the_gandy_man's reviews
92 reviews

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

3.75

Solid book. It's good for all the reasons you'd expect. I don't need to keep repeating them.

Jacques Snicket is an interesting twist. I also like that the Baudelaires successfully saved the Quagmires. It's certainly not ideal, because they probably won't get to see them again, and they didn't get to learn the secrets the Quagmires knew, but it feels good that they've achieved a goal they set multiple books ago.

I'm a little tired of the "which here means" bit. Sometimes it's genuinely defining a word or phrase, which I understand given this series' target audience. Sometimes it's wrongly defining a word or phrase, but in a way which is funny. Both of these are fine. What I'm tired of is when it wrongly defines a word or phrase by just being too specific. The definition being wrong isn't intrinsically funny, at least not this many times. It's getting a bit repetitive. But this is a minor complaint, and not specific to this book.

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Did not finish book. Stopped at 0%.

This book is just too hard for me to get through. I felt similarly about Red Mars, but powered through. I liked the plot and characters of Red, and I like the plot and characters of Green, it just moves so slowly. There are vast stretches of the book where hardly anything interesting happens. A ton of time is spent talking about the minutiae of mars' ecology, various cultures and ideologies, terrain features, etc. A lot of people are probably really into that, but I'm not nearly interested enough in it.

2.75 stars

The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket

3.75

This book is the best in the series so far, which is great after 3-5 being roughly equally good. We finally have some overarching stuff. What's the VFD business? What's up with this conspiracy? We get some developments but it's all largely still a mystery. We have goals now! More immediate ones like rescue the Quagmires and more long term ones like the aforementioned mysteries. The series is really hitting its stride.

I like all the stuff happening in this book a lot. This fucked up society that lives by what's in and out is great. The titular elevator is great. The unreasonably massive apartment. I like Esme and Jerome. I like the Baudelaires' investigation, piecing it together, the high and low points. It's just really interesting and compelling. I think this is the first time I've come away from one of these books without any real negatives.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

3.5

There's a lot of fleshing out the world in this book, which I like, as well as spending time just hanging out. Some things are introduced, like apparating, which I didn't expect to be introduced so early, and that dispels a bit of the feeling I was having that Rowling didn't really think things through.

I like the premise. I like the shadow that the attacks cast over the whole school throughout the year, and the growing fear. I like Harry having to deal with people thinking it's him, although I don't think it makes much sense that they start thinking that before they know he speaks parseltongue. I'm not sure why, but I didn't feel quite as invested in this book as the previous, mainly in the latter half.

In the previous book, I didn't love the part where the bad guy explains every step of the plan they enacted. Like I get it it was you the whole time. The part with the troll was you and the curse on Harry's broom that was you I GET IT. Well this book had two of those. Not a fan.

Also yet again, there are some baffling plot points. The big one is Harry and Ron deciding to take the car to Hogwarts. Like what in the fuck are you thinking? How could anyone possibly come to the conclusion that that's the best option? They could just go back to the car and wait for the Weaslys to come back. Why would they think they can't go to Hogwarts if they miss the train? It's ridiculous.

The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket

3.5

The school with all the wacky rules is fun. The Quagmires are great. It's about time the Baudelaires made some friends. The book ending with

the introduction of a larger mystery (VFD), and the Quagmires in trouble finally brings in a larger story, which is exciting.

I think the plot of this book is one of the weaker so far, though.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

3.25

This book just didn't do it for me. I liked what it was about. I didn't find the plot to be the most compelling thing in the world, but it works and it's short. I think the thing that makes this book a masterpiece in many people's eyes is Bradbury's prose. It's like poetry. It's impressive and beautiful. The problem is I don't really like poetry. I found my mind wandering a lot, and it took me a relatively long time to get through this short book. I guess my brain doesn't easily turn Bradbury's descriptions into images, and so it stops trying. I do appreciate Bradbury's prose, but it's more the sort of thing I would want to dive deep into a short excerpt rather than read a whole book of it. It's just not for me.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

3.75

It's quite good. The characters are all really great, except Harry who is pretty generic. I like the evolution of Harry and Ron's relationship with Hermione. It contrasts really well with Harry and Ron's friendship, and creates a trio that is interesting no matter what they're doing. The book nails the magical whimsy vibe. Dumbledore, for instance, is this ultra powerful, old, wise wizard who is kinda goofy and likes lemon drops, chamber music, and bowling. The world is vibes over everything. Hogwarts has moving staircases and wacky passwords you have to tell to a living portrait and a forest full of spooky creatures. It's really evocative. All this book has to do to be interesting is have these characters doing stuff in this setting, and that's great.

