Ed Kay
Austen writes insufferable characters well, but it does mean spending a lot of time with insufferable characters. And there are a lot of them in Emma, including the main character. I had understood from 'the zeitgeist' that Emma was a 'matchmaker' but that's not really true: she's a meddler. A matchmaker puts people together successfully; Emma just interferes.
It's also unclear quite why Emma is considered to be so eligible. Everyone praises her beauty but they also seem to think she is clever, whereas she comes across more supercilious. Maybe it's just her fortune.
Otherwise it's the usual plot - will they/won't they in bonnets and carriages. I found I didn't really care for the happiness of any of them.
I love Lockwood's writing and will definitely look up some of her poetry and possibly her novel, but this didn't really work for me. The good bits are good: she is funny, and sharp, and cutting - a lot like David Sedaris. But unlike his pithy tales there is a lack of direction here.
I also suspect a lack of honesty, which is a killer for a memoir. Clearly her father is a pain in the ass, bordering on absent or unloving, but she paints him as a loveable buffoon.
Worse is the fact that clearly Lockwood is a modern woman, probably feminist, very liberal, and yet there is absolutely zero reckoning with the wrongdoings of the Catholic Church, that well known and multi-faceted criminal organisation. There's an awkward discussion with “the seminarian” where she suggests that one of his pals is possibly a serial child abuser, but when he embarrassedly mutters excuses, she just feels shame that she might have been wrong (when she clearly isn't). She suggests no one really knows why her mother “hates nuns so much” - even though her mother has said “Sister liked to spank”, as if that's not enough. As if the crimes of nuns in charge of so-called schools and laundries and any other institution weren't well known to be horrific and abusive ‘care givers'.
I get that one of the most prolific and disgusting crimes of Catholicism is the doctrine of original sin, and the fact that all children are taught that they are inherently evil and therefore should despise themselves, but seeing this guilt and shame revealed in the cowardice of this memoir is tragic, as well as uninteresting. I'd have preferred something a bit more cathartic and excoriating.
Favourite quote, that describes exactly the enjoyment of my own totally pointless English Literature degree:
Singing down into yourself was called vocal masturbation, and you weren't supposed to do it, even though in literature there were postmodernists running around all over the place wanking themselves into recursive frenzies and getting awards for it.
Supposedly a masterpiece but I thought it overlong and mostly dull. The aliens were remarkably human - their planet has streets, cars, museums and zoos. They also seem to be hugely technologically advanced and yet incapable of solving their breeding problems. Not sure what it is that people are finding so exciting about it.
My favourite quote is more a reflection of when this book was written than of the book itself:
“Carrying a child doesn't seem to slow a Motie down,” Renner observed.
Renner's Motie said, “No, of course not. Why should it?”
Sally Fowler took up the task. She tried carefully to explain just how useless pregnant human females were.
I enjoyed book one, started to lose interest by book two, but thought I should plough on with the final act just to find out what happens. Goodreads star ratings imply this is the best of the trilogy, but I was not impressed. I'm not sure it was necessarily any worse or better than any of the other books, I think I've just had enough of Diana and Matthew's fervent kissing and brooding glances, and all the secret keeping. I started it in a bad mood and was apoplectic by the end.
Spoiler laden ranting starts here.
