bibilly's reviews
321 reviews

dnf for now

the trailer of the show hadn't amazed me one bit, so i picked up the book thinking the original material with the brunette version of Percy could change that or be more exciting on its own. i stopped reading when his mom died and i didn't feel a thing. that convinced me im not the target audience for it. im too dead inside for a book that'll probably have more jokes than grief after such a big trauma in the protagonist's life. i also realized greek mythology isn't really my thing, at least not in a fantasy book. maybe im wrong and i could actually take it seriously, but it's 2023, and i don't want to finish this and still prefer Harry Potter (the series, not the character). that would be sad. and kind of immoral. 

third chance i give Brandon Sanderson (fifth if we consider Legion is divided into three volumes) and now i have a fairly plausible theory on how he's able to write big books set in his even bigger universe so fast: they all lack nuance. the man simply doesn't care about it, if the five titles i've read written by him are anything to go by. a reviewer said he's a step up from a hack writer, and im starting to agree. 

the lesser of the evils: in The Emperor's Soul there's yet another mc you can't tell how old is. i understand not wanting to bluntly state the information (even though so many others, less relevant, are), but the tone of the character's inner voice should show their age without the reader having to put together little pieces of the story to know it.

all you get from the protagonist's monologue is that she's a scholarly type of Mary Sue who can literally turn superhuman when marked by a stone stamp that erases her past and replaces it with another for some time without any real consequence. how are the "soulstones" carved with this magical ability? what is the source of the magic? can anyone turn superhuman after years of carving the right marks or is our mc just that special? no one knows. the narrator swears to god that "forgery" —the ability to create anything out of anything based on the principle that every object has a past, a soul AND an identity— is more complex (or less absurd) than it seems and you're supposed to go with it.

perhaps, were the magic system purposefully whimsical rather than academic and a "science" supposedly exact, i would take it more seriously. however, the whole novella is just talk: lots of telling-not-showing in which the author brags, either through narration or dialogue (bc a high-rank politician who answers only to the emperor does NOT know how everything in the palace is built), about how badass his ideas are, how manipulative his mc is, without never really explaining or letting us see the core points that sustain and prove it all. there's history and psychology behind every carving, yet it comes off sillier than the Avengers' infinity stones.

plotwise, things are conveniently arranged and left to luck or "i hope this character is dumb enough to do exactly as i planned". the mc is tasked with forging back to life the emperor's soul, who had his brain reconstructed through forgery after an assassination attempt but his mind forever lost. [spoilers of the obvious ending ahead] another character eventually sobs out of amazement at her artistry —which would serve the thematic inspired by the ancient Chinese nobility's costum of marking works of art with a signature stamp, if only the art in question weren't considered impossible by the artist herself and didn't depend on her playing god without considering even once the dubious morality of it. on day one, she's lying that she can do it; three months later, she's whispering into the emperor's ear how she knows him better than himself after reading his diary. just like that a whole mind is reconstructed and even righted: the emperor is brand new and will now follow the path to greatness after years of laziness. and i wasted my fucking time. again.

with such a cool opening, this volume should've made me bump up my rating of the trilogy to at least three stars, but here we are. the first three chapters are definitely my kind of messy and what i expect of a story about a man who lives with dozens of hallucinations as if they were real people (later on, the trick is repeated, but it doesn't land like the first time). we finally focus on the nature of these entities or 'aspects' summoned by the protagonist with their own personalities and backgrounds to compartmentalize his vast knowledge and array of specialized skills, which he does so quite literally through speed-reading. despite the absurdity of this method, the aspects and everything they imply —the questioning of the concepts of insanity and reality, the crazy relationship we established with ourselves to maintain a sense of order within our personal lives, and how uncomfortable must be to have the weirdness of our brains out in the open for everyone to judge instead of neatly hidden inside our skulls— are what kept me intrigued during a rather disappointing reading. naturally, many questions piled up, yet only a few are answered here and plotlines introduced in the previous novellas are left hanging. the resolution of the mystery of the mc's disappeared love interest that runs throughout the three volumes is unsatisfying and their romance, as corny as the ending. like with Mistborn, i picked this up for the premise only to see creativity eventually being replaced by mawkish writing and characters, with little to no payoff. so two stars still.

