Mandy
3.5 stars. This was OK, a serviceable mystery with a relatively predictable conclusion. I almost wonder whether Beaton deliberately set out to shock people with the character of Agatha Raisin though. I went in expecting something akin to a more updated version of Miss Marple, but instead, Agatha Raisin is the loudest and most non-PC middle-aged London career woman you can imagine. Put her into a rural country village that does somewhat come out of Miss Marple, and that's basically this story.
I'm not sure whether to feel invested in Agatha Raisin or not. She is by turns self-centered and abrasive, but also sometimes shows a bit of her vulnerability and loneliness. I was a little disappointed in Roy's character trajectory however. He was a pretty funny sidekick all the way till the end where he seemed to do a 180. The character of Col. Lacey also seemed a bit randomly shoved in for no reason except to give Agatha Raisin some kind of love interest almost near the end of the book.
The mystery itself is... okay. I had a lot of suspects in mind, all of which I felt would've been more interesting than the one that was revealed at the end. The revelation felt also rather predictable, with Agatha bungling everything up (perhaps that's the point). I particularly suspected the vicar's wife - I felt like she couldn't have been so nice for nothing! But that would've been a Christie-esque ending, perhaps.
I guess I would continue on this series if I was in the mood for something a bit more brainless to read.
4.5 stars. This was actually more fun than I expected. It took a while to get going, but when it did I was hooked.
Right from the get-go, I was cautiously delighted by the sharp humour that characterizes Howard's writing style, particularly suitable for the atmosphere of this book. If I had to nitpick, I'd say sarcasm as a device was used perhaps just a tad bit too often and it made the book felt a little dated, but luckily it was nowhere near overused and insufferable, so I could close an eye to it.
The premise was pretty interesting too, although it took me quite a number of chapters to really get into the groove of things. Johannes Cabal is a brilliant scientist and necromancer who travels into Hell to make a bet with Satan - to get a hundred souls in the span of a year in exchange for his own soul back. To help him do it, Satan provides him with a diabolical carnival which he must run and use to tempt people to sign over their souls. Cabal enlists the help of his brother, charismatic vampire Horst Cabal, to help him run the place.
At first it felt a bit aimless, like I wasn't sure what I was waiting for and what the whole aim of everything was, but when I realised that this was going to be a somewhat episodic adventure where we follow Cabal and Horst as they meet different people and situations along the travels of the carnival, I felt like I could settle into that vibe and finally found the groove of the story.
The ragtag bunch of people/demons Cabal surrounds himself with are generally also quite memorable, if not endearing. The most outstanding of the bunch is definitely Horst Cabal, and the love-hate, push-pull relationship between Johannes and himself. I enjoyed their dynamic and the way Horst was written. Johannes himself as a character was also intriguing - we know he wants his soul back for a reason but he never quite reveals that reason until right at the end. We're given enough glimpses and hints along the way to want to continue reading though. Importantly, Johannes and Horst are also distinctive enough characters that they don't blend into each other, which forms the basis of having a believable and strong character dynamic.
Though this book wasn't without its flaws, ultimately it felt like everything worked out pretty well for me. I enjoyed the tone, the writing style, the premise, and the characters, and I'm curious to know what will happen next, so that's gonna keep me going for the next book!
The stories in this one range from bewildering and I couldn't quite figure out the point of them, to being really memorable. Interestingly, the one I probably enjoyed the most was only one that was probably the most non-fictional, “Lucky Break”. These stories definitely aren't geared towards children as most of Dahl's iconic works are, but feel a bit more like what we would call young adult nowadays, although definitely much more brutal than most YA stuff.
“The Boy Who Talked with Animals” is about a fisherman who hauls up a giant snapping turtle near a Jamaican beach resort. While the guests and fisherman alike are clamouring over how best to kill and consume the turtle, its life is saved by a little boy who claims to have spoken to the turtle and so pressures his parents to pay off the fisherman and hotel manager to save the turtle's life. This one was pretty touching, although I couldn't help feeling a little sad for the boy's parents in the end.
“The Hitch-hiker” didn't feel like it had a proper ending. Our protagonist meets a hitch-hiker who eggs him on to test out the speeds on his new flashy car, but then is caught by a very mean policeman. The hitch-hiker later explains his talent to get them out of a scrape. The story ends on a very strange note, like there is no hint of a resolution and I don't get what the whole point of this story was.
The same can be said for “The Mildenhall Treasure”, which was even less interesting than “The Hitch-hiker” even though it was about people finding buried Roman treasures in a farm. I couldn't quite figure out what was the point of writing this, but apparently it's based on a true story so I'll have to do a bit more research on that one.
“The Swan” was probably one of the most memorable stories of the lot as well, only because it was the most brutal. It dealt a lot with the theme of bullying and I was beginning to wonder why Dahl had a thing for depicting cruelty in children, inflicted both by children and adults. I found this also to be the case in the other Dahl book I just read today, The Witches. In any case, “The Swan” was way worse than that, although I guess I could understand why the ending was left deliberately ambiguous, but also there's a certain sense of melancholy and hopelessness in that ambiguity and that was probably deliberate as well.
“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” is the cornerstone of the book, and actually probably the most wholesome of the lot. Essentially, it talks about a man who is only motivated by self-interest and greed to embark on a pursuit for a magical talent, but the discipline it required of him to even achieve those talents changed his entire worldview. This was probably the most well-rounded story with a proper conclusion.
