Gray

Picked this up and finished it within 48 hours. Breathlessly paced, starts off with a shocking murder witnessed by three grade schoolers whose plot to blackmail the murderer spirals wildly out of control. Ends up being a compelling commentary on Chinese social decay, classism and elitism.

I hesitate to call this a medieval novel, because it's so unmoored from any sense of time or place that it almost solely functions as an allegory. The message? Rich and powerful people hoard resources at the expense of the underclass whose labor generates their wealth. Religion is the opiate of the masses. Yawn. Fortunately, the character work here is strong enough that I still had a good time reading this. I have a soft spot for depraved and damaged degenerates and there is no shortage of these here. Overall, this was salacious and edgy enough for me to enjoy, but not as funny, original or profound as Moshfegh's excellent My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

I've been playing as a dark elf in Baldur's Gate 3, so I decided to check this out to delve more into D&D Forgotten Realms lore. A fairly imaginative setting held back by generic characters and story beats, but I wasn't expecting too much more than what I got. Weirdly horny in a way that I've come to expect from “nerdy” media from the 90s. Felt like some of Salvatore's.... proclivities were on display in this one.

Oh boy. Going into this, all I knew about the premise of this story was that it was about two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, somehow coexisting in the same geographical space. Having assumed that this would be caused by some supernatural phenomenon, I was shocked to find out within the first 100 pages that the bifurcation between the cities was purely psychological, that citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma were trained from birth to systematically ignore each other under penalty of severe punishment. On its face, this serves as a pretty powerful albeit obvious metaphor for the class divides in modern urban life. Unfortunately, from this point on it becomes clear that China Miéville is more interested in meticulous “worldbuilding” than he is in actually exploring the interesting thematic implications of this setting.

This “Emperor's New Clothes” society is completely preposterous, and the more Miéville fleshes out the history, politics and granular details of how people live their daily lives in Besźel and Ul Qoma, the less I'm able to take anything that happens in the novel seriously. This wouldn't even be a problem if the story was presented as a satire or with a decent helping of wit, but Miéville plays the whole thing almost entirely straight. Almost all the characters we follow are completely psychologically in thrall to the society's structure with very little acknowledgement of its absurdity. Moreover, even this would have been something I could accept if the detective story this world was built around wasn't so stale and predictable, populated with one-dimensional archetypes that come off as brainwashed drones. And if all that wasn't enough to sour me on this novel, I couldn't even get behind Miéville's prose - halting and stilted, with a sense that he's trying to cram as much information and qualification into every sentence as possible.

I've seen comparisons of this novel to Borges, but the Borges version of this would have been a 6-12 page short story with exactly enough information to understand the core concept and its thematic implications rather than a 300+ page slog in which I have to learn about the differences between Besźelian and Ul Qoman traffic laws. This novel is a great illustration of how overrated “worldbuilding” is as a literary device, even in genre fiction. All that lavish detail and none of it is remotely as moving or interesting as the simple fact of the novel's basic premise.

Decided to read this after seeing Scorsese's recent adaptation. While i found the film itself to be a dull, repetitive slog, the story of the Osage Reign of Terror was fascinating and shocking and i felt the need to gain a more complete picture of what happened. This turned out to be a stellar read, with the most illuminating and sobering details being the laws and institutions that not only ignored but actively facilitated a conspiracy of murders with a scope that far exceeds the film's focus on one particularly notable villain. Here we see not only the corrupting effects of individual greed, but the all-consuming barbarism of settler colonialism as a whole.

This novel has an incredibly creative and enduring concept at its center that Danielewski is determined to rip the reader away from as much as possible. Not exaggerating when I say I would have enjoyed this more as a creepypasta or SCP story, or even a high concept video game (MyHouse.WAD tries to tackle this with interesting results) The frame narrative and academic satire did absolutely nothing for me.

This is the second volume of Knausgaard's autofictional epic novel My Struggle, dealing with the trials and tribulations of his life during his relationship with his wife, Linda, and their three children. As with Book 1, I very much appreciated Knausgaard's lucidity and honesty when assessing not only others and the Swedish bourgeois community as a whole, but himself and his own shortcomings. The result is a portrait of a man who comes away looking frankly pathetic, having multiple petty crises of masculinity and a deep desire for solitude that seems mostly motivated by his own unhappiness as a husband and father. Knausgaard's feelings about himself and those around him often ring true as thoughts and feelings I've had myself but didn't have the personal fortitude to acknowledge. I have to admire the bravery it takes to write a novel so self-effacing. Knausgaard's honesty in assessing his own feelings leads to some hilarious moments throughout the novel in which this taciturn, self-serious man suffers greatly through such “emasculating” activities as attending a child's birthday party, taking his children to the park or, my personal favorite, attending a “Rhythm Time” activity with his infant daughter. This serves as an entertaining prelude to a good deal of sobering introspection about love and fatherhood, the pain of being in a relationship that has lost its initial flame of passion and the mind-numbing drudgery of the daily routines of a parent. I was receptive to Knausgaard's critiques of secular, materialistic, hypocritically liberal Sweden as being on some level spiritually empty and soul-crushing, but I also believe that Knausgaard's unhappiness isn't a function of his environment but rather his own self-hatred and difficulty coming to terms with his upbringing. Ultimately, despite some slower sections towards the end, I was really moved by this novel and am looking forward to continuing the series with a look at Knausgaard's early childhood in Book 3.

Had an interest in reading some pulp horror and saw that Ketchum is one of the more well regarded writers in the genre. This novel was based on a true crime in which a woman tortured a teenage girl who was in her care and encouraged the neighborhood children to take part. I don't think this was a story that was worth telling, at least not in novel form. There were some thought provoking themes, like the exploration of the ways in which objectification of women leads to dehumanization and violence, but ultimately this was too lurid for me and not close enough to the real life events for me to feel like i learned much about what actually happened. As far as pulp horror goes I preferred The Cellar which was about a bunch of weird sex monsters and was too stupid for me to take seriously. This was just disturbing and not worthwhile.

This seems like it was a fun book for Greg Egan to write, but for me it was a painfully boring read. Ultimately i'm less interested in the nuts and bolts of Egan's sci-fi conceits than the psychological impact they have on the characters. Egan's previous works achieve a good balance between high concept sci-fi and psychological drama, but this novel ended up devolving largely into long winded math, particle physics and biochemistry lectures that i had no patience for. From the plot descriptions of Egan's later works I suspect this trend gets even worse over time. Still highly recommend his early stuff.

There's plenty to dislike about this book, whether it's the grossly hypersexualized female lead, the laughable character names (Judgment Rucker. Lol), the pro-carceral themes, but the central premise of the Beast House, which I won't give away here, is so absurd and funny that I ended up enjoying the book overall.

i enjoyed the suspenseful interplay between the two central characters. Both ended up being too psychologically broken to even properly hurt each other.