Books I've Rated 3 / 5
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Columbus Day
Finished
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Siege and Storm
Finished
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Kafka on the Shore
Finished
If I’m being honest, this one is getting an extra star for “I’m clearly too stupid to understand this.” I didn’t really enjoy it. Nakata’s storyline was interesting, although it never really amounted to anything concrete. There was a lot of “he didn’t know how he knew; he just knew” which in real life is an interesting phenomenon, but in fiction just feels like a cop-out. And when it all came to a head, there was clearly a metaphor or some kind of symbolism that I just missed entirely. Kafka’s storyline, meanwhile, was full of horniness and potential incest and mostly just made me uncomfortable. Also a bit of what I would consider to be mishandling of a trans character.I loved [b:What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 2195464 What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473397159s/2195464.jpg 2475030], and the writing style here was in a similar vein: relatively sparse and matter-of-fact, which I appreciate (though some of the sexual scenes were made all the more uncomfortable by it), but I just didn’t really enjoy or, I think, understand this book. I’ve been told I should try [b:Norwegian Wood 11297 Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386924361s/11297.jpg 2956680], and I’ve always heard good things about [b:The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327872639s/11275.jpg 2531376]. So I’m not sure I’ll give up on Murakami after this book. But it may be a while before I attempt another one.
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The Star-Touched Queen
Finished
An interesting book. Definitely a distinct world among much of the YA fantasy I’ve read, and I appreciated that. I could’ve done with a bit more character development, and at times a bit more description of where we were, what was … actually happening. The prose got pretty flowery in places—sometimes, it worked, but sometimes it took me out of it. A lot of kind of extravagant descriptions that failed to actually give me a visual picture of a person, place, or thing.
I liked it, but I didn’t really finish the book feeling like I wanted to return to the world and characters, because I’d only just started getting to know them when it wrapped up.
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The Fold
Finished
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The Woman in the Window
Finished
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Annihilation
Finished
There’s something very Lovecraftian about the style of description of the foreign organisms, the idea that there are concepts that English has no word for, which I appreciated for a while until it was clear that I was really going to be left with no greater understanding of what the protagonist was trying to describe. The premise was intriguing, but by the end of the book nothing really seemed to have been revealed. I ended the book with almost exactly as much information as I had one third of the way in. And the style was simultaneously too robotic and too flowery? Like, robotically poetic. I dunno. I’d be curious to know more about what’s going on here, but probably not enough to read two more books—I might just look on Wikipedia. And I’ll probably check out the movie.
I contemplated giving this two stars, but I feel like I want to give it an extra star for effort, even if I didn’t really like the result. I liked what VanderMeer was going for, but I felt like it didn’t land, for me, in the end.
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Algorithms to Live ByThe Computer Science of Human Decisions
Finished
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Autonomous
Finished
I bought this immediately when I read that Neal Stephenson said, “Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet.”
That may have jacked up my expectations too high.
It felt a lot like a lot of other books I’ve read in the genre. The contemplations of autonomy were really pretty interesting but far from the focus of the book, which was entertaining enough and had pretty standard implications regarding capitalism and tech, but didn’t really hold much emotional weight or any particularly new and compelling information. I’d have liked more examination of any one single theme the book had.
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The Lying Game
Finished
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Murder on the Orient Express
Finished
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One of Us Is Lying
Finished
Entertaining. Just about everything I expected from it. My wife and I had the mystery roughly figured out from maybe the midway point, maybe a bit before that, but I can say we were never confident that we were correct, which is just about all you can ask of this type of thing.
We were listening to it on Audible, which has four different voice actors for the four main characters, and we constantly had to pause to sort out which character was which. It was a while into the book before I realized I was confusing two or three of the dudes, and for a while I was forgetting which one had said which earlier on. I think that’s just… high school drama, right? The names all blend together when you’re hearing it secondhand.
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The Blood Mirror
Finished
I still really like the world Weeks has built, but I had several issues with this book:
The most glaring is that there was no real overarching plot – it’s just a book to, presumably, get you from book three to the final conflict in book five. A lot of stuff happened, but as a book on its own it had no real arc. I don’t hate just spending some time in this world, but when it was all over, I was left feeling a bit disappointed.
The other thing that bugged me was the overwhelming horniness of the first two thirds. You’d get a chapter of plot and then a chapter of male desire. I understand that some of this stuff served the plot to a limited extent, but the amount of breasts discussed, and the volume of women throwing themselves at men just became tiresome. It made me think of that meme about “men writing female characters” (Google it). And it was disappointing because much of the rest of the book was really fun and interesting.
The plot has still got me hooked, though, and there’s one book left. I’ll definitely pick it up when it drops.
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Everybody LiesBig Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Finished
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Fight and Flight
Finished
Didn’t feel like a full story. Felt like a mini-adventure, which I’d assumed was because it was tacked onto an otherwise-complete trilogy … but the epilogue indicates there’s more coming. So this is a mini-adventure between real stories? I’m annoyed, because the tease at the end and the foreshadowing throughout is way more intriguing than this story was. That said, it was fun to pop back into this world, regardless.