“Lucky Break”, as I had mentioned earlier, is really Dahl recounting bits of his life story and how it all led up to his actual lucky break as a writer when he was in America at the tail end of WW2. This was the most absorbing story to me. I hadn't known that Dahl was a fighter pilot, or that he had himself been the victim of bullying and some really brutal treatment (although probably normal at the time) at boarding school, and that probably accounts for the casual violence that his books can sometimes have. Not that, I think, Dahl was a proponent for violence on children, but he seems to have grown up with it as a normal part of life. In any case, it was fascinating to hear about how Dahl had a run-in with C. S. Forester who was generous enough to help him get his first lucky break with a publisher.
“A Piece of Cake” felt like a fever dream, but probably deliberately so. Dahl describes this as a non-fictional account of his own experience when he crash-landed as a fighter pilot, but I've read that there were some details that may have been changed. Nevertheless, it's hard to reconcile this pretty hard-hitting account with all the traumas of being severely injured in war with the children's author that we all know.
Overall, some pretty interesting stories in here but definitely don't expect anything geared towards children in this book.
Idk man. This is such a classic children's book and I've heard so much good things about it, but honestly it fell a little flat for me. I think I would've appreciated it a lot more if I had read it for the first time as a child instead of an adult almost in my mid-30s though.
It isn't so much that it was childish - in fact, I think this book was shockingly mature in a lot of its elements. In fact, I felt like it had some themes that were almost a bit too politically charged for a children's book imo. It was very disparaging over a society that is driven by unison and equality, and to my jaded adult brain it feels a bit too much like anti-communism, perhaps appropriate given that the book was first published in the early 60s at the height of such tensions. I'm personally no supporter of communism, but at the same time I feel like because the book is aimed at children, it has to necessarily simplify communism into something digestible and therefore kinda paints any society where everyone is encouraged to blend together into a homogenous whole as somehow evil and unnatural. This simplification is dangerous imo and can become problematic when viewing other cultures in the world outside of America and maybe Europe.
I was also a little creeped out by this puppy love between 14 year old Calvin and I think 12 year old Meg. It's probably more normal back when it was first published, but then the expressions of this puppy love seems a bit over the top for this modern age: Calvin kept putting his arm around Meg's waist, telling her not to stop wearing her glasses because he didn't want anyone else to see her “dream-boat eyes”, and then ending everything off with a kiss.
The pacing also felt a bit disjointed in a lot of parts. For most of the first half of the book, I couldn't really quite figure out the outline of the story aside from the fact that we're on a mission to find Meg's missing father. Then even by the end, we still have no clarity on who or what the three W's were, or what Charles Wallace was either, considering he immediately claimed Calvin as “one of us” after first meeting him, and saying that Meg was neither here nor there. All these fantasy elements were mixed in really weirdly with some science fiction as well, with some really hard astrophysics being randomly repeated here and there. I just couldn't really get a grasp on things.
I've definitely read this before as a kid but I couldn't recall as much of it as I can with some of Roald Dahl's other more iconic works, so I had to revisit this one again. It was... definitely a trip.
There were a lot of dated concepts in here which is probably not unique to this particular title amongst Dahl's children's books, and I know there's already a debate about how much of this should be “updated” or not, so I won't touch on that bit.
Overall though, this was interesting to me comparing how I read this book as a kid vs how I read it now as an adult. Nothing much about the plot fazed me as a kid, and I thought it was just a pretty fun adventure of a boy and his grandma plotting against and fighting witches. As an adult that hasn't revisited this book in a while, I was incredibly surprised that we were reading all these as children and it was perfectly OK. It made me think about the immense capacity for children to take in some pretty violent concepts and sort of digest it into a natural part of life and the world. Dahl had the excuse of publishing this in the early 80s, but 100% for sure we won't see a children's book like this being written today.
Maybe a bit closer to 3.5 stars. This was entertaining enough, although I feel like Edgar Allan Poe had better ghost stories from this period.
The first two stories, “The Green Tea” and “The Familiar”, had very similar themes and in fact made me wonder whether it was a progenitor to describing schizophrenia, what with the central figure in each story suffering from persecution mania, hearing voices and seeing entities. This was more so in “The Green Tea”, where the protagonist's persecutor is invisible to everyone else, not the case in “The Familiar”. Even the third story, “The Justice of Harbottle”, felt a bit to do with hallucinations driven by a guilty conscience.
The last two stories were markedly different, and therefore more interesting. “The Room in the Dragon Volant” read more like a thriller and a mystery rather than a ghost story per se. Kinda felt almost a bit like The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe or even in some parts like The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The most famous story in the collection has got to be “Carmilla”, however, which is well known for having inspired Bram Stoker when he was writing Dracula. It deals with a vampire legend and shares a lot of similarities to Stoker's later work. Being a short story, it's also got a lot less suspense. What struck me the most about “Carmilla” was how much same-sex undercurrents it seemed to have, whether intended or not by Le Fanu. I know the standards for displays of affection between women back then were quite different, but I do believe the extent to which it happens here is beyond the norm, which was also remarked upon numerous times by the protagonist herself.
Overall worth reading if you're into Gothic horrors, but imo I don't think any of these will really haunt me for long.
