Ben Saufley
I loved The Paper Menagerie—one of my favorite books in recent years. It was full of life and really fascinating ideas and characters. I didn't feel the same about The Grace of Kings, which felt, for large swaths, like a summary. I only really settled into an understanding of the main characters and the thrust of the novel in probably the second half of the book, and even then many new chapters started by introducing characters, spending a while telling their back story, and then having them pop into the “present” timeline just to vanish for one reason or another. By the end of the book, it had established a rhythm and had focused more on the lives and stories of a few primary characters, and I enjoyed that. But I'm giving it a 3 because much of the book was spent summarizing great historical events and jumping around a bit confusingly in time, and not focusing on the human elements of the story.
After having just finished [b:Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition 22827628 Midnight's Furies The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition Nisid Hajari https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407814080s/22827628.jpg 42381651], I was interested to read this book, which was discussed as a kind of compliment to that book—Midnight's Furies being a more historical overview, Indian Summer being a bit more of a personal story. I think I enjoyed this book more than that one, for that reason—but I also found myself a bit more engaged here because of the personal stories woven into the history, where Midnight's Furies at times felt like a long list of incidents of sectarian violence and while I liked that book and felt like I got some idea of the course of the history from it, this book helped me anchor these events in time a bit by connecting them a bit more to the personal stories that shaped them. Both books focused more on Nehru than on Jinnah, on India more than on Pakistan, so I'm curious to find a book that focuses more on the latter, because I feel like while both books appeared to work to be impartial, I only ended up with mostly one side of the story.An interesting subplot of this book was the light with which the author clearly viewed Gandhi, which was a lot less favorable than my (admittedly very broad) impression. He didn't believe in germ theory and was (by this account) very weird about women! Interesting stuff, even if—as with all nonfiction—it only presented part of the picture.
One of my favorite genre books in a long time. Such an interesting world, magic system, political structure. It's not particularly literary, focusing more on characters, dialog, and plot than on evocation or atmosphere, and honestly a bunch of its pieces are standard fare for YA with a female protagonist (I don't know if the author considers this YA but it shares some traits regardless: outcast, “broken” girl is suddenly very important, torn between two boys, etc). Yet it still does a really great job fleshing out this world. I'm really looking forward to the next one.
Entertaining and competently written. Hugely formulaic, built on tons of familiar tropes, beginning to end, but well-enough put together. I might listen to more. Early on, the freed slave gives this small out-of-nowhere Ayn Rand rant about the value of struggling to survive that almost made me put down the book. But in the end I didn't get a ton of that—in fact I got some stuff that was at times quite contrary to it—so I'm happy to have finished it. I might read the next one.
If I'm being honest, this one is getting an extra star for “I'm clearly too stupid to understand this.” I didn't really enjoy it. Nakata's storyline was interesting, although it never really amounted to anything concrete. There was a lot of “he didn't know how he knew; he just knew” which in real life is an interesting phenomenon, but in fiction just feels like a cop-out. And when it all came to a head, there was clearly a metaphor or some kind of symbolism that I just missed entirely. Kafka's storyline, meanwhile, was full of horniness and potential incest and mostly just made me uncomfortable. Also a bit of what I would consider to be mishandling of a trans character.I loved [b:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2195464 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473397159s/2195464.jpg 2475030], and the writing style here was in a similar vein: relatively sparse and matter-of-fact, which I appreciate (though some of the sexual scenes were made all the more uncomfortable by it), but I just didn't really enjoy or, I think, understand this book. I've been told I should try [b:Norwegian Wood 11297 Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386924361s/11297.jpg 2956680], and I've always heard good things about [b:The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327872639s/11275.jpg 2531376]. So I'm not sure I'll give up on Murakami after this book. But it may be a while before I attempt another one.
An interesting book. Definitely a distinct world among much of the YA fantasy I've read, and I appreciated that. I could've done with a bit more character development, and at times a bit more description of where we were, what was ... actually happening. The prose got pretty flowery in places—sometimes, it worked, but sometimes it took me out of it. A lot of kind of extravagant descriptions that failed to actually give me a visual picture of a person, place, or thing.
I liked it, but I didn't really finish the book feeling like I wanted to return to the world and characters, because I'd only just started getting to know them when it wrapped up.
I bought this immediately when I read that Neal Stephenson said, “Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet.”
That may have jacked up my expectations too high.
