erbium's reviews
41 reviews

"perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life."

Oh Edna, you poor thing. What a heartbreaking, resonant story. 

Somehow the fact that this is more of a philosophical novel evaded me before I started reading it - and then immediately caught up with me. The beginning was a bit heavy, this I admit, but I quickly got absorbed by the story and found the narrator's reasoning - whenever he became more introspective - clear and easy to follow. And then - what a story it was!

This is my third Lem novel and for the third time I'm tempted to say, "not much happened, but not for a moment was I bored." I usually love the concept of human scientists making successful contact with an alien civilization via the universal language of science (what can I say, I'm a STEM student), but here I got something different: all the reasons for why we might fail to communicate with aliens and it got me hooked from the start. As always, the prose was just perfect - descriptive and beautiful but never superfluous. Not action-packed, like I said, but when there was tension (oh, you'll know which part I'm talking about when you read the book!), I physically felt it.

Definitely not everybody's cup of tea; but if you're looking for reflective scifi, this is it. 

I picked this book because Angela Collier recommended it in one of her videos. She called the main character "so pathetic" and this I can definitely agree with. The MC is pathetic, she's naive, angry, borderline self-destructive. At times I felt sorry for her - genuinely pitied her when she brought up her powerlessness against the sexist, racist system we all live in, sympathized with her longing for freedom and autonomy - but then she would always turn around and do something truly awful that made her seem repulsive to me.

This itself isn't a bad thing - nasty as she was, she was a well-written character. But apart from the times when she was saying insightful, honest things about race, class, and gender, I just couldn't relate; worse yet, I couldn't care. Her obsession with the handful of meaningless Instagram celebrities was incomprehensible to me, just like her frustration with them. They present no worth, they're fake deep, why do you pay so much attention to them? Just leave them alone, you're wasting your time. We should all be ignoring them instead. 

The most pathetic thing about her was, obviously, her "relationship" with the man she wanted. It was just too long. All that was to be said about the situation was said early on and there really wasn't anything to add, but the story just kept going, not adding anything new. 

I'm actually really interested to see what else Sheena Patel has in stock, but overall this book wasn't great.

Delightful and very unexpected - I often struggled to believe this was written in the middle of the 19th century; save for some details, it felt like it was a couple of decades younger! The plot was very engaging and absorbing, the characters well-written, the prose beautiful but light. It was so refreshing to read an older novel with so many smart, resourceful women, so eager to help each other, and so natural and believable at that. I liked the main character a lot and, even if I couldn't always relate to her, I rooted for her from the beginning to the very end - and it was the end that turned the 5 star rating that I expected to give into a 4.5 one: I found it a bit disappointing, although I can see why some could say it was the necessary way to end the story. Still, I enjoyed this novel very, very much, I'll definitely read it again, and I sincerely recommend it.

A pleasant surprise. If this is horror, then its value isn't in being scary but in being unsettling, or in making the reader feel trapped just like some of the characters, or (as the author explains herself) in the loneliness permeating these stories. There were two or three that I didn't like much for completely subjective reasons. The rest of them I found good or very good, two of those I'd even call heartbreaking in the best way.