Ed Kay
I don't really read Stephen King any more. I read a lot of his early stuff when I was younger, but eventually lost patience as the books got thicker, more baggy, and ended abruptly, almost nonsensically, as if he woke up one morning after typing hundreds of thousands of words and said, “I'm bored now”. Very frustrating as a reader having waded through so much to realise that it wasn't really taking you anywhere.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this huge, 700 page monster. And, unfortunately, it was more of the same. But worse. It seems the influence of Owen King not only failed to add some much needed plotting and structure, but also took away a lot of what makes his father so readable: good writing.
There was so little to enjoy here. Characters were bland and one dimensional, the writing workaday, and the plot incredibly simplistic. Clearly this was supposed to be some riff on sexism, misogyny, feminism and the modern world, but other than a few vague paragraphs it didn't really discuss the issues in any depth.
Amazingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book the Kings thank an editor who culled the book down from “ a much larger manuscript”. I have nothing but sympathy for her.
Downloaded and read immediately after finishing Station Breaker as I was totally drawn into this incredibly insane (stupid) world. The sequel suffers from quite a slow start (a bit of farting around at the bottom of a lake) before Dixon gets drawn back into the main plot, but once it gets going it's a fun ride. Rather than the all-out-crazy-action of the first novel, this has more of a detective-thriller vibe, which Mayne handles very competently. Very enjoyable two-book series.
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!
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.
After recently re-reading the Earthsea trilogy and writing a review condemning those fantasy novels that have no rules to when and how magic can be used, I was initially very frustrated with this book. Spells are cast willy-nilly (to repair clothes, or make a delicious feast, to transport from a village to the tower) but then not utilised in times of need. At least the author recognised this, at one point having Agnieszka notice that “perhaps the spell wouldn't work at such a distance”. But it was still annoying. Plus “the Dragon” - the ‘love interest' of the book - is just an irredeemable misery. At no point did his character soften, or apologise, or behave anything other than churlishly. I'm all for misanthropes but there seemed to be nothing to him at all that would draw Agnieszka to fall in love with him, except for their rather erotic magic-weaving, which I can assume was great for her but left me cold.
Having said all that, I found myself getting drawn into the book almost against my will. The malevolent Wood that “corrupts” anyone who gets drawn into it, and the horrific beasts and praying mantises that come out of it, I found quite disturbing. Add in some interesting magical concepts and eventually more engaging wizardly characters and I found I cared about what would happen in the end, despite the flaws.
This is probably the most ridiculous book I've ever read, but Mayne is such an assured handler that I was happy to just throw myself into it and go along for the ride. This is an excellent airport novel - breathless, urgent, preposterous and charming.
The voice of Jack Sparks is brilliantly rendered: cocksure, brash, full of himself. And totally deluded. I found the first half of the book more compelling than the second, when things started to get just a bit too silly. But since I read the book in one day, it clearly had me hooked, and 3 stars would not really do it fair justice.
Hilarious and failed attempt at replicating the ‘Jack Reacher' formula.
Reacher is generally ridiculous, but remains almost plausible if you suspend your disbelief and commit to the fairy tale world that Lee Child creates.
This guy, on the other hand, demands an investment of faith bordering on the religious - and even then the story barrels on past implausibility into the preposterous and farcical.
The White House is blown up in the first 100 pages, for goodness sake, and things just get more ludicrous from there.
Some of my favourite quotes:
Was he really going to drive out to Mount Weather, now, after almost forty hours without sleep?
Yes.
He spun, took a knee, and fired two shots. He knew they had better be perfect shots, or else he was dead. He wouldn't have time to take a third.
BOOM. BOOM.
Luke saw no movement, as all became still. Finally, there was silence. He looked outside and saw the two men, both dead, both with perfect head shots.
He felt excruciating pain as he felt the bullet graze his arm. Blood squirted everywhere.
But he knew from experience it was a flesh wound. It was a small price to pay for saving her life.
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
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.
Some really lovely stories in this collection, balancing science and feminism with elements of fantasy and magic realism. Plus the writing, at times, is beautiful. Goldschmidt is adept at finding metaphor within the language of physics.
