storyorc's reviews
640 reviews

Didn't understand enough to give a star rating. The high-level idea that the logical conclusion to absurdism first appears to be suicide is radical (to me anyway) and exciting enough to want to understand fully Camus' claim that to evade this conclusion, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy", not to mention how one can possibly consider Sisyphus happy. It's the sort of train of thought that feels right but needs help being thought all the way through for us non-philosophers.  However, the first three-quarters of the book seemed like many words for not much additional insight and I don't know what to make of the last quarter beyond just travel writing with a philosophical bent. I certainly wouldn't take it as truth about those cultures without confirming works from people within them. 

I imagine this collection gives more the more you reread it. And benefits from finally getting around to Nietzsche. And reading Kafka's The Castle instead of giving up on him in disgust after The Trial.

The prose is the standout here - not to say that the look into the narrator's relationship with love and sex isn't interesting but enveloping it in touching, earnest, beautiful prose furnishes it with a contemplative edge that elevates it from a nosy peek or a straightforward write-up of an American expat's experiences in Bulgaria. The audiobook, narrated by the author, colours it in a way I doubt I would have thought of in text form too; an honest, but resigned acknowledgement of when these experiences don't mean enough or mean too much, like one long, heartfelt sigh. 

In a Macmillan interview, Greenwell states he wanted to write "something that was 100% pornographic and 100% high art". This characterises the three explicit scenes pretty aptly. They are a strong challenge to anyone who disparages sex scenes as pure titillation. They point toward things the narrator is looking while still admitting the ugly parts. 

The only part of the book that left me truly uncomfortable is also the part I can't find anyone else discussing - the narrator's final night out in Bulgaria at the end of the book with two of his ex-students. Artistically, it was an interesting mix of tense dread and youthful joy, but this is the only part of the book wherein I felt the author let his narrator off the hook a little. Not entirely -

Z's reactions still make the pit of your stomach drop and the narrator blanches with us at times, once wondering whether sexually assaulting his ex-student was being a 'caricature' of himself or himself 'without impediment'

- but I was looking forward to seeing how his sober self would process the night. Furthermore,

the dog scene read to me like smoothing over the violation, acting as a metaphor for allowing yourself some spots of moral dirt. But not all dirt is equal. It seemed to soon to make peace with predation, especially when it the only other instance of predation in the novel for our minds to go to is the abuse that so dogs his beloved R's footsteps. I'm not arguing against the inclusion of the narrator taking advantage of his ex-student, I just feel it was comparatively unexplored (interestingly, the only other part I felt similarly about was the longer-term effects of the narrator's own rape)

. The ending note sounded a little false to my ears after being trained on chapters of relentless honesty and self-reckoning.

Yangsze Choo continues to excel at picking interesting (and, to Western eyes, niche) subject matter, drawing up 3-4 compelling characters, and wrapping it all in a page-turning mystery. I was able to guess at enough to keep me engaged while still being surprised at some twists and turns. I also applaud the author's sense of when to let a plot thread or narrative goal go. Choo doesn't dwell in details to wrap everything up nicely; she seems to be aware of exactly where the pull of her story is (the foxes) and keep the focus and momentum there.

Snow, Bao, Tagtaa, and Shiro are wonderful, willful, and, in Shiro's case, wicked. Scenes with two or more of them together always had me leaning in. The only shortcoming of the book is that Kuro's reserved nature, along with the choice to leave his part in Snow's history ambiguous until the ending, left him lagging dangerously close to a quiet, stoic stereotype. In any other book, his gentle charm and seeing his effect on other humans would have been enough to carry him but he pales next to his vibrant castmates. This made it difficult to be fully invested in his part of the ending.

Most impressive, is how Choo makes her foxes feel human enough to love but Other enough that the reader feels it would be unwise to relax in Snow's chapters. Whenever Snow is just starting to feel like a woman you might know, she is compelled by foxish curiosity to do something reckless, makes an offhand mention of a close call two centuries ago, or scales a sheer wall and runs across a roof. Even her tendency dangle a tidbit of her history in front of the reader only to say she'll fill us in later, while annoying, feels very much like a predator playing coy with its food. Their literal magical influence is almost superfluous. No matter how many times the narrative suggested, or Snow explicitly said, not to follow Shiro, his antics and daring, paired with those glimpses of honest yearning, still made him my favourite character. My only complaint in this department is that they spend almost no time in their fox forms!

(One thing I can't explain is why Choo alternates between first person for Snow and third for Bao, unless it is simply to enforce the fact that Snow is the protagonist. Hopefully someone else can posit a theory in their review.)

Fun voice with intriguing information, I just read the parts relevant to my research. Would return as a starting point if I needed to research other cadaverous topics this book covers.

Try the audiobook if you are struggling to get through this one. It is well worth persevering.

I was astounded how tender and thoughtful these hardened whalers are. Ishmael is the infectious heart of this of course; the whole book is him cradling the Pequod and her sailors and their leviathan prey and the whaling industry and sometimes the entire ocean in his hands and holding it out to show us like a toddler that found a cool bug. He is so deeply in love with everything he talks about that you can't help but fall for them too. Even the many long passages of tangential ruminations on the colour white or objects made from whale parts or the wind become endearing rather than frustrating (though it didn't harm my experience to glaze over for some of them).

