bluejayreads's reviews
814 reviews

dark slow-paced

3.75

I didn’t pick this book up entirely by choice. For Valentine’s Day, my local library did a “blind date with a book” promotion where they wrapped the books up in paper and just put a few facts about them on the front. I love the concept (I appreciate anything that gets me to try new things), so I knew I had to try one. Eventually I picked this one, and here’s all I knew about it until I got home from the library and opened the wrapping:

This is where the blind date with a book concept really comes in handy, because I had actually looked at this book on the shelf previously and decided it didn’t look interesting. The back cover introduced way too many characters and not enough plot, and it seemed like it was going to be very unclear what was actually going on and maybe a little dull. But since I had been convinced to check it out, I figured I might as well read it.

First of all, Joe Abercrombie is clearly a very good writer. This book was extremely well-written, and despite how many things are going on, it’s balanced well, and though the place is slow, it never gets dull. I did not find myself eager and enthusiastic about reading this story as fast as possible, but I also never considered putting it down. It seems strange to call a book full of as much death, violence, and bloodshed a pleasant reading experience, but it was – not slow or dense enough to lose interest, not enthralling enough to get me truly invested in anything that happened or anyone involved, no protagonists I disliked but also none I really loved. (Actually, while they were perfectly fine to read about, every protagonist was a terrible person in their own way.) I had quite a good time reading but didn’t get emotionally involved. It was the violent fantasy version of casual reading.

But then I finished it. And my husband asked if I liked it. And I realized how difficult of a question that actually was to answer. Because, as previously mentioned, I did have a good time reading it. And there were lots of really interesting aspects. Glokta’s experience of existing in a disabled person in a world that’s built for able-bodied people was intense and quite well-done. Bayaz’s wizardly shenanigans were entertaining and I liked that the history of the magic system was part of the story. And though it was violent, the violence never felt excessive or overdone, except in a way that made it clear that violence is always a tragedy, despite how the people who benefit from it may try to reframe it. So for that, it was good.

But then we come to the struggle that I really have no idea what was going on, plot-wise. There are a lot of point-of-view characters. There’s Logen, Jezal, and Glokta, as mentioned on the back cover. Despite being on the back cover, Bayaz isn’t a point of view character. There’s also the Dogman, a member of Logen’s old warrior band. And there’s Farro, who doesn’t get introduced until a third of the way throught the book, and who is 98% rage by volume, mostly feral, and whose primary goal in life is to commit as much murder as possible, with or without provocation. So there’s a lot of people running around doing things. But none of those things really coalesce into a plot. Glokta is doing his job; Jezal is shirking swordsmanship training and falling in love; Logen is tagging along after Bayaz, who definitely has plans but isn’t sharing them; the Dogman is traveling with the warrior band; and Farro is trying her best to commit a lot of murder, but is mostly being guided to somewhere by a magical old guy who also has plans but isn’t sharing them. There’s also two brewing wars, some internal politics driven by people who definitely have goals (but again, no indication as to what those are beyond “I want power”), a subplot with a swordsmanship contest that didn’t seem to have a point, and mostly just a lot of little things happening with no overarching plot or even protagonist goals. Farro’s story didn’t even meet up with any of the other characters until the last few chapters. And almost everybody felt like they were wandering through the story with no real goals or interest in doing much beyond live their lives. The only primary character who seems to have any sort of motivation or goal that could drive a plot is Bayaz – and as I said, he’s not telling.

This whole book really felt more like the setup than a story in and of itself – which is a very strange choice, considering that this book is over 500 pages long and there’s only two more books in the trilogy. (Although there are a bunch of standalone books, a second trilogy, and some short stories in the same world, so who knows what the thought process was here.) At the very end, something happened that felt like the inciting incident of an actual plot. So perhaps things will actually happen in the next book. I’m on the fence about reading it, though. On one hand, The Blade Itself was a perfectly fine read. On the other, it wasn’t any better than “perfectly fine”, and if the next book is anywhere close to this length, that’s an awful lot of pages to commit to when the story doesn’t even have an identifiable plot yet. I don’t regret the time reading this one, if for nothing else than exposure to something I wouldn’t have voluntarily picked up otherwise. But I don’t think I’ll be voluntarily seeking out book two, either.