This was... OK? This was serviceable. I felt that the beginning was a bit muddy and I couldn't tell the difference between most of the characters, aside from the central few, but it got more engaging around the 50-75% mark.
The ending was incredibly predictable however. Not that I could've guessed the culprit, but the way we find it out felt a bit contrived (It was a deus ex machina on two levels. First a maid who was conveniently dismissed and therefore missing through the whole story suddenly just tells them she witnessed the whole scene, and then the actual “murderer” herself confesses out of a fit of conscience, I guess? It felt like Hugo and Freya did pretty much almost no detecting at all.).
Not only that, we have an ending “climax” scene which was straight out of a formula. The moment things started happening, I already knew exactly how things were going to play out to a tee. (Of course Hugo would independently deduce somehow that it was actually Guthrie who had killed Selchester, and of course he is unable to reach Freya to tell her about it before she unadvisedly wanders out into murky conditions to find Guthrie and, for no good reason, spill the beans to him and immediately after realise that he is the murderer just before he tries to kill her. Everything was just straight out of a textbook, imo. I could've excused such formula if it was done by, say, Conan Doyle or Christie because they were basically progenitors of such tropes, but in a contemporary book written decades after these tropes have become incredibly overplayed, it was just incredibly disappointing.)
It was OK. I'm indifferent to continuing the series - I didn't hate the experience but I felt like there wasn't much in the story that is appealing enough to me to want to read more of it.
I'm left wondering what the whole point of this book was. The plot is basically what you read in the blurb, and even if you went in without reading the blurb, you could probably tell how the story's going to unfold within the first few chapters anyway. It took at least 25 agonizing chapters for the story to reach a pivotal moment that we saw coming from the beginning. I definitely found the second act of the book a lot more engaging than the first, where we finally get past that long-awaited moment in the story and can finally get on to finding out what happens to the characters after.
There's probably a deeper point to this story that I'm not getting. I didn't hate it, but I'm not really sure if I'd reread it again. I give it 3 stars because I quite enjoyed the writing style, especially in the first few chapters before we embarked on watching a train wreck happening in extreme slow-motion.
This was pretty fun. 3.5 to 4 upon 5. I really enjoyed the first half where it felt like a lot of tropes were being subverted and expectations turned on their heads. I liked learning about the world this was set in, the country seeming to be influenced by Middle Eastern culture. I liked how we had a proper problem at the center of it all that was intricately linked to the economics of the place, and Kadou our protagonist having an exceptional talent for touch-tasting metals as well as knowing a lot about economics. I even liked how the romance began as a slow burn.
I did however feel like the second half was somewhat weaker than the first. Certain tropes started coming in, and then I thought the romantic moments were eclipsing and taking precedence over plot development. The set-up for the underlying political conspiracy was such a huge deal in the first half, but the resolution fell rather flat and seemed resolved almost a bit too quickly in favour of having more limelight on the romance. Some parts felt a bit too draggy while other parts felt a bit too quick. It also felt like development for some other side characters were also very much stunted for the sake of the romance. In particular, I was interested to see how Tadek would fit into the dynamic because I had him pinned as a villain from the start, but then I was pleasantly surprised in Ch 5 when he showed enough genuine attachment to Kadou to acknowledge his part in the hunting incident. By the end, it felt like Tadek got reduced to being a sort of jester-like campy sidekick whose purpose was solely for some comic relief, which seems like such a far cry from the depth of potential he had at the start.
Nevertheless though I did really enjoy this book overall and I was pretty engaged with the romance and the dynamics between the two, and I'd generally recommend this to just about anyone looking for a m/m romantasy. The fantasy element in this one is very light though, with Kadou's touch-tasting abilities being the only hint of magic here and even that only comes into the story very rarely.
OK, this was a pretty great and engaging read but it's also really complex that I can't even think of how to write a review. Like even writing a review requires some mental bandwidth that I don't feel like I have at the moment.
So I'll just summarize my experience: I enjoyed it. This was fun and satisfying. It wasn't always the most pleasant read because some graphic, horrible things do happen in it (nothing too triggering for me thankfully), but overall it all seems to serve a purpose and comes together in a pretty cohesive whole. I'm due to read The Vanished Birds some time early next year and I look forward to it.
I overall enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would (considering I DNFed this at an early point during my first attempt a year or so ago). The first 25% or so was too infodumpy and at that stage I was thinking I'd give this a max 3 or 3.5 stars, but after reading it through, I've increased my rating to it to about 4, maybe even 4.5 stars. The world was immensely fascinating and so so interesting, even if the set-up was a little clunky. I also had some issues with some characterisation works in this one, but it was palatable enough to read and especially knowing that Sanderson has improved on many of these issues in his later works (which I've already read earlier).
I also get why the book was so expository at the beginning - it's a huge world and Sanderson really needed to give us enough context to appreciate all the political and religious machinations going on, as well as the central mystery surrounding Elantris. All of these was probably my favourite parts of the book, and what really kept me going. The construction of the religious tension within the society, the clash between different cultures, and the fascinating mystery of Elantris was all so rich and engaging that it really caught me and was why I finished most of this book in one day.
