Like all of the Tchaikovsky I’ve read so far, the plot carries you along and keeps you engaged all the way through. And also like all of the Tchaikovsky I’ve read so far, the central feat of prestidigitation is to take all the protagonist’s assumptions and flip them on their heads. But, to some degree, the trick doesn’t work quite so well in this novel because the audience sees through the hero’s illusions pretty early on. The novel still works, but you don’t get the sting of wonder when the truth is revealed.
If not for my book club, I wouldn’t read a book with such an inflammatory title, but we’d previously read Haidt’s previous book The Righteous Mind and found it pretty interesting. This one doesn’t at all live up to that precedent.
The basic point is unarguable–by over-protecting children, we make them vulnerable to fragility and likely to have extreme reactions to disagreement–but the authors seem to be more interested in clutching their pearls about kids these days and in cherry-picking scandalous sounding exemplars than in asking deeper questions about why young people feel the way they do or how the situation might be more nuanced than it seems at first glance. It leaves me with a strong urge to dismiss it with a shrug and an “okay, boomer.”
Heinlein’s characters like to sit around and talk about ideas, which I love. In this book, however, there’s a bit of dissonance between the armchair philosophy and the stakes of what the characters are planning; they just don’t seem worried enough as they plan the revolution over glasses of vodka. But the revolution does come, and the danger arrives with it.
Even in the really talky bits, this book is a page turner.
A solid deconstruction of spycraft and the cold war.
DNF
There are some really interesting ideas, images, and scenarios in this book, but I never connected with the characters or the plot. And when faced with an expiring library loan, I found that I wasn’t invested enough to check it out again to finish reading it.
TIt may be more telling about me than about the book that I often found myself mentally quibbling with small points of usage or grammar over and over again as I read this.
There’s some good advice in here. I’m definitely giving some of a it a try.
A unique and very readable deconstruction of high fantasy good-versus-evil tropes. Only, I wonder if it might be even stronger without the arch humor that underlies the tone.
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.