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Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This book definitely had an old-timey feel, what with all the flowery language, characters as drivers of plot as opposed to a person you're supposed to connect with, and the whole optimism about the future thing. The way everything shook out was extremely unsettling with strong cosmic horror vibes, made all the more horrifying by the fact that pretty much everyone in the book viewed it as an inevitability at worst, and at best the extremely positive ultimate achievement of the human race. It also left me with a nagging feeling that it didn't quite finish wrapping up. Sure, that's the end of the story, but I still have many questions. And it also feels like there's some sort of message or theme or moral or reflection on the nature or purpose of humanity that I haven't fully grasped but I'm not sure I particularly like. Perhaps the point is to make you think about the ideas rather than provide answers or express opinions about them, and admittedly some of the questions it raises are interesting. Mixed feelings overall towards this weird little book.

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Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework by

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3.75

I have not read much poetry, and it's not usually what I gravitate towards. But I was drawn to the topic of this book because I actually appreciate housework. (It's a great combination of physicality and solitude - nobody's bothering me while I'm scrubbing splattered spaghetti sauce off the stove.) So I was excited to see both the good (aforementioned physicality and solitude; the pleasure of a well-cared-for home and of having a home at all) and the bad (it never ends; the persistent gender dynamics of who does it) of housework explored in poetry. And like any collection of anything, there were some I liked more than others. "Perhaps the World Ends Here" snagged my brain and pulled me up hard. "A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs" used housekeeping as a metaphor and I didn't love it. "Upper Peninsula Landscape with Aunts" didn't do it for me from a poetry angle, but I found the subject itself engaging and true-to-life. But I did devour this book in a single evening, found a lot to appreciate it, and spent the rest of the night imagining how my own housework experiences (getting meat out to thaw for tomorrow's dinner, putting away clean dishes, putting away the miscellaneous things that didn't end up where they belonged throughout the day) could be made into a poem. I even considered writing this review as a poem, but I am not good at poetry and it didn't work. So I'd say on the whole it's a solid collection and a good read.

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Hellbent by Cherie Priest

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4.0

For as lackluster as this back cover is, I enjoyed Bloodshot enough to be excited about reading this book. I’m not generally an urban fantasy fan, but I found Raylene a well-done snarky protagonist and surprisingly well-rounded for a badass vampire thief, and the whole book to be more action thriller than urban fantasy mystery. It’s like urban fantasy lite, and I enjoyed it.

This book, though, leans heavier into the urban fantasy elements of the series. Raylene interacts with multiple vampire Houses, she’s hunting down some magical artifacts, and of course there’s the whole sorceress thing. But despite that, it didn’t really have an urban fantasy feel to me. I think that’s because every other urban fantasy I’ve read has had some variety of romance (often a somewhat unhealthy romance), and even though the back cover tries to imply that Raylene and Adrian are going to get together, they are most definitely not. And I think having the first book be so light on the urban fantasy elements helped ease me in, as well.

It’s a general tendency of sequels to be just not quite as good as the first book. That’s not really the case here. Bloodshot and Hellbent are both well-written, well-plotted, interesting, and enjoyable to read. Raylene herself is still great. She is, as I’ve said, remarkably more full and well-written than I anticipated. Her snark works, she’s experiencing some growth, and I love her dynamic with the unique cast of characters she’s surrounded with. She’s dynamic and quite fun to read about, and she’s a large part of the reason why I’ve enjoyed this series.

