Rob
Worth a read unless you're already headlining international festivals, I think. A decent “getting your feet wet” guide for newbies, answering a lot of basic questions, and for sure this is aimed largely at that crowd; to that end, Morse spends significant time explaining some real basic stuff that I think is beneficial, whereas trying to learn that stuff “in the wild,” so to speak, could result in either some embarrassing problems or in being mocked by people you ask. There are a few suggestions in here that I think are really great even for the more experienced crowd, though, even if much of it will be a retread for that audience.
I think we all knew we were heading for something like this. I didn't predict the ending, although I feel a bit like I should have. This series of trilogies is, I think, the greatest modern work of fantasy I've ever read, and this was a perfect, amazing conclusion.
I didn't read this final trilogy for a good while after it was released, and procrastinated reading this final volume even longer, partly because the series is important to me and I didn't want it to be over, and partly because I've read enough Hobb to know that it would be an emotionally difficult read. I was right; I spent most of the last 10% of it – which is an insanely large amount, when you think about it, especially for a 950 page volume – sobbing and hyperventilating uncontrollably. My wife came downstairs to check on me, thinking from the sounds I was making that I might have received some kind of awful news.
The first volume of the first trilogy of this series was published in 1996, according to Goodreads, and I think I must have started reading it not long after publication. That means I've read this series for almost 25 years, which is a longer relationship than I have with nearly any other series. I hardly know what to say now that I've finished it, except that I have a decades-long connection to these characters and I'm incredibly pleased that Hobb has finished it so well, though that's no surprise.
Strangely, I never read the Rain Wilds trilogy, and I'll have to go back and do that. It'll be interesting and different to read it for the first time now, knowing what we learned in this final trilogy.
What an immense talent.
The epitome of “okay.” It's not that this is worse than the first book; it's perfectly competent. In fact, I assumed we were going to get Bujold Hogwarts, and I'm pleased that she chose to skip that particular trope.
I thought the first book was thin but maybe setting up some really good stories. But the second has no more luster than the first. It's adequate, but life's too short to read adequate books.
I cannot possibly say enough good things about this book. Absolutely, jaw-droppingly incredible. I have not been this excited about a book in years. Recommended wholeheatedly and without reservation.
This was just sort of quietly heartbreaking. I can say it was a good read; I don't know if I can say I enjoyed it.
It's the story of Stevens: master butler and relic of a bygone era, who served an English lord through two World Wars before the house, and what staff remain, transferred to a new American owner. He's a consummate professional, suborning all personal matters to the demands and dignities of his role.
On a rare – possibly only – vacation, Stevens finally has the leisure to reflect on his life. At first concerned wholly with his profession, his thoughts wander and he begins to peel back the years of his life, and layer upon layer of self- deception.
Often, Stevens' thoughts reveal to us as readers facts that he does not yet and might never realize himself. Front and center is his former master of the house, Lord Darlington. Stevens idolizes Darlington: as a butler he considers it his highest calling to serve a man so central to the halls of power in England. He considers Darlington above reproach, and as Darlington does foolish or even reprehensible things, he either makes excuses for the man, or else denies that it's even his place to judge. The most obvious is Darlington's hand in international politics. We slowly discover that Darlington is a Nazi sympathizer with fascist leanings; rather than acknowledge these failings, Stevens decides that Darlington knows better than his detractors. After all, Darlington is a great man.
This is hardly Darlington's only misstep. Darlington orders Stevens to dismiss the Jewish members of staff; the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, objects strenuously, and demands that Stevens recognize the immorality of the order, but Stevens resolves the cognitive dissonance by recusing himself from considering the matter. It is not his to reason: Darlington has made his wishes clear, and there's nothing more to say.
Miss Kenton, of course, is the other central figure in Stevens' life. She is representative of all that Stevens has failed to do: directly, as a potential romantic interest clearly interested in him as he is in her, and indirectly, as the conscience Stevens will not permit himself.
The motoring trip, as Stevens' first real extended time away from Darlington Hall, is a horrorshow of these revelations for Stevens. He slowly realizes that he's wasted his life: he pegged the entire value thereof to his service to a great man, only to discover in his twilight years – when his professional capabilities are beginning to desert him, as his father's did – that that man wasn't so great after all. There's still so much he hasn't come to grips with when the story draws to a close: his feelings for Mrs Benn (neé Kenton), the fundamental insufficiency of his world view – after all, he still has the same slavish devotion to his profession, he merely regrets the decisions of his previous employer.
By the end Stevens has grasped some of the inadequacies of the actors in his worldview, but come precious little closer to grasping the inadequacy of the worldview itself. Crushing.
Like everyone else, I've waited for this book for a long time, as Lynch has had a number of personal life issues to work through. It pains me to say I am unhappy with the eventual result.
