Source of book: Bought for m'self Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explSource of book: Bought for m'self Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
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Welp. I'm honestly not sure where to begin.
So, there's a lot of, um, feelings in the reviews of this book and I guess whether you end up having a lot of feelings about it yourself will depend, to some degree, what you think (or have decided) this series *is.* I suspect if you're looking for coherent plotting or sound thinking as regards the philosophy of physics then you're going to be somewhat disappointed. You may also be disappointed if you were looking for a meaningful resolution to the inherent inequities of dark academia as an aesthetic and a genre. You're definitely definitely going to be disappointed if all you really want is to see two cute gayboys of your choosing hold hands under a rainbow. If, however, like me, you can come to terms with the notion that a bunch of things you *may* initially have found interesting about these books aren't necessarily what the series was ever intended to be about then there's a modicum of emotional closure here.
Is it worth the slog to get there? If you'd have asked me that question at the 40% mark of The Atlas Complex I'd have told you no. If you asked me at the 70% I'd have told you possibly. If you're asking me now, I'm telling you I just don't fucking know.
I should say before I get into it (and spoiler warning for the series and the final book in particular), I do understand why the subsequent Atlas books wouldn't, and indeed couldn't, be like The Atlas Six. A6 was a claustrophobic psycho-sexual thriller with overtones of dark academia and a murder game at its centre. It was full of little mysteries. It had endless leeway to obsessively detail the fucked up interpersonal dynamics of its major characters. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, lightning in a bottle. Literally impossible to follow. And this has nothing to do with Blake's skill as a writer. Once you've done your claustrophobic murder game, you have to expand the world, find another way to up the stakes. And that can be interesting, for sure, but it's never going to be as fascinating, as tense, and as compulsively readable as the initial setup. Again, let me reiterate, this isn't about Blake. I feel the same about The Hunger Games trilogy. The first book gripped me, the second book mildly disappointed me, the third book lost me, even though I fully recognise that what Collins was doing with the second and third books was vastly more ambitious in both scope and complexity than what was going in the original Hunger Games. Or, y'know, maybe I'm just a sick fuck who loves a (fictional) murder game.
Anyway, if we take as read--as I think we must--that neither The Atlas Paradox nor The Atlas Complex was going to be, nor were intended to be, "like" The Atlas Six, I can see that the trilogy as a whole is doing some stuff. It has some shit to say. There are themes. There is even some degree of resolution and catharsis on offer for those willing to take it. Unfortunately--as as ever, this is just my perspective--none of this comes together coherently. Partially by design, I think, given we're playing with multiverses here. But also in ways that, deliberate or not, wound up being ultimately pretty frustrating.
The second book, for example, is almost completely pointless. Or rather, it exists to motivate Libby's actions in the third book, which don't make a whole lot of sense anyway. But I increasingly feel this series could have worked as a duology and perhaps could have worker better as one. And, yes, yes I know all three books are first and foremost a set of intensely intricate character studies, and what actually happens is much less important than the impact it has on the protagonists. Unfortunately this kind of has diminishing returns over the course of two books of stalling, introspection and avoidance, and what started out as as kind of exuberant maximalism in A6 has become undisciplined and bloated by the halfway point of The Atlas Complex.
There's also bit towards the end of The Atlas Complex where Libby thinks to herself: "How ridiculous that Atlas had once sat within these walls reading The Tempest when it had been Hamlet all along!" And I nearly threw the book at the wall, I felt so fucking trolled. Because I'm honestly not the biggest fan of Hamlet, a play about an self-absorbed man who does nothing for three hours, and then murders everyone pointlessly. And this is essentially what we get in The Atlas Complex: a book about six self-absorbed people who do nothing for five hundred pages. And, no, it doesn't help that this was what I was set up for this from the beginning. And, yes, I do understand that it's a book about people, not about events. But it's not until the 50% mark of The Atlas Complex that we get any character development at all, further contributing to my sense that book 2 was little more than water treading.
I'm not saying that an Atlas duology (with the second book consisting of a compressed version of book 2 and the latter half of book 2) would be a better series. But it would certainly make me feel less like my time was being wasted.
Okay, I think that's all I can say without spoiling the book. Time to get into it.
Libby has come back from the 70s thanks to nuclear-powered time travel. This means the archives haven't received their blood sacrifice. The 6 are bodding about doing their own things: Tristram is brooding, Nico is kissing Gideon, Parisa is discovering Dalton is hideously and irredeemably broken, Reina and Callum are trying half-arsedly to influence world politics. The Forum are ... there? As for Atlas, he's MIA, though we learn this is because because Libby killed him in order to prevent him destroying the world. Everyone spends about 200 pages dancing fruitlessly around each other, naval gazing and wondering if they should do Atlas's multiverse experiment anyway. They decide to do Atlas's experiment anyway. Halfway through Atlas's experiment Libby realises this is a bad idea, bounces a graviton particle beam of the main deflector dish, and kills Nico. The Forum try to invade the Alexandrian society. Parisa and Gideon have a big psychic battle with Dalton and the Forum inside Dalton's crumbling mind palace. This is cool but pointless because Callum then shoots Dalton in the head. Tristram's dad abducts him. Callum runs to his rescue and gets shot. Tristram later takes out James Wessex (who is also the guy to whom Gideon's mum was indebted--though she's killed in, like, chapter 2, so add that subplot to the pile of pointlessness). Reina is sad she is maybe not a god and maybe ends up with Parisa. And, yeah. That's it.
