Adam
2019 - I feel like I may upgrade my opinion of this one after it's had some time to sink in.
2022 - Yup. Reread this in anticipation of reading the sequel and definitely liked it more the second time around. There's quite a bit about the story that's deliberately opaque (i.e. the identity of the boy the main characters all seek), or runs off along tangents (i.e. I hope the business with Tracker's wolf eye has some relevance in the sequel), and piecing all that together while also acclimating to the idiosyncrasies of the author and the narrator (for example, James likes long conversations between pairs of characters where the speakers alternate without ever identifying who is saying which line of dialog) sort of made me bounce off it the first time. Much better the second time around, armed with familiarity.
I loved this series when I was like fourteen, and was wondering how well it held up. Eh, not bad for tie in fiction, I guess. Very of its time.
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.
Took my a while to get going with this one, since it's written for a field, political theology, with which I was not previously familiar, and engages heavily with a number of works of which I have only read one (Polyani's The Great Transformation). Once I got over the hurdles, though, I found it very interesting. The central idea is a definition of ‘demonization' lifted from Christian theology, where Satan etc. are said to have had free will which was used in order to rebel, establishing their blameworthiness. A similar idea exists in the neoliberal idea of economic freedom, where negative outcomes are blamed not on systemic issues, but on the nominally free decisions of individuals. What is important is that freedom under neoliberalism exists, not to uplift humanity, but to establish that each individual is nominally free to make economic choices and, thus, blameworthy for their own economic circumstances.
Awesome how even doom and gloom from just four years ago seems like sunny optimism from the perspective of 2020.
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.
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.
I was only reading this one for 372 pages, and I fell too far behind the podcast. I was in the middle of The Malazan Book of the Fallen at the time, and couldn't force myself to yank my attention out of that world and into Kaileb's ridiculousness often enough to keep up.
I'm giving this 3 stars on average, but I'd rate the five Corwyn books somewhat higher and the five Merlin books somewhat lower.
More like three and a half stars. I was slow to get going on this one, mostly because, while half my brain was focused on the story, the other half was distracted by the idea of a D&D campaign set entirely in an infinitely tall tower. Once I got going, though, I enjoyed this quite a bit.
Of all the writers who are not named Stephen King, Chuck Wendig is the most Stephen King.
Not bad. This is the first of his books I've picked up since The Dark Tower ended in 2004. It's definitely a Stephen King book. It's got that thing going where all the characters talk like they're from 1970's New England.
According to the author's note at the end, he first came up with the idea and wrote a little bit of it in 1977, but stopped because he wasn't confident in his ability to plausibly describe the conditions that might obtain in a town sealed off from the outside world by an invisible wall. I'd be interested to find out which portions of the story were original and which were added during his 2007 writing sessions, because there are really two stories here. There's a sort of cosmic horror piece about being toyed with by unknown inhuman forces that bookends a political horror piece about living in a polity driven mad by fear and willing to suspend civilized government in favor of an authoritarian who promises protection. The former almost seems like it was a short story pressed into service as a setup for the latter, which reads like an obvious reaction to the Bush years.
I remember being really impressed by this in 1998 when I originally read it but, in retrospect, it seems very pseudo-scientific. Might be worth a reread to see how it holds up.
I enjoyed it. It's weird, because there's virtually no characterization in his work, his narrative structure nearly always hews very closely to the junior high school essay “tell me what you're going to tell me, tell me, tell me what you just told me” paradigm, and the horrifying twists are easy to see coming from miles away, but his writing is atmospheric enough to make up for all that.
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.
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.
I read this for 372 pages, and while I don't think it's quite as bad as they make it out to be, it's also really not good.
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.
It's probably a bit unfair to judge a story from Dune's era by the standards of modern science fiction, so take it as understood that when I complain about, for example, cliches and overused tropes, I recognize that the genre was newer back then, and what's cliche today may have been fresh when the book was written. I also grant that much of what appears in Dune has become iconic. Seemingly every desert planet in sci fi, not to mention the occasional planet with appreciable precipitation, has giant burrowing worms infesting it, to take just one example. Having said that, though, I didn't read the book in 1965, I read it in 2009, so I'm less interested in what I might have thought had I read it forty years ago than I am in what I did think reading it today.
