ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

I don't usually go for memoirs, but this literary memoirs of Batuman's education with Russian novels is really lovely. She has a real talent for connecting entertaining anecdotes about college and grad school with corresponding discussions of related literature. The three chapters on her summer in Samarkand are wonderful -- somehow de-exotifying the post-soviet Uzbekistan, while also opening up new worlds into a literary history of a country that English speakers will probably never know, because no one translates Uzbek classics into English -- and in describing these literary artifacts, she re-exotifies the country (to a Western reader like me, at least), making it strange and wonderful and enticing again. And I loved the chapter about the Tolstoy conference, which rang very true to life of academic conferences. Really, if you like classic Russian literature, this is a great book; or if you have been to grad school, this is a great book; and even if neither of those things are true, give it a try! Batuman has such an engaging, charming voice, and the structural connections between each book or author, and the events she relates alongside her discussion of them, is very skilled.

I wanted to like this. I wanted to like this so much. I thought Space Opera did something new and fresh and exciting, and I was so eager to see what could be done with the sequel. The problem, though, is that the narrative voice that made Space Opera so fresh and new was the same voice here, given such free rein that it overpowered all the other things we need in a novel. Every character had a tendency to monologue in the identical matching narrative voice; and the side-quests into, say, overly stalled board meetings, or the incompetent team activities of the Metagalactic Grand Prix Semi-finals, felt self-indulgent and slow. The last 10-15% or so were constructed to build off certain events and clues that were dropped earlier, but the wildly wide-ranging narrative approach from the first 85% of the book felt so slow and incoherent that the eventual emotional pay-off just didn't land. The building blocks were in place for something really terrific; but unlike the first block, the coherence of the rest of the book was too tenuous to actually tie together the key things effectively. 

This series is entertaining, with a lot of different characters who seem reasonably distinct from each other. It's fast, it's fun, and if it's not terribly groundbreaking, I do keep an eye out for 99p ebook sales, and intend to read the rest of them.

A folklore-inspired mishmash built on the association between the oft-acknowledged etymological link between 'grammar' and 'glamour'. I've seen this done so often before that I was worried El-Mohtar would be heavy-handed, but she has a deft touch with a theme, her exploration has some lovely touches. The idea of magic being measured in 'grams' was cute; and the use of 'conjugation' to refer to spellcasting, because to conjugate means to change -- verbs, people, the possibilities of the past/present/future of the world -- was inspired.  The folktales that were woven together into this story were all familiar to me, but they are less commonly used than the ones that make me groan and roll my eyes at yet another damn fairy-tale retelling; and I've always loved the one about the woman whose body is turned into a harp (which I've only ever seen done before by Juliet Marillier in Wolfskin). Also, my own mother used to sing to me I Gave My Love a Cherry, which is very rarely mentioned elsewhere, so I was thrilled to see it here. It has slightly different words from my mother's version, but the interpretation weaves back into the idea of conjugation beautifully. Overalll, this was an elegant book that also spoke to my own childhood associations with folktales, and my own aesthetic values about fantasy narrative, and so worked particularly well for me.

I always enjoy reading Marie Brennan's work. This one had a real suck-you-in quality that I appreciate, and I gobbled it up. The author's note in the back is not to be missed, by the way: in brief, the genesis of this tale is as a fix-it fanfic of a Norse Saga that had an extremely disappointing conclusion -- but you should read the full details for yourself. Still, the story relied on repeated invocations of my least favourite trope: a woman dressed as a man, who is revealed as a woman, and loses everything that she managed to build up while dressed as a man. I hate it so much, and it happens multiple times here. And somehow, because of the requirement to start over after trope-revelation, we have multiple sets of characters, which means I can never really build up much sense of relationship to any one set of them. This means that their tragic ends (usually at the hands of someone going berserk and slaughtering them all -- Norse saga, remember) doesn't hit as hard as it might.