i thought the religious debate would be a one-time thing and we'd move away from it, but in this volume Sanderson again tries to reconcile faith and rationality. that's not something bad per se, but his corny attempt makes it obvious the struggle is his and not the main character's, whose speech on the subject is so unnaturally delivered with its cheap metaphysics ("oh i don't believe in god, but i do believe in infinity". bitch you're about to be shot in the head) it turns the most dangerous situation of the story in a self-help book chapter. that comes after the protagonist is abruptly separated from his hallucinations — entities or "aspects" he summons after learning a subject by just flipping through the pages of a book bc he's that smart. they being his receptacles of knowledge even for social interactions, the separation opens a lot of possibilities to discuss his condition that are never explored as they should due to the author's little "philosophical" moment and to limitations of format, since this is just a novella. the aspects' nature, my favorite part of the book, is better explained here, yet i still find it contradictory: if they're supposed to know only what their creator knows, why are there instances when they see what Stephen isn't looking at and are even ordered to "keep watch"? as for Stephen himself, he confesses to being "a rather bland man in his thirties" and that "the aspects have all the character", and i agree (except for the fact he comes off like a man in his twenties not thirties). however, there's not much to the aspects' said character: while i like Tobias' oldman aura and Aubrey's self-awareness, every time Ivy exclaims "language!" like a broken record is a reminder she didn't bat an eye to JC's racist comment in the first volume beyond asking why do they keep him around (just to get caught kissing him afterward), and his "can i shot them?" line was already annoying in the previous novella. a butler completes the main cast, only you tend to forget him when he isn't calling his employer "master" as if they're both starring in a new Batman movie. the mystery and sci-fi plotlines are also better woven this time, although the holes and amateur mistakes eventually appear —the biggest of the first being a professional assassin suddenly starting to believe in ghost stories so she can conveniently miss a shot at our man— and everything is wrapped up by an anticlimactic resolution with little to no feeling of fear or tension throughout it. despite all that, the last volume is in my plans for this week; i'm already here, might as well finally discover what's up with this guy's mind.

"my name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. my hallucinations, however, are all quite mad."

I wasn't aware Brandon Sanderson had short works published, so I'd never given him a second chance. his first was Mistborn, which reads too much like YA, and not a fun one. basically the only thing I liked was the magic system. one could argue he might have gotten better since orphan former homeless Vin and her tendency to fall in love with the enemy in a matter of days. however, as far as I knew, the man refused to write at least one short novel, so I refused to read another book written by him. until I came across his novellas. 

I'm big fan of short books. with a lower number of pages, writers don't have much time to make mistakes and are less likely to fall into old habits, meaning they're forced to adapt their usual methods or change them completely if they want to create a well fleshed-out story in half the amount of pages they're used to or even less. and to know if they failed, one doesn't waste days of their life, just a few hours. for authors, that can come either as a challenge or a relief.

now, I'm not familiar with Sanderson's novels to properly compare this novella to them —all I know is that he usually writes epic fantasy, which is not the case here— but it doesn't look like he truly challenged himself with Legion. I guess it was more of "a welcome break from other projects", as stated in the preface of the edition with the three volumes (the novella is part of a trilogy). its title and cover for some reason made me think of X-Men, but this is actually a detective story (not me picking up another mystery book after the disaster of the last one), so my reading experience was as exciting as I was expecting: not much.

Legion is the nickname of Stephen Leeds, a man who I couldn't tell how old was and "whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills". the mystery Stephen and his so called aspects are drawn into surrounds a camera that can take pictures of the past. the device brings back into Stephen's life, in the form of a black and white photo, the woman (apparently a love interest) who disappeared a decade ago after helping him gaining control over his mind and never contacted him again. to follow her trail, Stephen and four out of dozens of aspects have to search the missing inventor of the camera, a christian who seeks proof to his faith.

what follows is a sequence of quick conclusions and convenient solutions. the author simplified the interesting parts and complicated the boring ones without properly explaining eitheir of them. one character has a theory that Stephen's hallucinations are a way for him to cope with his brilliance and pass as someone unremarkable, since he doesn't want to be casted out as special (which happens anyway); to confirm it, however, the reader would have to continue the trilogy. Stephen doesn't consider himself insane, for his aspects don't stop him from function nor present a danger to society, a concept I highly appreciate. on the other hand, the fact that he can simply guard them in rooms of a mansion as if they were real people, without being really disturbed by outside forces, makes his condition too simple and easy. even more unbelievable is his ability to summon an aspect with the requisite knowledge and experience after just flipping through the pages of a book whenever a specific set of expertise is needed. is it an unexplored side of the human psyche or just magic?

the sci-fi bit also makes the plot unconvincing, since the mechanims of the camera are kept a mystery —a silly one to be frank— till its rushed resolution. again, more like magic than science. I'd prefer if the plot were a traditional mystery so the hallucinations could stand out more. they're easily dicernible and their interactions are funny, albeit their creator could've been explored beyond his role as their spokesman. here the number of pages begins to show insuffiency, but reading the first chapter of the second volume I could see myself becoming fond of the group at least a little.