Which, you know, to be fair, I think would have been okay had it not taken us the entirety of Paradox and most of Complex to meander our way there. But, also, I don't want my frustrations with the format and the approach to diminish my genuine love for these characters, even though it's a love as complicated as the love they have for each other, in that a lot of the time it feels a lot more like irritation. Parisa is wonderful in this book. Just wonderful. She gets moments to shine, moments to acknowledge her own vulnerability and--best of all--moments to grow. To be fair, most of them do, it's just that, for me, she's the character who has the most cohesive emotional arc. Like, I feel I understand all her actions, even the self-destructive ones (like shacking up with Dalton), and, for me, there was a measurable progression from the Parisa we meet in book 1 to the Parisa we part ways with in book 3. Callum, who I've always had a soft spot for, I also felt had got a fully realised and recognisable arc: the scene before his death, where he's surrendering to the general mortification of love and willing to give it all to Tristram, is gorgeously executed and is so completely Callum:
He wouldn’t kill Tristan with a knife, he’d kill him with such cherishing. He’d offer to take Tristan to the movies, he’d feed him grapes, he’d brush his hair. He’d make a meal for him, the kind his mother had always insisted on when she was in a good mood, food that was meant to be eaten with leisure. He’d peel an orange for Tristan, share the slices of a clementine, drizzle him with honey. It would be embarrassing and he wouldn’t die of humiliation. He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.
Although I will note that I felt the impact of this scene was somewhat diminished for me by the fact Gideon expresses very similar sentiments about Nico literally a few chapters later:
Nico’s brow arched with prompting and Gideon, wretched and helpless—Gideon, little motherfuck that he was, a true idiot prince—wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and kiss Nico’s feet. He wanted to buy Nico’s groceries, to write Nico poetry, to sing Nico the songs of his people in terrible Spanish and passable French. He wanted midnights in Brooklyn, golden hour in a galley kitchen, coffee with cream.
Of course, maybe this is deliberate parallelism--a more general statement about the humiliating banality of love's power to overthrow you as a unique and rational being--but it just felt repetitive and diminishing to me in the moment. I mean, you can't get two characters more unlike each other than Callum and Gideon--I literally don't think they have a single interaction across three books--and yet they both characterise the experience of love in almost identical terms? Or are both these sections simply sop for shippers--a forced nod towards romantic conventionality in a series that is otherwise deeply cynical. At this point, I don't even know any more.
And, oh look, I've drifted back into complaining. But please don't mistake me: to return to my original point, I deeply and sincerely adored the moments of true character development that finally unfurled in the second half of The Atlas Complex. The personal revelations. The honest-at-last conversations between Tristram and Callum, Libby and Nico, that really really fucking needed to happen. Was it enough, though, to give shape to a book that is otherwise little more than a pile of themes and ideas? Again, I just don't know.
Thematically, at least, I think you can get something reasonably coherent from The Atlas Complex (though, again, is theme enough to support an entire novel? It feels kind of like trying to build a house on metatext). As I've seen other reviewers point out, ultimately this is a series about damaged twenty-somethings given access to nearly-unlimited power and nearly-unlimited resources, and needs to be understood in that context. In fact, I would go so far as to say The Atlas Complex foregrounds this idea pretty damn explicitly--for example in this scene where Libby and Tristram are talking over wine.
“I feel like [said Tristram] we’re in a pretentious film about tortured geniuses.” “Yes.” “But actually we’re just babies with expensive glassware.”
The series, and the final book in particular, is asking questions about power and trauma and responsibility and choice. It doesn't necessarily care that much about the trappings of dark academia or who is kissing whom. Nor should we be expecting sensible decision-making on the part of any of these barely-more-than-children who have the capacity to alter the fabric of the universe but not necessarily the ability to change the world (oh do you see). And, y'know, by the end of The Atlas Complex each of the six have faced some kind of reckoning with their own power and their own limitations (whether that's their limitations as, essentially, magical superbeings or their limitations as humans who can be hurt just as easily as anyone else). Some of these confrontations are more successful than others (again, I mention my hero, my beloved, my queen of queens, Parisa, but poor Reina is shunted into a corner doing her own political thing for the entire book) but they're all, singularly and in totality, at least interesting.
The problem is that when you step back from the charisma of the characters themselves and you think about this as the overriding theme of a three book series it starts to feel a little shallow. I mean, you can ask me "hey, Alexis what would be the consequence of giving a bunch of damaged twenty-somethings access to unlimited power and unlimited resources" and I don't even need to write one book to answer that question for you. I can, in fact, tell you right now: "It would be a fucking disaster." And, once again, credit where due, maybe that's the point (or a point) - but I think, as much as power is given arbitrarily in the world, there tend to be some natural checks and balances applied to most twenty-somethings by sheer dint of their being twenty-somethings.
