a veeery... slooow... reeeeader...
(he/him)
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Share this More sharing... Facebook Twitter After seven years of exile in Ireland and the …
I was today years old when I learned that in Victorian England, a life-preserver was not a floatation device, but rather a small club to be carried (typically with a small leather strap) and used to beat off attackers.
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost …
Content warning maybe spoilers or not but just in case
I gave up on this once but decided to finish it because of supposed easter eggs that connected this to Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility. It turns out there were common elements, but they seemed more like recycled incidental characters and situations than some kind of connective thread. we get a quick peek at the author of the Station Eleven graphic novel, working on it, maybe.
I think Mandel is a very good writer; her descriptions are compelling and she creates characters that have the potential to become interesting. but they don't. She tries to give minor events dramatic significance that doesn't really play but the central event of the story falls flat. Pages and pages are devoted to bland, amoral mediocrities while the few sympathetic characters get a few short passages. oh, and ghosts ()?
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, published in October 2006, is a collection …
This made me think of fan fiction, but with writing as good as the original. I really like the way Clarke approximates the style of 19th Century English literature. It doesn't have the scope of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but to me that's a good thing. it's like a purer distillation of that world.
I liked this book a lot, but not in the way that it seems other people do; there are so many rave reviews that i almost feel like i'm missing something. maybe it was over-hyped.
Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, her fourth. It takes …
a fairly good read in parts, kind of tedious in others. The character that links together all the other pivotal characters was mediocre and pathetic and so much of the book is devoted to the most banal aspects of contemporary life. I think I would rather have read the graphic novel that's at the center of the story but remains mostly undeveloped.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …
I liked the intertwined storylines and i thought the characters were well drawn and sympathetic. The only problem I had was the idea of the continuation of culture over hundreds of years. it rang false to me.
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building; its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls …
Content warning possible spoilers from Mountain in the Sea and Some Desperate Glory
Piranesi has a lot to say about memory and forgetting and also about identity and I feel like these are themes that are present in a lot of my recent reading. The Mountain in the Sea talks about artificial intelligence and the inability to forget, what that means to the identity of the AI. Forgetting is a function of consciousness and seems important to survival, or at least sanity. In Piranesi, forgetting is considered a symptom of madness by some of the characters but not by Piranesi himself. In Some Desparate Glory the main character, Kyr deals with a fragmented identity due to having lived in multiple timelines. Piranesi deals with this as well, having lived in another version of multiple timelines. i'm not sure why these are sticking with me, maybe it's a reflection of contemporary life, where people may navigate online identities and irl identities and the possible contradictions.
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building; its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls …
I like this a lot. I'm not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. it was like a really good, really satisfying meal.
Leonora Carrington, the distinguished British-born Surrealist painter is also a writer of extraordinary imagination and …
I think Leonora Carrington is my favorite.
White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. …
i've got too many books going simultaneously
Building on Council Minutes, 1655-1656, this volume provides a translation of the proceedings of New …
Very excited about this one.
This was enjoyable in part; the storytelling was engaging but the descriptions of sex and gender interactions in general I found to be traditional and uninteresting. When the setting moved to crypto currency and tech start-ups I lost interest altogether.
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and …
A good book about smart octopuses
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
Content warning possible spoilers? (definite spoilers, be warned)
It took me a while to get into this; I found it confusing at first, but then it sucked me in. it wasn't until the last chapter that i realized it was groundhog day as a space opera. (I don't mean that in a bad way) The protagonist starts out a brainwashed jerk and then has to go through multiple timelines and multiple iterations of her possible lives in order to gradually become a decent person. Somewhere in there is a meditation on our essential selves versus the way our personalities are shaped by our environments. it's all an illusion, people. don't get caught up in it.
