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larsinio's review against another edition
1.0
Well it serves me right to read a book in the Tumblrish zeitgeist of 2017. The similarities to this book and our current administration can be summarized in the same paragraph youve read on any website.
Theres a few coincidences nothing more. Ultimately i could care less about synchronicity , if the book was strong. But this terrible. Definitely the worst thing i read this year, if not in the last 5 years. Serves me right indeed.
The dog, Bulger, is the best character in the book. That's about the nicest thing i can say.
A plot that never has any arc - Baron Von Trump is everything the book requires him to be to step through various minor challenges. THe plot is unnecessarily extra boring that it would need to be.
The underground civilizations he meets are not well thoughout, and do not make any sense, even in an 1899 context, if you think about them for more than 2 minutes. A group of blind mole like people, some ice people, some people who live in a really bright cave and have to all wear goggles.
Endless boring descriptions - a lot of words yet not describing much.
And finally, the book, just like this review, suddenly ends.
Theres a few coincidences nothing more. Ultimately i could care less about synchronicity , if the book was strong. But this terrible. Definitely the worst thing i read this year, if not in the last 5 years. Serves me right indeed.
The dog, Bulger, is the best character in the book. That's about the nicest thing i can say.
A plot that never has any arc - Baron Von Trump is everything the book requires him to be to step through various minor challenges. THe plot is unnecessarily extra boring that it would need to be.
The underground civilizations he meets are not well thoughout, and do not make any sense, even in an 1899 context, if you think about them for more than 2 minutes. A group of blind mole like people, some ice people, some people who live in a really bright cave and have to all wear goggles.
Endless boring descriptions - a lot of words yet not describing much.
And finally, the book, just like this review, suddenly ends.
sakusha's review
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Written in the late 1800s, this story was a lot like Gulliver’s Travels, another story I found mostly boring. But I enjoyed seeing the few similarities between this book and the real Donald and Baron Trump and the world we inhabit.
Interesting quote:
‘if you could only get rid of your ears too, you would soon be rid of your rulers who oppress you, who prey upon you; for no one would have any desire to be a ruler if there was no one left to look at him and if he couldn’t hear what the flatterers said about him. Vanity is the soil that rulers spring from, as the mushrooms spring from the rich loam of our dark caverns. They pretend that it is the exercise of power that they are so fond of. Believe them not. It is the gratification of their vanity and nothing else. “If it were only in thy power to say to every man who itched to be a ruler,—“‘ Well and good, brother, a ruler thou shalt be; but bear in mind, weak man, that when thou hast donned thy gaudy uniform and mounted thy gayly caparisoned steed, when thou ridest at the head of troop and cavalcade with ten thousand armed men following thee on foot, as slaves their master, and the plaudits of the foolish multitude rend the air, no eye shall witness the splendor of thy triumph, no ear catch a sound of the deafening cheers,’ take my word for it, little baron, no one would want to be a ruler any more.’
Predictive:
Portal in Russia.
Trumps are rich.
Trumps don’t surrender.
Telephone.
“the motto of the Trumps, Per Ardua ad Astra—the pathway to glory is strewn with pitfalls and dangers—“
“After half an hour the deliberation was completed, and, to my surprise, the Great Circle broke up into squads and companies of foul’s and sixes and tens, and then each disappeared slowly and steadily with lock step, passing out of the City into the dark or only partially lighted chambers and passages that surrounded it. The search for the missing Soodopsy had been begun.”
True of modern people, especially youth:
““By the exercise of their strong wills they have been busy for ages striving to unload their brains of the to them now useless stock of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors, and the natural consequence has been that the brains of these curious folk, who call themselves the Happy Forgetters, relieved of all labor and strain of thought, have absolutely shrunken rather than increased”
“people who look with absolute dread upon knowledge as the one thing necessary to get rid of before happiness can enter the human heart.”
“the Happy Forgetter has more dread of knowledge than we have of ignorance.”
“one day this happiness came to an end, for a strange malady broke out among the people. They were seized with a wild desire to invent names for things; even many names for the same thing, and different ways of doing the same thing. This strange passion so grew upon them that they spent their lives in making them in every possible way harder to live. They built different roads to the same place, they made different clothes for different days, and different dishes for different feasts. To each child they gave two, three, and even four different names; and different shoes were fashioned for different feet, and one family was no longer satisfied with one drinking-gourd. Did they stop here? “Nay, they now busied themselves learning how to make different faces to different friends, covering a frown with a smile, and singing gay songs when their hearts were sad. In a few centuries a brother could no longer read a brother’s face, and one-half the world went about wondering what the other half was thinking about; hence arose misunderstandings, quarrels, feuds, warfare. Man was no longer content to dwell with his fellow-man in the spacious caverns”
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