Like, I do think the books have things they want to say about the nature of power and, more significantly, the value of accepting powerlessness. Of choosing something as banal as love. Of living with grief. Of recognising that meaningful change cannot be violently enforced. Or imposed on the many by the few. I guess from a certain perspective, the Atlas series is, at heart, an incrementalist fable. But, again, is that enough to justify three books? Does it payoff what was initially set up? Is it a satisfying or a meaningful conclusion to, um, anything? Well. Maybe? I guess.
I will say, however, that while some thematic coherence and a few emotionally satisfying moments can be dug out The Atlas Complex you do kind of have to work for them. And I don't mean in that in a "ahh, the book richly rewards your labour" way. More, it is literally hard work to get through it. Because, for every moment of deft, devastating character writing like this...
This was it ... the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.
...there's some, err, arrant nonsense like this:
The question is not whether the world can end. There’s no question that it can, that it does every day, in a multitude of highly individualized ways ranging from ordinary to biblical. The question is also not whether one man is capable of ending the world but whether it is this man, and whether such destruction is as inevitable as it may seem. What is the problem? The constancy of fate. The liquidity of prophecy. The problem is Einstein’s theory of relativity. The problem is closed-loop time travel. The problem is Atlas Blakely. The problem is Ezra Fowler. The problem is the invariability of the particular strand of the multiverse in which Ezra and Atlas meet.
I'm sorry, I'm not usually one to critique writing or bad science, but this is utter bobbins. It is meaningless. It is just some words. And there are a lot of words in this book that, unfortunately, end up coming across as just some words. To say nothing of some sections that are genuinely stylistically repetitive, as though (and this is pure, and purely unfair speculation, on my part) neither editor nor proofer had troubled themselves unduly with this book as it passed through their hands. On top of the excess of verbiage, there's a bunch of POVs in the Atlas Complex whose relevance and necessity I found myself constantly questioning--especially because we get barely more than a chapter of them so opportunities for either emotional investment or intellectual curiosity were minimal. I get that Blake is trying to expand the world, and increase our understanding of it, but this is book 3 of 3. I need the focus to stay on the characters I've already spent two books with. It's too late for me to give a fuck about, like, Julian? Who the fuck is Julian? (That rhetorical, he's one of the Ezra Six, but it's too damn late to get me care about the Ezra Six)
To be completely blunt, it's also too damn late to be able to get me to be able to care about Atlas and his Sinister Plan to end the world. It doesn't help that he's literally dead for this entire book--killed off page by Libby--and therefore broadly irrelevant. And yet we get multiple sections trying to ... I don't even know what. Contextualise him? Explain him? None of the above? I assume none of the above because there's another trollish-section at the dead centre of the book where we're asked a succession of self-described "book club" questions about Atlas's choices that are, in fact, a set of moral philosophy hypotheticals. Unfortunately, by the time I reached that the point my answer to each and every one was "don't care." So that was either very effective or the opposite of very effective, depending on what you think that section was for, and what you think the book--and the series--are doing as a whole.
I won't lie, there's something fairly relatable to me about Atlas's Sinister Plot. I mean, who hasn't occasionally wanted to access a multiverse in which you personally have never existed. I think that's why therapy exists. But it's also why I didn't need multiple chapters exploring what might lead to someone feeling that way - you can get everything you need to know about Atlas from the nature of the Sinister Plan itself. "I want to erase myself on the quantum level" is depression. It's, err, not that deep. (Though, again, maybe's that's the point. Although if so much of what I'm struggling with is, indeed, the point, could there not have been a way to convey the point less ... annoyingly ... laboriously? ... somethingly?)
(Omg, this review is too long for GR - continued in comments. HELP)....more
Source of book: KU Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent frSource of book: KU Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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I read this for completeness and because it was on KU like the first book. Plus I will never not be obsessed with Soulsborne games.
It basically has the exact same strengths and weaknesses as its predecessor: which is to say, it was fine, readable, fine. But also contains a lot of very detailed and declarative lore-dives that—for me as a player of these games—I found actually kind detracted from what is compelling and fascinating about them? And having a bit list o’ themes that were hurtled through in the final chapter felt … unsophisticated? But, again, that’s just me. I’m interested in how themes function as inherent to narrative, design, and mechanics. I don’t think it’s particularly useful to isolate them as a checklist like you’re playing Look Over There.
The other thing I find vaguely unsatisfying about both these volumes—and this came up as regards to Gwyndolin in the first book—is that I feel they’re kind of resistant to or refusing to engage with particular perspectives as regards these games. And that’s not me saying that we need to view absolutely everything through a lens of social justice or whatever, but I think any act of critical analysis requires us to be at least *aware* of the multiplicities of interpretations that co-exist around any piece of art. Basically, at this point, it just kind of feels cowardly to me to be consistently ignoring or downplaying all the stuff about bodies and gender that’s just kind of endemic to the games, even if you don’t want to also read queerness into it. And to be fair, it doesn’t completely ignore that there’s an awful lot of pregnancy/bodily modification/body horror going on in Bloodborne: it just kind of acts like it’s no big thing, really?
I think it doesn’t help that there’s so much fascinating, deep-divey Soulscontent on YouTube. So the whole book, to some degree, felt on the edge of irrelevant. ...more
Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: none Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: none Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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Spoilers ho.
