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kyatic's reviews
917 reviews
Three to See the King by Magnus Mills
2.0
This book was an obvious allegory, yet I found that I was nowhere near interested enough to try and work out what the allegory might be. Religion, maybe? The hive mind of society? The prevailing importance of adhering to social hegemonic values? Who knows? Everything in it is clearly carefully designed to be a symbol for something else, or a metonym, but I just wasn't invested enough in the story to be bothered to decode them.
This is a short book. Some thinly crafted characters do some random things for no real reason. There is a vague sense of events moving from A to B to C to some half-hearted resolution, somehow both anti-climactic and entirely unexpected; the entire latter half of the book seemed to be leading up to a more interesting climax, only to falter and fall flat in the very last sentence. It somehow manages to be a book that is neither plot-heavy nor a character study. The protagonist remains unnamed throughout, which is a device that can work if they are fleshed out in other means, such as having an actual personality. Other characters are always referred to by their full names, first and last, which again is an interesting technique that would have worked if they had ever been more than their names. Instead, they were just cardboard cut-outs, archetypes that moved across the plains of the book (literally, I am not just being poetic here) with no real motivation or characterisation.
For all intents and purposes, this book was marketed as a philosophical comedy, but there was precious little philosophy in it, and even less comedy. The author seems to think that punctuating every tenth sentence or so with an exclamation mark turns it into a punchline, without appearing to realise that a punchline usually follows a comedic remark of sorts. There was even an instance of my least favourite grammatical entity - the double exclamation mark. There was really no going back from that point for me. It struck me as childish, and coupled with the sparse prose - usually a favourite of mine, when not littered with awry !!!!! - it meant that the book read like a high school essay from a B grade student.
The two stars I'm awarding this book are given on the sole two merits I found in the text. Firstly, Mills does have a knack for dialogue, and although it was obviously very artificial and structured with little to no regard for realism, it worked well in the context of the book. I liked that the characters didn't speak like people. For a book that is clearly supposed to be self-aware (although aware of what, I don't know) the stilted dialogue worked for me. Secondly, the surrealism. I genuinely liked the idea, and honestly, if the book weren't clearly trying so hard to make A Philosophical Point, I can see that I might have been quite invested in the story of a man, his house of tin and his neighbours' obsession with the knowledgeable newcomer. That in itself is a great plot, already imbued with a lot of references to a certain doctrine. If only the text had been less blatant about its ulterior motives and let the plot do the talking, then I think I would've enjoyed it a lot more.
I'm sure that there's a very deep meaning to the text if you look hard enough, but like the canyon excavators in the latter half of the book, I just gave up digging.
This is a short book. Some thinly crafted characters do some random things for no real reason. There is a vague sense of events moving from A to B to C to some half-hearted resolution, somehow both anti-climactic and entirely unexpected; the entire latter half of the book seemed to be leading up to a more interesting climax, only to falter and fall flat in the very last sentence. It somehow manages to be a book that is neither plot-heavy nor a character study. The protagonist remains unnamed throughout, which is a device that can work if they are fleshed out in other means, such as having an actual personality. Other characters are always referred to by their full names, first and last, which again is an interesting technique that would have worked if they had ever been more than their names. Instead, they were just cardboard cut-outs, archetypes that moved across the plains of the book (literally, I am not just being poetic here) with no real motivation or characterisation.
For all intents and purposes, this book was marketed as a philosophical comedy, but there was precious little philosophy in it, and even less comedy. The author seems to think that punctuating every tenth sentence or so with an exclamation mark turns it into a punchline, without appearing to realise that a punchline usually follows a comedic remark of sorts. There was even an instance of my least favourite grammatical entity - the double exclamation mark. There was really no going back from that point for me. It struck me as childish, and coupled with the sparse prose - usually a favourite of mine, when not littered with awry !!!!! - it meant that the book read like a high school essay from a B grade student.
