ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

Ahhh, so good! The character work is so strong! Kyle Haven is so plausible, and yet so vile. Malta is such an astonishingly horrible brat. Kennit is incredible.

This book was not terribly good, but I really enjoyed reading it, because it is a wonderful microcosm of life in Glasgow in the early 20th century. The details of neighbourhoods (Langside is very dull and respectable) and attitudes and activities of Ellen Carstairs provide an undeniably authentic look into the past, because, for all the sophomoric claims about what makes true writerly imagination, this is an undeniably heavily autobiographical book. I suspect that the internal musings of young Ellen have little to do with Carswell's desire to create a character, and are instead serving as a mouthpiece for Carswell herself. This is autofiction from a half century before the term was invented (1976, according to the OED). And if these musings are genuinely the thoughts of Carswell herself, then I don't think she was a terribly nice person. Ellen is constantly making quite snide, unkind remarks about the people in her life, which seem to me entirely uncalled for -- and, given the narrative gimmick that this diary is simply notes for letters to her friend, seem quite gossipy. It's one thing to make private remarks in a private diary of this sort, but if you're instead writing a draft of letters to a friend, it becomes awfully catty and mean. 

There was, however, a very good extended metaphor about marriage for a woman being like walking to a destination on foot, rather than taking a car in traffic. What is so laborious for the foot traveller is complicated further by the rapid, easy passage of everyone in cars blocking road crossings; how it is easier to trust one's progress to a driver, and look out in ease and comfort at the world from inside a car; and yet, if the driver goes in the opposite direction from where you want to go, you'll never get somewhere that on foot you would eventually reach. 

I think there's a real authenticity about young Ellen's internal agonies about her engagement that wouldn't work in a modern book written today, but set in the same era. The way she genuinely wants to have her own career and independence, yet at the same time fully buys into all sorts of gender essentialist claptrap, reads very differently from the pen of an author who genuinely lived that life, compared to an author who imagines one living that life, while having in fact grown up in a world whose public Discourse has evolved from a century's converation of those ideas. A modern writer would probably try to take Ellen on a journey in which she realizes that she can have a fulfilled life that does not depend on carrying out her expected role as a wife and mother; but from Carswell's pen, it seems like Ellen is genuinely giving up something that she wants and believes in. The sacrifice is realer, and cannot be turned into a #GirlBoss parable.

I think if the quality of the writing had been better, I would have been very moved by this book. But as it is, it's not a terribly good book, and interesting more as an artifact of the literary history of my city, than as a piece of literature.

I don't really have the vocabulary to evaluate literary fiction. This felt like a flabby sack of introspection about a writer who's trying to write a novel while worrying about her daughter (and had a lot of very early 2000s thoughts about Women In Society) . . . and yet I really enjoyed it. Especially starting about halfway through, as the flabby sack revealed itself to have a thematic structure, whose shape and coherence became clearer and more elegant up to the last page.

Well, it wouldn't be a literary fiction if a creatively blocked professor didn't decide that what he needs to do is dump his wife with the childcare and go off and have affairs with the neighbour, now, would it?

Pity. The stuff about Breugel was good.

Thank you to netgalley for an ARC.

A whimsical romp in which the moon one day, inexplicably, turns to cheese. Rather than following the implications of this in the form of a story, Scalzi instead gives us a pastiche of entertaining set pieces: how does the local church respond; how do the proprietors of competing cheese stores respond; retirees in a coffee shop; Holywood execs; popular science writers; NASA; asshole billionaires; has-been musicians; and so on. There's not really a plot, just a series of conversations. This both does and doesn't work well. I think the series of set pieces is a nice way to explore the implications of something so huge and also so silly as the conceit of this book. But also, Scalzi is not great at characterization. Or rather, he's not great at varying his characterization. Everyone speaks in the same voice; and every conversation has the same fast-paced, reasonably witty back-and-forth. When you have a smaller cast of characters, this isn't so much of a problem. But when you have a book where each chapter introduces new people in new settings with ostensibly new perspectives on the phenomenon, and they all sound exactly the same, it lampshades Scalzi's reliance on this one neat trick pretty saliently.

This is a remarkable book -- not so much for its accomplishment of what it promises on the cover ('A bacteriologist's classic history of mankind's epic struggle to conquer the scourge of typhus'), but for 1) its insight into the world of medical science in 1934 (when it was written) and 2) the author's delightful rambling personality. We get very little actually about typhus, but quite a lot about the problems with biographers these days (too Freudian); the distinction between art and science with commentary about the silly modernists these days (especially Gertrude Stein); a fond, affectionate description of the life cycle of the louse; chapters upon chapters upon chapters of discussion of histroical epidemics that are not any of them typhus, with chapter headings saying things like, 'This, we promise, is the last serious digression from our main theme'; and then a few chapters later, which still is not yet about typhus, 'The need for this chapter will be apparent to those who have entered into the spirit of this biography'.  