This was very weird and bonkers in a way that worked very effectively. The high-tech interstellar galaxy-wide corporate civilization sat cheek-by-jowl with a more mythic-feeling, personal fantasy about an odd bit of forest with strange people in it, where time runs out of order; but the integration was effective. The final revelations of how everything fit together was a bit sprawling in a way that I remember always left me feeling a bit dizzy when I read Diana Wynne Jones as a child (we really didn't need Arthurian mythology shoved in there, to be honest); but overall this was playful and creative and I look forward to unpacking it with my book group.

Again, weird and effective! I think the structure of the plot wasn't quite as clear as in the first book -- Book 2 itis -- but it does a great job of expanding the setting and deepening the magic and the ending makes me very eager to read book 3.

Not one of Trollope's best. His books are really good when they pit the marriage plot against some other element of institutional structure: the Church (Barsetshire), Parliament (Palliser), Finance (The Way We Live Now), fox hunting (all of them, really, but especially The American Senator). Even the execrable Dr Whortle's School was pitting a couple of marriage-plot type things against each other, with a backdrop of private education as an institution. 

But this book had none of that. It was just the marriage plot, and an awfully boring marriage plot at that. Our young heroine, Clara Amedroz, must choose between the Good Lover, Will Belton, who is bluff and hearty and impatient in his love and dreadfully dull; and the much more interesting Bad Lover, Captain Aylmer, who is an MP (of course) of aristocratic family. He's not a bad lover because he's a rake, but rather because he is not capable of being sincere and genuine in his love. He shows different faces to different parts of the world, depending on the role he's playing: a dutiful nephew to a mutual aunt he shares with Clara; a dutiful son to his overbearing mother; a politician to his constituents, a man of the world in London. Our heroine is a much more interesting person at the beginning of the book, when she's talking to him. She makes trenchant remarks about how women are seen as hypocrites if they adapt their behaviour to different situations, whereas for men it's accepted. This, of course, is how we know that Aylmer is a bad lover; because he's benefiting from the ability to do exactly what Trollope is telling us (through Clara's voice) is bad no matter who does it.  But the fact that he and Clara can have these conversations means that they make the book so worth reading, unlike when Clara's talking to Will Belton. Then she descends back into Trollope's ubiquitous role for young women: 'oh, I'm much too virtuous to say exactly what I want, and must demure and pretend I'm not in love!' I swear, Trollope is so much better at character development when he's not trying to shove virtuous young women into the right person's arms.

I want justice for Aylmer! There's so much scope for character work with him. He has genuine conversations about things other than tedious love-talk with our heroine, and although he is fully under the thumb of his overbearing mother, he is still governed by a genuine sense of honor and desire to do the right thing that is all his own. Wouldn't it be interesting to see him meet a heroine who, rather than deploring the accepted hypocrisy of men, is instead able to help him harness it, and indeed harness it in herself? The largest reason things break down between Clara and Aylmer is because Clara cannot subjugate herself to Aylmer's mother. But a true match for Aylmer would know how to present a subjugated face to Aylmer's mother, while in fact doing exactly as she likes when not in her presence. This book would have been so, so much better if Clara and Belton's true, sincere, unchanging personalities were set as foils against the hypocritical, changeable, ever-shifting personalities that Aylmer and his own eventual bride offer, as an alternative way to interact with the world.

There was certainly room enough to do it. As it was, the thin, unsatisfying plot was tiresome and repetitive, with nothing to offset the tedious virtue-focused marriage plot that is always the boringest part of every Trollope novel. If that had been trimmed, and an Aylmer foil-plot built in, this book would have been terrific. As it was, ugh.

On the one hand, I enjoy how the series is giving larger and larger roles to the new generation, but I find moony lovelorn Ramses so dull. Emerson and Peabody are presented with a tongue-in-cheek poke at the types they represent. But Ramses and Nefrette seem to demand to be taken seriously, which is so much less fun. Good to see how Peabody's own internal prejudices (which were pretty darn evident in the first few books!) are being called out explicitly, but it did feel a little bit forced. Still, I quite enjoyed the discussion of Davis's wildly incompetent treatment of his tomb, which seems to reflect quite extensive research into the matter, to the point that, for the first time in the series, the book begins with an offer to send a full bibliography to any reader who writes in with a self-addressed stamped return envelope. Peters has receipts!