Reviews and Comments

DNF. Until I hit the super antisemitic bit, I was wavering between "I don't really care about the story" and "but each page is fun to read", and... it's not fun any more. I didn't even decide not to continue, I just haven't felt like it.

Oh, so that's where the antisemitism I saw another review mention is waiting. And it's not just the sort of casual BS I sadly expect from 19th Century goy authors, it's a character with no name other than "the [disgusting | ugly | insert other insult here] Jew", whose ugliness is mentioned every page for a while, and appears to "own" a young actress. Also, a Shakespeare impresario who the character can't imagine could possibly actually appreciate Shakespeare rather than just seeing money to be made, because that would be too human.

There's a lot to unpack here about whether it's Wilde telling us how he really feels or not, given that he puts a lot of obvious nonsense in the mouths of his characters. But I'm not sure I have the energy and I might just bounce. Partly because I think I need to not keep running into [epithet Jew] right now, and partly because I'm a bit frustrated with the book anyway.

I'm finding I don't care what happens to any of the characters. Not even enough to wish ill on them, I just don't care. Until this bit, the pleasure of reading each page was keeping me going, and a lot of it really does sparkle, but put a big caveat on that pleasure and why am I still reading?

I recently inherited a beautiful edition of Wilde's complete works from my great-aunt--with her signature dated 1946 in the inside cover!--so it's time I finally read this story. ...and it just occurred to me that the physical book in my hands is older today than this story was when my great-aunt bought it.

So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.

It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but I kind of want Nayler to write a few short stories filling out the characters a bit more and picking up some of the loose ends - perhaps something like Sofia Samatar did with The Winged Histories.

One little thing that's bugging me about this book, while I'm otherwise enjoying it very much, is that either author or publisher couldn't be bothered to typeset Vietnamese properly. We get the diacriticals for Mínervudóttir, but in rendering Côn Đảo as "Con Dao" not only are the diacriticals missing: "Đ" is a fully separate letter from "D". It's odd because Vietnam is the one place in the book that it's clear from the author's bio he did live in for a while.

"Rustem" also feels wrong to me (it should be Rüstem or maybe Rostam), but there I may be overapplying Turkish defaults which might not fit right for Tatar. I'm just going to keep reading it as "Rüstem" because that sounds right in my head.

Lent to me by a friend who loved it and whose recommendation is reason enough to read a book I know barely anything about. The cover certainly has my attention....

I repeatedly almost put this book down, and each time I was brought back in by the sheer beauty of the writing. It's simultaneously a reworking of assorted Russian folk tales and a magical realist retelling of ~30 years of Russian history, from the October Revolution to the Siege of Leningrad. It's full of interesting ideas and engaging imagery, but much of the time also has this sense that nothing any character might choose changes anything.

I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts about this book, but I think I largely agree with this review: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/deathless-by-catherynne-m-valente/

A fun, light read, with a charming protagonist who's fiercely independent and very wily, but quite prone to underestimating others.

#SFFBookClub October 2023 pick

This ended up being the third of 4 stories I read this year that were all variations on the Fall of the House of Usher (including the original), and I think it's my favourite. The slow pace with which the protagonist (and by extension us the readers) learn what exactly is up with the house felt realistic and made for great tension because there's such a long period in which it's clear that something is Very Wrong but not what it is. And along the way Moreno-Garcia gets in some choice digs about what colonisers are and do, including to themselves and each other. Deliciously gruesome.

#SFFBookClub May 2023

What a joy this book was! It's a fairly light adventure, but with an emotional journey, some relatable characters, and a setting that feels like a relatively positive future with some unspecified dark times in its past.

This was the #SFFBookClub April pick

I really can't get enough of Janloon and Kekon, and thoroughly enjoyed this shorter return to it. It pulls of the wonderful trick of being a totally self-contained story with all new characters for the important roles, while tying in very well to the bigger arc of the Green Bone saga, giving major characters from that satisfying cameos, and reinforcing the human stakes of the events of the big saga.