Dune certainly deserves an important spot in the history of the genre, but the copy of the novel I read proclaims itself, via a cover blurb, “Science fiction's supreme masterpiece”, which is going a bit far. I expect more than “eh, it got a number of things right, largely by doing them first, and the things it got wrong it got wrong in ways that used to be less tiresome” from a “supreme masterpiece”. It's probably worth mentioning here that I'd expect “Science fiction's supreme masterpiece” to be more firmly entrenched in the realm of science fiction. Dune is far enough to the “soft” side of the science fiction continuum that, like many other works (Star Wars, for example) it can be more fairly characterized as a fantasy where the superpowers are attributed to technology instead of magic.
The story is a scrapyard of tired, played out science fiction and fantasy tropes. In short, it's the tale of a deposed royal heir who flees to the wilderness, goes native with the noble savages living therein, learning their survival skills while imparting to them his civilized leadership, and eventually claims his throne, thus fulfilling a prophecy and achieving his special destiny. This all takes place against the background of one of my least favorite lazy stock settings, Feudalism in Space. The protagonist's noble house is uniformly upstanding and heroic, while the antagonist house that ousts them is uniformly evil and treacherous. The ultimate driving factor behind the plot is humanity's “racial memory” which somehow “knows” that the human race is stagnant and “wants” to further its evolution. Ugh.
The characters are poorly developed caricatures, particularly the protagonist. Paul-Maud'Dib is less a character than he is a collection of powers and abilities. He has no real weaknesses or character flaws. He's an insurmountable fighter, universally acknowledged as able to defeat any member of the Fremen, who are in turn universally acknowledged to be better than the Emperor's crack Sardaukar, who are universally acknowledged to be better than anyone else. He's also a wise leader, respected by the Fremen, and able to outwit his chief rivals, the Emperor, and the Bene Gesserit. From the age of fifteen, he is already taking charge of his mother, who is not only an adult but a trained Bene Gesserit, with all the mental and physical discipline inherent in that, and defeating Fremen in single combat. He has every superpower that canonically exists, having been not only trained as a Bene Gesserit, but also as a Mentat, not to mention combat training from the very best professional soliders. To top it all off, he is the prophesied Kwizatz Haderach, making him the only man with the genetic memory superpower normally restricted to Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers. By the age of, I believe, 19 he has displaced the Emperor and sits on the throne. I got a 77 out of a possible 100 by filling in an online Mary Sue test using Paul as a template, and this without knowing whether he and Frank Herbert share any interests (unlikely...I suspect Paul doesn't have any interests beyond reclaiming thrones and developing new powers).
Among all the other worn out tropes, I found myself scoffing at the Fremen's role as transparent stand-ins for a Lawrence of Arabia style view of Arab Muslims, noble savages awaiting the civilized leadership whose lack is all that prevents them from rising up and ousting one colonial power in favor of another, ostensibly more enlightened, colonial power. The scoffing rose to the level of actual offense, however, when I reached the scene in which the Fremen Reverend Mother refers to “our Sunni ancestors”, and realization set in that the Fremen are not merely the clumsy equivalent of Space Muslims, they are literally Space Muslims, in the Space Desert, controlling access to the Critical Space Resource. Further, these Space Muslims aren't even allowed to be Muslims. Rather than anything which might be recognizable as Space Islam, their religion has two identifiable aspects. First, a dream of ecological salvation given to them by a colonial scientist whom they, naturally, accept into their society and revere as a leader. Second, and more offensively, a prophecy artificially grafted onto their culture by the Bene Gesserit that, like something out of the wettest of T.E. Lawrence's wet dreams, predisposes them to give aid and comfort to a colonial who will someday appear to lead them. Again, I realize that 1965 was a different time, hell, Orientalism hadn't even been written yet, but the implications of the treatment of the Fremen in the story are unpleasant to say the least.
Overall, I'd give it two giant worms out of a possible five. The plot, while hackneyed, was almost entertaining enough to carry the cardboard characters and it has a number of interesting concepts which are, unfortunately dragged down by the unfortunate implication that colonialism is great, as long as you're from the right colonial power.
MMT isn't new to me, but this is the clearest, most concise explanation I've read. This is a book to give or lend to anyone who argues that the United States budget deficit restrains government action or that entitlement spending threatens federal bankruptcy.
Starts off really slow, but about halfway through, gets really interesting really fast.
Interesting read. I really enjoyed the first two thirds or so, which focus on McCandles' travels, and the very end, which discusses the possible reasons for his death. I thought the part in between, where the author talks about his own experiences and interviews the family were a a bit slow.