Nrgh, I don’t quite know what to say about this. And it might just be a case of wrong reader wrong book. Potentially wrong reader wrong book wrong genre altogether. Because, the thing is, satire is a difficult beast to corral. By its nature, it requires you not to care. And the problem with not caring is that, well, you don’t care? On top of which Glitterati seems to sort of hedge its bets between not-caring and secretly trying to make you care. Except the people, or maybe the one person, it wants you to care about is a member of the ultraelite who is so detached from the world at large that, even if he does develop a flair for art near the end, still has no idea what capitalism or childhood is.
Glitterati is set in a nebulous far future where the lives of the ultrarich have been completely detached from the rest of society: with any elements of experience deemed to be traumatic, be that a trip to the doctors, childhood, understanding of their own wealth, or the way society works, literally erased from their brains they live lives entirely dedicated to aesthetic ideals. The hero, Simone, inadvertently wears white one day, believing it to be Tuesday, when it is instead Wednesday, upon which people wear purple, which catalyses a chain of events that lead to him becoming a trendsetter, getting locked in a ruthless rivalry with a fellow fashionista, encountering a child (which he and his wife understand as a small drunk human) and finally inadvertently committing a crime which throws him to contact with all sorts of unaesthetic elements of reality like prison and the law.
Weirdly, despite the book being mostly a fever dream of excess and vapidity, it does kind of have a happy ending?
In any case, there were definitely things I admired here: the writing is fluid and vivid, the characterisation is, y’know, about as sound as it can be considering the POV character is literally missing most of his brain, there were some amusing moments (like the sequence with the lemon), some unexpectedly touching moments (Simone’s relationship with his wife is genuinely sweet, tender and sincere), and the world is imaginatively realised, with some decent neo-future fashion porn if that’s your thing. I also liked that there’s a kind of … interestingly de-gendered quality to everything: from the characters names (Simone and his wife, Georgie, for example) to the clothes they wear (Simone wears skirts and dresses interchangeably with more conventionally masculine attire, and Georgie vice versa), and while Simone is very in love with his wife he isn’t above admiring the rippling physique of his best friend Darlington (who is married to another man). Frankly, I rather admired Darlington’s rippling physique myself.
Where the book kind of lost me was around, um, what it was actually about? I mean, what was it a satire *of*? That the lives of the ultrarich are detached and inaccessible to the rest of us? Yeah, I think I got that memo already? That the ultrarich are, in their own way, an industry? Uh-huh. That even people who exist in rarefied spheres can be exploited or victimised? Okay. That fashion is kind of shallow? Wait, are we still doing that after Miranda Priestly’s ‘Cerulean’ monologue? Surely not. And I, honestly, have no idea what to make of Simone’s redemption arc, whereby he kind of undergoes emotional development in prison (because prisons, right, so beneficial to the incarcerated), buys a child from her mother (because poor people will literally sell their kids for a pair of designer shoes), and ultimately runs away from getting his memory wiped again because he wants to retain his personal growth, ending up on a massive luxury yacht with Georgie and the kid that has been gifted to them by a famous fashion designer who has recognised that Simone is an artist.
I don’t even know what to do with any of this. Maybe just be dazzled and not think too hard about what it means? I couldn’t even tell if I was meant to be pleased Simone got some kind of privilege-fuelled happy ending i.e. that his discovery of art was supposed to be genuinely redemptive for him or if it was simply another expression of wealth and power in action. Like, the ultrarich get to explore ART. Poor people get to sell their kids. And, y’know, it’s more than possible I just failed to “get” this book and what it was saying.
Or, ironically, it could be a case of style over substance?...more
Source of book: bought for mah damn self Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, withoSource of book: bought for mah damn self Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
This was another in my run of “I’m ill so I’m going to lie here reading category romances until my eyes fall out”—and as is so easily done with category romances, it turned out to be the final book of, I think, 5? So it was mainly a roll call of other couples, some of whom have sprogged, that I am supposed to have enough context to care about. Sorry, book. I done you wrong.
In any case, this is a second-chance-at-love situation. The hero and the heroine married young, fucked it up, because she was worried about holding him back, and he couldn’t cope with her enormous wealth, and now it’s twelve years into the future and she needs his help because she’s being pursued by an evil stalker.
The hero, Jacob, is a white dude who runs a Dojo. The heroine, Jianne, is a Chinese woman who has enough English ancestry to give her “Western-tilted” eyes. And I feel gross just writing that. Plus, the book opens with the hero’s masculinity being so very, very fragile he won’t wear a lavender necktie.
The thing is, the hero and the heroine have good chemistry (although they both get over their previous set of problems incredibly quickly) and decent bants, and the “will she get murdered by her stalker” subplot gives the book plenty of momentum. I actually liked Jianne a lot, although I could have done without the hero reflecting on how mysterious she is every second line. Because Asian woman: so mysterious, right? Also Jacob is the protective-alpha type, rather than the dickhead-alpha type, and I kind of appreciate m/f romances where the hero has to come with the terms with the heroine being richer and more socially powerful than he is....more
So I read this because I felt I should have read it – which is not an ideal way to read a book, and that’s on me.
But I think maybe … it hasn’t aged soSo I read this because I felt I should have read it – which is not an ideal way to read a book, and that’s on me.
