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gluckenstein's reviews
127 reviews
Good Night, Mr. James: And Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak
3.25
How corny, yet how, sometimes, comforting. I dismayed at a story I must've liked as a part of The City, and was partial to the two tgat had actual plot: a western and the Ganymede one. The last one seems to be fun and revealing.
The Case of the Missing Men by Kris Bertin
fast-paced
3.75
Not that unique but cute enough.
More than enough plot to take up 12 issues, and contours of the town the story takes place in start to emerge nicely by the end. But when all said and done, for a twin pastiche in such overcrowded genres as a 'meddling kids' detective story and a ghastly small-town underbelly mystery, this lacks enough unique images to really set it apart, and while characters are drawn well and lovingly, dialog doesn't rise consistently enough over functional to completely fall in love with the comic's panel-to-panel writing either.
Enough formal gambits to prevent the story from getting monotone! The tenth issue, I think, is a standout in cleverness.
More than enough plot to take up 12 issues, and contours of the town the story takes place in start to emerge nicely by the end. But when all said and done, for a twin pastiche in such overcrowded genres as a 'meddling kids' detective story and a ghastly small-town underbelly mystery, this lacks enough unique images to really set it apart, and while characters are drawn well and lovingly, dialog doesn't rise consistently enough over functional to completely fall in love with the comic's panel-to-panel writing either.
Enough formal gambits to prevent the story from getting monotone! The tenth issue, I think, is a standout in cleverness.
Polostan by Neal Stephenson
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
3.0
Neal Stephenson is a horse girl confirmed.
Having read Cryptonomicon, which was so adamant about being something more than just a historical novel, it's kind of delightful in its own way to see Stephenson writing what appears on the surface to be a much more conventional historical (+spy-ish) fiction, with all its cliches, like cameos of historical figures that the perfect reader gets a rush out of recognizing paragraphs before they are named by the author. On the other hand, there's not quite enough exciting action in this volume (let alone weighty character relationships that, to be fair, probably never were author's strongest suit, although some character stuff here is solid) to make up for how places where Stephenson struts his stuff as a science popularizer (or just a Wikipedia-brained freak) are minimized compared to the earlier novel.
Also doesn't help that rarely do you see a beginning of the trilogy that makes less bones about being just a first third of a story. It's very common and sensible to end a novel that will have continuation on a cliffhanger but when it has to do with a character that was first introduced 10 pages prior... Come on, that's not how it's done!
PS. Or is it not even confirmed as a trilogy and may prove longer? If so, God help us all.
Having read Cryptonomicon, which was so adamant about being something more than just a historical novel, it's kind of delightful in its own way to see Stephenson writing what appears on the surface to be a much more conventional historical (+spy-ish) fiction, with all its cliches, like cameos of historical figures that the perfect reader gets a rush out of recognizing paragraphs before they are named by the author. On the other hand, there's not quite enough exciting action in this volume (let alone weighty character relationships that, to be fair, probably never were author's strongest suit, although some character stuff here is solid) to make up for how places where Stephenson struts his stuff as a science popularizer (or just a Wikipedia-brained freak) are minimized compared to the earlier novel.
Also doesn't help that rarely do you see a beginning of the trilogy that makes less bones about being just a first third of a story. It's very common and sensible to end a novel that will have continuation on a cliffhanger but when it has to do with a character that was first introduced 10 pages prior... Come on, that's not how it's done!
PS. Or is it not even confirmed as a trilogy and may prove longer? If so, God help us all.
The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
dark
funny
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Like 12 Chairs and other books of that nature, where the main character has to do a similar thing a predetermined number of times (in this case it is 6+1 homicides, not 12 chair guttings), this has some trouble with the variety of the set pieces but overall this is funny and lean enough to offset the thinness and the monotony of the conceit.
Youth Without Youth by Mircea Eliade
4.0
Wow! That's certainly something!
I thought the book is weirdly lopsided. The first two parts (basically a half of the novella) cover relatively small ground time- and happenings-wise. But the way the book ultimately goes beyond what I remembered about the movie, its ultimate shape and breadth took a wind out of me. A real Life, the Universe and Everything kind of book.
Of course, this is very intellectualized, not too much naked emotionality, but what else do you expect from an academic?
I thought the book is weirdly lopsided. The first two parts (basically a half of the novella) cover relatively small ground time- and happenings-wise. But the way the book ultimately goes beyond what I remembered about the movie, its ultimate shape and breadth took a wind out of me. A real Life, the Universe and Everything kind of book.
Of course, this is very intellectualized, not too much naked emotionality, but what else do you expect from an academic?
The Hunter by Richard Stark
3.5
Mafia is pretty lame, according to this.
A strange thing about this book is that the story starts very personal, as a tale of revenge, and then wraps itself up with just some banal money grabs. That's completely backwards! That's not how Robert McKee teaches to do!
A strange thing about this book is that the story starts very personal, as a tale of revenge, and then wraps itself up with just some banal money grabs. That's completely backwards! That's not how Robert McKee teaches to do!
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
3.75
“He gives it a single-mindedness he found in an Oortian sculptor, and the coordination ability of a concert pianist, seasoned with more primitive animal forms from the older libraries: shark and feline”
Overall pretty impressive.
Gives out the vibes of a mix of old and new space opera (Alfred Bester and Ian M. Banks) and a curious smidge of Pitoff's Vidocq.
In the days when I've only just acquired the ability to read science fiction in English without looking up words in the dictionary twice a sentence, I was extremely scared by books like this (including this one specifically): what I then understood as HARD (otherwise why so many references to quantum entanglements) sci fi set in ridiculously involved transhuman futures. With a sigh of relief or shake of the head, but I find I no longer fear those. Have learnt to see through the jargon recognizing bigger things like tropes and structure.