Accompanying these more light-hearted commentaries are digressions in which Zinsser makes his political view clear. He never loses an opportunity to comment on how bankers are parasites upon the worker; or, oddly, to criticise the New Deal, and he becomes remarkably eloquent on the horrors of war, and how it is diseases, rather than military strategy, that are often deciding factors. 

One does not read this book to learrn about typhus. There actually isn't all that much about typhus in it, and I'm sure a modern book of popular science (a genre which Zinsser despises, for which reason he gives very little information about what is known scientifically about the disease; how discoveries of its spread and action were made, or anything of that sort) would be much more effective in teaching the reader about the disease itself. But from the perspective of 2024, this 90-year-old book is a remarkable window into the personality of a passionate and peevish bacteriologist.

I quite enjoyed this one. I thought the magic system was pleasing; I loved the worldbuilding of the wilderwoods, and it's always rather refreshing to read a book that starts off with students in Magic School (tm) preparing for Magical Trials (tm), in which none of the key events actually revolve around the Magic School (tm) or Magical Trials (tm). The slow burn between Grim and Leo felt genuine, and I'm pretty sure that in book 2 there will be a revelation involving whether or not the counterspell was actually necessary, given a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in the climax that seems to be the payoff of a not-terribly-subtle bit of foreshadowing from the sorceress.

Honestly, what I liked most about this book was how there was, really, any antagonist. There was a magical problem to be solved, and people who had to be persuaded, one way or another, to help solve it; but the main thrust wasn't man vs. man, but more man vs. mistake. Overall, then, this was a fun romp, with some nice character moments and pleasing worldbuilding. I'll read the next book with pleasure. I love the idea of wild monsters in the scary magic wood that really just want to settle down for a singalong.

 This was a wonderfully constructed book, whose interleaving strands were so deftly connected that all the way through I felt myself on the edge of tears as each new hint revealed a new point of contact between the different plot threads. But somehow, at about the 80% mark, as the plot threads started coming together, the book began to drag. The final culmination of all the storyliness didn't do anything that hadn't already been hinted at. The things that I knew were coming did come, but they came exactly as I expected them to, based on the hints, and somehow that felt like a let-down. 

The problem, as I see it, is that this book is brilliant at evoking stories in their absence, but struggles to evoke them in their presence. The moment when Arthur returns to the Yazidi village and learns that they were massacred in his absence, was incredibly effective. Actually *seeing* Isis massacre the Yazidis in 2014 on the page, was not. Watching Narin's treatment in captivity to Isis made me feel nothing; but learning that she had been there for *four years* before being rescued evoked so much more horror off-page than anything that happened to her in the text. Learning about the connections between Narin's family lore and Arthur's quest, and the links between Arthur and Leila, right down to the revelation that Leila's grave is positioned so that she can watch over him in the cemetary, was beautiful. Seeing Arthur meet Leila on the page was a complete snoozefest. 

So: this is a remarkable book, with an exquisite structure, but somehow it didn't quite land the way its premise set it up to do. And that is quite a pity; I was all prepared to rave about it up until I realized that I wasn't. 

I kind of struggled with this one. For some odd reason, Ropa's voice, which was so effective and charming in the first three books, felt slightly forced and artificial in this one. I can't explain why;  It just stopped working for me. The plot, too, seemed unformed. A whole lot of it revolved around sitting down and learning about Ropa's grandmother's history, which, honestly, seemed fairly unrelated to the main power struggle within Scottish Magic (although it was nice to finally learn the whole story about the Catastrophe, which has been only referred to pretty vaguely up until now). And it ends  on a cliffhanger, which is very irritating. The whole series has been so nicely self-contained within each book up until now, so I didn't appreciate being left on a limb, after having been trained to expect a satisfying conclusion from the last three books. I don't see myself reading the next book.

First of all, this book takes a TURN that renders it substantially less similar to the bluebeard-esque narrative that it resembles for the first three quarters. That is to the good, and I was taken quite by surprise when it happened. But all the same, I keep reading these books in the hopes of recovering the structural brilliance that so impressed me about The Emperess of Salt and Fortune, and WHen The Tiger Came Down the Mountain. But I think Vo has abandoned that type of storytelling for this series, and I keep getting disappointed, as I was here. I think I might give up on the series, at this point. It's just not giving me what I want out of it.