STUPID MAGIC SYSTEM - It's made abundantly clear on multiple occasions that Diana is a very special witch and as such cannot do spells - and yet, every time she thinks about doing magic she says something dumb like "I still think magic would be faster – so long as I can figure out what spell to use" YOU CAN'T USE SPELLS DIANA! In these occasions, she ends up not doing any magic, when it would be useful. - The corollary of this is that the way she can do magic - again, which was made abundantly clear in book f***ing two - is to just 'wish' or 'want' or 'desire' something, and it happens. Of course, this happens for stupid and pointless things, like rearranging coats when she wants to go to sleep, or floating up the stairs when she's rushing to see Jack, or opening a locked door - but never when it would actually be useful or helpful i.e. all the times she's trying to think of spells, plus other times like when she wants to get off a boat in Venice and it's slippery and she can't "figure out a solution". How about you fly, like you did about 3 pages ago for no reason? I hate these kinds of badly thought out magic systems. They always do this - magical solutions mentioned in passing for utterly pointless things and then totally absent when problems arise. - For example, getting the Ashmolean book. At what point in the library did she think of - duuur - maybe just "wanting" to have the book in her hand?!! NEVER! Can't she just apparate it into her hand, from home? If not - perhaps the summoning magic only works at short distances - surely she could do it when she's actually in the library itself? No! Of course not. Here are the amazing plans that these apparent Yale professor geniuses and thousand year old vampires come up with: 1. Send a request in a vacuum tube - in the middle of the night, when no one is working, and therefore no one will be at the other end to open the vacuum tube and go find the book. This not only doesn't work, but they sit around for two f***ing hours waiting for it to work, before deciding that possibly it hasn't 2. Doing a little group spell with salt and hand holding and reciting words (reminder - you can't do spells, Diana!). After doing the ritual and it doesn't work they then decide to sit around for another hour, I don't know, to see if it beds in a bit?!! 3. Ask the firedrake to 'sniff it out', like a dog. - The end result of Diana only thinking about spells and then never doing magic is that we're reading a book about a super powerful witch who has been prophesied for generations - there are paintings of her in London, everyone knows her, she's the saviour of witchdom - but who does nothing magical. Nothing magical of interest from a story perspective, anyway. Surely one of the best things about supernatural books is enjoying watching characters with special skills doing something special. Three whole books - 1,000 pages - and she does nothing of any consequence except right at the end. What's the point? - Finally, for 95% of the books magic has no consequence, it's all free, who cares, magic this, magic that, there are no rules to how much can be done... Oh no, suddenly we need it to be difficult because after Diana has taken an age to 'build' a spell to kill Knox (again, can't she just "will" it rather than making up a stupid rhyme?) - slowly enough for him to have noticed, by the way, but rather than counteract it he just stands there goading her and getting increasingly worried - it's all too easy, we need her to be exhausted so that there is now peril when she goes to fight Benjamin, so now we get the whole "Magic, like any resource, is not infinite in its supply" and she's super tired. So now she doesn't float up the stairs, she just runs, and when she gets face to face with Benjamin... That's right, she magics him to death as well. LOL. So not that tired, after all, I guess? So the concept of restriction is introduced right at the end - and then totally ignored.OTHER RANDOM STUPID PLOTTING THAT DROVE ME CRAZY - The sudden description of Diana's photographic memory that has never been mentioned in two and a half books - and when it is, she's complaining how her photographic memory is "failing" to work. Which doesn't really seem to be a facet of a photographic memory. You either look at something and remember it, or you don't. - Chris, the devilish but human best friend scientist dude, says at one point: "I'm a scientist. I'm trained to suspend disbelief and remain open-minded until something is disproved." THIS IS NOT THE WAY SCIENCE WORKS. In fact, it's the total opposite. You're supposed to not believe until the evidence is presented. Sounds like this 'genius' Chris probably also believes in the Loch Ness Monster, fairies at the bottom of his garden and Russell's teapot. - Not only does Chris not know how science works but this idiot's character USP is that he loves nicknames. There's one scene in the lab with him and his team and I was lost within 2 pages because 8 people are all introduced with their real names, and then given nicknames, and then I'm struggling to understand who the hell anyone is for 5 pages before I gave up caring and it really didn't make any difference because the whole 30 page chapter was a waste of time anyway. - Miriam calls Matthew - a vampire, who doesn't sleep - at 3am and Diana panics, knowing for sure it must be an emergency because it's so early. I'm sure Matthew makes and receives all sorts of calls throughout the night that Diana is unaware of, because she's sleeping and he is not! - Whilst trying to get the book, Diana has a totally weird and implausible reaction to the idea of releasing Corra in the library. The act of releasing her familiar is apparently some kind of 'heavy' magic that will mean "the last remaining links to my life as a scholar would dissolve". This just doesn't make any sense. She timewalked back to the 16th century FFS, she's a witch, she's been learning and coming to terms with being a witch for the best part of 3 books, but apparently this is a step too far. It's just ridiculous nonsense. - Also, this firedrake now apparently speaks, and is actually really mad about being enslaved to Diana... Hold on a minute, isn't Corra her 'familiar'? Aren't they bound together in magical harmony, or some kind of weird symbiotic relationship? No, apparently not, Diana seems to be holding her