Albert
I was affected more by the large-scale tragedy than by any of the personal suffering of the main characters. The final personal loss did not hit me very hard because I was already numbed by the descriptions of the horrors happening to secondary and background characters, like the beheaded servant, or the malnourished children.
Throughout, I had the sense that the main characters were a bit contrived to be in an optimal position to cover all aspects of the war. For example, Olanna happens to have an ex from the north, who ends up on the opposite side of the war.
The Part 3 section was particularly jarring, an extended flashback focusing on soap opera-like subplots, which interrupts the story of the war.
All in all, despite the flaws in characterization, it was still a powerful account of a period of history that I was ignorant about.
In a way, the title is misleading. I was expecting something like a biography of Genghis Khan, and it is that to start with. I was surprised when the death of Genghis Khan occurred about a third of the way through the book. There's a definite tonal change at this point. The parts about Genghis's early life and eventual rise to power feel more like legends and myths because the research is drawn from stories that were probably passed down orally before being recorded historically. After his death, the book shifts to a more high-level account of his descendants and empire. As the empire grew, so did the number of “proper” historians taking down the events. As a result, the text becomes more encyclopedic and less personal, and I found it less compelling. Still, I learned a lot about a subject that I wasn't that familiar with before, so it's good.
The linguistic theory stuff in City of Glass reminded me of [b: Snow Crash 40651883 Snow Crash Neal Stephenson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1530057753l/40651883.SX50.jpg 493634], which is always a good thing. Ghosts was a bit weaker, and felt like a variation of the same themes. But The Locked Room brought it around for me again, by bringing the more abstract ideas of the others into a more personal story.We become our obsessions, and if our obsession is another person, we risk losing our identity.
I read this after enjoying the TV series. The book is good, but I must say the TV show does a pretty good job of covering it. I was able to gloss over some of the more descriptive parts of the book because I had already seen the visual representation and so already had a mental image.
The real test will be when I read the next book, which I want to do before the second season of the show comes out...
Since this series of books is so plot-driven, it's hard to discuss without giving anything away. I'll just say that I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to see what happens next. I'm also very curious about how HBO is going to film this; it's bigger in scope than the first book and has more big action scenes that will be difficult to bring to the screen. Buy the DVDs, people... they're going to need the money.
An old favourite. This time around, I found myself getting impatient towards the latter half. The first act setup is probably my favourite part, how it creates the setting and introduces the concepts of the Metaverse. As a software guy, I love that “hacking” is like a superpower in the book. Once we get into the long discussions with the Librarian, I started skimming.
I could have done without the repeated references to historical Transcendentalists. It would have left a more focussed look at her personal life. I was blown away by Fun Home, but this one didn't hit as hard.
Towards the end, as the book explores concepts from AI, I lost a bit of interest because I had doubts about whether it's out-dated. AI has progressed greatly since this book was written.
But the first half, leading up to the explanation of Godel's theorem, I found fascinating.
Is there such a thing as “so good it's bad”?
We're all familiar with the inverse, usually in the form of a movie which is so clumsy and inept that it becomes entertaining, in a “laughing at you, not with you” kind of way. What would the opposite—”so good it's bad”—mean? I believe that I had this experience when I read the legendary It by Stephen King.
There is no doubt that I enjoyed reading this book. I formed a real connection with the characters. My favourite scenes are when the kids are just being kids, joking with each other, building a dam, or running from bullies. I felt like I grew up with them, and when they are reunited in adulthood, I was fascinated with how they ended up and what they've done with their lives, just like I would be if I was reuniting with real people from my real childhood. How did King make me bond with the characters? He did it like any great writer: by giving the characters detailed characteristics and personalities, so that they feel like real people.
This attention to detail extends beyond characters, and into the setting as well. The town of Derry is treated to a series of “interludes” that separate the main sections of the book. The interludes serve as a history lesson of the town, and also as a way to build the myth of the monster called It. They have the feel of an origin story in a comic book, where the monster and the town itself became linked as a character of its own. By presenting the interludes as the personal journal of Mike, a black man, King even manages to tell an inspirational Civil Rights tale about a military nightclub called The Black Spot.