The main issue is that the plot and the world often don't make sense. For instance, Gringotts is basically the only wizard bank. Hogwarts is the only wizard school. There's only one place to get your school supplies which has one store for each thing you might need. Students are sorted into brave, smart, evil, and everyone else? The way into the common room is reliant on a living portrait who can just go somewhere else and now nobody can get in.

The sorcerer's stone is guarded by relatively easy puzzles and trials rather than actual attempts at stopping someone. Children are punished for being out at night by risking their lives in the dangerous forest. The only thing between a school full of children and a huge three-headed dog who likes to eat people is a locked door which even first-years are taught how to unlock.

Quidditch is a terribly made sport. Wizards who can teleport (I guess we don't know that yet) deliver messages with owls. It goes on and on. It's a credit to the rest of the book that all of these things amount to no more than a distraction, and as a whole I still found the book to be quite good. It just feels like a bit more effort could've been made to at least make everything feel plausible.

Also I don't like the narrator of the audiobook version I listened to. Sorry Jim Dale. Every 10th or so dialogue line he reads in a really weirdly wrong tone/with a weirdly wrong intention. A character will be pleading with another and he'll make it sound like they're trying to seduce them or they're some kind of witch trying to cast a spell on them (not a Harry Potter witch, like an old green cackling gross kind of witch). I don't usually comment on the narrator, but this significantly lessened my enjoyment of the book.

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

3.0

It's fine. The beginning is great, but then it's a pretty standard zombie travel story. There's not much that interests me for the bulk of the book. I like Melanie. I like how she's smart about managing her affliction, contrasting with how Justineau is appalled that Melanie is treated like an animal. There's some moral questions at play which are interesting, and the ending is pretty cool. But mostly it's fairly boring for most of it.

It also feels somewhat derivative of The Last of Us. It's a pretty different story but many elements, such as the disease being cordyceps and our young girl protagonist being immune and people want to dissect her to find a cure. The Last of Us came out a year before this book. I don't know how long books take, but I'd imagine this is all coincidence. It still doesn't help my experience with this book that I could so easily compare it to a story that is so much better.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

4.0

Borne has a lot of really interesting, unique stuff. Borne himself is incredible. The book is at its best when he's there. He has a childlike sense of wonder and naivety while at the same time being essentially alien with abilities, senses, perhaps motives that are beyond human comprehension. He's simultaneously cute and terrifying. The world is very interesting. I like that the setting is post-apocalypse without dwelling at all on the apocalypse, instead focusing on the fucked up situation we're in now. It doesn't matter what people before called anything. It's just "the city" or "the company" now. I like all the biotech stuff. It's very cool, and I don't think I've seen a sci-fi world where the future technology is like it is in Borne. And of course the giant floating bear is fucking sick.

The main thing I didn't love was the plot in the later parts of the book. Once

Borne leaves

, a lot of the stuff that happens doesn't really interest me. I don't care nearly as much about

Wick being not human or Rachel being from the company or from wherever that portal thing goes to

as I do about

Borne impersonating Wick and Rachel

.

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis

2.25

This book is hardly a story. We're

dethroning the evil ruler of Narnia and making the good guy king, which is the same thing that happened in the first book.

At least in the first book there was some low point, some semblance of an arc. I found the first book's story to be way too simple, such that it hardly interested me, but this book manages to be much simpler, and much less interesting.

We arrive in Narnia again. We get history explained to us. We go to help the good guy king in his war. We make it there alright and we help him win and that's it.

Where's the story? What's the point?

I did enjoy the getting history explained to us part, probably because things were actually happening, but once that ended nothing interested me.

I thought Aslan was being sus, but then turns out actually he wasn't.