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When the book ended at about chapter 123, I thought I'd probably give it two or three stars, for being an enjoyable cartoon read if one could just ignore the constant scientific mistakes and the implausible plot.

But then it went on for another 17 entirely unnecessary chapters. And it occurred to me that lots of people are going to read this without realizing that the science is all wrong, and that given we currently have a vaccine-denying pseudo-science huckster as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, that's really a bad thing.

I don't really know that it's worth saying about "The Secret of SecЯets". The travelogue parts, the main parts of Brown's novels that are most enjoyable for me, are fine; I do want to go to Prague now. Even that has its annoyances; the vastness of the Prague Castle complex is breathlessly described in Chapter 3, then again in Chapter 47, and again in almost identical words in Chapter 139. But at least as far as I can tell it's mostly accurate.

The science, on the other hand, is just ludicrous. Claiming that scientists have transmitted information faster than light using entangled particles, oversimplifying the role of GABA in the brain to the point of pure wrongness, claiming that the only way to reduce the level of a brain chemical would be to actively intervene at every synapse individually (tell that to my SNRIs), citing "nonlinear mathematics" as a source of theories of consciousness (what, like exponents?), claiming that there are hundreds of convincing documented Out Of Body Experiences (there just aren't), that lots of real scientists believe that the brain is just a receiver of consciousness that originates somewhere else (yeah, right), and on and on and on. The Secret Project that the Evil Government Agency is revealed to be working on is literally laughable.

And, as usual, Dan Brown's self-insert character is just annoying. Langdon always knows everything and wins everything. The female lead in this one, despite being older and probably better-known and likely smarter than he is, is constantly deferring to him and needing help from him and admiring him. Yet he is also amazed by ideas at the level of "late night speculation down the pub", and he's baffled (if briefly) by a message being spelled backwards.

Brown's put in another late-story twist, but this one rather fell flat for me. It's true I didn't see it coming, but it wasn't all that revelatory. In fact come to think of it much of the extraneous material in the end section of the book, after it ought to have ended, involves working out in unnecessary detail some of the consequences of the twist, so maybe Brown himself realized that it was kind of weak.

Okay, I'll try to stop. :) The travelogue parts were fine. It didn't have the editing problems and constant repeated malapropisms and egregious ellipses of some of his earlier books. (It does have the constant unnecessary "luxury" brand names, which were as annoying as ever.) The action was very Dan Brown, as the hero rushes between thrilling logistical challenges, solving cute little puzzles along the way. The crazed religious third-party character (Brown really likes those) was kind of fun and interesting. Those two things did pull one along, and it's a page-turner despite the annoyances.

Lovecraft only quite different.

Mostly more conceptual than body-horror, definitely weird and unsettling, certainly not cliched.

A friend pointed out, based on the stories in another Ligotti collection but also true of this one, that while Lovecraft's narrators are usually a normal human reporting on their contact with the weird and uncanny and mind-bending, Ligotti's narrators are more likely to be part of the weird and uncanny and mind-bending themselves, even if for the first few sentences we don't realize it.

And that's an important difference.

Definitely worth reading; what more can be said?

The author of "Day of the Triffids", but no aliens here. In form and basic setup it's a well-crafted comfy British mystery: plucky girl returns from India to find that her brilliant eccentric scientist father has disappeared, she appeals to her two somewhat ne'er do well witty young male friends who have a housemaid named Mrs. Roberts, eventually Constable Pennywise is involved, and ultimately the sharp-minded Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, we have a side-plot about which of the young men if any may be in love with the girl, and so on. Quite nice!

But also we get some rather weighty addresses from more than one of the characters about how there are bad trends in the world and people are just hiding their heads in the sand, about how war is bad and (private, capitalist) weapons makers are very bad, and ultimately the message of the book is that sometimes a desperate character has to take things into their own hands, and do illegal and even violent things.

Which is rather outside of what we expect from the genre. But (or therefore) it works, and works well. A fast, but memorable and worthwhile, read.

Just such a wild and good book. It could be described as "Moby Dick, except that instead of chasing a whale in a sailing ship, they're chasing a giant mole in a railroad train", and that would be accurate but also not. And it sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it works, and it's terrific.

It's also steampunk of a sort, but steampunk that's fresh and unique and not Just Steampunk.

It is a wonderful time, a rollicking adventure, a sweet romp, complete in itself, the loose ends not exactly tied up but not exactly left dangling. It is easy to imagine (and even long for) sequels, or other stories in the same universe, but it's also easy to imagine there won't be any; this was about perfect.

Highly highly recommended.

I came to this book from Sandifer's "Neoreaction a Basilisk", and even though that book is partly a commentary on this one, the commentary is in this case more interesting than its subject.

It may be that different people just have very different susceptibilities to horror, and that mine and Land's have little or no overlap. This brief story shows us two parents worried about their daughter, the three of them going into a somewhat interesting sensory-immersion video game together, and then coming out again (OR DO THEY??? [portentous orchestra hit]).

Even including that obvious final trope, nothing about it struck me as disturbing, scary, horrible, or anything else related to horror, although there were lots of multisyllabic words telling me how terror-inducing it all was. Okay, I guess? For some people?

Various promising elements introduced early on (a creepy stuffed animal, a classmate attempting suicide after the daughter said something mysterious to them) are dropped and never taken up again; perhaps the reader is supposed to fill those bits in, but I didn't see anything in the video game world that would have had much of an effect on a modern youth, except possibly to get them to try a free trial subscription.

Given that I didn't find any horror in the horror story, it's perhaps not surprising that I didn't find the analysis of horror in general, and the horror of Fermi Paradox in particular, especially convincing either. It seems to me that horror, to be effective, must be grounded in the concrete and visceral, even if has a significant component in the abstract and unknown. A fly-covered liver can be horrible by itself; the purely abstract idea that something we currently haven't thought of might remove humanity from the universe sometime, not so much.

I feel as though I ought to have enjoyed these little police mysteries more, given how famous and well-regarded the author and the character are.

I read the first story and half of the second a while back, but bogged down and put it aside. Today I picked it up again, more determined, and read from the beginning of the second story all the way through. It wasn't bad?

These are simple crime mysteries with a homey feel; one is clearly supposed to like Inspector Montalbano and his setting: the general feel of small-city Sicily, the housekeeper who cooks so well, the young girlfriend from Genoa whom the housekeeper dislikes, the various foods and drinks that are so often and lovingly mentioned, the colleague that knows the history of every attractive woman in town, the eccentric unreliable secretary or something at the station who talks in a barely comprehensible accent that draws one to think about how a translator translates something like a thick regional accent.

(In this translation, Catarella has lines like "Chief, 'ere'd be a soitain Signor Valletta onna premisses wantin' a talk t'yiz poissonally in poisson," and one is extremely curious what that was in Italian and what it signified.)

The crimes, even when the Mafia is involved, are relatively mundane, even when horrifying. The solutions are sometimes completely unremarkable, sometimes aided by the equivalent of a fortunate shower thought by the Inspector, sometimes involving a little casual law breaking or letting the guilty go free in the interests of a wider justice. Which is all fine. Montalbano sometimes feels like a slightly-too-perfect possible self-insert, but not painfully. I guess it's somewhat comforting and heartwarming overall?

But I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but I didn't come away feeling like it had all been a particularly good use of time in the reading. Maybe if I read more of them I'll come to know better and be fonder of this world, and more eager to just hang out and be comfortable in it?

Maybe we'll see. :)