The level of detail is staggering, and it is a strength of the novel. But as I kept turning the pages, I came to see it as a weakness too. To put it bluntly, there is simply too much of a good thing. For example, I wrote down a note to myself at around page 300: “Eddie and the lobsters.” After finishing the book, I flipped back to that section to find 4 pages of backstory about Eddie meeting a hobo on the tracks, and obtaining a box of lobsters, and then eating (or not eating) the lobsters, and then being chased by a hobo or something. I had no recollection of this part of the book, because really, it had no bearing on the main plot. After some more flipping, I saw that the lobster/hobo episode is embedded in the middle the story of Eddie's encounter with the It monster, which is itself bookended by the story of Bill telling Eddie and the others about his encounter with the It monster.
This form of recursion, flashbacks within flashbacks, backstories within backstories, is a technique that gets used over and over in the novel. King seems to want to leave no gaps; every memory triggers another, as if the characters need a reason for every feeling and recollection that they have. I admire the skill that it must have required for King to pull this off, but the result is that the book became structurally predictable. I felt like I always knew what I was going to get, especially in the second act: this chapter is where Ben sees the monster, and we'll get some backstory about his life; then, the next chapter is now where Stan sees the monster, and we get some backstory about his life. Don't get me wrong, all of the pieces and stories themselves are compelling and enjoyable to read, but in the end, it felt like an album filled with good songs, but they all have the same time signature and chord progressions.
One of the plot devices of the book is the fact that the characters in their adulthood have forgotten what happened to them when they were kids, because of the psychic powers of the town and the monster. Given the mystical amnesia, I would have accepted some fuzziness in their memories.
You have a great imagination, Mr. King, but please leave some things to ours.
The illustrations were great. I didn't read all of the text because it's written at a very kid-friendly level and didn't interest me much. This is one example where the movie works better than the book, mainly because I think it's very important to actually see Méliès films in motion.
My favourite little bit is when Okonkwo's daughter is taken by the priestess for some ritual, and Okonkwo desperately wants to go after her and make sure she's okay, but forces himself to wait a “manly” amount of time before going. Nice dig at male insecurity.
Really indulgent first chapter about NBA drafts, which was interesting, but had little to do with the rest of the book. I was most interested in the story of Amos and Danny's relationship, and I almost think the book could have been entirely about that.
I liked the parallel and contrasting histories of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy, and how the rise of Christianity changed everything. But when it came to the actual ideas in Lucretius's poem and how those ideas affected the Renaissance, I felt it was kind of rushed and crammed into the final two chapters.
Frankly, I'm surprised I finished this book. I sort of saw it as part of my current project to work my way up to reading [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165604485s/6759.jpg|3271542]. (Which is currently sitting on my dining room table. I'm afraid to shelve it lest the lack of a visual reminder will make me forget that I have it. It is also my hope that visitors will be impressed by the sight of the thing.)
Anyway, I figured I would read a bit of Everything and More, see what it's like, and skim through the rest when the math got too hairy. Now, I'm not claiming that I understood all of the math and that it didn't get hairy, or that I never skimmed through any of it at all, but I did follow the general gist for most of the way, or at least enough that I never felt like slamming the book closed and hurling it across the room.
This I credit to DFW's writing style. I don't think I've ever read anything where the text was so aware of its being read. There are constantly little asides and apologies (many in Wallace's trademark footnotes) about how difficult a particular section is, how you might want to re-read this or that paragraph, how it's all going to be OK in the end. These constant conversational reassurances do a lot to encourage the reader (me, at least) to keep going, despite the difficult math.
And there is a suspense to it all too. Cantor is mentioned near the beginning and is set up to be the Hero of the Story, the one whose theories are the ultimate culmination of everything I'm reading, and I genuinely felt the urge to know what Cantor did, like wanting to find out who the killer is in a mystery novel. Wallace does a good job of reminding us how each theory through history will be relevant to Cantor's transfinite numbers, while making each theory interesting to learn about on its own. And while the actual proofs and formulae are explained well, I found the most enjoyment in the connective tissue about the like societal and cultural and historical contexts around each discovery, e.g. the geometric rigidity of the Greeks, the need to develop and accept infinitesimals in physics and science during the time of Newton and Leibniz, &c. I actually wish he had focussed on those contexts more, and I think he probably could have written a thousand-page book (it amazes me how much research must have gone into this as is). I would probably have still read it all.