But I think maybe … it hasn’t aged so well? It feels like the kind of book that would be shortlisted for the Booker circa 2003. And, to be fair, I think that says more about the kind of books a white British audience wants to read about non-white British people than about non-white British people themselves or, indeed, non-white British authors.
So the deal here is that the novel takes place between 1985 and 2002. It’s mostly set on an imaginary council estate near Tower Hamlets and mostly centres on Nazneen—a virgin bride sent to London from a Bangladeshi village to marry Chanu, an older and self-described ‘educated’ man desperate to establish himself in the UK. Something he singularly and persistently fails to do, through a combination of, uh, what I assume is institutionalised racism and also just, um, being a loser? Hard to entangle that one for sure. Later she has an affair with Karim, a second-generation immigrant, somewhat younger than Nazneen herself, who is radicalised after 9/11 and later vanishes. Finally Nazneen pushes back against her life of submission and decides to stay in London with her daughters following her husband’s decision to return to Bangladesh.
I am having a really hard time to sorting out my thoughts on this one, while also sensible of the fact that it’s not really my place to dig into what this book does or was trying to do. While the character work is really intricate, especially when it comes to Nanzeen and her husband, and does pay off at the end it takes a long time to get there. And a lot of that time is spent essentially trapped in the council flat with Nanzeen which is narratively stifling. As, I guess, it’s supposed to be? There’s also long sections of the book which take the form as letters from Nanzeen’s sister—her scandalous flight from the small village where she and Nanzeen were born precipitated Nanzeen being sent to London—and while I appreciated Hasina’s importance to Nanzeen I did find this sections hard to get through. They didn’t feel fully integrated into the novel’s structure but given the very different paths of Nanzeen and Hasina’s lives, this probably deliberate.
More complicated still—and even more beyond the scope of what it’s appropriate for me to talk about—I couldn’t help but feel the characters occasionally came perilously close to falling into “types” that spoke more to, well, white British stereotypes of the immigrant experience? I mean, the silent, submissive Bangladeshi wife? The husband who is full of goals and lofty talk, but has nothing to show for it? The radicalised youth who sees Nanzeen as “untainted” by the west. I just don’t know. And this is why I’m inclined to feel the novel hasn’t aged so well. Obviously I don’t get to say what stories get to be told, nor who gets to tell them but it’s very difficult for me to see, perhaps, what this book might say to a British Bangladeshi reader in 2021. I’m not quite sure what it says to me as a random white person either.
Also, for a novel called Brick Lane, I found it surprisingly lacking in sense of place. But since alienation is one of the major themes of the novel, maybe that too is necessary?
I did appreciate the writing here, though. And I’m glad the read the book. I feel singularly incapable of engaging with it usefully though. ...more
I should really accept that I just don’t get on with Ian McEwan. As a writer I mean. Not personally. Nobody’s fault. It’s not him, maybe it’s me.
But I should really accept that I just don’t get on with Ian McEwan. As a writer I mean. Not personally. Nobody’s fault. It’s not him, maybe it’s me.
But I’m always intrigued by his books for, like, the blurb? And then I try to read them and it all goes to pot. I also suspect that I’ve spent too much time reading SFF where, y’know, novels about androids are actually about androids.
Rather than maybe about androids a bit?
Apparently I was meant to be unsettled by this novel. Mainly I was, um, bored? I mean, there were aspects of that intrigued me—but those were the setting (it’s set in alt-history 1980s where Britain lost the Falklands War and Turing is alive and fabulous) and the bits that were abut either androids or Alan Turing.
Everything else was kind of profoundly disengaging to me. And, hey, this is lit fic. That might have been deliberate. But the narrator is tedious and the woman he is in love with enigmatic to the point of opacity.
There’s also … spoilers incoming … one of those plots that hinges on a woman lying about being raped in order to seek justice for someone she cared about being raped. And I know there are actual documented incidents of this happening but given the distressingly low conviction rates for sexual assault—the general struggle of survivors to be believed—I feel it’s kind of irresponsible to use this as a plot point. ...more
I think I’ve said this before, but part of the problem with reading a thriller is that you know yI just fancied a thriller.
And this is … this is fine?
I think I’ve said this before, but part of the problem with reading a thriller is that you know you’re reading a thriller, so you spend the entire time squinting for twists and waiting for the other shoe to the drop.
There is no other shoe here.
It’s about a book about an unwell gentleman who believes his ex-girlfriend (happily engaged to someone else) is still into him. Partially based on the fact they used to play a game called Crave, where she would go to a bar, and get someone else to hit on her, and then he would be like, wtf dude, and then the other bloke would get all scared and this would turn them both on like whoa.
So essentially the narrator has convinced himself everything that’s happening is an elaborate game of Crave. Which leads to, you know, a whole host of bad shit.
Mostly I think I am glad there was no other shoe. I mean, the optics of “and she was secretly evil all along” would have been bloody terrible. And, in my more generous moments, I saw the book as sort of being in dialogue with the thriller genre as a whole—specifically the whole Manipulative Sex Woman trope that is at once so titillating in the right fictional context, and so fucking harmful in any other.