I do think his characterization was also a bit rougher than his later works but we had some really good gems here. In particular, I was a little put off by Sarene's characterisation. I felt she was based a bit off the “not like other girls” trope, but also “different girl who thinks she's unattractive but actually many guys think she's hot” and “yearning for love against all odds”. Then we have to reconcile that with someone who is apparently so very politically skilled and intuitive, apparently able to twist all these veteran politicians and businessmen around her finger from as quick as a single conversation. The combination overall just doesn't make sense to me, it just didn't feel like good characterisation to me. Some parts that just didn't make sense to me: I didn't understand why she put on an act of silliness in front of Iadon but then flagrantly disposed of that act in front of almost literally everyone else in Arelon, as if news of that wouldn't reach back to Iadon. we were supposed to think she's politically manipulative by putting on that act of Iadon, but we also needed opportunities to prove how glib and witty she was and have other ppl admire her, so everyone else in Arelon could apparently see through it. a lot of things happened way too conveniently for her (and for Raoden too), like even her acceptance by the other Arelon nobles into their secret club felt a bit too quick and easy. Overall though, I thought Sarene was perhaps a precursor to Steris from Mistborn Era 2, of whom I'm a much bigger fan, so I'm glad that Sanderson at least brushed up on that.
I did really enjoy the character of Hrathen though! His internal struggles were really fascinating to watch - he was powerful but yet suffered enough setbacks to make him human as well. His was perhaps my favourite POV in the whole book. The only thing that didn't make sense to me was him falling in love with Sarene at the end. It just really seemed to come out of nowhere and felt really unnecessary tbh. I didn't see a single interaction between them that would make someone, especially a hardened priest like Hrathen, fall in love with Sarene.
This book worked well as a standalone but there're a lot of things about the conclusion that made me feel like it kept itself open to sequels, and I've also since found out that Sanderson has in fact planned/written sequels to Elantris which would be super exciting. I'd be really interested to see how he brings this world forward with his current level of expertise versus this being his first published work.
3.5/5. Well, this was... a trip. This book had a lot of interesting ideas, but ultimately it quite often felt like a drag to keep reading. Our protagonist, George Orr, is as wishy-washy as his last name. His psychiatrist Dr Haber is even worse. The only person I could remotely feel some liking towards is the lawyer Heather Lelache.
This story kinda feels like it probably inspired Christopher Nolan's fever dreams. It had some elements which seemed like it might've inspired Inception, Interstellar, and sometimes even Avengers: Infinity War. Those elements were interesting in themselves, but I also wanted to think about more. Le Guin gave us tantalizing glimpses of the Taoism that is such a major influence on most of her works, but we never really get down to the meat of it to discuss these ideas and how it should impact our perception of reality.
What i found most compelling about this book was how plausible Dr Haber was. He wasn't an out and out villain. Sure, he's a manipulative asshole, but when he was talking to George you could really feel his charisma somehow. He reminded me a lot of Thanos from Avengers (and also the population-halving snap!) because he always seemed to have such altruistic motivations for what he was doing with George. Even though i found him mega sus straight from the start and even after I knew for sure he was a manipulative asshole, when he kept talking about making the world a better place, i could still feel seduced by his speeches despite myself - so no wonder George couldn't resist, as mentally battered as he was.
So ultimately I'm in two minds about this book. I love the premise, I love some of the ideas that it seemed to start, but I wasn't a fan of how everything went down in the end (the last quarter was pure chaos) nor can I shake off the feeling that I'm not sure what I'm walking away from this book with. I really enjoyed what I've read so far of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle from the fantasy genre and thought that even in the first book of that series, I got a better sense of the really thought-provoking Taoist ideas that informed Le Guin's outlook on life than in this one.
This book was an odd mixture of tropes that I'm personally already a bit sick of, but with a fairly compelling mystery at the back of it all. I did want to keep going and find out the solution to the mystery, but by the last quarter of the book I was starting to skim - a lot.
This book is chock full of tropes, but one of the most annoying of all is having an apparently 19th century heroine espouse 21st century values - all too common in this historical fiction genre nowadays, sadly. Genevieve grows up poor and struggling with her mom to put food in their mouths, which is why they began this business of being spiritualists to begin with. When she is basically thrown into the employ of Mr. Pemberton, Earl of Chadwick, and is invited to Somerset Park, his luxurious manor, Genevieve goes on a few tirades about how unfair it is that the privileged should have everything while there are so many who have nothing. Now, this sentiment isn't exactly nonexistent during the Victorian period, but it's clear that this was written with a very 21st century lens, which took me out of the story a bit. Granted that this isn't meant to be an incredibly accurate historical piece, but I just felt like it was shoved in there to soothe 21st century sensibilities about the very strong class hierarchy system in this setting without really giving it serious thought. Plus, the whole message is undermined by how the plot develops (true for this book, but also a trope across the whole hist-fic-romance genre as a whole): Genevieve supposedly laments about how unfair all this class system is, but in the end she falls in love with a rich, titled Earl and not only that, she comes into her own money and ends up a rich woman in her own right. So... it seems like you only need to be bitter about it when you're the one who's poor, but it's totally fine once you're in the position to reap the benefits of the very system that you apparently set yourself against all along. I also find that it really undermines the whole thing when you have a heroine who hates inequality but chooses to fall in love with a rich, titled man in the end, it'it's almost never someone from a lower socioeconomic status, or even if he is he wouldn't stay that way for the rest of the book.
