Reviews and Comments

Don't remember when I finished this one, but it's been a while. I liked it!

got lent it by a friend with a strong recommendation, I'm excited to start! :3

I just really, really do not get along with this author. I'm only four-ish chapters in but it's bad enough that I'm getting antagonistic to the idea of meditating so I think it's best for me to stop.

"... only then can be or she chose the precise set of actions that will be truly optimal for that situation." First of all, they. Secondly, you can only optimize towards a goal. What you're calling requirements are the requirements you're advocating optimizing for and you need to admit that to yourself.

This starts off strong with 'Dissatisfaction is inherent to the human condition unless you meditate. As proof, consider how bad surviving under capitalism makes you feel. Yeah that's innate."

It was a reasonably fun read, but ultimately doesn't say or do anything new or challenge much of anything at all, in the literary genre or as a commentary on the real world. The story is told in alternating chapters of near and far past, arranged so that the further in the past sections end where the more recently set sections began. It's neat and adds to the tension a little bit, but for such a long book it's just not enough to carry it—especially when the convention was dropped for the last several chapters and can't be carried forward into the three sequels.

And god, the names. It's a problem that I run into a lot in fantasy and it's here in force. There are just too many people with similar but unfamiliar names to keep straight, all scheming and plotting against each other. Intrigue is fun to try to puzzle out, but when I have the full picture but can't remember who did what because they all sound the same, that's not fun.

It was pretty fun! I'll probably have more thoughts about it after I stew on it for a bit though. I can't think of a single named character that wasn't able-bodied.

I'm excited for this one! It's very clearly a 2012 republishing though and was written much longer ago judging by what the author assumes the reader is familiar with 😆

I'm happy to be already hoping i have time in this library loan to read it twice. I think this book deserves me taking the time to properly collect and organize my thoughts about it.

I'm reading this series because I watched the anime and remember liking it. My consistent complaint with manga is that it struggles to add the same depth to a story that I get from well written prose, and that holds here too. I found the very sparse palette of 5 or so tones in black and white made it hard to understand the images in some places, and I don't think it fits the setting's vibrant gemstone people. That said, I do really like the story, and technical immortality while you slowly watch your memories erode with your stone body is an intense tragedy that I think the author captures pretty well. If you like reading over watching a show, they're a quick enough read that I think it's worth picking up from the library.

This series feels like a hug printed on paper to me, and there's not much to say about this volume besides that it continues the atmosphere and small story telling of the previous volumes very well.

I really enjoyed reading Bats of the Republic, but it's a very disorienting book. The story is told entirely through in-world documents, which is important to remember as two of those document sets are narrative fiction in the world and only one of them is open about it. The story hinges around a vault of documents and copies in a post-apocalyptic future, and Zeke Thomas's hunt for a letter which illegally was never copied for a government record, and is interspersed with letters written by Zeke's ancestor Zadock on his journey to deliver that same letter. The past and future very nearly mirror each other the entire time, such as with Zadock's horse Raison D'etre which runs away and abandons him in the wilderness, and Zeke's friend Raisin Dextra who wants to run away from their city with Zeke. The future tracks Zadock through his letters, and the past tracks Zeke through a story written by a fortune teller.

The book very effectively captures the feeling of being one of the workers in the Vault of Records, collecting and cross-referencing various documents to try to build up the truth of what happened. It even includes, at the very end, the mysterious letter that everything was revolving around. Unfortunately I'm more confused by it than anything else. I love when a story ends in a soft cliffhanger, with a satisfying conclusion but a strong sense that more is to come and you dream for days about what that might be. Bats of the Republic has that sense of mystery, but without the solidity of a conclusion. Things escalate to the very end and cut off in a literal ouroboros of past and future. I think I'm more likely to wonder for days about how this one actually ended than dream about what happens next.

The aesthetics of this book are really interesting. "An illuminated novel" is a pretty solid description; the story is told jumping among several time periods and through in-world documents, and each is styled differently. I haven't gotten much into the actual story but dang is it a beautiful book.

I've definitely gotten useful tidbits from this, but so far it's been almost entirely from criticizing the extremely heavy pro-capitalism bias in the text. I think the approach to necessary labor it describes can be useful as long as you ignore everything it has to say about worthwhile things to do and places to work.