It felt a lot like a lot of other books I've read in the genre. The contemplations of autonomy were really pretty interesting but far from the focus of the book, which was entertaining enough and had pretty standard implications regarding capitalism and tech, but didn't really hold much emotional weight or any particularly new and compelling information. I'd have liked more examination of any one single theme the book had.
Entertaining. Just about everything I expected from it. My wife and I had the mystery roughly figured out from maybe the midway point, maybe a bit before that, but I can say we were never confident that we were correct, which is just about all you can ask of this type of thing.
We were listening to it on Audible, which has four different voice actors for the four main characters, and we constantly had to pause to sort out which character was which. It was a while into the book before I realized I was confusing two or three of the dudes, and for a while I was forgetting which one had said which earlier on. I think that's just... high school drama, right? The names all blend together when you're hearing it secondhand.
Man, I was really interested in reading this book and I did not enjoy it. It reads like a fever dream, and not in any sort of compelling or intriguing way. The heavy, invented colloquial speech is distracting. The plot is not ... really a plot, it's more of a montage of scenes. I found myself moderately interested in the flashbacks to Roland's childhood, because things actually happened there and there was a bit of an understanding of the world he lived in, and there were real secondary characters. Just about everything in the present was hazy and disjointed, void of character or place, and building up to a climax that really wasn't. This is only my second King book (the first was [b:11/22/63 10644930 11/22/63 Stephen King https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327876792s/10644930.jpg 15553789], which I really enjoyed even if I felt the ending got away from him), but my experience with this one was wildly different from the last. I think this book was written much earlier in his career and was maybe more experimental for him?The good news is that this is one series that I don't find myself compelled to finish. I have too many series to read already.
I still really like the world Weeks has built, but I had several issues with this book:
The most glaring is that there was no real overarching plot – it's just a book to, presumably, get you from book three to the final conflict in book five. A lot of stuff happened, but as a book on its own it had no real arc. I don't hate just spending some time in this world, but when it was all over, I was left feeling a bit disappointed.
The other thing that bugged me was the overwhelming horniness of the first two thirds. You'd get a chapter of plot and then a chapter of male desire. I understand that some of this stuff served the plot to a limited extent, but the amount of breasts discussed, and the volume of women throwing themselves at men just became tiresome. It made me think of that meme about “men writing female characters” (Google it). And it was disappointing because much of the rest of the book was really fun and interesting.
The plot has still got me hooked, though, and there's one book left. I'll definitely pick it up when it drops.
I kind of want to give more stars because this isn't really bad but it's really ... it's not a full book. It's one thing that happens, and more than that it's a thing that happens to the children and basically requires no participation. This is a feeling I've had about the series for a while: the mythology and prophecy are really interesting but then the kids just experience it. They just watch great uncle Merry be cool, and they basically don't do anything. They're more passive even than many other kids in a genre full of kids mostly experiencing adventures rather than participating in them. Combine that with the fact that this feels like a short more than a full story, and I can't really give it a particularly good rating. I'm still going to read the next one, though.
Listened on Audible, which adds (as far as I can tell) even more rambling digressions than the book apparently has (in the form of footnotes – called out as such in the audiobook). It's an interesting memoir. Didn't answer a ton of questions – in fact, it prompted a few I still don't have answers for. He discusses “regrets” and then lists things that of course he should be proud of... that one stuck out to me because it was as the book was ending.
It's not just a book of his comedy. It's heartfelt. But there's still a lot of comedy interspersed. It's a fun read (or listen). I'd recommend it.
As I approached the end of the first book I was not convinced that I'd read the second. It was fun, its magic system relatively unique, but the overall story just hadn't pulled me in too much; I didn't get a sense of the world, or its inhabitants besides a small few. But the last chapter of the first book, the cliffhanger with the other prism (to avoid spoiling anything), intrigued me. I said, alright, I'll give it one more book. And I'm glad I did, because this one was a lot of fun. The world really filled itself out; the many interwoven plots were fun and constantly intriguing; and now I have to finish this whole long series. I've just gotta know. Sounds like I'll have to wait for the fifth book too.
My one complaint is that this one had a few superfluous and silly sexual encounters – an issue I tend to have with the genre as a whole. I'm sitting in traffic listening to this audiobook when all of a sudden this entirely unnecessary sex scene or a few paragraphs about breasts interrupt the flow of the story. I'm no prude, but I don't really read for titillation, and when it does so little for the story especially, it just undermines my enjoyment of a book. Thankfully these little interludes were a small fraction of the book.
