Reviews and Comments

[actually using the edition downloadable from standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain/the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer ]

I tried reading this when I was approximately Tom's age and knew almost nothing about US culture, and bounced pretty hard. I was curious to try again now that the cultural distance wouldn't be so alienating.

I am enjoying it much more this time, but I think the real variable is age. The cultural setting still feels so far removed from anything I know that I needed the first chapter explained to me; fortunately it hasn't been a barrier in the rest of the book, but it's still highly unfamiliar. But I remember hating the famed whitewashing a fence story as a kid, and this time I found it wryly amusing - I just think this is a book for adults about a kid, not a book for kids.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through and both the racism and the amount Twain condescends to his characters are grating. But he was also an excellent observer and writer; so far there's enough to keep me going while sometimes gritting my teeth or rolling my eyes at the author.

At the heart of this book, there's a good, simple ghost story in a creepy setting. It would work well as a short story, and Myfanwy Piper did a great job distilling that short story back out for the libretto of Britten's opera version. But the original text is so heavily larded with too many words--too many adjectives, just too much in general--as to ruin it for me. Some of this is the sheer wordiness, some is how slowly the story is drawn out, which was probably an artefact of having originally been published as a serial. But some is also how heavily the protagonist feels the need to imbue every step with Drama, to the point that when the ending comes it has no impact whatsoever because the piece has been blaring at fortississimo for an hour.

Seriously, the opera is a so much better telling of the same story.

How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

#SFFBookClub

As it happens, this book was written by a good friend's brother. But it's also about a couple of questions close to my heart: what of the ideals of communism can be salvaged from the horrors of 20th century "Actually Existing Socialism" as practiced, and how can we be appropriately critical of those horrors without throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

It's perilous ground, and I've already found things to argue with in the first chapter. But he's a good writer who clearly knows the field deeply, and I am interested to see where he takes it.

I appreciated how much this book fills out the world and culture of its setting through individual characters' stories, without having to do a lot of Worldbuilding per se. I found each main character in some way relatable, and particularly enjoyed the way their initially disparate stories gradually get connected to each other. In the end I didn't find it quite as satisfying as the more tightly focussed stories of the first two books, but it's very nicely done and has a lot of very timely stuff to say about ways people care for each other or fail to, and about both emigration and immigration.

I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.

I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background to the first book. This neatly gives Rice a way to work in some rehashing naturally as people answering her questions, but also this book fills in a lot of information that none of the characters knew during the first one. That said, I'd still recommend reading Crusted Snow first because the most emotional parts of this story are bound to have more impact if you've had longer to get invested in the older characters.

CWs: racist violence, and this one's a real tear jerker.

#SFFBookClub (we read the first one as part of the book club last year)

Sherman's reflections on the writing of this are worth a read: siouxchef.substack.com/p/reflections-on-creating-turtle-island

And I hadn't realised quite how short it is, which makes my not having read it yet even sillier.

In the strange hybrid acknowledgements / epilogue to Cahokia Jazz, Spufford mentions this story as evidence that Ursula Le Guin (to whom the book is dedicated) wouldn't have liked the world he built. I've somehow got to now without having read Omelas so I'd better fix that now.

The music is a big deal in the book, and Spufford made a Spotify playlist to go with it. I don't want to use or direct people to Spotify, so I made a qobuz equivalent - mostly the same versions but I couldn't always find them, and added a couple of things in: open.qobuz.com/playlist/42331567

Edited: I learned that without an account one can only hear snippets of each song. There are free accounts available at least, but I hadn't meant to be as much of a qobuz shill as this is turning me into.

This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.

I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.

Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.

The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.

Minor criticisms: even the other characters who get significant time don't feel fully fleshed out, probably because we only see them through Colin's eyes. And there are times, particularly towards the end, when the fantasy elements can get a bit USS Make Shit Up. Which would be very frustrating if the point of the book were Serious Fantasy Worldbuilding, but it's so not that.