I mean once shit gets super real, the focus of the novel pretty much bypasses the chronically unreliable narrator to emphasise the various messed up ways gendered expectations play out not just through the criminal justice system but in Society As A Whole TM.
In the baldest possible terms: that a woman will pay a price for getting off on sex games that no man ever will.
These are not unobvious points. But I guess they’re effectively made?
Unfortunately I semi recently read, err, of all things Lolita. And that book is so much the Grand High Monarch of unreliable narration that the unwell gentleman of Our Kind Of Cruelty felt pretty limp by comparison. I also don’t know how I felt about his time in care—he has had a bloody awful childhood, and has been seriously damaged by it. I’m not sure if this was meant to give him nuance—some elements of sympathy for a reader to cling to rather than refuse to spend another minute in the company of such a terrible human being—or if the absolute last thing we need is another story about how care leavers are under-socialised to the point of sociopathy and hadn’t we better scared of them....more
I don't know why this book is showing up on GR without a cover because it definitely possessed a cover at time of purchase.
Ehhhhh...I've been having I don't know why this book is showing up on GR without a cover because it definitely possessed a cover at time of purchase.
Ehhhhh...I've been having really good luck with Harlequin historicals recently (shoutout to The Rake's Enticing Proposal) but this one didn't work for me.
It felt ... sort of adequate, but nothing about it quite came together for me. But maybe that's what I get for reading the third book in a trilogy out of nowhere. So the concept is, he's a spy who everyone thinks is a fribble, she's ... a human female? She works for her father's wine business and is awesome apparently, both of which I'm here for, except for the fact none of it ever seemed to mean anything.
Show don't tell is as godawful writer cliche because sometimes it's just better to tell shit ... but it seemed to me that I was told a lot in this book. About how Emily was beautiful and intelligent and serious. And about how everyone thinks Chris is a wastrel for no reason (because he's blond and has a nice smile?). The romantic conflict, such as it is, boils down to kind of nebulous emotional ... nothing? Chris, on the basis of no evidence, thinks Emily is too good for him. Emily, on the basis of no evidence, thinks Chris would force her to be a traditional wife when she's not up for that. Whenever we're in one of their heads, they spend the entire time thinking how smart/handsome/wonderful the other one is, and how much they want to kiss/bonk/marry them , but unable to act on it because they KNEW IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN. Over and over and over again.
Also I was disproportionately irritated by what came across as some quite noticeable structural issues: information is conveyed really haphazardly (we only learn Emily is getting dodgy letters because a maid accidentally half-reveals it to her father in a different conversation - WHAT?), the book at one point drifts chronologically backwards to an occasion on which Emily and Chris snogged in a hedge maze but that's the only time it does that so it feels a bit random and de-anchored, the POV occasionally switches to external characters for singular chapters solely for the purpose of making sure a reader was 'there' for something the author felt was significant.
Ehhh. It's just me, being a weird fussy dick, but I prefer my books to feel more coherent in the way they unfold their plots to me. I want time shifts and perspective shifts to be positioned for more than their transparent utility.
So. Yeah. Um.
Oh, oh, shit I liked.
1. No fucking Dukes (I mean, some background Dukes, but it still counts) 2. Paris setting 3. The hero randomly bones down on a prostitute ... which I know is an odd thing to like but it struck me as unusual. It's really rare for me to encounter modern-written romances where either protagonist boinks someone else, and that's seen as okay. 4. Heroine has what she believes will be casual sex with the hero (of course they're getting married about 3 pages later) and is cool with it
I thought this was going to be a romcom with a touch of Yes Minister.
It wasn't ... that. At all. I was on a plane, and I kept reading--despite havingI thought this was going to be a romcom with a touch of Yes Minister.
It wasn't ... that. At all. I was on a plane, and I kept reading--despite having a kindle full of other books--so it was definitely engaging on some level. It teeters on the edge of being obvious at times but is never so obvious I was annoyed.
And while its character are far from appealing, they also all get what they want--after a fashion.
Stayed because it takes a fucking long time to get to any Merman sex.
It's weird reading books-that-are-not-romances when you rCame for the Merman sex.
Stayed because it takes a fucking long time to get to any Merman sex.
It's weird reading books-that-are-not-romances when you read a lot of books-that-are-romances because people keep telling you things are terribly shocking and erotic and you're just, like, um? I think I was meant to be having my hidebound middle class mind blown by things like menstruation and anal sex. And, no?
There's always something really difficult about books that are trying to shock and/or challenge you - I tend to get stubborn about them, and refuse to be either shocked and/or challenged, which renders them pointless.
In any case, this is a book about a depressed, miserable, PhD student who has lost her way in every way it is possible to lose your way (intellectually, emotionally, romantically) and ends up house-sitting for her sister, going to a therapy group and later--much, much later--boning a Merman.
I appreciated that the main character is kind of horrible, in a self-absorbed, fully rounded way, and how much of the book is obscured behind this destructive, self-destructive perspective. And I'm sure it was saying something about Women TM and their relationship to fantasy (as manifest in the figure of the Merman), which I am, of course, not qualified to comment on.
I notice this gets talked about as a "love it or hate it" kind of book. I thought it was ... fine?...more
Another one of those books I have no idea why I bought ... and increasingly can't remember anything about. Probably not a pull quote there.
