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lovedayrobijn's reviews
26 reviews
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle
5.0
Probably one of my favorite books of all time. It makes an indelible impression.
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
5.0
Fascinating work. It is consistently _horrifying_ but never really a _horror novel_. It understands that the best works of horror are ultimately about isolation, depression, a search for something that cannot be found -- about what's behind the door, and the realization that finding out is always worse than not knowing.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
4.0
It's good! It starts _very_ slowly. Part of the reason I can't give it five stars is because the prose itself is sufficient to the task of describing the action and the internal world of Breq, but not particularly stylistically interesting. One would be hard pressed to detect a unique voice in any particular paragraph -- but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Not, perhaps, something I could or would say about the subsequent novels.
The Etched City by K.J. Bishop
5.0
Phantasmagoric, dust-dry and rust-red novel of the same Weird Frontier breed as the ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah, Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, and Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus -- stories concerned with the empty spaces where wind and ghosts are more at home than are we ourselves. More than any other author I can name, I wish desperately for a new novel by Bishop. A masterful prose stylist with an immense and unique gift.
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
5.0
I gave Gideon the Ninth five stars because the concept of numerically or ordinally grading art is, in very much the same fashion that we grade students, a hold-over from a period in history where everything was evaluated by its market value even -- and especially -- art, and children. How useful is it to us? How impressive will it make us seem? Will it go to a better school than its classmates, have a nicer house than its neighbors, hang on a more auspicious wall?
But neither art nor children are meat. They should not be graded. I am adamant about this. Also, Gideon the Ninth is a fucking five out of five star book and if you disagree with that then all I can tell you is that I admire your willingness to look like a complete fucking tool in front of everyone like that.
Why am I talking about Gideon here? Well, for two reasons in particular. One is that if Gideon the Ninth is a five out of five star book, Harrow the Ninth is like... twelve out of P stars. It's incredible. It achieves a level of greatness only attained before by Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun, by Iain Banks in Excession and Use of Weapons, and by Ursula K. Le Guin in A Wizard of Earthsea (specifically and especially The Tombs of Atuan). The entire time we were reading Gideon the Ninth, we were completely unaware that that hard-charging weirdass hilarious sci-fi tragicomic romp was _JUST LAYING THE GROUNDWORK_, and that in a few moments time, Harrow the Ninth would hit the springboard at full speed: its tiny, traumatized, lightless, Schwarzschild-dense body hurtling at the face of God himself, like a vantablack bowling ball thrown by a deeply hormonal teenager who has recently been conclusively wronged by reality itself.
This book is _angry_. It's cruel. It is a book with many layers, about people who have lived very bad and unfair and in some cases tremendously long lives. It is about what we do to one another, and what we do to ourselves (because of what we did, because of what we can't stop doing, because the only thing in life that truly matters is the boundaries we draw for ourselves and how we convince ourselves to step over them). It is a book about pain, and about discovering that a capacity to endure pain, to put it aside like an object of contemplation for the times when you are not getting on with the business of living: that that may not actually be a strength at all.
Mostly, it is a book about a handful of young women who were taught to speak and think in a language that was long ago emptied out of anything resembling love or kindness, replaced with bouquets of long-dead callalilies and roses and big placards with words in fancy scripty font, expressing in elegant and dignified language that the world is amoral, pointless, inimical to warmth and caring, so you'd better fucking get used to being alone. Make some skeletons if you're lonely. It is a book about those women, in that place, finding their way back to one another. Not in anything so grand as love, or even camaraderie or friendship; but in the communal strength of survival, the sacred bond of mutual need, and the faithful sisterhood of the promise well made and the secret well kept.