The ramshackle crew are almost as charming. As many times as the carpenter complains or Stubbs insists on some ridiculous superstition or Captain Ahab snatches 'doomed by the narrative' from the jaws of 'getting over it', they are always colourful in character and, especially, in phrasing. The Nantucket whaling dialect is a form of poetry. It was also a relief to find out that the many characters of colour have as many (perhaps more) heroic moments and insights and jokes, and even flaws, though Melville does withhold from them the internal depth he languishes upon Captain Ahab and Starbuck and Ishmael. We come closest with Queequeg, with whom the narrative is quite smitten, during his coffin episode, but not even he truly gets his own POV like so many of the white sailors.

The head-hopping in general is far out of line with modern standards of good writing. I didn't mind it on the whole, though I did miss Ishmael and Queequeg, who drift farther out of the book's focus the longer it goes. It suits the rambling, all-encompassing nature of the piece. This book contains adventure, sure, but calling it an adventure novel would be a stretch. The pace rises and falls like conditions at sea and you have to have to ride out both the storms and the doldrums. Its structure is more jumping between islands of an archipelago than a cross-country quest, with lectures on the boat rides between. The encounters I found most fascinating personally were when the Pequod encroached on a pod that included calves and when they met the English captain who lost an arm to Moby-Dick.

Spiritually speaking, I have never read anything so complete on any topic as Moby-Dick struck me as being complete on the nature of whales and whaling as seen through a Western lens. I struggle to think of any aspect of them not touched upon - their migration, breeding, products made from them, mythological presence, physical presence, their sweetness, the danger they present, their intimacy with ocean depths and the spectacle of their spouts. Almost as much can be said of the men who hunted them. If you've ever looked up at a titanic plastic whale in a museum and felt a glimpse of something existential, Moby-Dick will dangle you all the way over that edge. 

Few prequels are able to turn their prequelness into such a roaring advantage. Since we already know the general trajectory of this world, the narrative is under none of the usual pressures to keep this collection of telepath's powers modest, controlled, or even particularly under wraps. This allows it to really dig into what telepaths could do to our society - or more broadly, what people with unanswerable power can do. Having one telepath positioned above the rest only adds nuance to the power structure. A lot of books will soften their hypothetical scenarios by making the powerful side pure evil or making a vigilante beloved by the people to excuse their extrajudicial violence but Butler does not shy away from the complications of her setup. There is a very specific horror in watching people grow accustomed to - even happy with - a lack of freedom. The greater good of society vs freedom of the individual tension is acutely felt. This gave me a similar mounting dread on the ideological level as the 2024 Dune II film.

Even as the book generates this great and horrible sense of hurtling toward tragedy on the macro scale, my ignorance of the details of the original novel kept me on the edge of my seat in regards to  the fates of certain characters. Doro is still the monster from Wild Seed but also still not without love and loneliness and a very human arrogance. Butler excels in seeding the reader with an insidious pride and curiosity in his millennia-spanning project despite its sickening cost simply because there is no-one else reaching as high as he is. Mary is easier to root for, but prone to an equally human pettiness, bitterness, and that same arrogance. She is no benevolent dictator, much as she might wish to be, and her abilities amplify her little cruelties through her impressive creations in fascinating ways. In the end, they are all just people struggling with issues far bigger than any single person should be. It makes the book hard to put down. Thankfully, the novel's final gift is that it's pretty short.

Great portal into reflecting on the identity of the human race and whether preserving it has any inherent value.

A DELIGHT. Pratchett makes an art of subverting expectations not just in the narrative but at a sentence level. The setting is an enthralling exercise in contradiction; its common people act like your neighbours but there's dragons in the air and the city feels sprawling and alive yet every detail introduced pays off later. For a style with such flourish it hides an incredible economical skeleton. 

What elevates this from amusing to making me want to pick up another Discworld novel is the moments of brutal insight on the nature of humanity and humanity at scale that Pratchett dots through his hijinks. Many I agree with, a few I don't, and some I hope to see expanded upon in his other works. The characters straddle the aspirational-relatable line wonderfully and all have a distinct set of traits. Except wit - very few get through the novel without delivering a few zingers.  The worst thing about this book is that it makes you want to be that annoying friend who won't stop sharing quotes of what they're reading.

Wonse getting killed by luck of the narrative and the dragons flying away to spare the characters some of the messy fallout of doing things by the book

felt like a slight cop-out to me but that could just be because I liked him despite the... everything. I was disappointed the Patrician

regained control in the end since it's always nicer to have the little people vs the power rather than vs themselves but it probably would have been too glamourous and tidy for the tone if they'd defeated the power hierarchy as well as a dragon

. 

World like a Studio Ghibli dream, violence to make you wince, and characters who range from trying so hard to be better to monsters with oddly redeeming qualities. The experimental literary device of head hopping into bit-characters for a sentence or two of italics allows people from all strata of this society a voice and makes it feel so alive and extensive. It is one of many examples of how Jimenez infuses the story with empathy to give it depth; he doesn't demand that we excuse wrong-doing, only that we understand it.

The main two characters are exactly the messy and fun relationship needed to anchor such a surreal tale. The framing device of a modern-day emigrant watching the story as a play was atmospheric and provided some cool a-ha moments but might have felt more vital to someone with more similarities in their family history. I was always eager to return to our two heroes of myth.