evelynkonrad's reviews
386 reviews

lighthearted mysterious tense fast-paced

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

5.0

Love this kind of story; a man against an indefatigable and arbitrary force determined to completely destroy his life. A good combination of justified paranoia and bureaucracy.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

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fast-paced

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

5.0

This book is wild. The first quarter I was thinking "this is incredibly bad writing, how did it become so famous?" But at some point I bought into it fully and it didn't let up. Terrible book, five stars.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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adventurous funny lighthearted reflective fast-paced

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

4.0

The Man Who Ended the World by Jason Gurley

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dark lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

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

3.0

This is the first (and possibly will be the only) book I have read in the worst way I have come up with yet. Each time the book you're reading mentions another book by name you stop and read that book before continuing. In this case a few pages in it mentions "the earth abides", a rather long and procedural apocalypse. Shortly after then there are a couple of kids books/YA novels; "the castle in the attic" and "are you there god? It's me, margaret". The former was at least a quick read, and the latter was quite good and something I'd thought of reading before anyway. Thankfully no other books are mentioned, and I opted not to go another level down and read the books mentioned in those books—partly because the books mentioned are Robinson crusoe and the Swiss family Robinson (which I had started and abandoned as too boring and long as a child), some 50s gynaecology/obstetrics textbooks, and a couple of introductions to/histories of Catholicism, Judaism, and protestant Christianity. I think The Man Who Ended the Earth would be better read on its own, and I think I liked it better than any of the books mentioned in it.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

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adventurous reflective slow-paced

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

2.0

It was fine

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

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challenging dark sad fast-paced

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

3.0

There's a lot of interesting stuff to be explored in this world, and the book touches on a lot of it but fails to quite connect the dots into a larger picture. Holes in the premise are left unpatched and while a lot of the details are left vague it may be better that way as when they're explained more fully they don't make sense. I was on board for the first half, but then it fell into the surprisingly common trap of

having the middle aged man protagonist fuck the young and fantastically naïve woman who literally has no voice and is legally his property

though in this case it at least has a narrative and thematic function (

even if the scene is written as some tender moment for him, in contradiction to the moral framework the book has tried to reconcile where it is okay to eat a certain class of people but it is still wrong to rape them

), and the latter half deals with the consequences of that. It feels like there are two directions that the author could have gone with the aftermath (

he comes to see her as fully human and faces the dilemma of how to reconcile that with his work and the prevailing morals, ultimately railing against the evil new world, or he forsakes his previous misgivings about treating humans as products and denies any humanity for her, keeping her as sex slave/incubator

) but they didn't commit to either of them so that plotline ends up weak, meaningless, and disappointing.

Content Warnings