Did not get this at all. Was constantly waiting to get drawn into it in some way, but it never happened. I realise that the translator aimed deliberately to convey the voice of the author even if it did not render in a traditional American style (grammatically and narratively) so no doubt there was some difficulty introduced on that front. However, I found it lurching and simplistic and plodding, and I can't put any of that down to cultural differences, just bad writing. Some positive reviews have dismissed criticism saying that this is just “Hard SciFi” as if naysayers just can't handle the fact that the book contains swathes of discussion about physics and mathematics. That didn't bother me - in fact, they were probably the most compelling parts. At least I was learning something! Ditto the historical sections that provided information about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Everything else was just too straightforward, there was no nuance. Characters were one-dimensional, plot devices were introduced and dismissed without any depth, and the science itself just didn't hold together. There were so many bad explanations and contradictions that I got more and more frustrated:
* Communication with the aliens seemed suspiciously easy - the difficulties of language and translation were dismissed with a sentence claiming that the message contained a 'self-deciphering' system* The Trisolarian pacifist who responds to the first Earth message complains: "I am tired of Trisolaris... We have no art, no literature..." - so how is it that he knows what these things are?* When explaining about the three-dimensional proton unfolding resulting in shapes that looked like eyes, the author pops in a note explaining that of course we don't know what they look like... And then goes on to describe them having an iris, a pupil, and being an eyeball that loses the shape of the eye to become a circle. So, it sounds like we do know what the Trisolarian eye looks like, and it sounds very much like a human one.
Not to mention that the whole three-body 'game' involved almost zero interaction. Where was the gameplay? It was more like an interactive movie. (Although that may well be what video games are like these days.) And how do you fall in love with an alien species you know nothing about, other than the fact that they live in a planetary system with three stars? And how is it that a civilisation that spends a long proportion of its time dessicated and inert can somehow become more technologically advanced than Earth, which has a temperate climate?
Other reviewers have pointed out that the third book in the series is clearly the best, and is brilliant, and whatever. I'm intrigued to see what that might look like, but not so much that I want to wade through a second terrible jumbled turgid mess before I get there. This was a one-book problem for me, and thankfully my game is over.
Have rated all four books in this trilogy as 4 stars, though I'm still quite unsure about what I just experienced. Initially frustrated by the fact that there were never any easy answers, I've read a few reviews that point out that this isn't a straight science fiction text, but more of a “weird” fiction, a genre I'm not all that familiar with, but which apparently has less of a reliance on tying things up.
There's a lot to enjoy in here, particularly the writing style which is very hypnotic. It washes over you with a kind of steady, wave-like rhythm, appropriately, given the strong presence of the sea in the book - and hypnosis, of course.
This is a terrible review, partly because I feel this trilogy has put me in a kind of fugue state. As if I have been colonised by Area X and am not sure where my own interpretations and impressions end, and Area X itself begins.
It's very haunting, and I think will stay with me for a while. Not so that I can try to solve the mystery (I don't think that is possible) - rather, so that I can revel in it.
Haven't read much King lately and disappointed to find he's still in need of an editor with a butcher's knife to slash away the dead meat. Far too long. Also found a lot of the exposition ringing false, in particular the descriptions of technology. At times it was like asking my grandpa to describe the internet. Noticed that his wife Tabby is thanked for her assistance explaining mobile phones. Can't help but think someone under the age of 70 might have been a better advisor. Liked the characters though these also felt like they were veering on the edge of caricature. He can still drive a plot and raise the tension like a master, but wonder if he's losing touch with the Americana he used to convey so well
Utterly gripping. Horribly sad. Was still reading at 4.30am because I couldn't put it down. Beside the tragedy there are also some amazing stories of courage and survival.
While I think this was probably far more nuanced than Mockingbird, unfortunately there's barely any story. Nothing happens for over 100 pages, and then the only ‘action' is disillusionment. By the time it actually got interesting, I'd already given up.
First two thirds of this were surprisingly compelling, as I'm not really a fan of ‘hard sci-fi'. Unfortunately, the final section tipped over from space-thriller into techno-masturbation, and I was intensely bored with page long engineering blueprints describing exactly how the habitats were designed. Yawn.
Also: mermen? Really?!
Excellent representation of a mind slowly losing touch with the present. Very well plotted, juxtaposing the past with the present and weaving two narratives together intriguingly. However, I just found it a bit dull.
Not read one for a while. Airport. Picked it up. Just like another cup of coffee. Then read it. Turned the pages and looked at them. Not my favourite, not my least favourite. But somewhere in between. Mid-range Reacher. But mid-range Reacher is still better than another high end book of the month. Solid. Reliable. Comfortingly familiar. Reacher never gets less than three stars.
Interesting, complex and probably a great literary achievement, but unfortunately let down by the artwork which makes some scenes difficult to understand, particularly in recognising characters.
I think I prefer King's shorter works, because often with his novels I find he can go on and on and on, run out of steam and then slap a crappy ending on it. With shorter works, at least the bad endings come before you've invested so much in the story.
Not that he's a bad writer - in fact, it's because you can get so lost in the worlds he creates that the bad endings are like a slap in the face.