At the very least though, this book stays away from some tropes that would've made me DNFed immediately, like insta-love/lust, or overexplaining the setting to the audience and being overly conscious about how “period” it is, so I could at least sit through the whole book. The mystery was really the saving grace through this book and was the one thing that kept me going. I didn't feel attached to any of the characters at all, but at least I also wasn't incredibly annoyed by any of them. For someone who grew up in a brothel, though, Genevieve is incredibly prejudiced against sex workers. I would have expected that she would at least have a more nuanced view, and understand the hardships that come with being one, and how most of them usually have no other choice. At the very least, she directed her anger to both the women plying it and the men demanding the trade, rather than just to women.
It was an overall serviceable time with a decent mystery at the heart of it all. I'd recommend if you're in the mood for Gothic murder mysteries and don't mind the tropes of contemporary hist-fic.
Northanger Abbey is one of Austen's earliest written works and it shows. Sometimes things happen a little conveniently, sometimes the pacing is a little off. But even at this young age, Austen's characteristic spark and wit shines through brilliantly. Even in this early work, we already see her astute observations about the foibles of humanity and the sharp delivery that accompanies them. Because this is written at a young age, we also see a playfulness in Austen's writing here that diminishes as she gets older. She doesn't take herself too seriously in this one, sometimes even calling out her own flaws, or those in her characters. I reread this one because I recently read The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and wondered if it might give me any deeper insight into this book - it didn't, so I wouldn't at all call it recommended reading. Nevertheless, Northanger Abbey is still a delightful comfort read at any time.
3.5/5. This was my first foray into espionage novels, I've always avoided them because I'm not really one to appreciate a lot of physical action in my books. But maybe it's because Le Carre is a bit more old-school and definitely very English, so the vibe of this one felt almost a bit like the Agatha Christie vibes that I'm very familiar with and I quite enjoyed it overall. It sometimes felt more like a mystery, although there was definitely more of that political thriller element in the background of it.
George Smiley is an interesting protagonist, starting off the entire series already near retirement age, and looking nothing like your usual dashing hero of a spy movie. He's supposedly short and stout, and looks more like a well-to-do freeloader, though he in fact is part of the Secret Service and gets a lot more action in his life than one would expect.
I'd definitely continue, especially since my whole objective is to eventually work my way to reading the two titles that I always hear the most about: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, as well as The Night Manager.
Phew, this is probably the first Murakami I've actually completed. My last abortive attempt was perhaps not the best starting point with his works (Hard-Boiled Wonderland) so I'm really glad that this one was much more successful. This was OK, I'd give it a 3.5/5.
The story follows Tsukuru Tazaki and basically his attempts to reconcile himself with his past, specifically his history with four high school friends, each aptly with a colour in their names. Because he is the only one without a colour, they call him Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and the nickname stuck. When he moves to Tokyo for college, at first all seems well but suddenly and apparently out of nowhere, all four of his friends cut off all ties with him and refuse to speak or see him again. The shock and sudden absence of this friend group, which had formed the core of Tsukuru's life, threw him into a downward spiral. Years and years later when Tsukuru is in his mid-30s, he is encouraged by a girlfriend, the first one he feels deeply for, to look back at his past and find out what really happened so that he can put down the burden and move on with his own life.
As you might expect from such a story, there are a fair bit of time jumps in the narrative. This isn't super jarring, but also isn't as smooth as I would've expected. We also get to see and hear a lot of side characters who appear and then disappear, and hear stories that seem like they may have some significant importance to the overarching plot but end up not. On some level, I wonder if that's the point. Tsukuru's one big passion in life is railway stations - he loves everything about them, from the way they are designed to safely transition commuters from platform to train, to the way they are the one stationary spot in a world that's endlessly changing. Tsukuru himself can be likened to such a train, remaining rooted to that same spot from that very moment when his group of high school friends abandoned him. People come and go in Tsukuru's life, often without warning either way, and he has to grow used to the idea of basically losing people out of nowhere.
This book would probably be much more of a hit with people who enjoy leaving a lot of things open to interpretation, but if you're like me and want something that wraps most, if not all, plot elements up nicely by the end, this book may not quite satisfy. Still though, despite the lack of a resolution, I did somewhat enjoy reading this. There was something compelling, an onward motion to the narrative of this book that kept you going and going trying to figure out why things happened. We don't always get concrete answers to every question in the end, but I think we get enough of an ending that it isn't completely left dangling out of nowhere either. It's a great book to read for a book club.
From this, I can hopefully assume that I am perhaps more inclined to enjoy Murakami's less abstract and more “real-life” works, like this one.
This was a pretty tight mystery and does raise the interesting question of: how do you deal with people who've almost certainly committed a crime but in a way that the justice system is unable to convict them?
For me, the standout part of this mystery is how it bounces off Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. There are plot elements that are very similar to the conclusion of that book (though it does not explicitly spoil that book), and if you've read it before, it feels like the book invites you to decide whether the mystery is going to play out in the same way or not, and if it will be different, in what ways? The book explicitly names Orient Express, Agatha Christie, and Hercule Poirot at least once each, so it's quite certainly trying to draw a connection to that.