(Come on everyone -- the protagonist of this book is the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House! _THE KEEPERS OF THE LOCKED TOMB._ _THE HOUSE OF THE SEWN TONGUE._ _THE BLACK VESTALS._ The Ninth house has its specialty and strength, like every other house -- but it was never bone magic and skeletons. In fact, unique among the house emblems, the skull of the Ninth is notably and MEANINGFULLY deformed, black eyes above a maxilla from which its mandibular partner has either been removed -- or was born lacking. I AM SAYING THE NINTH HOUSE IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING SECRETS AND THAT'S WHY THE BOOK IS HOW IT IS)
Along the way, Muir takes a delicious and sadistic pleasure in royally fucking with us, and I was 100% sold on it. I can _ABSOLUTELY_ see it pissing people off. If your tolerance for being deliberately fucked with (in a manner that is infuriating but also cheeky, like a sibling who knows something you don't know and keeps dropping insanely obscure but technically correct hints at this big obvious thing you can't see staring you in the face) is low, you may need frequent breaks during certain chapters. But I promise you this: IT ALL MAKES SENSE. It is not being weird for weirdness's sake. There is a reason things are playing out the way they are in this book. I saw it coming, but not in time to save myself for how emotionally devastating it was, rendered in Muir's spare, almost gentle epiparodos, where we spend a quiet few moments alone with Ianthe Tridentarius, and in those few pages, where nothing much happens except that the loneliest woman in the world gently strokes the fevered forehead of another woman who would be extremely distressed to find out that she was Ianthe's only friend, were she not very likely permanently brain-dead, it occurred to me that Harrow the Ninth, ultimately, is about what we give up to feel anything other than shitty death in a world that is always loudly dying everywhere around us. It is about what we give up to and for each other, because it is better than being alone.
Gideon is a book about heroism. Gideon was a hero. She was brave, and kind, and she did things like try to save the lives of extremely shitty teenagers because that is what heroes do, and it's not their fault they're terrible, they're teenagers and that's what teenagers are. Gideon is brave, and Gideon doesn't care if she dies, because Gideon has never been allowed to have a reason to live. She's a badass action hero and she earns a good death, and it's completely fucking radical and the only thing that would have made it more awesome would have been, like, a motorcycle made of gold, or something. She earned her good death in the service of her adept. It's what she'd always wanted, in a weird way -- to fight, and die, for a cause greater than herself.
Harrow is about having to watch Gideon do that for you, and then go on living with yourself. It's a story about knowing that your life was bought with the mass-murder of two hundred tiny children, all of which deserved their lives more than you ever deserved yours. It's about what happens to us when our pain and grief overwhelm our capacity to endure it.
If it sounds like kind of a downer; well -- yeah. There are several aspects of this story that hurt, and don't stop hurting. This book is _real_ about obsessive self-loathing and the desperate, tragic, ingenious ways we cope with our individual experience of trauma. It's still very funny -- Muir's writing style is irrepressiblely lively and gregarious -- but the tone has shifted. As the book progresses, there is a sense of inevitable failure and futility. It reminded me, to my genuine surprise, of elements of Catch-22.
I rreally am dancing around discussing the book beeause you owe it to yourself to read these books, and to engage with them without preconceptions or foreknowledge. But I've seen a lot of folks saying that the book was confusing or didn't make sense and that they were getting frustrated and giving up. That is your prerogative -- life is long and full of books -- but for the story Muir is telling, it couldn't have been done any other way. It needed to be like this. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to hurt us so badly, in just the right spot, in just the right way.
And I haven't even MENTIONED The Emperor yet! HOLY cOW THIS B OOK IS AMAZING
But neither art nor children are meat. They should not be graded. I am adamant about this. Also, Gideon the Ninth is a fucking five out of five star book and if you disagree with that then all I can tell you is that I admire your willingness to look like a complete fucking tool in front of everyone like that.
Why am I talking about Gideon here? Well, for two reasons in particular. One is that if Gideon the Ninth is a five out of five star book, Harrow the Ninth is like... twelve out of P stars. It's incredible. It achieves a level of greatness only attained before by Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun, by Iain Banks in Excession and Use of Weapons, and by Ursula K. Le Guin in A Wizard of Earthsea (specifically and especially The Tombs of Atuan). The entire time we were reading Gideon the Ninth, we were completely unaware that that hard-charging weirdass hilarious sci-fi tragicomic romp was _JUST LAYING THE GROUNDWORK_, and that in a few moments time, Harrow the Ninth would hit the springboard at full speed: its tiny, traumatized, lightless, Schwarzschild-dense body hurtling at the face of God himself, like a vantablack bowling ball thrown by a deeply hormonal teenager who has recently been conclusively wronged by reality itself.
This book is _angry_. It's cruel. It is a book with many layers, about people who have lived very bad and unfair and in some cases tremendously long lives. It is about what we do to one another, and what we do to ourselves (because of what we did, because of what we can't stop doing, because the only thing in life that truly matters is the boundaries we draw for ourselves and how we convince ourselves to step over them). It is a book about pain, and about discovering that a capacity to endure pain, to put it aside like an object of contemplation for the times when you are not getting on with the business of living: that that may not actually be a strength at all.