I think thiAnother one of those books I have no idea why I bought ... and increasingly can't remember anything about. Probably not a pull quote there.
I think this was ... fine?
Basically, it's a fictionalised account of the life of Margaretha Geertruida (better known as Mati Hari) through the eyes of the people connected to her: her alcoholic husband, the friend of Picasso who painted her portrait, her maid, a Russian officer who falls in love with her, a prison doctor, and a member of the firing squad who executed her in 1917. The effect is deliberately enigmatic, as much obscuring and complicating its central figure as revealing or explaining her.
Which works - and suits the subject. But also made the book really ... kind of ... ephemeral? In my brain. It was there, and then it wasn't, and *shrug*....more
I think I picked this up because it was an Oxford book, and I have a weakness for Oxford books. It’s sort of half The Secret History half Brideshead RI think I picked this up because it was an Oxford book, and I have a weakness for Oxford books. It’s sort of half The Secret History half Brideshead Revisited, while not being nearly as good as either. It’s readable enough, I guess, and the intricacies and insularities of Oxford are well-depicted but it all felt very been-there-done-that to me. The narrator is ye typical ‘normal’ outsider person who gets drawn into a circle of fabulous Bohemians, led by a damaged homosexual. The problem is, this sort of book turns on that character being as fascinating to the reader as they are to the narrator. And despite Mark Winters having all the designated attributes—beauty, money, promiscuity, Catholic guilt—I kind of failed spectacularly to give any fucks about him. And the rest of the cast is similarly un-fuck inspiring.
I think part of the problem was a lacklustre dismantling. These novels have a particular trajectory: The Normal comes to university, full of hopes and dreams, is initially disappointed to discover the place isn’t what they imagined. Then they find their low door in the wall and are for a little while blessed, dazzled, enraptured, believing they have what they didn’t originally realise they were searching for. Then it all goes horribly wrong. In The Secret History it’s because they literally murder someone. In Brideshead Revisited Sebastian’s descent into ruin mirrors the destruction caused by the coming war. In The Lessons … it’s more just kind of an eh. Things are a bit depressing. People make ill-advised choices and are sad. Oh, the narrator is gay outta nowhere. That must have been one hell of a handjob.
There’s some really well-articulated stuff about Oxford itself though:
What is Oxford? It is like a magician, dazzling viewers with bustle and glitter, misdirecting our attention. What was it for me? Indifferent tuition, uncomfortable accommodation, uninterested pastoral care. It has style: the gowns, cobbled streets, domed libraries and sixteenth-century portraits. It is old and it is beautiful and it is grand. And it is unfair and it is narrow and it is cold. Walking in Oxford, one catches a glimpse through each college doorway, a flash of tended green lawn and ancient courtyards. But the doorways are guarded and the guardians are suspicious and hostile.
And I appreciated the shout-out to the St Giles toilets....more
This is kind of … meant to be a thriller, I think? It’s got a very portentous / titillating “oh bad things have happened and more bad things will happThis is kind of … meant to be a thriller, I think? It’s got a very portentous / titillating “oh bad things have happened and more bad things will happen and if only I had known” tone to it that I felt promised more than it actually delivered. The basic premise is that the grief-stricken narrator (we learn fairly early on her fiancé has been killed—in the sense of stabbed in the street, rather than this being any kind of mystery, although the details of it come out slowly) who used to be a promising theatre director but has moved to Edinburgh in order to take up a post at a semi-gothic though well-intentioned pupil referral centre. This is position she is no way qualified for but she gets due to the intervention / kindness / nepotism of an old university tutor. She apparently teaches more than one class, but the only one we’re invited to care about her is most troubling: five notably difficult students that she manages to partially engage by making them read Greek tragedy. Naturally they spend a lot of time talking about big themes like revenge and redemption and fate and self-sacrifice.
It’s kind of obvious where this as all going – the book opens by coyly promising a monstrous act – so the questions that remain are who and how and why. It’s quite a cheap device, but a compelling one, and I pretty much read the book in one sitting. I don’t have enough Ancient Greek points (not having received that kind of education) to be fully aware of the extent to which the book uses the devices of the plays it references to tell its own story, but there’s definitely an air of inevitable doom that felt all Greek tragedy to me.
But, in general, I found the whole thing a bit incoherent and ultimately tepid. The narrator’s sections are interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of her students and I found these especially unconvincing—for me, the voice didn’t ring true, but I’m aware that’s a vague and wildly subjective comment to make. Similarly, I found this character pretty woolly—she was more a collection of traits around which a thriller could be built (obsessive! clever! alienated! potentially inclined to violence! maybe a lesbian!) than a fully put-together portrait of an actual person.
I was also kind of … expecting more twist, somehow. The narrator is this slightly grief-deadened, distant figure (even when she’s directly telling you stuff) so I was constantly assuming a degree of unreliability that may or may not have been there. And maybe that was the point but unreliable unreliability is one step too meta, even for someone who loves their meta as much as I do. The book consistently presents us with evidence that not only is the narrator’s judgement impaired (she tells us so repeatedly) but that her self-perception is distorted. She’s constantly insisting she’s doing a crap job and other people are constantly telling her she isn’t – I mean, to a degree that’s borderline annoying, because there’s nothing more frustrating than secondary characters who exist solely to insist on things about a protagonist that you yourself don’t ever witness. Also, having some experience of the issues involved around pupil referral units, I was inclined to feel she was, in fact, doing a crap job. So anyway, the upshot of all this unreliable unreliability was that I genuinely thought the narrator was going to have actively manipulated a vulnerable teenager into the “monstrous” act. And the narration itself was a further act of manipulation of the reader.