Plot-wise, there’s a lot happening, but it’s balanced very well and all of it is enjoyable. In many ways, it exactly the same plot as last book – someone wants Raylene to obtain something, but someone else wants that to not happen. Last time, Ian wanted her to get some records and the government didn’t want her to do that. This time, she gets a job to steal some magical bones, and the sorceress who also wants them doesn’t want her to do that. But this one manages to make itself unique in a few ways: First, a single slightly-crazy sorceress uses much different Raylene prevention methods than the federal government. And second, this book leans harder into the urban fantasy aspects of the story. It becomes clear that there’s other supernatural creatures than vampires in this world (although none of them actually show up on-page, they’re mentioned). Raylene interacts with people from three different vampire Houses, and actually visits one House’s house. And there’s a sort-of subplot that’s a little bit trying to figure out who murdered a particular guy (although figuring out the answer requires less “figuring out who did it” and more “walking into the correct room while doing something else,” so it doesn’t really count as a mystery in my mind).

And now that I’ve finished expressing that I found this book quite good and an enjoyable read, I want to comment on the unusual aspect of it – which is that it doesn’t at all continue the plot from Bloodshot. At the end of that book, the main plot points were resolved, but there was still one antagonist on the loose who needed to be hunted down and dealt with. The implication was that this was the setup for the rest of the series, and Raylene and company would be working on tracking down and doing something (possibly murder) to the rest of the people involved in Project Bloodshot. But besides a mention at the beginning of this book that the events of the last book happened and there was at least one guy still out there, nothing in this book had anything to do with any of that.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more books. But there are only two Cheshire Red Reports books, and this one is over a decade old. Cherie Priest has said on her website that she may in the future write a third book in the series, but at this point there’s just the two. Which leaves the whole thing feeling incomplete. Sure, this book wrapped up really well, even resolved a few sub-plots from book one, and left the characters in an overall good place to end a series. But that one major thread left over from book one – that the guy behind Project Bloodshot is still on the loose and Raylene and company intend to hunt him down – is really bothering me. Even just one more book to resolve that would make this feel more complete as a series. Or it’s possible that I’m the only one bent out of shape by that one unresolved thing and everybody else is fine with the way it ended. Who knows.

This complaint really has nothing to do with this book, which I very much enjoyed. This series just feels incomplete with that one major thread left hanging, and I would love to see a third book come out at some point to resolve it. And if Cherie Priest ever decides to take up this series again and write more than one additional book, that works for me, too – I enjoy this series and would be happy to spend a few more books in it.

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Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World by Bernard Lefkowitz

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3.75

I spent a remarkable amount of time trying to track down this book considering I didn’t know very much about it. I knew the title, and there was a photograph of the paperback cover available on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I couldn’t find a description or anything regarding what it was about, and I couldn’t track down any reviews. It probably has something to do with the book being a not-particularly-noteworthy longform journalism piece published in 1979, but even the few places on the internet that acknowledged the book’s existence didn’t seem to care to do more than that.

I eventually located in my local library’s storage archives and had to go request a librarian go into the archives and grab it for me. But in the end, I did get my hands on it. (And I added the back cover information to The StoryGraph, because that part of the dust cover was pasted inside the book itself and I don’t think it’s actually online anywhere else.) Which seems like a lot of effort for something that, again, I knew next to nothing about. But the title caught my interest, and even though I knew I was unlikely to find anything particularly actionable in a book about people opting out of work in the 1970s, I still wanted to read it.

The 1970s was nearly fifty years ago, so this book felt less like a current events analysis (which I’m sure it was supposed to be) and more of a capture of attitudes of a particular subset of people in a particular time. One of the things I found most fascinating about it, though, was how many beliefs and attitudes were exactly the same as today. Nobody wants to work anymore; people aren’t religious anymore; the government is full of liberals who want to destroy us conservatives; your job is your identity; maybe your job shouldn’t be your identity; these are all familiar ideas expressed at one point or another in this book. Even though economics have changed, societal beliefs about women working have changed, and ideas about the very meaning of work itself have changed, a lot of the attitudes Bernard and his subjects express haven’t.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how un-feasible most of the subjects’ strategies would be in today’s world. One person managed to get unemployment for seven years; several had their formerly stay-at-home wives go to work and support the family on a clerical salary; a remarkable number of them got their employers to say they were laid off so they could get unemployment in the first place. And that’s not counting the ones who were fairly wealthy to begin with and chose to just live on their savings. All of them put a big emphasis on cutting down their expenses, but I can’t help noticing all the ways none of this would work in 2024.