hostage, and Corra has really been wanting to leave this whole time. Does this apply to Granny Goggins's (or whatever she's called) 'shadow' from 16th century London? Is this 'shadow' also a disgruntled slave? - All the farting about in the library (waiting 2 hours for the vacuum tube to work, waiting another hour for the spell to work) is suddenly critical because when they get out they've been gone for over 5 hours and Gallowglass has been milling around outside for all that time waiting to tell them that Matthew is kidnapped! "hich is so urgent, and yet, then they travel to Sept Tours, and then to Venice, and Poland, and mill around - so maybe that 5 hours was not that important, after all? By the time they rescue him Matthew had been tortured for weeks. - After going to the Congregation and getting them to agree to Matthew's rescue, Diana sends a clever cryptic text message to Hamish with the code "QGA" in case anyone was monitoring their communications. But who would want to do that? Someone who shouldn't know that the rescue might go ahead, presumably, who is Benjamin. But... don't they suspect that Benjamin working with Gerbert and Domenico, so if they're doing military texts it can only to be hiding information from them... BUT THEY ARE IN THE CONGREGATION - THEY WERE PART OF THE VOTE! So they already know! So why have a whole clever message system in the first place? I suspect so that we could have a whole page of similarly dumb text messages all with allusions to chess pieces... Oh, hold on, sure enough 6 pages later here is Diana actually acknowledging that "Gerbert might already have warned Knox that I had won the vote" so even she knew it was stupid, but did it anyway. - Arriving at the place where Benjamin is holding Matthew, the vampires go off to find and kill the baddie vampires who are surrounding the compound. It takes them an hour to kill them all. We're racing against time, but this took an hour. Then they suggest there are just as many stationed inside but Baldwin doesn't seem worried. Cool, it'll just take another hour to kill them, I guess (and then they are never mentioned again, were they even there?) - These mega brains from Oxford and Harvard and Yale - plus the group of scientists they've wrangled in from Chris's class, one of whom is like a computer scientist or something (not a biologist) because it's specifically pointed out they want people who have unique and crazy ways of looking at the data - have all of the creature DNA but did not think at any point that it might be interesting to compare them with each other? Surely the most basic first step that anyone would ever think of? They're supposedly trying to work out what links daemons, vampires, witches and humans so wouldn't a comparison of the DNA be a good place to start? Like, surely anyone you asked who knew nothing about genetics would say that as their only idea. But no. These crazy nicknamed fools are too clever and have to wait for Diana to suggest it, so that the reveal occurs nicely at the end of the stupid book. - 500 pages in and we have to have 20 page description of the labour of the twins and the subsequent christening? Was this really necessary?!
FINAL SCORE
I gave this 2* originally but writing all of this down has infuriated me further so now I give it 1*
The verse was beautiful - never read any ‘alliterative' poetry before and really liked it. But the subject is so dull. Lots of swiping and swishing of swords and blasting and bleeding of mail and men, not much else besides. Started strong with the Ogre at St Michael's Mount but went downhill from there.
Almost put this down after 50 pages but there was something hypnotic about living so completely in this delusional man's head. The main adjective Bascombe uses to describe himself is “dreamy” and the whole novel - almost 400 pages to describe a weekend - is very fantastical, if not nightmarish. Frank is so self-assured it takes a while to realise how weak and pathetic he actually is. Everything he says out loud he assures us isn't how he really feels, or what he really thinks. I was surprised when Vicki punched him in the mouth but by the end the surprise is why more people in his life haven't done the same thing.
This is where the annoying stuff has started to override the enchantment. It was fun for a while but by halfway through I was pretty sick of these two aimless main characters who start off with plans and then do anything else other than execute their plan, all the while having stupid arguments and then making up with kisses and fervent “I love you”s. These books could have been waaaay shorter.
Specifically I hate non-consequential magic systems (i.e. magic is ‘free' and therefore can be used to do anything, at any time) since every book I've ever read that has them (Strange and Norrell, Harry Potter etc) has the problem of lots of pointless magic being done for fun and then all of a sudden there's no magic whenever a problem arises. There's no consistency, other than that which is demanded by the plot. It's dumb. This series suffers from the same problem.
Meanwhile we have time travel that seems to work concurrently, it doesn't make any sense. If you can go anywhere in the past or future, then surely when you come back, you can go back to the moment you left, as if you hadn't gone at all? No, in this world, when you go back in the past, for every day you spend there a day passes in “your” time. So when Diana's father visits Elizabethan England for 2 weeks he can't stay longer because his wife is expecting him - he is going to arrive 2 weeks after he left! Huh? When Diana and Matthew return they have been gone 7 months. Meanwhile the things they do only affect history on the same day in their “real” time that they did it in the past? What? None of it makes sense.
No doubt I'll wade through the third book to see how it all ends but I can't say I'm looking forward to it.
Pretty torn over how to rate this book. I found myself really enjoying it, despite the nagging feeling that it wasn't all that good. One other reviewer expressed the same feeling as having been ‘enchanted', which is about right. Suffice it to say, I agree wholeheartedly with most of the criticisms levelled at this book in the many one star reviews, however, somehow, I found it compelling and enjoyable nonetheless. Averaging this out to 3 stars.
