Activity

👍

I think this is a bad book overall, but I respect a big swing. This will be a largely critical passage, but that is because I feel like this is a subject matter that requires an incredible amount of empathy and care to pull off and I think there were real glimmers of that. The idea of making fictional people we care about live through some of the worst experiences in real human history as a way to work through what it all means is one of the most compelling exercises that art can attempt. Doing so in the Battle of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanjing is especially important (especially for a Western audience). Muddling the history by placing passages from “Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze” into a cast of effectively anime characters? Not particularly compelling. It made me feel gross. More gross than when I read that actual history, if that could be possible.Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it really could have worked. Kuang makes some really good choices with structure and then sacrifices too much to get "to the point". Blitzing through magic military academy and interrupting the rhythm with a war is good and the tonal shift here worked for me. Unfortunately, doing so appears to have been almost entirely at the cost of characterization for everyone involved. Kuang uses tropes and stock characters to hand-wave through things and that detracts terribly from the power of later events. I think literally 15 total pages of dialogue between some characters would have made the later “and then my friends and I experienced a genocide” more impactful. In fact, with the use of character tropes, poorly masked transliterations of real Chinese language and folkways/spiritualism, combined with the near-verbatim descriptions of actual war crimes plonked into a fantasy setting I am not entirely sure if any of the actually “good” stuff is her work beyond a very capable and creative initial concept. And yet, despite all this, I will still probably give the second book a shot. I am generally excited to read more R.F. Kuang.

👍

Bitter men beget bitter gods beget bitter disasters. Very loose for me plot-wise, with many digressions but they weren't unwelcome. Such a thoroughly textured, lived world and Achebe isn't going to sit and explain too much just because you don't get it. Such colorful idioms it blew me away.

👍

¿Vos sabés quién sos? Heartbreaking, heartwarming, devastating and delivering. The depths of human depravity can only be overmatched by strength of spirit and relentless resolve that are also so core to being a person. This book maintains a strong pace and yet is detailed enough to show exactly how the gears of fascism grind away at the minds of a population to the point where a bunch of un-uniformed thugs can just bundle a person into a car and make them disappear- and a street full of witnesses will never speak of it. I am also impressed at the creativity it takes to effectively topple a regime by simply showing up every Thursday and marching arm-in-arm. The sheer force of will it takes to effectively browbeat the international scientific community into connecting you with somebody willing (and able) to revolutionize genetics is awe-inspiring. I could probably rant for longer, but it wouldn’t do the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo justice. They are still finding the Desaparecidos, and yet more of their children may not know who they are.

👍

Excellent. Sometimes I even thought I should learn some of this Latin stuff. Mr. Miller wrote some really killer sentences that I sometimes had to just sit and think about for a couple of minutes, which is my favorite type of author and it really is a shame that this is one his only works that ventured beyond short story and that he struggled following up. Of the three stories, I think the first is the weakest ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but Fiat Lux more than makes up for it. Biting commentary both against and for strict Catholicism. I think the discussion at the end about mercy killing/suicide/murder is especially poignant coming from an author who was Catholic and also clearly struggling. "Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think- as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste."

👍

Quick read, interesting concepts only briefly touched on in ways that do not overstay their welcome. I think there are some decent points.

👍

Really interesting, glad to see an account of druids/Celtic culture that acknowledges and attempts to rectify the fact that most of their history has been written by their colonizers. Reads as if you have a really intelligent friend showing you their red yarn conspiracy cork board and absolutely trashing the Romans/British/previous scholars. One of those histories where the whole thing should be read almost entirely with salt but done so in an admirable way.

👎

BAD, NO GOOD, BOO

👍

This is good, but felt rushed in read form. I think the economy of setting is good for a stage play, and the characters not really knowing what is happening is good comedy.

👍

Reads as a decent play, had to look up "The Auld Triangle" to listen and was pleasantly surprised to see that Behan is a capable singer. I think it could be an interesting staging updated for new conflicts.

👍

Not the best Discworld I have read, largely because the main character is literally characterized as being boring. OM is cool though, and a god forced to be scrappy is a solid premise. Lots of this could probably distilled down though.

👎

I think Mr. Pynchon has gotten too used to people rewriting his books into movies. I was pretty excited to read about Wisconsin cheese crime and instead got a (bad) absurdist ramble.

👍

Great collection of stories. Full of that good good farie danger.

👍

Clarke kills me every time (all 3!). Piranesi has some cool things to say about ~being~ in a different relationship with the environment around you. The concept of reaching an arrangement between water, boat, and passenger is compelling. Well told.

👍

Interesting read, I think the last chapter indeed should be cut because it is a crime against the work. Burgess is kinda a shitlord anyways. Otherwise its a bezoomny cowboy riot.

Hey, any novel that properly captures rabies anxiety is going to be solid. Absolutely love it as a way to characterize the people around Sophie and how Fox centers such fraught relationships.

👍

Needed this, wish I had found it earlier

👍

Highly delirious, occasionally magical, I feel like it was probably better in French but the translation has some good lines. Interesting things to say about parents and children.

👍

👍