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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
A tale of political intrigue set in a complex sf/fantasy world where boundaries are chosen ideologies rather than geographies. Intellectually engaging rich thought and writing.
For example: "Here seven perfect lotus blossoms rise against the sea, glowing from within with clean, warm light like happy ghosts and dusting the ground around their roots with shimmer."
"As when Utopia has sent a brave and precious probe to skim the surface of all-swallowing Jupiter, and the silence breaks, and the technicians lean raptly over their screens to piece together meaning from this first fuzzed data stolen from the heavens, so these nine men locked upon the words of their unofficial Tenth Director."
Notable: The Utopians! The constellations of Utopians! "Reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but, so long as the Utopians still live and breathe, they will not give up on our last great dream: the stars."
For example: "Here seven perfect lotus blossoms rise against the sea, glowing from within with clean, warm light like happy ghosts and dusting the ground around their roots with shimmer."
"As when Utopia has sent a brave and precious probe to skim the surface of all-swallowing Jupiter, and the silence breaks, and the technicians lean raptly over their screens to piece together meaning from this first fuzzed data stolen from the heavens, so these nine men locked upon the words of their unofficial Tenth Director."
Notable: The Utopians! The constellations of Utopians! "Reader, we no longer aim for Earth nor atom, but, so long as the Utopians still live and breathe, they will not give up on our last great dream: the stars."
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Third and final book from my Mr B's book subscription.
If I could give fractions of a star this would get 2.9, but I just can't quite give it 3. It's got some amazing concepts in it that I found fascinating but I just didn't enjoy reading it. I wanted to know how the world Ada Palmer built worked and I wanted to know where the story was going but the style spoiled the journey for me.
First up, this seems to be book one in a series that isn't a series at all but one stupidly large novel that's sliced up into four chunks so it has no real conclusion of its own to speak of - apart from a reveal that is so ludicrous it only very slightly raises my interest in what might happen in the next book.
It tries far too hard to be clever and it's so earnest there was little to no sense of those little moments of everyday humanity in the lives of the characters. Those little moments of fun and joy - of light in the dark. (Characters do enjoy themselves at times in this book but it's always with a message to serve the Seriousness of the Very Grave Situation the world finds itself in.)
The (what I'm assuming to be) mildly unreliable narrator is writing in what he believes to be the style of the 18th century, in a book set in the 25th century, addressing an imagined reader from further into the future, and every so often expresses in dialogue with himself the frustration he imagines the reader from the future might feel with his writing style. If that's your bag then great but for me it was a massive distraction and bored me senseless.
This is set in a world that the narrator protests from the beginning is definitely more enlightened than societies from the past, having done away with nation states and is instead structured by a society of Hives, which citizens *choose* to join when they come of age. And this is Definitely A Good Thing and when the narrator constantly describes the appearance of every character according to their ethnicity it's Definitely Not Foreshadowing that really there's Trouble At T'Mill.
Society also no longer uses the gendered pronouns 'he' and 'she' as that's also Such An Old Fashioned Concept. Although the narrator, for the purposes of the book, has decided to use 'he' and 'she' because of his "18th Century" style. Sometimes he arbitrarily and ambiguously assigns pronouns on the basis of the character's role in society above anything else, and then has an argument with The Imagined Future Reader about it. EVERYONE IN THE FUTURE IS DEFINITELY NOT HUNG UP ON SEX AND GENDER NOW THOUGH AND THE NARRATOR IS DEFINITELY NOT PROTESTING TOO MUCH. You won't see anything about sexual repression/perversion later in the book, honest. (I would have found this a really interesting and thought provoking facet of the book if it wasn't being telegraphed every other paragraph and suffocating the main narrative.)
I could have enjoyed this book if it just took itself a bit less seriously and had a sense of humour about the total unsustainability of the 300-year-old society portrayed in it, and in which the world's leaders had hoodwinked the general population into believing Everything Is Fine through the clever annual publication of a series of Forbes Lists.
I could also have enjoyed this book if The Most Interesting Thing In The Book had featured more. (It's made clear it becomes super important later on in this hacked up quarter-story but if the narrative still isn't at that point after working my way through the first 528 pages, I ain't paying good money to be disappointed by the rest of it. Especially when such a big mention of it is on the back of the bloody book and it's hardly in it.)
Oh god I just remembered all the Very Clever References To Philosophers. It was all just a bit too much like hard work to read.
If I could give fractions of a star this would get 2.9, but I just can't quite give it 3. It's got some amazing concepts in it that I found fascinating but I just didn't enjoy reading it. I wanted to know how the world Ada Palmer built worked and I wanted to know where the story was going but the style spoiled the journey for me.
First up, this seems to be book one in a series that isn't a series at all but one stupidly large novel that's sliced up into four chunks so it has no real conclusion of its own to speak of - apart from a reveal that is so ludicrous it only very slightly raises my interest in what might happen in the next book.
