Reviews and Comments

An unavoidably difficult, frustrating book, given the subject matter. I appreciated Imarisha's honesty, including about the number of the things she doesn't have satisfying answers to because no-one does.

VanderMeer's use of negative space is stunning. I spent the first couple of chapters frustrated with omissions but it quickly became clear that they were both deliberate and masterful. I'm not quite sure what this book is, but I know I loved it.

I think I see why this is such an important book to many of my friends, but I didn't get on well with it. Part of the problem is definitely that I'm reading it as an adult and it's clearly intended for a significantly younger audience than the YA novels I've enjoyed over the past few years. But there's other stuff too.

The Meg-Calvin relationship developed without ever developing - like it was just inevitable that these two would have a super gender role normative relationship so there was no need to bother with exposition of it - and felt like it undermined her agency. The weirdly formal tone of most of the dialogue. The simplicity of "evil" in the book, which when its content was explored at all just felt like red scare propaganda, as if 1962 America didn't have its conformist, deindividuated suburbia. The occasional bursts of god-talk in a story that religion doesn't seem to fit into. The way the beloved father figure keeps resorting to authoritarian responses to children who know things he doesn't.

Maybe this just hasn't aged well? Or maybe it's just not a book for me.

Lovely collection of poems from a time that Britain calls the dark ages because so few written records survived from the other end of Eurasia. Wang Wei was particularly good at capturing small details of scenes - the way a canoe's paddle moves through the water, or subtle changes in a town with the seasons - but he must also have taken great joy in people because another rich seam in this collection is poems of farewell, greeting, and missing people in between.

This was one of the most disturbing, uncomfortable books I have ever read, because it goes so deep into dehumanisation by those who wield power. And yet I finished it in a week because the key characters and the strange world Butler set up were so compelling.

This book approaches a particularly interesting time in Russian history in a new-to-me way: by compiling poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction) from the first two years of the Revolution. It's a well compiled selection that covers a very broad range of reactions, and humanises the events of the time in a way that purely historical accounts can't. Also gave me a lot of authors to add to my wishlist....

This book is a lot of fun. For once, an alternate history that isn't about the Nazis winning. Of course it's plenty about the real USA and how government does and does not work, but it's also an action story with engineers and scientists for heroes and a really engaging vision of a different way 20th Century technology could have unfolded. Towards the end it suffers a little from trying to cram too many ideas into a fairly short book, but the momentum of the story kept it going.

Interesting stories, skilfully retold and accompanied with beautiful drawings. The existence of this book is both a happy and a sad thing: putting an oral tradition into writing both to share it with the world and to protect it in case things continue to get worse for the storytellers. There are some elegiac moments in the book which are quite powerful.

A very interesting book that suffers a little from not being quite sure which thing it's going to be:
There's a memoir here about a specific trip
There's some first-hand journalism about the places visited
* There's a meditation about what journalism is

The thing is that it's actually quite good at all three things, but they do trip over each other a bit.

Nice approachable intro to what feng shui really is, which as predicted is much more interesting than the "put a crystal on the toilet cistern" version that reached me nth hand in the 90s.

A beautiful book that powerfully illustrates its key claim: that the Native history of Seattle may be dramatically changed and challenged, but it's neither past nor complete. A few things I particularly appreciated:

The vivid description of the multi-ethnic Seattle of the early pioneer days. It made me wish that hadn't been wiped out, and wonder what kind of hybrid culture could have emerged in a Seattle or a Vancouver that had allowed it to keep flourishing.
A clear sense of how the contemporary Tribes of the region relate to ancestral and language groups.
A much clearer portrayal than I've seen elsewhere of who "Chief" Seattle really was and why he commanded so much respect and attention.
Many mentions of individuals and families who weren't necessarily individually notable. A lot of them are very brief sketches, but they still mean much more than just saying "we know there were Shilsholes and Muckleshoots working at this mill", etc.
The powerful sense of continuity of Native Seattle even among all the hardship and forced change.
The atlas section at the end that brings the immediate pre-Settler period to life though its list of place names and explanations of their significance.

That atlas was what I thought the whole book would be, but it's actually much more interesting in the context of all the stories that precede it.

Fun collection to dip into from time to time. Of course it's super inconsistent given that contributors range from professional writers to primary schoolers whose first language may not even be English, but the majority of the contributions are at least interesting, and some of the kids can really write.

If Robinson were better at writing characters, this could have been a book I'd really love. It has an engaging sweep of a plot, it makes Mars feel more real and reachable than anything else I've read, and all the politics & ecology running through it feel at least possible, mostly plausible. But the characters are so painfully thin! Each is either a pure vessel for an ideology (and at times their arguments made me feel like I was reading the lefty Ayn Rand), or a nation profession combo caricature. By far my favourite parts of the book are the long sections in which Mars itself is the main character, because in those this flaw recedes. And the worst parts are the interpersonal drama because I could so readily slip into dropping the names altogether and just reading it as "Japanese gardener talks to Russian engineer", and so on.

Overall I enjoyed the book enough to keep reading, but found it frustrating enough that I went and read the synopses of the other two in the trilogy because I can't see myself getting around to reading the actual books. The strengths of it left me wanting to hear speculative non-fiction from Robinson, but his weaknesses as a writer of fiction undermined this book pretty badly for me.

This book is a lot of fun and quickly sucked me into its world. There are some ideas I wish it had expanded on. Ironically it seems a bit thin about some of the ideas that the author--as a USian convert to Islam who lived in the Middle East for a while--is more qualified than most to talk about, like the ways it plays with the contrasts between "western" and "Islamic" ways of seeing the world. I have to wonder if there was some fear, from editor or author, of putting off American audiences by going too deep into those. Still well worth a read, though.