Reviews and Comments

I've not been making enough time for reading lately, but I have been enjoying this book a lot as I slowly make my way through it. #SFFBookClub

#SFFBookClub book from a few months ago. I read this quickly and enjoyed it, but it also felt very thin. The overall arc seemed sort of formulaic, and it just never got me caring enough about its world or characters for the ending to make me feel very much.

Possible future #SFFBookClub book? (largely on the strength of bookwyrm.social/user/sohkamyung/review/10090007 )

Whew. This volume really brings home the grotesqueness of war in general and Japan's war in particular. It was already gut-wrenching to read, and then just a week after finishing it it suddenly felt very topical. Will we ever learn?

I think I might set this book aside for a bit. I enjoyed it a lot for... oh about the length of a typical modern novel. But the slowness of the story is starting to drag, and I'm getting tired of how much of the story is now about Hans Castorp's exceedingly middle school crush on a woman he'll do anything for a chance to gaze upon but heaven forbid actually speaking to her beyond the most formal of pleasantries.

I'm not sure if I'm giving up on this or just taking a break, but I need to read something faster paced and with a less tiny world.

For the first chapter or two I'm reading this and the older translation that Standard Ebooks has and then I'll decide which to finish.

When I heard of this book--a generation ship novel entirely in verse--I was excited and felt some trepidation, because it can be easy for a technical feat like that to overshadow the story. Once I had it in hand and flicked through, I felt both of those things more intensely, because parts of the book employ the sort of creative layouts I associate more with zines than novels.

It turns out that all of that drives the story and characterisation with a singular focus. Even the wackiest-looking page layouts are a guide for pacing and mood, and work fantastically well. I am unusually tempted to just go back to the beginning and read the whole thing through again.

It is also an interesting story, and the three main characters are compelling. It made sense to mostly focus on them at the expense of the ship's crew, but at the end I was left a little frustrated that one question was never addressed: what would have motivated rank-and-file members of the first generation crew to sign up?

It is also a deeply Christian story, enough so that I feel like that needs to be a potential CW. But this is handled in a very interesting way that worked for me as a non-Christian reader.

#SFFBookClub

This is one of those books that's a deceptively easy read while full of heavy themes: war, hate, difficult parent-child relationships, adolescence. Some chapters were just plain fairy-tale fun, while others were quite grim, and it's all pulled together cohesively.

The last few chapters are a gut-punch, and the one sour note for me is that the twist towards the end makes some of the earlier parts of the book feel like a con.

About half a chapter in, and I can already tell this is going to be gloriously batshit. I think I mean that as unqualified praise, ask me again after a couple of chapters. #SFFBookClub

Lent by a friend. I'm about halfway through already. So far it's very good, but also kind of painfully on the nose to be reading while Russia tries to annex Ukraine and the US threatens everywhere.

I kind of have two reviews of this book. On the one hand, I now understand why it's a classic. Twain was a great observer of his peers and an even better writer. It's not a book for kids, at least not contemporary ones, but setting aside the things I'm about to complain about it's a great read about childhood for adults.

On the other, it's also very clear to me why many people don't want to read this book and particularly want it taken out of curricula. It's not just the N-word, though that's all over the place. Personally I was much more troubled by the attitudes through the book.

The worst part by far is Twain's treatment of the one indigenous character, "Injun Joe". The story needs an antagonist, and the cartoonishness of Joe and his crimes seem like an OK fit. But why make him indigenous at all? His indigeneity is irrelevant to the plot but Twain is literally incapable of mentioning him with explicitly flagging it. I realised towards the end of the book that this is a direct counterpart to the antisemitism in Dorian Gray, which I found such a slap in the face that I couldn't finish the story. I don't think it says anything particularly good about me that I could hold my nose and keep reading when it was less personal, but that's also not very surprising. In any case, I would rate this as the primary reason to keep the book off syllabi, and I can certainly understand anyone refusing to finish it once the treatment of this character becomes clear.

By comparison to that disgusting benchmark, Twain's treatment of Black characters seems slightly less bad, in that: there's more than one, they aren't interchangeable, their Blackness is relevant to the roles they get to play in the story, and he puts some positive words about at least one of them in a character's (Huck's) mouth. But even that last is tempered: Huck seems proud to treat the Black man who gives him food and board less badly than other white people do, but it's very explicitly a concession that Huck will share a table with him. All of which, and the liberal use of the N-word in dialogue, seem realistic for how this set of white people would have talked about Black folk in their town, but it still makes for hard reading today.

And even the way Twain approaches the white characters of the town is somewhat condescending. He's a good enough observer that it's clear he's talking about the sort of place he grew up in, but he also seems very keen to separate himself from it, like he's better for having got out, not just luckier. This is a much smaller flaw in the book, but it did grate at times, and that sort of superiority probably reinforces the racism showing through elsewhere.

@tak@reading.taks.garden 's review has me intrigued.