This Census-Taker

I feel like such a fake sometimes. I say stuff like, "I like eerie, atmospheric books," and think that there's nothing inherently wrong with an unreliable narrator or open endings. And yet when I read a story like this that has all three I'm just left thinking: wow, this was not for me!

Definitely a unique, lonely, and melancholic book. Kind of gave me James and the Giant Peach/Coraline/Series of Unfortunate Events-kind of vibes with respect to children in strange environments and an innate distrust of adults, especially parents. It's not necessarily a coming-of-age story so much as an adult man reflecting back on an unusual period of his childhood, but it feels like so little dramatic action is actually happening that I never felt unease or tension. It also has a fairly abrupt ending, which really got me because the last twenty pages or so of the physical book version is actually an excerpt from a different book by the same author, so I was holding several pages thinking I had that much more to go when I really didn't.

This is another candidate for my "Goodreads should give us half-star increments" campaign, because I'm treating this as a 2.5 rounded up for uniqueness. I try to think who I would recommend a book to at the end of my reviews, but this one is tricky. I guess if you're looking for a sort of Rorschach test situation where two people can look at the same thing and come up with wildly different interpretations, this would be a good one to consider; would be fun to do in a book club situation.

"weird" seems to be the word to describe this book. When I was a kid, there was a restaurant that set up these miniature tableaus that you could view through an eye viewer. I'm super short, so I could only stand on my tiptoes and catch glimpses of the edges of the scene. That's how this novella made me feel: Mieville created an expansive world and showed us slivers of it. There was no clear setting, the thinnest characters and definitely no plot. But there was atmosphere in spades. There will be fragments and passages that stick with me for such a long time.

In your life, you write three books. This is the one for a reader because some things can't NOT be written. But you can still have secrets.

This is the book that reminded me that reading is in and of itself a skill. This was challenging to follow and catch snippets, but so rewarding to read.