Books I've Rated 3 / 5
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Angel Down
Finished
I was so excited to read this book as it seemed like a great intersection of my main genre interests – an angel falls in the middle of a battlefield? – and more “high-brow” reading – it won the Pulitzer! And honestly I think a rating of 3 is padding it a bit for reasons of the latter.
In the end it felt so much like every other war book we had to read in high school: ugly and dark in all the same ways. And I get that, I don’t think it’s bad that books about war be dark and ugly; they should be! But I don’t really need convincing there. The addition of a fallen angel didn’t really seem to add anything unique—until maybe the climax, but by then it was too late, for me.
On top of all of that, the “one single sentence” gimmick was… eh? It added a kind of breathlessness to the piece that worked fine, but also: just replacing all your periods with “and” barely counts as an achievement. I was kind of hoping for a true, well-worked run-on sentence—one that used all the tricks of the trade to prevent a sentence from ever ending—but it was mostly just regular writing with a whole lot of extra “and”s.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Finished
I’ve really liked the Wayfarers series, but this one didn’t get me. Kind of an interesting premise that didn’t really go anywhere with the short time it had.
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Eulalia!
Finished
Wanted to revisit one of my favorite childhood series. Listened to an audiobook that was voiced by Jacques and “A Full Cast,” and surprisingly I think that hurt rather than helped my enjoyment. Part of it is simply that I listen to audiobooks at a higher speed, and the range of voices and accents didn’t do well in those circumstances: if I listened at 1x it was definitely too slow, but the voices were not a uniform speed, so a reasonable speed for the book was still too fast for certain characters. Jacques’s low Liverpudlian accent is lovely, but can also be hard to make out when, e.g., driving. So that’s obviously not a criticism of the book, but it did affect my enjoyment. The book overall felt a little strangely paced, without a clear rising action and climax. Few of the characteristic feasts, and actually very little time at Redwall at all. It was alright, but certainly not my favorite of the series.
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The Last Session
Finished
I picked this up after mostly enjoying The Writing Retreat, and so I knew going in that there was a risk that, like that novel, this one would be muddied by a layer of “is it real or isn’t it” supernatural/mystical elements. I didn’t love it either time—mostly because I think it’s just not compelling to not commit. In this book, like the last, everything supernatural could generally be hand-waved away (although there are a lot of “coincidences” in this one that don’t really get explained) as dreams, delusions, hallucinations, etc. But I feel like: do it or don’t. Either commit to the premise and let things actually be supernatural, or commit to the premise that they weren’t. The gray area makes for a much less satisfying thriller, for me, because thrillers are all about “what’s really happening here?” and leaving the answer as “who knows?” is just kind of frustrating. But it was an entertaining-enough read. I didn’t hate it, overall. I just think it could’ve been more satisfying when it was all over.
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Carpathians
Finished
This book purports to be about first contact, but mostly deals with a hyper-capitalist future and how humankind might react to the possibility of first contact. It may be a minor spoiler, but “contact” barely occurs in this book. I did think it was interesting, and for a while I thought the cynical angle of such a hyper-capitalist future added something interesting to the story, but at the end it became clear that that was the story and I was left unsatisfied. If Dixon intends to write a sequel, it would make sense, but I don’t see any indication of that at this point. Which leaves a big chunk of the focus of the book more-or-less unresolved.
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The Most
Finished
Boy, people like to make fun of fantasy books for their emphasis on world-building but that’s basically all that happened here. A simple scenario plays out with endless flashbacks explaining the life stories of everyone involved. Very literary, and certainly not bad but it’s funny to think about how this world-building is received in comparison to that of genre novels.
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The Colour of Magic
Finished
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Upgrade
Finished
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The Blue Hour
Finished
- Exodus The Archimedes Engine
Finished
The synopsis had me really interested but I think this book has maybe made me realize I’m not as big on the “space opera” subgenre as I thought I was. The book has some of the trappings of “hard” sci-fi, but is really just a fantasy book with a coat of sci-fi paint. The technology is magic; the near-lightspeed travel – although I’m sure the author had it all worked out – definitely felt squishy as far as what it meant for who was where, when. My order of interest went 1. Terrence, 2. Finn, ….10. whoever was in the palace intrigue subplot.
If I’m going to be reading a book like this, I want to care more about the individuals and I’m less excited by “fate of the universe” stuff. When the stakes get too high and the settings, tools, weapons all become too distant from the “real” world, I zone out. I can’t get invested. Maybe paradoxically, this book felt to me at times too distant from anything I could relate to, and also too close to present-day humankind to be believable as 30,000 years in the future.
I didn’t hate it. I liked some of the concepts that were toyed with, and at times I found myself rooting for characters. But I mostly found myself counting down until I could put it down and pick up something else.
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The House of Always
Finished
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The Measure
Finished
Eh. It was fine. An attempt to examine prejudice without the baggage of existing prejudices; didn’t really live up to that though. Just a kind of simple “ensemble cast”-style story of characters in this new world, none of whom particularly grabbed me. Didn’t really lead up to much or have a noticeable climax. Just kind of happened. Writing style unremarkable, so it’s not one of those literary “nothing happens but it happens beautifully” kind of books.
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One Perfect Couple
Finished
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The Dragon Reborn
Finished
I honestly couldn’t tell you what the overall plot arc of this book was. I know how it started and ended and I know several things that happened it it but the focus of many characters for the whole book had little to do with what could be called the climax.
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When I Was You
Finished
It’s fine. Nothing special. And the very end of the book drives home how it’s full of things that take you out of it and feel like author interference.