Except … no? This did genuinely seem to be the story of a grief-stricken woman who is the inadvertent recipient of a Grecian act of retributive violence enacted on her behalf by a teenager she has inspired by her teachin’.
Also in a mid-Brexit world I am not comfortable with portrayals of Eastern Europeans as wife-abusing thugs who murder nice white lawyers in the street...more
Small Town Trouble is the first book of the Kim Claypoole Mystery series (book two to be released June 2014). It follows the heroine (unsurprisingly nSmall Town Trouble is the first book of the Kim Claypoole Mystery series (book two to be released June 2014). It follows the heroine (unsurprisingly named Kim Claypoole) as she returns to her hometown of Fogarty in order to help her emotionally immature mother navigate the ever-deepening mire of her financial difficulties.
This review will contain spoilers.
Anyway, on arrival in Fogarty, Kim discovers that a local topless bar owner has shown up dead in his own carpark with his throat slit and his genitals severed. Because Kim isn’t so much a detective as the part-owner of a restaurant, she mostly ignores this fact an gets on with … well … the job she’s actually in town to do. Which I sort of appreciated on one level, because it added an air of psychological plausibility to proceedings, but I did spend about the first dozen chapters thinking “well this is all very interesting, but are we going to get any more information on that murder any time soon?”
To give Kim her due, she’s distracted by the rather more pressing mystery of the clearly pseudonymous “Larry White”, who is offering her mother far more money than is sensible for a tiny parcel of land and a failing local radio station. She’s also rather distracted by her tempestuous but currently off-again affair with minor TV personality, and by the reappearance in her life of an old schoolfriend, Amy Delozier, with whom she has – shall we say – unresolved tensions.
Well, bugger, I'm not supposed to have books on my shelves I can't remember anything about. And I'm actually get a Brought to by Reading Project 2015.
Well, bugger, I'm not supposed to have books on my shelves I can't remember anything about. And I'm actually get a bit worried by how much I apparently that I don't remember.
I'm not a huge SF reader, but I persevered with this series for some reason (trying to impress a boy? I can't imagine why else) and I did quite enjoy it. Though I remember Use of Weapons, The Player of Games and Look To Windward much more vividly. I suspect because this is less good -- first novel syndrome and all that. While there's lots of showcasing going on, it feels kind of ragged and incoherent.
I think this is the one about the Culture-Idiran War and, God, I am a terrible reviewer. And I think it's basically about the usual Star Trek questions of whether whatever-humanity-means can exist in a post-scarcity world given that so much about we conceive/imagine about humanity is its fundamental messy ugliness.
And the protagonist is a total dick.
Also war is apparently bad.
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I do, however, like that this book is called Consider Phlebas....more
I think it's just ... one of those things that you can either like Spenser or you like Milton.
There isBrought to you courtesy of Reading Project 2015.
I think it's just ... one of those things that you can either like Spenser or you like Milton.
There isn't really space in a sane human's brain for both.
And I'm #TeamSpenser. Cos more boobs and boys disporting in fountains. And monsters vomiting frogs and Catholic propaganda.
There's just no way Milton can live up to this.
Also I get epically bored with Satan-wanking. Um, that is not Satan himself rubbing one out in the pit fire (though I might have been more engaged in Paradise Lost if he had...) but over-sympathy for him as some kind of glorious rebel figure.
When he is stupid and fucked and futile and knows he is stupid and fucked and futile.
It is however all dense and impressive and I'm sure an important achievement of literature 'n' stuff. ...more
Unfortunately this is also where I started drifted away from this series. Basically it's when I realised it definAnother excellent-lookin' frock book.
Unfortunately this is also where I started drifted away from this series. Basically it's when I realised it definitely wasn't about things I was totally into it (weird gothic boarding schools) and was instead about things I was only mildly interested in (fallen angels, teen romance across the centuries).
Like the first book, it does do a fair amount of deconsruction of the tropes it employs - I feel it wants to ask questions around Love That Is Meant To Be, for example.
But I'd also been holding onto the possible that the heroine - Luce - was actually Lucifer.
I remember this as having very deep world-building and Marchetta's familiar unflichingness (yes, that's a word), leading the reader to and from some sI remember this as having very deep world-building and Marchetta's familiar unflichingness (yes, that's a word), leading the reader to and from some some very dark places. Like Jellicoe Road this is a story saturated with loss: the loss of self and the loss of loved ones, twisted what -- in different hands -- could have been a typical fantasy adventure story in something altogether more grand and resonant.
It's a little bit like a YA-Tigana, except without being eighty gazillion pages long. Also the YA thing is debatable because, ye Gods, does this take on some tough stuff.
It kind of cements Marchetta's place for me as one of the most powerful and versatile YA authors I've ever read....more
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