And, interestingly, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t work in the 1970s, either. A majority of the 100 people Bernard talked to for this book ended up going back to work. Many of them talked about the stress of cobbling together money to pay bills. At least one went to eviction court, and several more were close to it when Bernard’s research ended. A few got severely depressed by losing the sense of purpose and accomplishment that working and being the primary breadwinner gave them, and several talked about not really knowing what to do with their time now that it wasn’t going towards work. There’s a strange tension in this book between these people’s desire not to work, to be free from the job and the boss and the alarm clock and spending a bunch of their time doing things they hate or ethically disagree with or just aren’t the things they want to be spending their time on, and the fact that “living without work in a nine to five world” doesn’t seem to be feasible for more than a few years at a time. And the book never actually explores this tension. It covers people who are voluntarily not working with a sense of “I don’t really understand this but it’s the future of work,” but it also never seems to draw the connection that even for these people, it’s not really possible. To be fair, it is possible in some cases – if they already had a ton of savings to live on, if they were close to retirement age and had enough savings to live on until they could start getting social security or their pension, or if they had a spouse who was willing and able to go to work and who could earn enough to support their family. But those are all true today, as well. These people opting out of work hadn’t really found a way to opt out of work entirely. In most cases, it was something more akin to an extended vacation or sabbatical than dropping out of the nine-to-five world. But the book doesn’t acknowledge this. It presents voluntary unemployment and early retirement as the future while never seeming to notice that even most of the people already doing it couldn’t make it permanent.

There’s a point to be made about society’s view on work and how even though technology and automation has brought down the amount we really need to work, societal values have gone the opposite way than what Bernard predicted. Instead of normalizing early retirement and moving towards twenty-hour workweeks, we’ve made working into a moral and ethical good and busyness into a proof of your personal worth. It would be interesting to contrast this movement with today’s FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which has the same goal but aims to do it by becoming independently wealthy instead of by relying on social support systems. I would also be curious to hear from someone who lived through the 1970s about this book and how it matches up with the values, culture, and societal dynamics of the period. I’m especially interested to hear if the idea of living without work was a more mainstream idea at the time or if Bernard was reporting on an obscure hippie-adjacent subculture he was interested in. I can point out a bunch of things that were really interesting about this book and how it contrasts with attitudes about work in 2024, but my lack of context and historical understanding about this era limits what more I can get from it. As I anticipated, it’s most definitely not an instruction manual for how to quit your job and keep living afterwards in the modern day (or even at the time it was written). But despite that, it was extremely interesting, and I’m glad I took the time and effort to hunt it down.

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Zero-Sum by Joyce Carol Oates

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4.0

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

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3.0

This book was recommended to me, and I generally attempt to read books recommended to me. This wasn’t my first foray into this author’s work, either. I’d read his book Recursion a while back and found it a sci-fi kind of weird that isn’t necessarily my jam, but that was well-written and had some interesting ideas. So I figured this probably wouldn’t be bad.

And I was correct. Upgrade wasn’t bad. The protagonist may not have had very many interesting characteristics beyond being the protagonist, but the concept was interesting and Blake Crouch is a competent writer. The action moved along, the story was largely well-paced, and it kept me engaged the whole way through. Nothing spectacular, sure, but perfectly readable.

However. As you might have guessed by the tone here, I do have some criticisms. Again, Blake’s particular brand of sci-fi weird isn’t quite up my alley, so some of this could definitely be me. But some of it is I just take issue with some of the fundamental concepts of the book itself.

