', but Van Helsing stabs him to death in the next sentence, so that's all right) . Two pages. I'm pretty sure the original has bits that go on for more than two pages just about Van Helsing soliloquizing about what a good moral women Mina is.
Another 372 pages read. 12 chapters of unhinged weirdness, 1960's British humor, whooshing dogs, and nothing resembling a plot. Every non-dog creature n the world falls into a coma, while the dogs wake up with magic powers. An alien shows up and offers the dogs the chance to get out of Dodge before humanity possibly nukes itself to death. The dogs briefly discuss it, decide not to leave, and everything goes back to normal. I mean briefly. It's like three pages.
The best part is the bit where the dogs wonder if Cruella Deville might somehow be responsible for the coma slash magic powers thing, discover she's also unconscious and can't be behind it, then debate whether they should just murder her in her sleep, since they're there anyway.
Picked this up because I enjoy Imbler's work at Defector. Took me a while to get into because I expected it to be mostly about the sea creatures, but after I got over the disappointment at it not being the book I thought I was going to be reading, eventually the autobiographical parts grew on me, and I enjoyed the book I was actually reading.
It's hard to rate a book like this. It starts off as a 2020 campaign memoir, then becomes an outline of the Bernie Sanders platform. Everything in it is true and important, five stars on content and urgency, but it's nothing I didn't already know and agree with, so not very interesting to actually read.
I originally read this when it was new, but decided to reread in advance of reading some of Piketty's other books, as I remembered very little of it beyond r>g. It's a slow read, thanks to the mountain of data presented in it, but well worth the time to read. Easily one of the most important books of the last decade.
I think I would have liked this much better had I read it when it was published in 1997. As it is, I think it's two thirds of an amazing, thoughtful book, dragged down by hurried, pat ending.
What Copeland is really writing about here, I think, although the term wasn't in widespread use yet, is the neoliberal revolution, the period when the concept of the public good fell into disuse, to be replaced by a series of individual consumer choices. Watching his characters sleepwalk through the dissatisfying lives created by the lack of any purpose other than becoming more efficient workers who are then able to be more prolific consumers, while confronted with the sometimes literal ghosts of their teenage aspirations is an interesting read. I was disappointed, though, that the proposed solution to this state of affairs, delivered via worldwide apocalypse and spiritual intervention, is a lame “Question everything!”. Like, no, man, that's just another individual choice. Meh.
These books are so goddamned weird and I love them for it. Having said that, I don't know if this final entry quite sticks the landing. I'd have given the first half of this an easy five stars, but the second half (starting from around the point the Alexander is introduced) drags it down a bit, I think.
Things I liked:
- It was interesting to have so much more of the story told from a non-Mycroft perspective.
- The expansion of scope to include the actions of so many non-focal characters to show the wider impact of the war.
- The rapid fire betrayals, side swaps, clarifications, and re-allying of so many factions really brought home the idea of a war of many factions with no fixed geographic territory.
- The weaving in of the Homeric elements.
Things I didn't:
- The first three books played a lot with ambiguity and Mycroft's unreliable perception to make it unclear whether the supernatural elements of the plot might actually be more mundane, but this last one seems to take a much firmer stance, especially toward the end, and I think it loses something for that.
- Petty, sure, but more or less every viewpoint character seems to be, to some extent, a partisan of the faction in the real underlying war that I disagree with.
- The constant (lampshaded, even!) deus ex machinas. With a few exceptions, pretty much the only way for a focal character to “die” seems to be getting Bridgered into someone else.
- The last fifth or so of the book is basically just people standing on a stage making announcements.
Is there a term similar to “secondary world fantasy” for stories with no fantastic elements, but set in a non-Earth world? Secondary world historical fiction maybe? Anyway, this is that. Quick, clever, and enjoyable. Gets a bit of side eye for making the aristocratic ruling class (Romans or Byzantines, basically) black and the subjugated lower classes white. Different world, different history, different arbitrary hierarchy, yeah, but uncomfortable, and I don't think a good way.
I don't know why this took me so long to read. I found the book sort of slow to get going, got like a third of the way through, and then got distracted by the idea of re-reading Chris Claremont's entire Uncanny X-Men run. Then I picked this book back up and burned through the remaining two thirds in a day and a half.
Anyway, with more granular ratings, I'd give it three and a half. I do think it starts off sort of slow, but it picks up very quickly. I dig the slow motion apocalypse taking place just outside the boundaries of the story, and the way it mirrors Jane's personal situation.
Was expecting further adventures of the Wayfarer crew, and was at first sort of bummed to be reading a mostly unrelated story featuring a minor character from the first book and a character that was literally born in the last few pages of that book, but got over that pretty quickly. You can't really call this a sequel, as it shares almost nothing with the first book other than being set in the same universe and sharing the original's fascination with characters who have non-human psychologies while still being fully realized persons.
I read this a couple years ago, but did a reread after picking up the rest of the series for cheap. I remembered it being sort of a lighthearted space adventure, and it primarily is that, but I'd forgotten how much work and detail Chambers puts into building characters with distinctly alien psychologies who are still recognizably people. Definitely worth a read just for that.