The two stars I'm awarding this book are given on the sole two merits I found in the text. Firstly, Mills does have a knack for dialogue, and although it was obviously very artificial and structured with little to no regard for realism, it worked well in the context of the book. I liked that the characters didn't speak like people. For a book that is clearly supposed to be self-aware (although aware of what, I don't know) the stilted dialogue worked for me. Secondly, the surrealism. I genuinely liked the idea, and honestly, if the book weren't clearly trying so hard to make A Philosophical Point, I can see that I might have been quite invested in the story of a man, his house of tin and his neighbours' obsession with the knowledgeable newcomer. That in itself is a great plot, already imbued with a lot of references to a certain doctrine. If only the text had been less blatant about its ulterior motives and let the plot do the talking, then I think I would've enjoyed it a lot more.
I'm sure that there's a very deep meaning to the text if you look hard enough, but like the canyon excavators in the latter half of the book, I just gave up digging.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
2.0
I thought I was going to really like this book. It had been lingering on my 'to read' shelf, along with all the other books that I was going to buy just as soon as my pay came in, for months, and I was so excited to read it.
Boy, was I disappointed. For so many reasons, this book just really, really didn't do it for me.
First of all, the dialogue was atrocious. It was really stilted and artificial. And hey, I don't usually have a problem with that; novels are works of fiction, constructs, and I don't mind setting aside realism for stylistics. I do have a problem with it, however, when this comes at a detriment to the novel. The most prevalent dialogue no-no in this book was the constant unnecessary repetition. Every three pages or so, a character would say something to another character and the character would repeat it. For example (paraphrasing the surrounding verbs but the speech is ad verbatim):
'"It's too bad," I said.
"Too bad," said Suzy.
"Too bad," said Gina.
Too bad.'
At first, I thought it was just the narrator who spoke like this, and that it was maybe just an interesting dialectal quirk. Maybe it said something about the nature of his character, that he held onto other people's things and made them his own. And then I realised that it wasn't just him. Every character did it. Every single one. All the time. It got to the point where I just groaned out loud whenever I saw it happen.
Another issue was that the two main characters constantly refer to each other by name in speech when you just wouldn't. There was one moment when Ari says three lines of speech to Dante, and he uses his name in every single sentence. "_____, Dante." "______, Dante." "Dante, ________". The reason was that the writer didn't like using dialogue verbs, so he had to make it clear who was speaking. It just didn't work.
The third dialogue issue was that everyone spoke the same. Everyone. No-one had any interesting prosodic features. They all spoke in the same short, staccato sentences. Like this. All the time. Saying things that they thought were profound. But they weren't profound. And they used conjunctions at the start of it all*. And I'm not a grammar Nazi, really, but there comes a point where you just want to grab the author and shake him by the neck and say 'stop what you're doing, can't you see it's not working?
I'm not a huge YA fan. In my experience, most YA seems to be made up of improbably intelligent teenagers saying things that seem improbably smart on the surface, but mean jack shit when you look deeper. Ari comes out with this kind of thing. Stuff like 'I thought it might be a great thing to be the air', and 'maybe we just lived between hurting and healing', and 'the summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain'. It irks me. Teenagers are not dumb. Teenagers don't need to be force-fed this faux-philosophical bullshit that doesn't mean anything. Teenagers can comprehend meaningful things, so why shove empty sentences like that down their throats? It's a common trend in YA - John Green is horribly guilty of it - and I don't know, maybe I'm just too far from my teenage years to appreciate it, but the whole thing seems masturbatory and patronising.
The narration was also poorly written. It's told in first person, and Ari, the narrator, is obviously supposed to emulate a (not so) typical teenage boy. This means that the author keeps using filler speak like 'yeah', 'really', 'like' in the narration, and it begins to grate after a while. Add that to the fact that the author doesn't seem to know how teenagers converse with each other - an actual quote from a letter written by one teenage boy to another is 'have you ever drunk a beer? Done pot? Let me know', which I think sounds like those meme Twitter accounts with names like @definitelynotacop - and it makes for an incredibly inauthentic text.
