its_kievan's reviews
184 reviews

A fantastically interesting first 2/3rds let down by an overdeveloped ending. Muir’s choice to split the narrative between a present-day second-person(!) POV and a warped retelling of the previous book is a bonkers one, and I am insanely impressed that she pulled it off so well. All that goes to shit, however, when she explains too much and not enough, filling up far too many pages with monologues that never quite make sense. Particularly annoying are the

wildly underdeveloped Blood of Eden

and the godawful already-outdated meme speak. I really wanted to love this book, and for a while I thought I did, but sadly this might be my last Locked Tomb experience.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff buried in this book, but god is it hidden beneath a mountain of very uninteresting stuff. That’s a little bit my fault: I’ve been on a real early Christianity kick lately so a lot of things that would otherwise be surprising - Gnostics, forged Scripture, Paul being a dick - were old news to me. But the bigger problem is Ehrman’s writing, which is so endlessly repetitive that I could feel my brain wilt. Credit where credit’s sue, it’s not academic or jargon-y, but he goes too far in the other direction and takes a single idea and goes over and over it until it’s driven into the dust. Again, they’re fascinating ideas, and despite everything I think anyone who’s interested in the history of Christianity should check this book out - but I’m so happy I never have to read it again.

At one point in this story, one character injects another character's penis with spider venom, which causes it to rot and eventually fall off. This is a good analogy for Adjustment Day as a whole, except replace the penis with my attention span and the spider venom with one of the most toothless, incoherent attempts at satire I've ever read. It's just... it's bad. It's bad and it's not particularly clever or interesting. Good satire comes from caring about the subject, at least a little. You need to know a lot about something to criticize it well, and that's doubly true when you're trying to be funny in the process. Palahniuk, as far as I can tell, doesn't really give a shit about... well, about anything, and it shows. Adjustment Day is the sort of equal-opportunity mockery that you'd find on South Park, and as a result it reads like a high school student's report on a book they didn't even read. It's lazy, and it's boring. I'm sure somewhere there's an Adjustment Day fan - probably the same person whose response to Fight Club was "whoa dude that's so sick" - but personally I couldn't care less. I couldn't care less what Palahniuk thinks about masculinity, or about liberalism, or about identity politics, and I couldn't care less about his book.

Also he has two characters in this book talk about Fight Club, which is so blindingly obnoxious it nearly killed me.

Very much an investigative piece, in comparison to Say Nothing’s focus on storytelling. There’s a lot of technical ability on display, as Keefe covers three generations of millionaires and the opioid epidemic in under 500 pages without missing a beat. The book does lose something in the process, though I couldn’t say exactly what that is. Maybe it’s the fact that it feels less like a complete book and more like a very long newspaper article. I don’t know. Regardless, it is definitely required reading on the poisonous relationship between wealth and power, and the sheer horror that can be created by people whose only passion is their own bottom line.

Affected me way more than I was expecting it to. McCurdy strikes an amazing balance between laying out the harrowing details of her trauma and showing how she spent so long not recognising it as trauma. I’m also very glad her Mom died.

Absolutely fascinating to read. McCarthy strips his writing down to the absolute bare minimum (minus even dialogue marks) needed to keep the story going, to the point where Bell’s chapter-opening monologues feel breathlessly tense. I haven’t read anything like it (except maybe Hammett) and while it does take a lot of getting used to, it also perfectly fits the dry, wide-open setting. I almost wish I had a literature degree because I can feel all the subtext and allusions and deeper meanings I’m missing out on.

As a long-time SFF reader, I’m used to people going on tirades about how SFF books should be taken as seriously as “classic” literature, and I think this is a perfect counter argument. Even the best fantasy book left my head after an hour or so. No Country For Old Men is going to be rattling around in my brain for a long, long time to come.

A fun read to close out the year, but not the book I was hoping it would be. 

The problem is that the setting and plot are almost entirely separate, which is a real tragedy when the setting - alternate 1910s Cairo with djinns and angels - is so damn cool. Clark wants to have his cake and eat it too, and so he ends up with an interesting backdrop that never actually matters to the story. He tells us that sexism is more-or-less at 1910s levels, but at no point does anyone treat Fatma differently because of her gender - not in any way that affects the plot, at least. He tells us that homophobia is the same, and yet not only can Fatma go around in men's clothing but multiple characters know about her and Siti and no one even bats an eye. I get if you don't want to interrupt your fun adventure story with real-world bigotry, that's so incredibly fair, but in that case why even bring it up? Just be like yeah the djinns made us chill with gay women and leave it at that. The same is true of the fact that it's set in Cairo, and more broadly in the Middle East. Again, the food and clothes and architecture is interesting, but it's just set dressing - you could change Fatma's name to Faith and the djinns to ghosts (or whatever) and it fundamentally wouldn't change anything.

I want to make it clear, I still enjoyed this book. The reason I bothered writing all this is because I enjoyed the book enough to care about how it handled its setting. Clark is clearly a creative dude, and I I'm very excited to see what he puts out next.

I know it’s a dumb thing to say, but it’s crazy to realise that the people in Nazi Germany didn’t, like, know that they were in Nazi Germany. Boyd acknowledges early on - through the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, no less - that getting a complete understanding of an entire country is basically impossible. Still, she definitely has a solid go at it, drawing on accounts from aristocrats, intellectuals, athletes, and ordinary tourists, among others. I do wonder if Travellers might be a better book if Boyd had gone deep instead of wide - certain people’s “arcs” (for lack of a better word) got lost in the mix - but it’s still an absolutely fascinating glimpse at a very different and bizarre world.

A powerful combination of boring and stupid. I feel bad writing negative reviews, even when I know the author will never see them, but god this thing fucking draaagged. The dialogue is stilted and nonsensical, the characters are flat, the setting is criminally underdeveloped, and the entire plot depends on multiple characters - including the narrator - hiding information for literally no reason. I wish I could list all the  holes in this book (and believe me, there are plenty), but the whole thing was so mind-numbingly banal that I’ve already forgotten everything that happened.

An incredibly disappointing read. The English Commonwealth is a fascinating period in history: a government and nation divided between radical religious sects, proto-socialist soldiers, and would-be military dictators who believed that if they could just ban Christmas it would usher in the Second Coming. And yet Providence Lost takes that crazy, unprecedented mix and turns it into a long list of names and dates. He provides no explanation of what these various people and groups actually want, or, when he does, the explanation is given whole chapters after they are introduced. There's no thesis on display, no argument about the Protectorate's ambitions or place in history. Even Oliver Cromwell, the man at its very centre, feels weirdly remote and shadowy. 

I think the biggest problem is the editing, or lack thereof. Lay occasionally proves that, yes, he can actually write a strong sentence, but every time he immediately backtracks and chucks in enough commas to kill a printing press. A typical sentence in this book will go something like: "George Whatshisname, brother of Edward, a hapless figure who had been granted a peerage by that other noble figure Walter, 1st Duke of Whogivesashit-Upon-Avon and comrade of the prosaic Jonathan Dontcare, and who had subsequently gambled it away, sought assurances in the aftermath of the disastrous conflict at Ballsackfield from his army comrades - they of the leveller persuasion - who had so recently condemned him." That's not a line from a book, that's a sleeping pill in written form.

It's a bummer, because there is so much going on in this period. So much of the Protectorate is unique in English history, maybe even in world history. A book that explains clearly who these people are, what they want, and (most importantly) why it matters would be an instant 5 stars for me. Providence Lost, unfortunately, is not that book.