Spoilery thoughts about that, spoiling both this book's ending as well as Murder on the Orient Express: The whole cast of suspects all had a hand in killing the victim on the Orient Express, and each of them had their own different reasons for wanting him dead. In this book, it's something similar where Hasunuma has made an enemy essentially out of this little clique of villagers frequenting Namiki-ya. But knowing Higashino, I felt like he wouldn't do a straight copy & paste from Orient Express, and would find a way to pull the rug out from under our feet. And indeed he does. I was satisfied with the ending overall. I was a little worried that we'd even remotely touch on the gross bits about possible sexual assaults (and one involving a child), but luckily we didn't. The only part that made me remotely uncomfortable was where Rumi confessed that Hasunuma blackmailed her into sleeping with him. *BARF*. Anyway, overall the mystery kept me going and I enjoyed it all.
Higashino remains my most read author in 2023 and for good reason. Would absolutely be reading more.
It took a while for me to get into this because I've never read a “cosy” mystery set in a Canadian small village before, but it definitely grew on me before the halfway mark. I somewhat guessed the culprit and their motivation early on but wasn't confident of my guess until it was finally revealed - and it was pretty satisfying to get it right!
Gamache and Beauvoir were a pretty nice police duo. Gamache in particular managed to stand out from the bevy of cozy mystery police inspectors/detectives in a million mystery series out there primarily because he's “softer” than a lot of the others. Detectives in these kinda mysteries tend to be strait-laced and logical to a fault, sometimes to the point of sociopathy (see: Sherlock Holmes), but Gamache... isn't. He homes in on the human aspect of the crime, he immerses himself into the village life while still making it clear that the purpose of his presence is to investigate the crime. He's interested in humanity, psychology, and sociology, and actually talks positively about feelings, emotions, and intuitions, something that a lot of cozy mystery detectives would never touch with a ten foot pole.
I didn't enjoy the first few chapters tbh, where we open with Gamache being called to the crime scene, but then we suddenly go back in time to relive some events that happened before the crime was committed, but this was never explicitly denoted in the text. This does seem to be Penny's writing style of choice. Sometimes we're happily experiencing events in the POV of one character, who would then maybe look over at another character and suddenly we're reading the POV of this second character without it being explicitly stated that the POV switched. It threw me off a lot at the beginning but I got used to it, and thankfully this doesn't happen so often as to become annoying.
The village characters were all blending into one for me at first, and I found my engagement with the book dropping whenever it was all of them gathering at one spot. It got better eventually as the book went on and we found out more about each character to give them more of a distinct personality and identity. By the end of it, I came to appreciate some of the side characters who I was either completely indifferent to at first or even repulsed by.
A particular side character whom I just got increasingly frustrated and bewildered by as the book went on was Agent Yvette Nichol. Given that we actually spend a small bit of time in the book knowing about her backstory and family before she is thrown into the action with Gamache, I thought she might turn out to be a fairly important character in the process of solving the mystery. I thought I would be seeing a classic mentor-mentee relationship unfold between Gamache and her through the story. I was incredibly bewildered that neither of this turned out to be the case. In fact, her last few appearances in the book were so frustrating I kinda hope that she was just a one-off mistake and wouldn't come back in any of the other books. Spoilery thoughts on her and also on the ending: I thought she might actually grow from being an insufferable twit to becoming a bit more humbled and bit more wise by the end - but no, she was still an insufferable twit at the end. I thought she'd finally realise she was the problem when she saw her reflection in the window, but no, she put that blame on Gamache. That moment was the exact moment I gave up on her character. I also thought, OK, maybe she would turn out to be the insufferable twit who happened to have a stunning intellect that far outstripped everyone else's, even Gamache, because she seemed to have an idea of who the culprit was right from the start but was keeping it to herself. So when she finally said it was Peter Morrow, I believed her. But no, it turned out to be Ben, who was one of my first few suspects... So she's still an insufferable twit who is also WRONG. So what is the whole point of her in this story!?
Overall, I was happy with the experience of reading this book and it did give me some pretty nice quotes to think about, especially when Gamache speaks to Myrna about the idea that life is a series of losses, and how people adapted to that determined how happy and adjusted they can be with life. I will be continuing the series.
3/5. This book was way too long for what it wanted to do. A lot of plot developments in it was pretty unbelievable as well. I will just say that the book did make me want to keep on reading though - up to a point. There was a good amount of suspense, but also just too much description of landscape and nature scenery. The whole mystery and hunt for Dracula was definitely my favourite part of the book, it unfolded almost painfully slowly but it was so atmospheric that I didn't quite mind that.
It often felt like Kostova was mainly interested in writing a sort of history/travel literature piece about the Eastern Europe to Turkey region, but with some Dracula flavour to it to... give it some mass appeal? Unfortunately, I didn't really quite appreciate a lot of the Eastern European bits of the book, simply because it isn't a region I'm familiar with.
I also couldn't really get behind a lot of the character decisions, particularly the two main romances in the book. Paul and Helen's romance I already found a bit contrived because they had nothing in common besides being colleagues on the same academic journey, but what I really couldn't understand was the narrator's romance with Bartley. It felt completely random? I can understand if, as teenagers, they decided to sleep together or have a fling because they were just thrown together for a while and found each other attractive. But by all accounts they seem to have actually developed a romance despite their rather short relationship. I didn't understand why the protagonist's name had to be kept secret. Literally every other character in the book is named, and plus the narrator isn't even an important part of the story at all! It just felt like a meaningless and unnecessary gimmick. Ending spoilers: I didn't understand why Helen decided to abandon Paul and their baby daughter so suddenly and dramatically out of nowhere just to go hunt for Dracula. It again felt really unnecessary. Even if she decided she had to leave, couldn't she at least write to them telling them what she needs to do and why she needs to be away from them, and just keep her location a secret? Unless she doesn't trust Paul to do the right thing and abandon their daughter to search for her. I didn't even get why Dracula had to kidnap Rossi of all people. Rossi himself raised a good objection. Dracula says Rossi was the first scholar to find him, but Rossi's like, uh no I didn't, you brought me here. and Dracula's like, yeaaah details. His reasoning is that Rossi decided to try investigating him a second time but... I don't believe Rossi's the only scholar who reopened the investigation into Dracula a mere second time through like 500 years. Scholars are notoriously curious people! So it all just felt like a gimmick to get Paul and Helen on their epic journey too.