And hey, like I said - I don't mind inauthentic. Give me constructs. Give me style in abundance, just so long as there's substance to back it up, and I really thought that substance was lacking in this one, despite the fact that it basically stood up and shouted 'hey, read me, I'm about the meaning of life'.
But like I said, maybe I've just outgrown YA. It's a shame; I was a teenager before YA really came into its own as a genre, and I think I have to accept that I really did miss the boat on this one.
*yes, I was intentionally imitating the book at this point, so don't murder me!
Boy, was I disappointed. For so many reasons, this book just really, really didn't do it for me.
First of all, the dialogue was atrocious. It was really stilted and artificial. And hey, I don't usually have a problem with that; novels are works of fiction, constructs, and I don't mind setting aside realism for stylistics. I do have a problem with it, however, when this comes at a detriment to the novel. The most prevalent dialogue no-no in this book was the constant unnecessary repetition. Every three pages or so, a character would say something to another character and the character would repeat it. For example (paraphrasing the surrounding verbs but the speech is ad verbatim):
'"It's too bad," I said.
"Too bad," said Suzy.
"Too bad," said Gina.
Too bad.'
At first, I thought it was just the narrator who spoke like this, and that it was maybe just an interesting dialectal quirk. Maybe it said something about the nature of his character, that he held onto other people's things and made them his own. And then I realised that it wasn't just him. Every character did it. Every single one. All the time. It got to the point where I just groaned out loud whenever I saw it happen.
Another issue was that the two main characters constantly refer to each other by name in speech when you just wouldn't. There was one moment when Ari says three lines of speech to Dante, and he uses his name in every single sentence. "_____, Dante." "______, Dante." "Dante, ________". The reason was that the writer didn't like using dialogue verbs, so he had to make it clear who was speaking. It just didn't work.
The third dialogue issue was that everyone spoke the same. Everyone. No-one had any interesting prosodic features. They all spoke in the same short, staccato sentences. Like this. All the time. Saying things that they thought were profound. But they weren't profound. And they used conjunctions at the start of it all*. And I'm not a grammar Nazi, really, but there comes a point where you just want to grab the author and shake him by the neck and say 'stop what you're doing, can't you see it's not working?
I'm not a huge YA fan. In my experience, most YA seems to be made up of improbably intelligent teenagers saying things that seem improbably smart on the surface, but mean jack shit when you look deeper. Ari comes out with this kind of thing. Stuff like 'I thought it might be a great thing to be the air', and 'maybe we just lived between hurting and healing', and 'the summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain'. It irks me. Teenagers are not dumb. Teenagers don't need to be force-fed this faux-philosophical bullshit that doesn't mean anything. Teenagers can comprehend meaningful things, so why shove empty sentences like that down their throats? It's a common trend in YA - John Green is horribly guilty of it - and I don't know, maybe I'm just too far from my teenage years to appreciate it, but the whole thing seems masturbatory and patronising.
The narration was also poorly written. It's told in first person, and Ari, the narrator, is obviously supposed to emulate a (not so) typical teenage boy. This means that the author keeps using filler speak like 'yeah', 'really', 'like' in the narration, and it begins to grate after a while. Add that to the fact that the author doesn't seem to know how teenagers converse with each other - an actual quote from a letter written by one teenage boy to another is 'have you ever drunk a beer? Done pot? Let me know', which I think sounds like those meme Twitter accounts with names like @definitelynotacop - and it makes for an incredibly inauthentic text.
And hey, like I said - I don't mind inauthentic. Give me constructs. Give me style in abundance, just so long as there's substance to back it up, and I really thought that substance was lacking in this one, despite the fact that it basically stood up and shouted 'hey, read me, I'm about the meaning of life'.
But like I said, maybe I've just outgrown YA. It's a shame; I was a teenager before YA really came into its own as a genre, and I think I have to accept that I really did miss the boat on this one.
*yes, I was intentionally imitating the book at this point, so don't murder me!