I picked up this book after my company hired him to do an interview with our CEO, and I was struck by his charisma. His charm comes through in the book, making it an easy read, but he also deals with South Africa's dark history of racism in a refreshingly blunt way.
Beyond the impact of racism, there's also the huge personal cost of not fitting in with any particular group. He's not Black (though he identifies himself as such), he's not white, and that's hard enough. But there's also the colored people who are the result of race-mixing long ago, before it was illegal. He doesn't fit in with them either, even though he looks like them.
I didn't realize how closely The Social Network adapted this book. Having just watched the movie, I didn't find that reading the book added much.
Not as good as Oryx and Crake. I found that switching between two main characters took me out of it. It's a bit odd to have one of them narrated in first person, and the other in third person. I don't think it serves any great purpose, and it only caused me to have to adjust every time the perspective changed.
My biggest problem with it is that all the minor characters that Jimmy knew and met independently in Oryx and Crake are shown to have a history together in The Year of the Flood. It was too much of a coincidence and made it seem arbitrary.
It was good for the first couple of chapters. I agree that the Internet tends to glorify the participation of the masses, even if those masses produce very little quality. Keen criticizes Wikipedia in particular, which has made me second-guess my own dependence on that site. I've never used Wikipedia for any in-depth research, but I now worry that even the small factoids that I get from it may not be true. I think that we are starting to forget the distinction between content created by experts and by amateurs, and this book does a good job reminding us of that.
In the second half, I think the book loses track of its main argument and devolves into moralizing. It basically boils down to: “The Internet is bad because people get addicted to online poker! And people steal music! And there's too much porn!” These latter chapters seem disconnected from the original thesis of the book, since these problems aren't related to the creation of content by amateurs. While the first part of the book is about the objective quality of content, the second half deals with subjective morals, and it becomes too grounded in the personal values of the author.
Perhaps ironically, the very act of my writing this review (I'm not a professional writer or reviewer) is exactly the kind of thing that this book is arguing against. So I wonder, can anyone really write a review of this book without having an inherent bias?
Really enjoyed the sense of humour that Wong brought to this memoir. It really highlights the contradictory and absurd nature of Chinese communism. But, appropriately, the humour goes out the window during her first-hand account of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Those few chapters are very powerful indeed.
It was well-written and I enjoyed the narration of Grace, the main character. But I had a problem with the character of the doctor, Simon. It seemed like the character of Simon was meant to be a parallel to Grace, but I don't think the book spends enough time with his story to fully develop that connection. It would have been better if the time was evenly divided between the two characters, or just focussed on Grace herself. The chapters about Simon seemed tacked on; and I found that his subplot ended abruptly.
My favourite parts were the sections that consisted of letters between the different characters, especially the letters from Simon's mother. She played the motherly guilt trip in a way that was real and funny.
Really liked it until the husband's infidelity. After that point, it got a little chaotic, which I guess is part of the point.
Effectively captures the anxiety of day-to-day life, and then manages to layer climate anxiety on top of that. Best read in small chunks.
I liked it less and less as it went on. The first book, I was in, because it focused on one character's quest, and had a sense of discovery as Lyra learned about the rules of the world. There are many strange mysteries, and they all tie into her quest.
By the third book, the world-building and multiple plotlines have gotten so complex that it feels like the characters need to explain what's going on to each other in every other chapter. Lyra spends a third of it asleep, and she's the only character I ever really cared about. (Will is okay, but too brooding.) I found myself rushing through whole sequences, just to get back to her story.
Some subplots I found unsatisfying:
- The war against the Authority doesn't amount to much. We simply haven't seen the Authority do anything to make us want him to lose.
- The assassin sent to kill Mary because she was going to tempt Lyra... he gets killed without the confrontation ever happening.