It tries far too hard to be clever and it's so earnest there was little to no sense of those little moments of everyday humanity in the lives of the characters. Those little moments of fun and joy - of light in the dark. (Characters do enjoy themselves at times in this book but it's always with a message to serve the Seriousness of the Very Grave Situation the world finds itself in.)
The (what I'm assuming to be) mildly unreliable narrator is writing in what he believes to be the style of the 18th century, in a book set in the 25th century, addressing an imagined reader from further into the future, and every so often expresses in dialogue with himself the frustration he imagines the reader from the future might feel with his writing style. If that's your bag then great but for me it was a massive distraction and bored me senseless.
This is set in a world that the narrator protests from the beginning is definitely more enlightened than societies from the past, having done away with nation states and is instead structured by a society of Hives, which citizens *choose* to join when they come of age. And this is Definitely A Good Thing and when the narrator constantly describes the appearance of every character according to their ethnicity it's Definitely Not Foreshadowing that really there's Trouble At T'Mill.
Society also no longer uses the gendered pronouns 'he' and 'she' as that's also Such An Old Fashioned Concept. Although the narrator, for the purposes of the book, has decided to use 'he' and 'she' because of his "18th Century" style. Sometimes he arbitrarily and ambiguously assigns pronouns on the basis of the character's role in society above anything else, and then has an argument with The Imagined Future Reader about it. EVERYONE IN THE FUTURE IS DEFINITELY NOT HUNG UP ON SEX AND GENDER NOW THOUGH AND THE NARRATOR IS DEFINITELY NOT PROTESTING TOO MUCH. You won't see anything about sexual repression/perversion later in the book, honest. (I would have found this a really interesting and thought provoking facet of the book if it wasn't being telegraphed every other paragraph and suffocating the main narrative.)
I could have enjoyed this book if it just took itself a bit less seriously and had a sense of humour about the total unsustainability of the 300-year-old society portrayed in it, and in which the world's leaders had hoodwinked the general population into believing Everything Is Fine through the clever annual publication of a series of Forbes Lists.
I could also have enjoyed this book if The Most Interesting Thing In The Book had featured more. (It's made clear it becomes super important later on in this hacked up quarter-story but if the narrative still isn't at that point after working my way through the first 528 pages, I ain't paying good money to be disappointed by the rest of it. Especially when such a big mention of it is on the back of the bloody book and it's hardly in it.)
Oh god I just remembered all the Very Clever References To Philosophers. It was all just a bit too much like hard work to read.
This is a really good and hard to describe and categorize book. Both cover and description put me off for a long time but it is fun! It has murder husbands and intrigue and puzzles and philosophies and despite thoughts about how humans arrange themselves to be human. And some big triggery trauma things mostly around suicide and death but this book goes some far ranging places. I can't wait for more
I appreciated what this was trying to do, but felt like the story got lost in the language and side-stories. It was one of those reads I felt like I had to slog through even though I liked the idea at play.
Real score 34.89. Wow. Um, yeah, wow. I have to say listening was a much easier way into this web of a book. What a world! Insane. I love it. Is it or is it not in humanity’s power to let as near enough to peaceful and providing be? Or is it Kantian greater good? Who do you trust? Mycroft? I’m going to do what I rarely do and start the next book straight away. I cannot afford to loose the momentum. Wow.
More like a 2.5 stars - such a frustrating book. It makes me want to read on and to find out what happens and where it all leads to, what it all means (because it's a book of ideas and the ideas are fascinating - I'm in such deep love with the idea of bashes, I'm internally crying that they are not real ...). But there are also glaring holes, whole canyons, in the world-building and characters. And ... it's just frustrating, OK?
(Also that the first book just ends in the middle of it and you have to pick up the second. I don't like when authors do this to me. - edit to add: seems like this is not Ada Palmer's fault, who just wanted to write one very long book. So I retract this part of my complaint ;))
(Also that the first book just ends in the middle of it and you have to pick up the second. I don't like when authors do this to me. - edit to add: seems like this is not Ada Palmer's fault, who just wanted to write one very long book. So I retract this part of my complaint ;))
Poco se puede decir de este libro que no sea spoiler. No sabía nada de él cuando me puse a leerlo, no recuerdo ni cuando lo compré. Lo que sí puedo decir es que es raro, complejo, con una estructura una forma de contar las cosas un poco extraña. Probablemente uno de esos libros que no son para todo el mundo. Es un libro que, más que nada, creo que hablar del ser humano y su naturaleza, y de la sociedad, sus limitaciones y lo que pasa en los límites de la misma.
Ahora estoy pensando si saltar directamente al segundo o leer algo más ligero mientras.
Ahora estoy pensando si saltar directamente al segundo o leer algo más ligero mientras.