to sum it up, Legion is an unmoving story with an unusual take on the found family trope and a bland protagonist. it feels unfinished, not well thought out, but it's easy to jump onto the next installment if you have it at hand. ultimately, its biggest mistake consists of a racist remark a hallucination blurts in the group's flight to Israel (yeah, of all places) and that no one —not the mc, not the victim, not even the other aspect who is always screaming "language!" after every mild comment— calls out. that made me side-eye even more the religious debate (along with the mc's expectation of "islamic terrorists") that seemed to be the "personal" bit of the story Sanderson confess in the preface.

not even half away through this, I knew I'd give it 2 stars. I made myself finish out of annoyance at my self-knowledge (that and bc my dnf rate is getting ridiculous). the thing is: I'm not a fan of mystery books, the who-did-it, let's-follow-the-clues type of books. I don't vibe with tv shows of this sort either. most of the time with these stories, the writing's main role seems to be just to tell you things, to explain them, to say what's around the characters and what they've learned; while the protagonist's only task is to go from one place to another, leading you through the plot, in which a great deal of (hopefully) surprising stuff will happen in order to shock you. and I'm almost never impressed. this structure actually bores the fuck out of me. so why did I pick this up? bc I wanted to be blown away by science! seriously, I thought the sci-fi aspect of Dark Matter would make a difference, but now I'm afraid I'm allergic to sci-fi books too. I'm still not sure what quantum superposition is, and the story fails to link the subject to any meaningful human facet. the family drama, or the lack of it, never really lands; consequently, the what-ifs when dealing with the multiverse theory are pointless. all of the characters are middle-class white people who live fairly good lives compared to most of us mortals, so why even go there? the mad scientist here is cartoonish at best, going through a lot of trouble to fix a simple problem. the "trauma" of his mother's death is dropped out of nowhere so we can finally have a motivation for something, even if that something amounts to nothing. of course, there's a woman who eventually proves to be a temptation to the male lead, and their connection is even flimsier than the one he swears to have with his wife. she has no backstory whatsoever and is there only to help our man out of the goodness of her heart, make him company during his little spacetime travel, and then disappear out of the picture the same way she comes into it. talk about a self-realized character. the rest of the cast is as much fun as her. about the plot, other reviews already pinpoint its many inconsistencies, but what makes two adults deliberately walk into a fatal blizzard when they can simply stay where they are? also, the protagonist/narrator doesn't talk/think about his son half as much as he thinks about his wife? most of the time, it's as if the boy doesn't exist, just a name tag in a formulaic family that's supposed to be the reason the mc never gives up. moreover, the two major plot lines are predictable even to me. I'm a hater of the hidden identity trope (in my head, that's the miscommunication trope for non-romance books), but the chaos that arises from the disruption of the multiverse should be more astonishing. perhaps if I'd read this book in the year of publication, 2016, something in it would have amazed me. it's 2023, however, and I couldn't care less. despite all the action, the three acts of the story are dull and lackluster, stirring in me nothing besides a little curiosity, which no dimension visited by the characters was compelling enough to quench. maybe I should knock off another star.

the author tried very hard with the vampires-that-dont-sparkle thing, but her writing and worldbuilding are still boring and unconvincing /sigh

I've been looking for a good book with this kind of premise —romance between celebrities or set in the entertainment/book world— for a while now. in the right hands, I think it can offer really exciting takes on the fake dating and rivals-to-lovers tropes. unfortunately, I'll have to keep searching*. Stars in Your Eyes reads like ya, but there are ya books less contrived than this, and the first-person narration with its confessional tone doesn't help. the author gives a trigger warning for pretty heavy topics, but the story presents no nuance that lets you hope they won't be dealt with by the usual artificial and didactic prose of contemporary books ("this is problematic and here's why"). the bad boy doesn't have a real personality to deserve the epithet and I don't see myself becoming particularly fond of the good one. also, both protagonists are black men, but neither the cover nor the synopsis hints at that, even though it's a focus point from the beginning. regardless of my opinion on the book, I think the publisher lost the chance of attracting new readers for this author by not being more clear in its marketing.

* I've already tried some titles by Emily Henry and Christina Lauren btw, so I'm accepting recs.

se por um lado não consigo visualizar não fãs pegando este livro pra ler, por outro, quem acompanha o BTS há anos como eu não vai encontrar muitas informações novas nele (inclusive o narrador consegue ser bem repetitivo). trata-se de um apanhado da carreira monumental do grupo que oferece um olhar por trás das cenas, como uma bangtan bomb mais séria e documental ou um artigo extendido da weverse magazine, mas que não diz nem 10% do que haveria pra ser dito sobre a década em que sete coreanos, com todas as suas falhas, contradições e idiossincrasias, comeram o pão que o diabo amassou e conseguiram juntos transformá-lo num banquete. porém, não me arrependo de ter lido. pelo contrário: quero tempo para ouvir, ler e assistir toda a discografia deles de novo, agora com a consciência de que cada álbum foi mais que um conceito e realmente representou uma fase dessa trajetória bem como um estado de espírito do grupo.