Anyway... I'm glad I finished it. If this book was more focused on one thing - either the hunt for Dracula or history/travel literature - I feel like it'd have been much more successful in finding its audience.
As always, King is indeed a masterful storyteller. This is only my second book by him but I was really impressed by how intimately he could go into the psyche of a particular human topic. In this book, it's really all about the vicious cycle of intergenerational abuse and trauma. Yes, there're all the supernatural elements of this book that makes it creepy, but I think the ghosts are almost a sort of extension of the metaphor here, a way for King to explore how easily people can lose control.
I love how King drops crumbs but they all tie together into a motif that then feeds into the larger theme that he wants to explore. In this one, perhaps the most prominent one is the phrase: “Come and get your medicine.” Danny hears this as part of his visions from early in the book, but we don't know what that even means. Later, it's dropped casually and almost nonchalantly when we finally hear about the incident behind Jack's dismissal from his teaching position, where he assaults a student. He says, “If that's how you want it, just come here and take your medicine” to him before going into a trance-like rage. Even further still, we see in one of Jack's own flashbacks into his childhood, where we hear his abusive dad say the same phrase before he physically assaults his mom. So in all of this, we don't know what Danny is hearing - is he hearing his father say it in the memory about his student? Is he hearing his grandfather say it in his father's childhood memories? Or is he hearing a vision from the future where his own father would say the same to him? It all feeds into this feeling of tension and suspense that just builds and builds until the climax of the book.
Then there's also the theme mentioned about the cycle of intergenerational abuse. Jack's father was an abusive alcoholic, so Jack is now an abusive alcoholic. Jack is haunted, but more so than the ghosts of Overlook, it's this sinking feeling of being pursued by the metaphorical ghost of his father - he wants to exorcise it, but he feels himself uncontrollably falling under its influence, which i think King illustrates by having Jack also literally be falling under some kind of evil influence at the Overlook itself that makes him inexplicably act out against his wife and son. it was particularly sad when Wendy immediately attributes Danny's bruises to Jack. on one hand, we "know" that Danny apparently got attacked by the drowned ghost in Room 217 and Wendy was jumping to the wrong conclusion, but on the other hand - do we really know that though? Wouldn't it make perfect sense that Jack had lost himself again in another trance of rage and had harmed Danny, and Danny's supernatural experiences had been a child's reimagining of abuse at the hands of a beloved parent? Everything was just all so complex and multi-layered and I loved it. It's not just a simple story of humans being scared and pursued by ghosts, but that the ghosts are really manifestations (“real” or otherwise) of the spiraling traumas that haunt the humans.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jack as a character, in particular. He wasn't likeable by any means and I was annoyed and repulsed by him for most of the book, but he was incredibly complex and gray. It definitely kept me thinking about the question of culpability. We could blame Jack's childhood, his dad, his alcoholism, or an active malicious influence like the Overlook, but idk how far is a person not responsible for their actions? it's an uphill battle for sure to break free of the vicious cycle of generational abuse (physical and substance) and trauma, but does that remove or lessen culpability from Jack and the actions he has taken/will choose to take? I have a hard time saying an absolute yes to that. compassion for someone in Jack's position does not mean I should condone their actions or say they shouldn't face the consequences of them.
But ultimately, the ending still made me feel things. The bit where Danny stands up so bravely to the thing possessing Jack was just so weirdly uplifting, and then when Jack came back to his senses even just for a few moments and told Danny to run away, I almost cried. It was indescribably moving.
Overall 4.5/5. Really enjoyed this one.
Maybe 3.5 stars?
This book's premise is pretty creepy but I also kinda feel like it was just that little bit shy of hitting the true creepy-spot for me. Maybe it was in finding out too much about the antagonist too quickly? Maybe it was that there was no particular enigma or mystery to find out here, so it really kinda felt like a horror-thriller but there wasn't really any kind of suspense.
I felt like the pacing of this book was a little slow too, weirdly enough because there is quite a lot of action happening. There were so many parts where I just felt like skimming or skipping ahead already - but maybe it was also because I already could tell how the plot was going to develop miles ahead and just wanted to skip through all that and just find out the ending already. I had a strong suspicion Maggie Leigh would eventually become one of Manx's victims, I knew that we'd see Manx turn on Bing at some point, and that Vic would obviously kill him, and then find a way to destroy Christmasland because Manx would've kidnapped her kid. I wasn't sure if Vic would survive the book or not, so I wasn't that surprised or impacted when she did in fact die in the end.