Upgrade is ambitious in scope and interesting in concept. In a world where genetic modification is very possible (but also very illegal), an anti-gene-modification enforcement agent finds his genes being modified against his will, making him almost superhuman. Now he has to tackle questions like “why did this happen?” and “would the world be better if it happened to everybody?” But as interesting and potentially thematic as this idea could be, the execution is a little wacky. Some parts are frighteningly realistic, others are laughably not, and the discordant combination made the whole thing feel a bit silly. It would have made a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie, but the attempt at thematic depth just emphasized how ridiculous some parts of it were.

I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on my actual problem with this book. I had notes about how Logan Ramsey has big “r/iamverysmart” vibes, and whether or not killing the same character twice was too much, and how cruel Logan’s mother was and how I couldn’t believe that neither of her children realized how much they were like her. But then I was reminded of the word “eugenics” and realized my issue. Without giving away too many spoilers, the arguable antagonist of the first half of the book thinks climate change would be solved if people were only better in a specific way and wants to accomplish that with mass gene modification. It really feels like what a eugenics movement would look like in a world where you didn’t necessarily have to breed better traits into people because you could just modify people’s genes instead. But our protagonist seemed pretty against that whole idea, so I wasn’t too bothered. Up until the end, when (minor spoiler alert) he decided his problem wasn’t so much the eugenics-style idea, just which traits should be changed. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

It’s very possible that at least some of my complaints are because while I find these kinds of stories fine, they’re not the type of thing I generally really love. And on the whole, Upgrade was fine. I didn’t love it, I think its themes were handled poorly, and I really didn’t love some of the vibes it gives off. But it was readable. I found it interesting enough to finish. If it were made into an action movie, I think it would work pretty well. I just don’t particularly recommend it as it is.

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Sun of Blood and Ruin by Mariely Lares

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 8%.

Second book in a row with a fantastic historical setting but the writing just didn't do it justice. (I keep wanting to give historical novels a chance, but they're sure not making it easy.) I'm not against a good in media res but this story throws our protagonist into "hero of the people" scenarios without ever establishing that the people care about her, or even know about her. The writing was simplistic, the characters were bland and felt more like cutouts wafting through an admittedly interesting plot than real people with emotions and desires and flaws. For a supposedly anti-colonialism story, the protagonist has a lot of positive words for her colonial-ruler father and so far nothing but criticism for the Indigenous resistance movement. She seems to be doing Zorro-style, Mesoamerican-superhero kind of things without any real motivation to do so - it's cool, to be sure, but I never get the sense that she has any reasoning to do so. And it seems an awful lot of harm to put oneself in the way of without having some very clear reason, either emotional or moral, to go to all the trouble. Which is disappointing because the world is interesting and South/Central America is woefully underutilized as a fantasy setting, especially when history provides so many rich opportunities for mythologies and/or historical events to integrate into the narrative. Unfortunately, it ends up being very much like Neferura - a great idea with mediocre execution.

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Neferura by Malayna Evans

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.

My first DNF book of 2024, and it has nothing to do with the book's subject. I'm a huge Ancient Egypt fan and I loved the idea of a story focused on women's power and featuring the daughter of one of the very few female pharaohs. But it really failed in execution. Malayna has clearly done her research and knows a lot about the history and the time period. But it feels anachronistic in a way that's really hard to place. I think it has something to do with the characters, who feel like a variety of modern people who just happen to live in a world that looks like Ancient Egypt. Modern values and opinions seem plastered over the trappings of the time period. Though it's definitely not a YA book, stylistically it seems closer to something written for the younger teens. It also feels unpolished, like either the writer is either fairly young or this is one of their earliest forays into fiction. The characters are unremarkable and don't seem to have any real goals or desires. Supposedly they have relationships to each other, but there's never a sense that our titular protagonist actually cares about any of them. I think Neferura's emotions were the most confusing thing about her, because they never seemed to fit what a normal person would feel. Simple, inane things leave her struggling not to cry from sheer frustration; her mother's casual cruelty doesn't seem to even register. I feel like a real pharaoh's daughter would not make it to adulthood being as naïve and gullible as she is - she'd either get wise or be chewed up by the allegedly-ruthless court. And don't even get me started on the body-shaming and fat-shaming in this book. The very first line is Neferura getting body-shamed by her mother. In the first twenty-four pages, she is fat-shamed by her mother twice, by her own narration three or four times, and she fat-shames her mother once. It's excessive and entirely unnecessary to anything in the story. So on the whole, while I think the concept is interesting and I would definitely be open to a book exploring Ancient Egypt with Nefertiti's daughter, this book does not do that idea justice.

