Reviews and Comments

This was finally going to be the year I read Ulysses, and for my first time through I decided I was going to just dive in and read it all on my own, without notes or any preparation, and only a vague memory of the larger plot points of the original Homer epic. I did not expect it to take me four months to do it.

I have no fear of big, difficult books — I breezed right through 2666 and Infinite Jest and the complete works of Mark Danielewski — so I thought “just how hard could it be?” The answer is very hard. To understand and experience Ulysses I had to give it my full attention and read it far more closely than I’m used to reading. And both those things are difficult to me to do at the end of the day in bed when I normally read. If I had a glass or wine or two for dinner, forget it, I did not have nearly the focus I needed for this book and I had to put it aside and read other things.

That said I am completely captivated by this book, I don’t regret having spent the time, and I already have plans to re-read it later with better preparation. The writing is loose and impressionistic and there were times when I had feelings and sensations in my head from reading it and I had no idea how they got there. Joyce’s skill with writing is on a level I did not even realize existed, and I have not the faintest clue of how he did it. In that respect, I loved it, just loved it.

Four stars instead of five mostly as a reflection of my own inadequacies in understanding this book. Will re-evaluate on the next reading.

I am dithering between three and four stars for this book. I have a huge amount of respect for the ideas, not only for the unusual gender roles and sexuality the book is famous for, but also for the general theme of duality and otherness that is weaved throughout the book. There’s a lot to think about and to explore in this book as metaphor.

My issue is that the plot wanders, often focuses on subtle and arcane interpersonal politics, and there are whole sections that are just deadly dull. I found myself skimming a lot, especially toward the end when there’s a long long passage of the characters wandering through descriptions of the landscape. I also did not find the characters well formed or well differentiated, and as the point of view shifts from chapter to chapter it usually took me a little while to figure out who was talking.

I was also somewhat disappointed that although gender is a central question and theme of the book, I felt the book often did not go far enough in presenting a society that is wholly gender fluid. The premise is that all of the people on the planet Gethen are are male for the majority of the time, but can become female during “kemmer,” a once-a-month sort of heat or estrus. But the experience of kemmer is little described, and none of the characters are presented in their female form. Le Guin uses the “he” pronoun for every character, and although some characters are described as “effeminate” (in mildly disparaging terms), all the characters come across as very male. I recognize that it’s difficult to apply modern gender politics to a book that was written in the 1960s, and that I myself may have trouble recognizing the complexities of a gender fluid society, just as Genly Ai does in the book itself. But I felt that the duality themes would have been stronger if both male and female forms were represented, or if the androgyny of the “male” characters was more clearly explored.

(hidden for spoilers, but they are mild spoilers.)

This is not a subtle novel. Upton Sinclair was a muckraker journalist and clearly his intent here was to expose the horrors of unfettered capitalism and the , through the story of an immigrant family trying to survive in the Chicago meatpacking district.

The descriptions are lurid, the plot is melodramatic, and the various trials the main character endures are hard to take. Just when one miserable thing happens there’s another miserable thing, everyone cheats and robs everyone else, half the characters die horribly, it is an unending litany of abuse and injury and lying and death. I had to alternate reading chapters in this book with something lighter because this book was just so dark.

Toward the end the main character discovers socialism, and suddenly everything starts to go right for him (like I said, not a subtle book). While the book became decidedly more cheerful at this point, it also turned a lot more preachy, and ends feeling like aggressively naked propaganda for the socialist movement.

So, two stars for the quality of the book as a novel. But I did feel this book was worth reading for the echoes of the past in current politics, which gives it another star. The abuses against the workers described in this book are not that far off from what is common behavior today. Different industries, different eras, different immigrant populations, but the same problems. We’ve learned nothing at all in 110 years.

One other note: This book is known for causing such outrage at the time that it led federal slaughterhouse reforms and regulation. But all the actual reforms that happened were around food safety and animal welfare, around avoiding putting diseased animals and spoiled meat into the food supply. Those things were important, of course, but it saddened me that given the popularity of the book there was not a single law changed about the plight of the workers. As Sinclair commented, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Well, hm.

I'm gonna give it four stars cause like the other two books it was fast-paced and super fun and I adore the characters. It has a very satisfying ending, both to the plot of this book and to the overall arc of the trilogy.

But it wasn't quite as good as I expected, especially given how strong the middle book was. There are a lot of meandering subplots and side quests in this book and a lot of second-tier character background stories, and it's a very very long book with all that extra stuff. I ended up skipping a lot of the flashback/asides, because they weren't that germane to the core plot and also because the second-tier characters...just aren't that interesting. I feel sad about that because at least for one of them I did want to know more of her story....but it just didn't feel compelling.

Overall, though, I loved all three books. It's rare for me these days to find books that trigger can't-put-it-down reading mode, and this series did that.

I read the first book in this fantasy trilogy last year and thought it was super fun but nothing hugely groundbreaking, good enough to keep reading the rest of the trilogy when I had time.

This is the second and middle book. I got about a quarter in and it GRABBED ME AND WOULD NOT LET GO. Like OMG it is 3AM I have to put the book down. Like get out of the shower and read a few more pages standing next to the bed. Like finished it and RAN to Amazon to buy #3.

It is a strong plot for a middle book, well-developed on its own, but that also pulls in threads for the larger trilogy cycle. The characters are so well done and just so much FUN. The world-building is terrific. I could quibble that there’s some implausible decisions to further the plot, the “element games” is a bit of a gimmick and drags the pacing, there’s only one major female character in a good-sized cast (a classic example of the “she’s not like all those other girls” problem), and a cliffhanger ending, but still. FUN. FUN.

Also I am a sucker for a good 'ship and this is a REALLY GOOD 'SHIP.