I was pretty excited when I picked it up on release day, but it didn't last. It jumps back and forth between a flashback and present-day; it's been so long since I read the first two books that I don't recall it, but I'm reliably informed that the first two did this as well. Regardless, I found neither especially compelling. Characters' actions are sometimes inexplicable because their motivations aren't reasonable. The will-they-won't-they relationship between Locke and Sabetha is more irritating than anything else. I felt like Sabetha sometimes said and did the things she did not because they made any sense, but because she had to to get her character where Lynch wanted her to go.
Sad to say this did not live up to my expectations.
Thank god this is over. The first forty-five percent is impenetrable and the remainder is not worth penetrating. I could barely make myself slog through it, and at under 200 pages that's quite a feat. I have no idea why this is considered a classic.
The prose is as tortured as they come. Reading it is like listening to Robin Williams – every time you latch on to one thought, Pynchon careens off in another direction – but less entertaining. It bears some resemblance to the also-bizarre but less-terrible Orion, You Came And You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan, which was a strange read but one I enjoyed well enough. That was her debut, and if you enjoyed this one I think you may also enjoy the Henehan. I would not be surprised to see Henehan cite Pynchon as an influence.
I hesitate to even describe the plot, thin as it is. It concerns Oedipa Maas, named co-executor of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, and in the process of executing that duty she begins to discover and investigate a possible long-running conspiracy. Kind of. It hardly merits the name. Along the way Oedipa and the other characters will say and do a great many things that don't make any goddamned sense.
Recommended if you hate yourself. It's even worse than all the people writing unbelievably pretentious reviews about it trying to be cutesy.
First book in quite a while that has really grabbed me. It's exactly the kind of book I like – one that plops you down in the middle of a large, well-established set of rules different from the ones you're used to – but it's an excellent example of the type.
What stands out to me is the brutality. It's never cruel just to be cruel, but it – or rather its characters – pull no punches. To be clear, though, a lot of modern work in fantasy and even other media seeks to distinguish itself by what it would like the audience to believe is realism and grit, but which is really just mean-spiritedness for its own sake, and this doesn't fall into that trap.
Great building of its own mythology and systems. Strongly recommended among other recent fantasy, from which it stands out wonderfully.
EDIT: Why did I only give this four stars my first go-round? This book is great.
Fantastic and sad. Easy to see why it's a classic and I regret that it took me so long to read it. It wasn't part of my high school reading, and it's been on my to-read list for years; it was bumped up in my priority list when a friend posted Jem's brief exchange with Atticus after the trial, on Facebook in the wake of the Ferguson situation. So glad I picked it up.
Solid if not especially innovative. I love Bujold's Vorkosigan books dearly, and was kind of hoping for the same kind of madcap adventure, but it was not to be. This book is largely setup, though, so maybe there will be more of that once the series gets rolling. Quick read as it's only novella length.
I have pretty mixed feelings about this one. It's built on an incredible idea, but the novella format isn't long enough to do it justice, and the execution is merely okay.
The setup is very strong. All of the Narnia and Alice in Wonderland type stories, those are all true and happened to different people in different worlds. (The nature of the worlds varies and can be extremely dark and not necessarily what you might think of as desirable, but they are all appealing to the personalities of the people who stumble into them.) But most people don't get to stay in their Wonderland, and they end up back in the “normal” world, wanting nothing more than to get back.
So what happens to you if you're a former Wonderlander and now you're back in this lame world, unable to return to the much better place in which you sojourned? Well, it's pretty hard to cope, and their families can't understand and think they've gone mad, so they get sent to, ostensibly, a school to help them get past their delusions. But actually all the students are former Wonderlanders, and the people who run it know they aren't delusional. A little over a third in, the story takes another, darker turn.
Neat premise, right? I absolutely love the kind of stories that make up the building blocks of this one – I loved Neverwhere, for example – and this was recommended to me on that basis. But it's not one of those stories, it's a meta-story about those stories. Unfortunately, there isn't all that much meat there past the premise.
The protagonist, Nancy, is a returnee from a world that just... doesn't offer much of interest to most people, I don't think. It's a bit difficult to relate to her in that way – why would she want to go back there so badly? But you can accept that she does and move on. Nancy's friends tend to be the other misfits, all of whom are a little too cool for school and a little too quick with the repartee. The ones who aren't Nancy's friends are pretty one-dimensional, because there's not enough time for any real character development. I think I can remember one of their names.
After the first third, the “main” plot begins, but it's over before it starts and there's never all that much mystery. You'll figure out a bunch of what's going on pretty quickly, and what you don't the characters will, and then you're at the climax, which goes awfully quickly and with minimal drama, and then you're at the end. The ending is rather too pat as well, and while I don't want to spoil anything, it's not well-supported by the text.
I debated between two and three stars, and for now I've settled on two, although I might change my mind and edit it back up later. If three stars is “I liked it” and two stars is “I didn't like it,” well, for once neither feels quite right. I liked the idea and I wish I liked the end result a bit more. But it's not bad, just... it's a pity it doesn't build more out of the building blocks it has. It's entertaining enough, but the wasted potential is a shame.
