A monumental work in scale, prose, psychological depth, and artistic merit. Shakespearean in its use of language. Profoundly serious in its themes and yet very funny. Still groundbreaking in its structure and form more than a century and a half later.
An extremely shallow look at the idea that language is central to the power of cults and cult-like organizations. It feels like most of the author’s research was done on social media, and most of the content focuses on providing very basic descriptions of different types of cultish groups. Disappointing.
Lyrical and whistful, but ultimately not much happens. That might be okay if I connected more with any of the characters, but alas, it isn’t so.
A lovely little perigon of the hard-boiled genre. Witty and fun to read. The only down side is that it may be just a smidge too long.
This book is three-stars, but that's all it wants to be. It's great at being three-stars!
This book on the craft and process of writing fiction has some solid practical perspectives for aspiring authors. The advice is nicely non-dogmatic and goes out of its way to make the reader feel empowered and positive.
But it's funny to read this kind of thing from a writer with so few major novels under her belt. Somehow it seems like jumping the gun toward something that feels more legitimate coming from elder statespeople of the craft. When you read books on writing from Stephen King or Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury, you know they've been in the trenches for long time, writing millions of words and running into every obstacle along the way. This lacks that kind of authority.
Another interesting and, to me, mildly disagreeable aspect of this book is Anders' focus on encouraging you to write fiction that avoids the unpleasant. I'm pretty convinced that Kurt Vonnegut had it right when he said that you must put your protagonists through hell so that we can all see what they're made of. Not that every story has to follow this rigidly, but great adversity generally makes for strong characters and compelling tales.
Anders repeatedly says that the world is turning into a dumpster fire, and that's why our fiction should be warm and safe and escapist. And I find that perspective rather unfortunate. Partly because, while the world is certainly facing some difficult times lately, many, many things continue to get better. And also because it's such a passive, bury-your-head response to the challenges of our era. Fiction can mean a lot and change a lot for a world in peril, but only if it faces those things head-on. Just look at The Jungle, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Brave New World.
I had seen the Robert Zemeckis film version of Contact several times and always mostly enjoyed it, but until now I had never read the novel. Like any bonified science nerd, I love Carl Sagan, but I knew this was his only book of fiction and the film certainly has some ungainly elements to the story, so I was cautious. Now that I've finally read it though, I have to say that it is a monumental achievement.
What surprised me isn't the depth and detail Sagan brings to the scientific and political aspects of this story of humanity's receipt of an alien signal—Sagan was after all a real-life astrophysicist who had collaborated with NASA. No, what surprised me is the human depth of his protagonist and the mastery with which he weaves the threads of story together. The subject matter is so big that it's amazing any author was able to keep it so grounded, let alone a writer new to fiction.
Romeo and Juliet is among my very favorite plays. In popular culture it's usually treated as this great romance, but I think that idea misses the point entirely. Romeo and Juliet are teenagers, children really, and their love has all the adolescent intensity, rashness, grandiosity, and impulsivity you would expect from teenagers. (Could I be right in thinking this is the only play in which the Bard makes a point of mentioning his protagonists age? Eh, maybe in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Tempest also?) No, what makes this play great is the texture and life of the entire cast of characters, the tight and lively storytelling, and the deft use of tragic irony.
Speaking of the youth and impulsivity of the title characters, something that stood out to me on this reading was the relationships they have with their parents. Romeo's parents seem supportive in the abstract, but I can't recall that he ever actually shares a scene with either of them. They're just absent. Juliet's parents, on the other hand, are very present in her life, marrying her off to a man she barely knows at a young age and threatening her when she protests.
An interesting related thought to consider is that Romeo and Juliet each have a surrogate parent (Friar Laurence and the Nurse, respectively) who supports them, councils them, conspires to marry them, and helps them like true parents should.
Romeo and Juliet's psyches are not so deeply explored as Hamlet or Macbeth or Richard III, but the tapestry formed by all the relationships makes the play just as rich as those. Its these relationships between the characters, the complexity and effervescence of the interactions that give this play such staying power.
Possibly one of the blandest stories I've ever read.
The main conflict is that the protagonist doesn't feel quite perfectly happy in a perfect progressive society surrounded by a supportive community and given the freedom to seek any kind of work they choose for fulfillment. The hardest choice they have to make is whether to be friends with the perfectly nice robot who wants to be friends with them.