(I found it quite funny to find, in one of the story ‘intros', a complaint from the author that the TV movie ‘I Bury The Living' was wrecked by its denouement, and his wish that someone would remake and fix it. How about you rewrite the end of Needful Things, then, Steve?!)
His ability to sketch a scene or a character with a few strokes is on display in this volume, as is his imagination, some fantastic ideas (what if...) and - dare I say it - even one killer ending. He also showcases that he doesn't have to rely on horror or sci-fi to tell a good tale. In fact, all of my favourites here are just these kind of stories: character studies.
‘Morality' is a brilliant thought experiment riffing on the old premise: what would you do for a million dollars? ‘Premium Harmony' and ‘Herman Wouk is Still Alive' are two stunning little vignettes of desperate lives and sorry ends.
‘Under the Weather' is a great little tale of delusion (with the second best ending of the book); ‘Blockade Billy' is a proper Boys Own sporting adventure, (with a Kingian twist); and ‘Drunken Fireworks' is a pretty hilarious tale of back country one-upmanship.
I also enjoyed his attempt at poetry in the style of the Ancient Mariner: ‘The Bone Church' telling the maniacal tale of death and hallucinations deep in the jungle, in the voice of a man driven mad by the experience and faring worse than those who never made it back.
Most of the ‘typical' King stories here were of course entertaining and fun to read (a Kindle that predicts the future, a malevolent devil in the guise of a small boy, a monster car from another dimension) but for me, the glory of this collection are the stories that ditch the silly gimmicks and get to the heart of who we are.
King includes an anecdote about meeting a lady in the supermarket who recognises him as the author of “scary stories” that she doesn't care for. Instead she prefers “uplifting stories, like ‘Shawshank Redemption'”.
“I wrote that, too” he says.
“No you didn't” the lady replies, and goes on her way.
This sums up how I feel about this book, and perhaps King in general. He has such capacity for hope and beauty and can startle us with a view of ourselves and the human condition (I think this is why his horror leaves us so breathless and engaged) - but this element of his range is often lost or ignored in the majority of his books.
King clearly writes what he loves, and that, mainly, is horror. But it's a shame that his chosen genre and populist tag overshadows his talents, and that critics and fans alike overlook these less fantastical revelations of his skill.
Reminded me of Strange and Norrell. Interesting, promising and ultimately a massive disappointment. Overlong and under edited.
Saw this recommended as an apocalyptic/dystopian thriller so unfortunately that may have had an effect on my enjoyment of what is clearly a brilliantly written novel. The picture of village life is beautifully drawn: every detail is perfect. And clearly there is overlap with a dystopia in that the local society experiences both unrest and disarray. But it wasn't quite what I expected - I was in the mood for something a little more... anarchic.
I'd like to read more by Jim Crace, though, the guy can write.
I love Tom Hanks. He's an incredible actor, and seems like a thoroughly wonderful human in real life. Affable, genial, decent. I kind of wish he could be my uncle.
Then it turns out he collects typewriters - and has perhaps used them to knock out a collection of stories, featuring typewriters. As a lover of words and books, and admirer of typewritten text, this is seeming to be all too much. How the stars are aligning! What magnificent tales might Uncle Tom whisper into my eager ears?
Well, unfortunately, it seems Tom is just too nice. His stories are all of the apple pie, white picket fence, “aw shucks”, “American dream” variety that is sickly sweet and devoid of any flavour.
His characters literally say things like “jeez” and “yowza”, wish happy birthday by saying “hoopy boofy” or zanily swear by saying “Jiminy expletive!”. Every single one of them. This isn't how normal people talk - unless it's your parents (or your favourite uncle?!) trying to mimic the current slang to show just how cool and happening they are.
These bland and untroubled characters live in saccharine worlds where no problems exist, other than simple ones they make up for themselves, or are easily fixed by some sub-Dickensian coincidence before anything gets too real.
And as if the twee characters and trite storylines weren't bad enough but the writing is just so... bland. There's not a sniff of an interesting metaphor, or poetic observation. The only characteristic of the writing is the same kooky, gee whiz Walton-esque sing-song nonsense that the characters seem to embody.
I'm so disappointed. The lovable squeeziness and gentle lovability that make Hanks so charming and wonderful in real life just don't cut it when written down in story form. Clearly the complexity and nuance that he can embody so well comes from those who write the parts he plays.
The Sunday Times reviewer seems to have nailed this issue, in a damned-with-faint-praise sentence that the publishers have included on the cover seemingly without irony: “The great strengths of this collection are decency and sentimentality.”
Unfortunately, these wonderful characteristics don't make for interesting or entertaining reading.