I didn't like this at all. It starts with an interesting premise – a psychologist, treating a patient who believes he can control the weather, believes his wife has been replaced by a pretender and begins investigating – but never does much with it that's interesting. The book is short, but feels like a slog; the prose is stultifying, the characters' dialogue and actions unnatural.
Better than most comedians' books. Actually part humor, part sociology, and part advice column. Mainly about how technology and online dating have modified social norms. Feels a little like the jokes and the serious advice step on each other's toes sometimes. But I enjoyed it and found it surprisingly insightful.
CAUTION: SPOILERS
I have extremely mixed feelings about this one, for a few reasons.
The biggest is that Baru is a genius, a savant, a brilliant mind playing four-dimensional chess, except when for plot reasons it's necessary for her to do something dumb, which happens every time she turns around. She trusts someone for no good reason and is betrayed. She gets drunk and says something she shouldn't. Whatever the ostensible reason, the reaction is always the same: Why did I say that? Why did I do that? And the answer is, who knows, it doesn't fit. I do quite like the maneuvering, but the plot never quite aligns with what we're told of its protagonist.
The other big complaint is that you can divide the book into two halves, and most of the second half, the rebel war campaign, drags. Interminable stretches where little happens, Baru surrounded by dukes with minimal character development. They have their archetypes — the smart one, the hot-headed one, the sailor one — but they're pretty two-dimensional.
I saw the ending gambit of the last few pages coming, but by the end when it hadn't happened, I assumed I was wrong. So I was simultaneously surprised, and not. It did pique my flagging interest, so the next book is back to a maybe.
For most of the book, I thought I wanted Baru to be cleverer and do more political maneuvering. By the end, the plot has retconned itself so that she is and has, but the writing in between doesn't support it.
Might wind up revising my review score on this one. Strange book in a lot of ways.
I bounced off this pretty hard the first time I tried to read it, but decided to give it another chance and I'm glad I did. Seminal sci-fi masterpiece that creates an imaginative world. At this point, I think Dune is so subsumed into the collective literary consciousness that it's hard to talk about, because so many people are at least familiar with it. References to it abound in popular culture, so much so that even I could recognize them without having read it.
Two chief complaints:
1. The writing is inconsistent. Mostly, it's fine. Occasionally, especially at the beginning, it's unacceptably expository, with characters discussing things that they should all know perfectly well for the benefit of the reader.
2. Paul is borderline omniscient, except when he's not. You can see the roots of R. Scott Bakker's Kellhus here with the Bene Gesserit training, but when it's convenient plotwise, those abilities suddenly don't seem as powerful. Little explanation is generally offered.
Loved it anyway. Definitely worth a read.
Book 2, still good. Suffers from the same curse as other Book 2s, where it's transitional and not all that much can happen. But it's Hobb, so of course it's good. Enjoyed the read, gonna need a breather before Book 3.
Devoured this in one day, absolutely loved it. Best thing I've read in years, much better writing than all the mediocrity I've read lately.
This is the good shit, right here.
Everything Vol. 4 wasn't. Sets up a plot worth reading, and tells the story in style. Makes the arc begun two volumes ago worth caring about again.
Where cyberpunk got started. Even knowing that, you'll be shocked by how much other cyberpunk steals wholesale from Gibson.
Superb.
This is a short story collection by William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk, most famous for his seminal novel Neuromancer. To read Gibson is to realize just how completely every other work in the genre has cribbed from him, right down to the slang he invented.
Not all of Gibson's work is up to the standard of Neuromancer. I'm happy to say that this one is. Burning Chrome collects ten short stories of varying lengths. I would prefer not to describe the stories; I believe a critical part of the experience is going in blind, allowing oneself to construct a mental image of the settings Gibson creates from the context he provides. Extrapolating his world from the little corner he renders is part of the journey. Instead, here's a list of the stories:
1. Johnny Mnemonic2. The Gernsback Continuum3. Fragments of a Hologram Rose4. The Belonging Kind5. Hinterlands6. Red Star, Winter Orbit7. New Rose Hotel
8. The Winter Market9. Dogfight10. Burning Chrome
I enjoyed all ten of them, but the starred stories were my favorites. As is Gibson's style, the stories are grimy and gritty as you'd expect a cyberpunk setting to be.
I love Gibson for his ideas and his settings, but several passages made me wish for a Kindle edition just so I could highlight. A lot of good turns of phrase in here.
This book is currently available only in physical format, and is not currently being printed, but copies are plentiful at the moment and are not hard to get hold of. My paperback edition features a preface by Bruce Sterling in defense of science fiction as a genre, which I enjoyed very much as well. I am sorry to say that the genre does seem to need sticking up for.
Very much worth reading.
This is such a weird series. The prose is mediocre, the mechanics are trite and the plot is slow. But it is an amazing series that explores some unique ideas I've never seen addressed anywhere else, and it's worth reading at least once.
I am also a sucker for stories with epic histories and epic-sounding names, and “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and White Gold Wielder” does it for me.