This book is a little too puzzle-box-y for my liking (amnesiac hero with a dark past, falsified history, and other mysteries stacked upon mysteries) but comes together in the last third in a pretty satisfying and action-packed manner. Don't expect too much from characters, but as far as stories about mismatched pairings a la 48 Hrs go, this one, with its titular thief and a winged gal who extracts him from prison, is broadly functional, and that's not counting that the thief has a complex melodramatic backstory of his own to recover and sort out, and the setting feels pretty bonkers and large-scale.
That said, bonkers can go two ways, and if most of the time it means imaginative, like a moving city that rearranges itself, other times it can mean just some overcomplicated bullshit imagery that does not compute like aforequoted feline shark with the coordination ability of a concert pianist.
Overall pretty impressive.
Gives out the vibes of a mix of old and new space opera (Alfred Bester and Ian M. Banks) and a curious smidge of Pitoff's Vidocq.
In the days when I've only just acquired the ability to read science fiction in English without looking up words in the dictionary twice a sentence, I was extremely scared by books like this (including this one specifically): what I then understood as HARD (otherwise why so many references to quantum entanglements) sci fi set in ridiculously involved transhuman futures. With a sigh of relief or shake of the head, but I find I no longer fear those. Have learnt to see through the jargon recognizing bigger things like tropes and structure.
This book is a little too puzzle-box-y for my liking (amnesiac hero with a dark past, falsified history, and other mysteries stacked upon mysteries) but comes together in the last third in a pretty satisfying and action-packed manner. Don't expect too much from characters, but as far as stories about mismatched pairings a la 48 Hrs go, this one, with its titular thief and a winged gal who extracts him from prison, is broadly functional, and that's not counting that the thief has a complex melodramatic backstory of his own to recover and sort out, and the setting feels pretty bonkers and large-scale.
That said, bonkers can go two ways, and if most of the time it means imaginative, like a moving city that rearranges itself, other times it can mean just some overcomplicated bullshit imagery that does not compute like aforequoted feline shark with the coordination ability of a concert pianist.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
4.5
Single-mindedness of the book is very interesting. Basically it's nothing but a number of psychological portraits: any actions that are described are motivated by illustration of the characters or tracking their development, their passion. Practically no attempt is made to complicate the construction of the story and craft some additional plot driver, suspense source. In this sense you might call it truly unadulterated literary fiction.
I wasn't blown away by it but don't quite see how it could have been better at its thing than it is. As it is basically just a series of oddball character portraits it naturally reminded me of Weinsburg, Ohio, only this book is more nakedly optimistic (it earns it by aspiring to be more of a universal fable, I guess).
I wasn't blown away by it but don't quite see how it could have been better at its thing than it is. As it is basically just a series of oddball character portraits it naturally reminded me of Weinsburg, Ohio, only this book is more nakedly optimistic (it earns it by aspiring to be more of a universal fable, I guess).
Here by Richard McGuire
4.0
No doubt a smash in Tralfamadore!
One of those media objects that attempts to move its focus from the default — human characters — to something else, in this instance a place. I thought this a more radical and, for that, effortlessly successful experiment of this kind than something like Richard Power's The Overstory that labor to let its readers see the world through the eyes(?) of a tree.
There's a tricky balance a work like this has to maintain: not to fall back too fast or too hard to traditional plotting, which would render the whole undertaking a failure, and yet, ultimately, tell a story (or convey a message, which, for all intents and purposes of mine, is the same thing).
After one read-through I'm not sure how detailed a picture of the generations of the "here" room's inhabitants the slow accumulations of details over about 300 pages really draw. The main thread and organising principle of the book, anyway, seems to be simultaneously shattering of the illusion of permanence that home brings to its inhabitants and celebration of the continuity of human experience, or, broader, life itself. This is accomplished by a succession of atemporal resonances and juxtapositions, virtuosic for their blending of various snapshots of different 3-d spaces as well as different modulations of the art style, but also less impressive to a degree than, say, similar montages in Man with a Movie Camera for consisting of things that are — you know — made up.
Talking of made up, glimpses into the future, in my opinion, is where the graphic novel is at its least imaginative. History lesson of the vaguely Star-Trek future is in particular such a corny and uninspired choice. Encoding of the book's title in the charade scene near the end registers as a clever but superfluous postmodern flourish.
One of those media objects that attempts to move its focus from the default — human characters — to something else, in this instance a place. I thought this a more radical and, for that, effortlessly successful experiment of this kind than something like Richard Power's The Overstory that labor to let its readers see the world through the eyes(?) of a tree.
There's a tricky balance a work like this has to maintain: not to fall back too fast or too hard to traditional plotting, which would render the whole undertaking a failure, and yet, ultimately, tell a story (or convey a message, which, for all intents and purposes of mine, is the same thing).
After one read-through I'm not sure how detailed a picture of the generations of the "here" room's inhabitants the slow accumulations of details over about 300 pages really draw. The main thread and organising principle of the book, anyway, seems to be simultaneously shattering of the illusion of permanence that home brings to its inhabitants and celebration of the continuity of human experience, or, broader, life itself. This is accomplished by a succession of atemporal resonances and juxtapositions, virtuosic for their blending of various snapshots of different 3-d spaces as well as different modulations of the art style, but also less impressive to a degree than, say, similar montages in Man with a Movie Camera for consisting of things that are — you know — made up.
Talking of made up, glimpses into the future, in my opinion, is where the graphic novel is at its least imaginative. History lesson of the vaguely Star-Trek future is in particular such a corny and uninspired choice. Encoding of the book's title in the charade scene near the end registers as a clever but superfluous postmodern flourish.