I've already bought the third.
There's some interesting stuff here but it's shoved between hypocritical self-aggrandizement (so much disdain for “businessmen” while simultaneously describing himself as the same thing in different words), weird takes on science (in one breath bragging for creating polyester garments; in the next ranting about the risks of nuclear power and GMOs), and company promotion. Some thoughts about what a business can do to be responsible in the modern world, some thoughts about what humankind can do to stem the tides of climate change ... these were good things. But they were delivered in weird patches and at times filled with assertions that made many assumptions I wasn't willing to make.
He has a weird relationship with science. And he says “dirtbag” a lot in a context that I'd never heard before, but I guess that's a thing.
Didn't feel like a full story. Felt like a mini-adventure, which I'd assumed was because it was tacked onto an otherwise-complete trilogy ... but the epilogue indicates there's more coming. So this is a mini-adventure between real stories? I'm annoyed, because the tease at the end and the foreshadowing throughout is way more intriguing than this story was. That said, it was fun to pop back into this world, regardless.
I read Ta-Nehisi Coates's [b:Between the World and Me 25489625 Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451435027s/25489625.jpg 44848425] last year, a book that obviously draws a lot of inspiration from this one (including, I think, its title?). I'd recommend this book to anyone. It's a very short read, and it's very insightful. On top of that, while it's always worth noting that the abused have no obligation to consider the feelings of their abuser, Baldwin's words here are sympathetic and perhaps forgiving. I want to say more but everything I write just sounds dumb. Just read it, it's short.
Took a little while to get started. Dwelled maybe a bit too long on the politics of being a parent in an upper class community – I see why those bits were there but I feel like there was too much of it before the book established its pace and intent. But once it got going it was surprisingly interesting and well-told.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. I think it handles a lot of issues with delicacy and appropriate gravitas – understanding consent, with no hint of “boys will be boys” or anything – but the very premise is really concerning to me. As a YA book, especially, its premise of a girl who's killed herself and left tapes to point the blame at other people is worrying. Having had my own struggles with depression in adolescence, I think that the idea of weaponized suicide is dangerous and could be easily seductive to a kid who has those same struggles. The line between recognizing the consequences of our actions and saying “You are to blame for this person's suicide” is a tough one to find, but I think it has to be drawn.
SpoilerWeak spoiler, I guess: in the end, I think the focus on listening, reaching out, not just watching things happen to people is a good one. I think the lesson Clay learned, shown as he tries to reach out to someone else he thought might be troubled, is alright. But it feels secondary to the overarching narrative of punitive suicide.
I also think that Hannah was portrayed as far too lucid and balanced. Her decision is presented as a rational one, when in reality the mindset needed to actually do something like this is the opposite of rational, and while it's good to express sympathy, it's dangerous to treat such actions that way.
I'm not the kind of person who says “let's not let our kids read things like this,” because ... well, that's stupid. But I did have concerns about how the core premise was presented, and I think it's the sort of thing that, if I had a kid reading it, I'd probably want to discuss with him or her.
I also thought there were some minor issues with two-dimensional characters, and the kind of strange connection between Clay and Hannah (which felt forced).
I think it's probably worth reading (it's pretty short, if nothing else), but with a lot of caveats.
First: it's one half of a book. Apparently book two vindicates a lot of book one, but I'm not sure I want to give Suarez the pleasure of making me read a whole second book after this one.
Spoiler
Second: it takes a really interesting and plausible near-future premise and then, in the final act, switches to absurdist sci-fi. Killer robots, man.
Third: there's a nightclub scene very early on that is awful, unsettling, and unnecessary. It's supposed to, maybe, make the character bad? But then a few scenes later, the narrator clearly wants us rooting for him.
I guess that's it, really. Disappointing after some strong setup.
Very much not the book I was expecting – and that's probably good. I was expecting a kind of techno thriller along the lines of a bunch of other books (did anyone ever read Format C? I loved that book when I was a kid ). What it turns out to be is a satire. And it provoked much more thought in that way, I think. The thoughts it addresses are far from new but the way in which they're presented had me defending myself and my own worldview in the context of the implicit criticism.
It's still a bit shallow and oddly paced, but I enjoyed it and I'd probably recommend it.