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At some point in the past, I bookmarked Qiu Miaojin's Wikipedia page. I forget why I looked her up, or why I bookmarked the page, but it sat there on my bookmarks bar for at least a year before I was able to get my hands on a copy of Last Words from Montmartre.

To preface this, I've been through a breakup, and I lived with death by my side for a while afterwards. At that time, I read Murakami's “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” That book was perfect for me to read at the time. My then-current life events gave me, I think, a greater appreciation for the book than I otherwise would have had. At the very least, if I had read the book earlier, I don't think I would have appreciated it nearly as much.

Perhaps the same would have been true for Last Words from Montmartre. I found myself, now, years later, healed from that experience, and completely unable to relate to Last Words' narrator. I should also say that I was completely unable to divorce the author from the narrator, and read this as nearly factual. I don't think I was wrong in doing this.

The first three-quarters of the book are a plod. The author just keeps going in circles, raging with herself, raging at her ex, and flip-flopping between the stages of grief. The book only gets interesting in the last quarter (which I read last - I didn't want to flip randomly between letters given how they were all, from my perspective, the same). In the last quarter, the narrator loses all sense of identity and it's impossible to make sense of who is who, what is happening, and when it happened. I didn't bother to try, because I took trying to be an exercise in futility. It seemed purposeful to me that this section was such a mess. But even given this mess, I failed to see what was so experimental, and so revolutionary about the novel. And I found myself unable to empathize at all with the author. All I can hope is the Crocodile book is better.

Really more like 2.5 stars.

This book had a lot of interesting ideas, such as magic undergoing some sort of reversal around the birth of Christ, but most of the interesting ideas either weren't explored enough in favor of the swashbuckling adventures of the time-traveling protagonist, who I never really took a shining to.
Brendan Doyle always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow survive by the skin of his teeth. He's not really that likeable, has some tragic backstory about his wife that is set up to be super-traumatic but barely plays into his character, and becomes annoyingly fatalistic in the second half of the book. I think it says something that I often found myself rooting for the antagonists, who always (from their perspective) got the short end of the stick from this annoyingly persistent and should-be-harmless protagonist, and most of whom have the sympathetic goal of rewriting history so that Egypt maintains its independence from British rule.

Reading the other reviews, apparently this is often described as a steampunk book, but it is really not in the slightest, so if that's what you're in it for, look elsewhere. All in all, it was a decently interesting book that kept me reading more from a passing “let's see what happens” as opposed to an attachment to any particular character or plot-thread.

Overall decent story and interesting world with some interesting characters, but the prose and editing left a LOT to be desired. A lot of missing semicolons (pet peeve I guess) and it felt often that scenes and transitional actions were missing. Also not a whole lot of description in terms of what things look like so it's mostly up to your imagination - could be a stylistic choice and could be considered bad or good but I felt neutral about that. Also, I went in expecting more of a science-fantasy gaspunk aesthetic but it turned out to be more sci-fi post-apocalyptic, which I usually dislike but this time it was alright.

I didn't get it

(3.5/5)

A very short but raw look at life in juvenile gangs of NYC in the 50's/60's, as well as the NYC prison system. Ellison is definitely no hero, and it's clear throughout the book that he had to ignore his ethics in order to get these scoops. But at the same time, he's fairly sympathetic to the delinquents, and the book is itself a visceral call for change. It also serves as a time capsule to the 50's/60's and gave me an insight as to how much has changed in NYC and how much has stayed the same.

One more thing - the edition I read includes a preface where Ellison admits that at the insistence of his editor, he fabricated a prominent element in the latter half of the book. The confession left me unsure as to whether Ellison fabricated anything else, but at the end of the day I believe that the book is real even if it's not true.

I felt similar about this book as the previous - awkward phrasing for too many of the characters (a lot of “one had to,” “one must”), not many of the characters were that likeable (especially Max), and confusing visual descriptions. However, there were parts where I found it hard to put down, and I think I'll continue reading the series.

Six-Gun Samurai is a short and relatively entertaining book, but one I don't think is suited to modern audiences. There's obviously a thread of Orientalism that runs through the whole thing, which I suppose was more common at the time this was written (1981) but I suspect most audiences today would cringe at.

I just want to take an aside to note that I do consume a lot of schlock, usually in the cinematic realm, and I'm not opposed to exploitation films and the ninja movies of the 80's. I think a big part of why this book rubbed me the wrong way was that while it's clear Lee is a bit of a history buff (at least when it comes to Western firearms and Japanese military history), the way he presented Japanese things was kind of weird. It was always like, “he put on his gehtas, his wooden sandals, and stepped out.” The clumsy use of Japanese terms (which in many cases are misspelled or poorly consteucted - “Ichi biru kudasai” instead of “Biru wo ippai kudasai”, “saki” instead of “sake”, “dom arigato” instead of “doumo”, and many more) felt like he was trying to show that he knew his stuff, but came up short. And did a lot of Orientalization while depicting feudal Japan. Anyway, back to the content.

There was a lot of portrayal of racism of the kind you'd find in the Old West, which I was fine with (the portrayal, not the racism). But the way one of the non-white characters was depicted kind of felt like a caricature to me. I wasn't sure whether Lee was trying to emulate the way a pulp story would flatten “ethnic” characters into stereotypes or whether he just writes that way.

The sex scene felt like it came a bit out of left-field and you guessed it, had more Asian mysticism. There was also a lot more sexual violence than I was expecting going in.

This was the first “Western” novel I've read and I'm not sure if some of the things I disliked came down to genre conventions or the author's choices. If you can get past the egregious Orientalism and sexual violence, you have yourself an interesting and somewhat silly fish-out-of-water swashbuckler story that you can finish in an afternoon. Still, I don't think I'll be reading the other entries in the series.

Short sci-fi read focused on the relations between two uneducated families, and some visitors, in a little oasis amid a world that's been destroyed by a red tide. There was a weird focus on miscegenation, but I wasn't around in the 70's to know if that was a reflection/rebuke of real-world sentiments. The patriarchs of either family were also uncomfortably boorish, but luckily the POV switches to the children later on. Overall, somewhat interesting, but you're not missing much if you skip it (although it is very short - I'm a slow reader and I managed to get through it in an evening).