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This book is doing a fantastic job of capturing a very relatable tension between the protagonist's genuine, hard-won defiance and a certain amount of lying to herself in trying to deny how much it hurts.

The context immediately cuts down the melodrama, but this is an opening line I'm going to remember.

This is a set of stories-within-a-story, which are their best are very entertaining and vivid. But as another #SFFBookClub mentioned, I think it would have worked a lot better as a series of separate stories. In trying to pull it all together as one person's adventures, Nimr ended up making a lot of the dramas resolve too quickly and neatly to maintain interest, and the ending manages to be simultaneously too neat and unresolved.

OK, I spoke too soon. There are some longer arcs later.

This one's gonna be a slow read through, reading aloud with a group of friends an hour a week.

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'd forgotten quite how quotable Wilde's writing is. I think my challenge with this book is going to be not stopping every 6 pages to type out another quote, until everyone unfollows me sick of it.

@jcalpickard@bookwyrm.social I see what you mean about Verne or Wells, though I feel like they'd have made it more one human's heroic story. And it will be very interesting to come back to this in a decade or two.