This book showed so much promise but seemed to constantly drop the ball. Tension would be built effectively but all the payoffs were terrible. The writing of battles and fights was almost incomprehensible, so you had no clue who was where or doing what, and then suddenly things would be over. We seemed also to miss out on critical information eg. why did Roos suddenly turn from potential assassin out on the seas, to giving them the knife and information on how to kill the Nameless One? In one paragraph he was seeting at Ead, eager to kill her, and then... he was on her side? It didn't make sense. So much promise and an incredibly built world, fantastic characters, but it consistently fluffed its lines.
I loved Pride and Prejudice which was witty, characterful and dramatic. This is like a draft version of that book: the protagonists are almost identical, the plot points are similar, but unfortunately it's shorn of all of the humour and lightness of P&P. As an unexpected Austen fan, this has been a disappointment.
I only gave this three stars because it wasn't as bad as the last one, and I gave the last one three stars. It deserved only two, TBH. Andrew Child is a competent writer - he can do the style - but unfortunately he seems to be writing thrillers with Reacher as a character, rather than REACHER NOVELS. I don't want Reacher to be in only a third of the book, relegated to a bit part in his own story. He needs to be front and centre, cracking skulls and taking people down. Every year I get a little bit more disheartened by the decline of this franchise, and every year I excitedly buy the new one and think “maybe this will be a return to form”. Nope. Not this time. Not sure I'll be rushing out to get the new one next year.
Randomly picked up after seeing glowing reviews on Twitter. Can't say I really understand why. The main character is annoying, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in the narrative. I also don't really understand how a spaceship that's been shot through with multiple bullet holes can be ‘patched up' in a day or two enough to survive 6 months of space travel from Mars to Earth. I'm assuming that this is what ‘steampunk' means: science fiction with rivets. Regardless, it rattles along at a fairly brisk pace to its less than satisfactory conclusion.
The thing that saves this from 2* review is that the ‘strange' of the title is an incredible conceit, a really fascinating idea. Mars is alive, and it's suffusing the humans and their technology with its own consciousness. This idea appears about two-thirds of the way through, at which point it's a bit too late to do anything interesting with the idea. Shame this wasn't made more of.
Really enjoyed the Netflix series so bought this on a whim, and very much enjoyed the story all over again. There are only a few changes to the plot that I could tell, but the main thrust of Elizabeth Harmon's rise through the patriarchal world of chess is still a very thrilling journey to witness.
I was mainly surprised after I finished the book to realise that Walter Tevis also wrote The Hustler and Color of Money - as well as sci-fi classics such as The Man Who Fell To Earth. Will definitely be reading more of his stuff this year.
Love the Parker novels and found this when looking for a new one in a secondhand bookstore.
Grofield is very much in the Parker mould - though as the jacket points out, he's a lot more suave and charming, if not equally cunning and ruthless. Likewise Stark's writing style is as urgent and uncomplicated as in the Parker novels.
The book started off brilliantly and kept me interested, watching the cat and mouse between Grofield and the eponymous ‘damsel' (who perhaps isn't as helpless as that might suggest). However, the second half of the book dragged with a shift in focus to other characters, and overall was a bit of a saggy finale.
Well written, lots of 60s/70s Cold War intrigue and space race science, but just not that thrilling for a thriller. There was no clear hero, no one to root for, at times I wasn't even sure whether I was supposed to be on the side of the Russians or not. There was no detective work, no revelations by any of the characters really had any bearing on any other part of the plot, since one set of protagonists were on Earth and the others on the Moon. Meh
I have read other books by this author and found them serviceable thrillers, but this one is just absolute tripe. The writing is worse than anything by Dan Brown, repetitive and moronic. The plotting is thin. The ‘hero', presumably due to be a recurring character in a new series, is totally bland: uncharismatic and with no special skills. And Turner seems to think that by making him shout out “Fuck!” every once in a while it will truly convey the depth of feeling that he's experiencing.
I hated it, and by the end was just reading to see how awful it would get. I highlighted a number of passages that had me laughing and/or angry at just how bad they were.
At the shrink's, McNeal is talking about his murdered son, and has this incredible insight into his own psyche:
“There's an anger I can't explain”
“Son, listen to me. I'm proud of you. Easiest thing in the world to succumb to something like that. But that's not what we are. The McNeals are loyal. And true. Your mother, God rest her soul, would have turned in her grave if you had fallen for that woman's charms... But she raised you good.”
“One final thing: remember, take the battery out of your cell phone.”
“Why do you want me to do that?”
“So, we know you're alone and not being followed. Do you copy?”