Mostly, it is a book about a handful of young women who were taught to speak and think in a language that was long ago emptied out of anything resembling love or kindness, replaced with bouquets of long-dead callalilies and roses and big placards with words in fancy scripty font, expressing in elegant and dignified language that the world is amoral, pointless, inimical to warmth and caring, so you'd better fucking get used to being alone. Make some skeletons if you're lonely. It is a book about those women, in that place, finding their way back to one another. Not in anything so grand as love, or even camaraderie or friendship; but in the communal strength of survival, the sacred bond of mutual need, and the faithful sisterhood of the promise well made and the secret well kept.
(Come on everyone -- the protagonist of this book is the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House! _THE KEEPERS OF THE LOCKED TOMB._ _THE HOUSE OF THE SEWN TONGUE._ _THE BLACK VESTALS._ The Ninth house has its specialty and strength, like every other house -- but it was never bone magic and skeletons. In fact, unique among the house emblems, the skull of the Ninth is notably and MEANINGFULLY deformed, black eyes above a maxilla from which its mandibular partner has either been removed -- or was born lacking. I AM SAYING THE NINTH HOUSE IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING SECRETS AND THAT'S WHY THE BOOK IS HOW IT IS)
Along the way, Muir takes a delicious and sadistic pleasure in royally fucking with us, and I was 100% sold on it. I can _ABSOLUTELY_ see it pissing people off. If your tolerance for being deliberately fucked with (in a manner that is infuriating but also cheeky, like a sibling who knows something you don't know and keeps dropping insanely obscure but technically correct hints at this big obvious thing you can't see staring you in the face) is low, you may need frequent breaks during certain chapters. But I promise you this: IT ALL MAKES SENSE. It is not being weird for weirdness's sake. There is a reason things are playing out the way they are in this book. I saw it coming, but not in time to save myself for how emotionally devastating it was, rendered in Muir's spare, almost gentle epiparodos, where we spend a quiet few moments alone with Ianthe Tridentarius, and in those few pages, where nothing much happens except that the loneliest woman in the world gently strokes the fevered forehead of another woman who would be extremely distressed to find out that she was Ianthe's only friend, were she not very likely permanently brain-dead, it occurred to me that Harrow the Ninth, ultimately, is about what we give up to feel anything other than shitty death in a world that is always loudly dying everywhere around us. It is about what we give up to and for each other, because it is better than being alone.
Gideon is a book about heroism. Gideon was a hero. She was brave, and kind, and she did things like try to save the lives of extremely shitty teenagers because that is what heroes do, and it's not their fault they're terrible, they're teenagers and that's what teenagers are. Gideon is brave, and Gideon doesn't care if she dies, because Gideon has never been allowed to have a reason to live. She's a badass action hero and she earns a good death, and it's completely fucking radical and the only thing that would have made it more awesome would have been, like, a motorcycle made of gold, or something. She earned her good death in the service of her adept. It's what she'd always wanted, in a weird way -- to fight, and die, for a cause greater than herself.
Harrow is about having to watch Gideon do that for you, and then go on living with yourself. It's a story about knowing that your life was bought with the mass-murder of two hundred tiny children, all of which deserved their lives more than you ever deserved yours. It's about what happens to us when our pain and grief overwhelm our capacity to endure it.
If it sounds like kind of a downer; well -- yeah. There are several aspects of this story that hurt, and don't stop hurting. This book is _real_ about obsessive self-loathing and the desperate, tragic, ingenious ways we cope with our individual experience of trauma. It's still very funny -- Muir's writing style is irrepressiblely lively and gregarious -- but the tone has shifted. As the book progresses, there is a sense of inevitable failure and futility. It reminded me, to my genuine surprise, of elements of Catch-22.
I rreally am dancing around discussing the book beeause you owe it to yourself to read these books, and to engage with them without preconceptions or foreknowledge. But I've seen a lot of folks saying that the book was confusing or didn't make sense and that they were getting frustrated and giving up. That is your prerogative -- life is long and full of books -- but for the story Muir is telling, it couldn't have been done any other way. It needed to be like this. Otherwise it wouldn't have been able to hurt us so badly, in just the right spot, in just the right way.
And I haven't even MENTIONED The Emperor yet! HOLY cOW THIS B OOK IS AMAZING