On top of that, the scifi just isn't very imaginative. Picture the world as run by Brooklyn hippie-yupster moms. A robot who talks, acts, and thinks just like a human. A monk in a religion that barely exists in the story and that seems to have no impact on the monk's behavior or life other than a few vague mentions of gods. Bland, bland, bland.
I like that Chambers wants to be positive in her stories, but you still have to tell a good story or it just falls flat.
This is my kind of scifi, one that juxtaposes technology and mythology, past and future, language and ideas. I hesitate to say more, lest I should spoil anything for the reader. Suffice it to say that I will be voting for this as my Hugo award pick for the novella category and that I will be getting my mitts on more of Tchaikovsky's books very soon.
Does it make me a bad Shakespeare fan to say that while I like this, one of the most popular plays, I don't love it? Maybe I just never saw a great production.
Don't get me wrong. There are some great images (Prospero with his book, Caliban discovering booze), and some great language. But the story never really seems to fit together for me.
There's this fantastic thread of this powerful, almost inhuman sorcerer with a grand plan for terrible vengeance, prepared over years, and finally begun with the title storm. And he... calls it off and forgives everyone? It's a letdown.
And then there's Miranda, grown up isolated from all mankind save her father and the brutish Caliban, who has this fantastic feeling of epiphany when she is exposed to wider humanity ('Oh, brave new world!'). I really wish we see her story as she is taken to Milan and joins civilization.
For me, the only really satisfying feature of the conclusion to the tale is Arial's release from servitude.
I suspect that much of the play's enduring focus comes down to viewers looking for the voice of Shakespeare himself, heading for retirement in Stratford even as Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book. And, yeah, that does kind of get me too. All I'm saying is it's a mixed bag when taken as a whole.
This book strikes a great balance: 85% historical fiction and 15% fantasy, and in some places it's hard to tell whether the fantasy elements are really there or are just a figment of the characters' perspectives.
And while this book in many ways resembles its epic fantasy forbearers, with themes of power and destiny played out against grand landscapes and mighty battles, the setting (late medieval China) and the characters feel very fresh to my eyes, which are too used to seeing only fantasy with a European bent.
Finally, and perhaps this is most important to me here, it's great to see a contemporary novel that lives up to all the best instincts of the current wave of inclusivity-centric genre fiction (non-white, queer, and otherwise diverse POV characters) but without letting the craft of storytelling suffer. All the motivations feel real and the characterization is deep. There are no Mary Sues or tokens here. And there's none of this silly business where the author thinks that the characters must never be hurt or do anything wrong in order to be represented. In fact, the story is pretty tragic in multiple ways.
I really look forward to volume two in this series!
Holmes makes me happy every time. Delightful.
Classic Shakespearean comic tropes, deftly executed. Not one of my favorites, but plenty enjoyable.
For me, Lear is the most tragic of all Shakespearean tragedies, and it hits harder as I grow older. Both Lear and Gloucester are aging, and both are betrayed by their own progeny, the worst of the new generation casting aside their parents like worthless garbage. And it's all the worse because Lear's mind is slipping and Gloucester's loyalty is unbreakable.
I also love this play because it is among the most surreal of the canon. So much of the story is set in these nonspecific and liminal spaces, all moors and heaths and storm. And then there's the image of this half-mad king wandering the darkness in the company only of the acerbic fool, or the image of the blinded exile led to the edge of an illusory cliff by a beggar he doesn't know to be his own son. It's practically postmodern.
One of the Bard's very best.
I picked up this book because, as a history fan, the idea of looking at a single day in history seemed intriguing. For me, history is a tapestry of interwoven strands, all affecting the others. And it seems probable that any random moment in time can be examined to find important moments on a thread.
It was something of a disappointment, then, to discover that this book isn't really about history at all. Weingarten does indeed examine one randomly chosen day, but he's less interested in examining how the the events resonate down the strands of history, and more interested in simply finding juicy stories (with a few historically relevant gems sprinkled in along the way).
And don't get me wrong, Weingarten is very good at telling his stories, as it seems that so many journalists are when they turn to longer form writing. It's just that his interests aren't as aligned with my own as I wanted. In fact, there are a couple of chapters centered around sports stories that I skimmed or skipped altogether. At the end of the day, a fun read, but not a high ranker.