“I'm sorry this happened, Peter. Truly sorry.”
“Who kills a fucking dog?”
“The same people who killed Caroline.”
“But why? It's a dog.”
McNeal nodded.
“I've been renovating our house, remember. I've got stuff in the trunk. DIY stuff. Builders' equipment. Tools. It's all in the trunk of my car.” Peter reached inside the trunk and hauled out polyethylene waterproof sheeting, rolls of duct tape, a five-gallon bucket, two large bottles of water, and a large bag of quick-drying cement.
This is a real 5* book. Makes me feel like I have to go back through all of my Goodreads reviews and knock everything else down a star just to make things fair! It's an epic tale told in incredible style and I highly recommend it. My only complaints would be about certain annoying characters, but that's just another facet of the genius of this book: because the characters are so well drawn they leap off the page and they can't help but be who they are and do what they do. July's moping - while utterly aggravating - is just a reflection of who he is, his inability to communicate, his fear of women. I was also pretty distraught at the death of little Janey who I'd hoped would be around for a long time. She was a shining light for the 30 pages she got. McMurtry - like the wild west itself - does not play favourites. Good people die horrible deaths, while evil ones get to live. That's just the way it is. Gus understands that, I wish I had even a small amount of this guy's tolerance and stoicism. What a legend. This book is going to stay with me for a long time.
Obviously any account of the horrors of the holocaust is so tragic and moving as to demand nothing short of 5* which I certainly give the first half of this book. This account is all the more humbling and astonishing due to the matter-of-fact narration. It's almost impossible to imagine living in conditions like this, let alone surviving it. Perhaps our minds just don't want to imagine it, and resist. I suppose every survivor story is a mixture of luck and tenacity and Frankl's is no different. There is certainly a lot to learn from these account, if nothing more than giving one gratitude for how easy and wonderful our lives are, in comparison to how bad they could be.
This edition had two further parts which went into greater detail about Frankl's resulting psychotherapeutic methods called ‘logotherapy'. I was not particularly interested in any of this and it was quite a demanding read, and it's only because of this that the whole book gets marked down to an average of 3*.
My low rating may well be unfairly swayed by the fact that I bought this hoping for more of a study of octopuses specifically, and this book was about ‘intelligence' more generally and looking at the different types of intelligence that evolution has ended up creating. There are a few anecdotal stories about octopuses escaping their tanks to eat fish and some discussion of how they can change their skin colour but they are all too brief. The rest of the book deals more in the current scientific understandings of what intelligence means and how it might have evolved and while interesting, not really what I was looking for.
The author's style was a bit wishy washy. He often referenced research in passing but didn't offer any details about the experiments or how they worked, leaving you wanting more, and sometimes unclear as to how these unexplained studies actually related to the points he was trying to make.
For example:
rats with a severed spinal cord, and hence no channel from the site of body damage to the brain, can exhibit some of what looks like “pain behavior,” and can even show a form of learning that responds to the damage
I really enjoyed the first half of this book. The creeping dread was palpable: an isolated town populated by misfits and weirdos, where you can fell the mulch underfoot, smell the rot in Lauren's ramshackle house, shiver at the dreich Scottish weather and sympathised with this poor bullied child with the disinterested father. When a mysterious lady in white keeps appearing but no one can remember seeing her it just adds to the tension and the atmosphere.
As things start to escalate in the second half of the book, things take a turn. Mysteries are just easily discarded, which is unsatisfying (the constantly locked front room contains nothing of interest, and is just unlocked one day, meh; the mother's ghost is just hard for people to contemplate, so they forget, according to the mad old lady down the street who also sees her) and the denoument seems rushed. It all feels like a bit of a let down after the incredible, subtle effects created in the first half.
I'd probably give it 3.5* but rounded it up because I have so much good will from the incredible set up. I just wish it had just maintained that level to the end.
Having never ready any of the vampire/werewolf books I was very uncertain what to make of this which was gifted to me from a friend. However, it had me hooked after a couple of pages and despite its great length I finished it over a weekend (well, with lockdown level 4 there wasn't much else to do!)
This book is just so much fun! I laughed a lot at the interactions between Alex and Kevin, the science and action scenes were brilliantly written and as a thriller it was incredibly taut and clever. Plus, a female hero who can totally kick ass.
I don't think it needed to be 500 pages and there were a couple of times when things slowed down perhaps a little too much (mainly for Alex to moon over Danny) but I can't really drop any stars for a tome that flew by with me having a ridiculous smile on my face for the whole time.
Would be keen to read any more adult fiction by Meyer after this!