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Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

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5.0

I am not generally into books about time travel shenanigans. Not because I have anything against time travel in particular, but it just seems to be rare to have it done well, or at least in a way that I find enjoyable to read about. But, as usual, Sir Terry pulled it off.

I think a lot of that has to do with the character of Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Due to some unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time magical happenstance, Vimes ends up in his own past – the Ankh-Morpork of many decades ago, when he had just joined the Watch and things were, objectively, much worse than they are now. But one of the things that I appreciate most about Commander Vimes is that he is a relentlessly practical man. I recognize a kindred spirit in that, but it also means that the situation may be weird and fairly unpleasant, but he gets right on with dealing with it, with very little pining or philosophizing and absolutely no dithering or worrying about paradoxes.

That’s not to say that he’s emotionless, though. In fact, what makes Vimes so stellar as a character to me throughout this whole series is that he is competent, practical, and stays focused on the problem(s) in front of him instead of wasting time with excessive introspection or philosophizing, but he also has a strong set of personal values, cares deeply for the people around him, and feels his emotions intensely. He doesn’t do the introspection on the page because he doesn’t need to; he already knows himself thoroughly and is in control. To use the cliché, he is in touch with his feelings, but though they may tempt him to act against his values, they never control him. In so many ways, he is a paragon of positive masculinity – competent, principled, practical, honorable, caring, willing and able to experience great depth of feeling, never letting his feelings overrule him. He’s the rare character who is great to read about as a character, and also someone I think I would like, or at least respect, in real life.

Apparently this is the Sam Vimes Appreciation Review. That does make sense, because he really is the star of this book. Sure, there’s the whole time travel thing. There’s the murderer he’s tracking who also got zapped into the past and has the same future knowledge that Vimes does. There’s the fact that this point in the past is a particularly sticky one for Ankh-Morpork. There’s the sheer delight of a character being spectacularly good at what they do (some of it because Vimes has future knowledge, but much of it because he’s just a really, really good watchman). All of that is quite enjoyable to read. But this is a book that pushes Commander Vimes to his limits, and that means that he, as a character, is really what carries this story.

The Discworld series doesn’t generally shy away from getting dark in places. But this book is probably the darkest that I’ve read so far, and since the City Watch sub-series tends to be less funny in general, it’s not tempered with humor into something darkly funny. It’s just dark. Not at all in a bad way, to be sure. As I said, these events push Vimes to his limit, and it’s hard to do that without delving into some darkness. But even in terms of sheer numbers of deaths and injuries, this has got to be one of the more violent Discworld books. It’s not unnecessary violence when it comes to the plot, but it definitely goes (and takes Commander Vimes to) some very dark places.

I can’t necessarily say that Night Watch has replaced Interesting Times as my favorite Discworld book. The two are so different in mood, tone, theme, and content that it’s hard to do a direct comparison. But I can definitely say that Night Watch is among my favorite Discword books. If you like Commander Vimes as a character, love stories where protagonists are pushed to their limits, or just enjoy the very specific trope where a character is sent back in time and has to relive a difficult part of their life from a new perspective, I think you’ll agree.

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bluejayreads's reviews 814 reviews

bluejayreads's reviews
814 reviews