I kept dragging my feet coming back to this book, which is probably why I finished it so quickly because I kinda wanted to get it over and done with. There was a lot of things depressing and unpleasant about it, but I guess that's also kinda the point of a horror novel, so I don't know whether that's really a negative point in this case. At the same time, it didn't quite cross a line and become too triggering where I would've just DNFed, so I guess that's why I eventually pushed myself to finish it.
It did have some elements that were pretty thought-provoking, although I don't know how intentional this was. For example, it painted a pretty visceral picture of how frustrating it is to be in a situation that is not aligned with what the institution would like to pigeonhole you in. In this case, it's Vic having one side of the story but the institution choosing to believe another story about her and twisting all the facts to align with their side of the story, and how powerless it made her feel. This is unfortunately all too real. It reminded me of the Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya, where the institution also forcibly removed a daughter from her mother because it made a judgement and believed the daughter to be suffering from abuse from the mother, though both daughter and mother deny this. So the bit where the police kept repeating, “Your son's well-being is paramount.” while disregarding and even risking the safety and well-being of both parents while also completely dismissing the accounts of both parents as false reminded me strongly of that documentary and how real a situation this can be in America.
Anyway, so... 3.5 stars because I did occasionally find my thoughts wandering back to Manx and Christmasland even after I had put the book down so at least there's something in that.
This book was something of a departure from the usual Higashino stories that I'm used to (such as his Galileo and Kaga series), but that may be because it's a newer series compared to the others. In some ways, it felt a bit draggier and longer than the others because Higashino is suddenly taking a lot more time to develop other aspects of the story besides the msytery, but in others, there's some charm in getting to know our protagonists much better and seeing them develop, both individually and their dynamics with each other.
The overarching mystery in Masquerade Hotel involves a serial killer, who has already committed three murders, somehow revealing to the police that the next one would be done in the high-end Hotel Cortesia Tokyo. The police dispatches several of their finest to disguise themselves as hotel staff to keep an eye on things, one of whom is Kosuke Niita, hard-hitting cop who's not a little disgruntled at being assigned to blend into the front desk staff where he would have to be the epitome of hospitality and politeness in order to live up to Hotel Cortesia's reputation. The hotel staff in charge of training him up as a front desk personnel is veteran Yamagishi Naomi, whose entire identity is in being the perfect, role model hotel staff and giving guests only the best memories of staying in their hotel.
The actual mystery isn't that complicated and if it had been the only thing the book concentrated one (which is usually what Higashino does), it would probably take only half the length. But Higashino chose instead to focus a lot on developing Niita and Naomi's relationship dynamic. It sometimes felt like one of those Japanese dramas where each episode has a self-contained story about a problem with an odd guest and how everything gets resolved beautifully with rainbows in the end, with a nice message about how hotels are amazing.
The pacing of the book could be improved upon tbh, I think a lot of the smaller story arcs (which sole purpose was just for character or premise development rather than contributing anything to the mystery) could be tighter. I didn't really mind the episodic stories, but they could've taken a lot less time, and we could also probably see less of the policemen arguing amongst themselves or trying to stamp down on Niita's suggestions. But nevertheless, when you get into it, you do find yourself a bit sucked in.
Overall, I enjoyed myself and I found myself wanting to see more of Niita and Naomi by the end, even though it took me nearly half the book to really warm up to them. I would probably read the next one but it'll have to be a while from now because of how long it seems to take. I'm used to Higashino books being really snappy reads, so the fact that this seemed to go on forever was really weird.
OK, this was really quite a bit of good fun. According to the afterword by the publishers at the end, this style of mystery is under the subgenre called “honkaku”, which is much more interested in “pure” mysteries without any social criticism. Readers are given all the clues they need to solve the mystery before the end of the book, so there's perhaps less focus on the personalities and backstories of the characters and more emphasis on the actual puzzle.
Indeed, you really do feel like this is a logic puzzle in the form of a novel. Things are laid out for you right from the prologue itself. It's got a sort of narrative thread, but it's really just our two main characters, Kiyoshi and Kazumi, discussing with each other and therefore infodumping every little hint and detail of the puzzle to the reader. It's not exactly a crime-solving journey that the reader is invited on, it's really the author giving you the puzzle pieces and telling you to try solving it yourself.
It takes a while to get used to but I found it pretty fun. Some of the dialogue may seem a bit stilted but I chalk it to translation. I find that East Asian languages inevitably lose a lot of colour and nuance when translated to English, and it results in slightly strange-sounding dialogue sometimes which I don't really mind. Plus, this book was published 40 years ago so I'm sure a lot of the terminology, proverbs, and slang used here is already long outdated.
I didn't quite solve the murder before the last Act, but I'm slightly happy to say that I did guess it just before it was revealed in the narrative, with the final clues that Kiyoshi threw down before he went ahead with the full explanation. The solution was fairly ingenious, but I thought the backstory was more mundane than we might've expected, although I usually find that to be the case for murder stories with the most sensational premises, what with all these astrology elements and bizarre dismemberments.
I'd definitely read more of Soji Shimada's books.
Short but a duly impactful and iconic story. By today's standards, The Call of Cthulhu probably wouldn't be considered remotely scary - except in how dense the writing is compared to contemporary horror - but it's still such a great study in cosmic horror. I like to call it the fear of the vast unknown.
The writing style might not be for everyone but if you're able to stomach it, I strongly recommend it for just about anybody who loves fantasy, sci-fi, and the idea of being tiny and insignificant in a vast and unknowable universe.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.