the_gandy_man's reviews
92 reviews

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

3.75

This book pleasantly surprised me. I listened to it only because I needed an audiobook, after how I felt about Ender's Game, I wasn't especially excited to continue the series. I found Ender's Game boring and annoying, but Speaker for the Dead is not boring and quite a bit less annoying.

I like the concept of the speaker for the dead, and I like Ender's journey with the family and with the town. I like the mystery of the Piggies and how that unfolds.

I like when aliens have fundamental differences from us that make them not make sense, so that the more we learn about them, the more questions we have, until we finally figure them out by completely re-conceptualizing something we thought was true, and this book does that whole thing well.

I like the fucked up family. Most of the things that happen in this book are fairly interesting. The plot is a little messy in my opinion. I think it would be much more interesting for

the characters who live on the planet to figure things out, and to have the climactic moment with Human at the end, rather than Ender come in and do everything for them. I feel like the elements that tie this story with Ender's Game are some of its weakest points. I also find Jane to be an awkward character. She disappears for a big chunk of the book to go off and miraculously move the plot forward.

I had a lot fewer issues with the worldbuilding than I did reading Ender's Game. This book even clarifies that people don't understand how the Ansible works, and can't travel faster than light, only communicate faster than light. I still think the implications of faster than light anything are not explored nearly enough, but I'm not super mad about it anymore. Calling the new aliens "Piggies" is perhaps even stupider than calling the old aliens "Buggers". It makes it hard to take everything seriously. I could hardly believe it the first time they said "Piggies". Jesus Christ.

Like in the first book, perhaps even more so, some of the characters are fucking stupid, in a way that feels like it's just to make Ender seem smart when he exercises average intelligence. The "scientists" in charge of learning about the Piggies are completely unwilling to think outside the box. The last aliens humans met were a hive mind that could communicate instantly across space, and you can't even make the reach that

maybe the Piggies' trees are more than just totems? Maybe, after they murder important Piggies which turn into holy trees and also the humans that helped them the most in a weird ceremonial way, we should think maybe to them that's a good thing? Ender arrives, is there like two days, and says "what if what the Piggies say is true is actually true" and the scientists after generations of research are completely baffled by this suggestion. They never even considered it.

And another thing. Novinha stumbles on some grand discovery that will change everything, and Pipo goes and gets killed by the Piggies when he tells them about it. Novinha then decides that she will hide this discovery and not let anybody find it, especially Libo, because she is scared the Piggies will kill him too. WHY? We don't have the advanced problem solving ability to think maybe we can learn the important discovery and then just not go tell the Piggies about it. Basically the whole plot is built on Novinha's insistence that nobody see this important discovery while her reason for that is complete nonsense. She doesn't even know what the discovery is, so she's just completely going on "Pipo learned this and they killed him so if ANYBODY ELSE learns it they will also be killed." I like the family drama mystery thing going on, but I'd like it a lot more if it had a real reason to exist.

A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir

2.5

Every aspect of this book is like the worst part of a good book. The plot is really boring. Basically nothing interesting happens until near the end. The characters are, like, fine? I wouldn't go as far as to say I like any of them. The prose helps the minute-to-minute experience in being about as boring as the overall story. The double love triangle is excruciating. I don't give a single shit about any of the romance. It feels like Mockingjay in that regard. The world is super generic. Very little feels unique. There's a lot of Arabic-inspired stuff but all the names of things are just European words. The little magic stuff could be interesting, but it occupies an extremely small portion of the story. It feels like in future books we'll learn about why some characters have magic powers and why it's only the main characters and what that has to do with the Efreets or whatever, but that shit ain't in this book. There's no aspect of this book that is better than just fine, and so the book is pretty mid. I might continue with the series if I need an audiobook, but I don't really want to.

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket

3.5

I like how this book changes things up a little bit.

Klaus is more of a plot device than a character for most of the book, forcing Violet to solve things on her own. She has to decipher a complicated book, and then at the end Klaus has to invent something. I like how that shows how they've learned from each other. Count Olaf plays a much less direct role in this book. Orwell is a weird character. We don't really get to know who she is. Is she an old friend of Olaf, or did he just come to town and seduce her or something? And then the Foreman is obviously an Olaf goon but the Baudelaires never really consider that. The whole villain situation is a bit awkward in this book.

I like the hypnosis stuff. It's interesting and scary. It's a fun puzzle to figure out what the trigger word is, and it's fun that the reader can try to figure it out too. There's some wacky moments, especially towards the end with Sunny's sword fight and Klaus' debarker-gum fishing rod, which I like and I think do a good job of gently pushing the limit of what is plausible in this world.

This book breaks away from the pattern, but not too much. I think it's a little messy, but there's enough cool stuff to continue the trend of each book being better than the last.

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket

3.5

Better. There's a lot of excitement in this book which the last two didn't really have. I like how quickly we get into the shit's going down section. The unraveling is more interesting. These books are only getting better so far. 

Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

3.5

More of the same. I'm getting a little tired of the vampire stuff. This book is all about vampires while still not really advancing the larger vampire war plot. There's some good character stuff, we finally get to see Murphy and Harry big time team up, which is great.

This series really likes to objectify women in ways that make me uncomfortable, and than are very immature. This book takes the cake in that regard when

Murphy has to crawl under a laser but her ass is too big so she has to take off her pants.

I THINK the next book is when the series will start hitting its stride. I'm hoping.

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket

3.25

Solid improvement on the first book. A little longer. The plot's a bit more interesting. It's hard to say because I knew what was coming, but I think the mystery aspects work better in this book. Like ooo what's he doing what's his plan? The first book it felt pretty obvious the marriage play will be a real marriage. But again, that might just seem obvious in retrospect. Uncle Monty is fun.

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket

3.0

This series was one of my favorites as a kid. First, this book is clearly aimed at someone younger than me. Obviously. I felt similarly about Percy Jackson, but with this book it's more-so. The voice of the author is really unique and does a lot of work. For example, Snicket will often define words for the reader. This is in part to help younger readers who may not know the words, but it's also often comedic or clever. An example of that is "...faking - which here means "feigning" - ...".

The actual substance of this book is pretty underwhelming. It's really short. The story is fine. I think this might end up being one of the weaker entries in the series.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

4.25

Really really great. There's a lot to love here. It's very visually appealing. Great plot. The world feels very deep. The ideas it plays with are really interesting.

There's a lot of fluff that contributes to the depth of worldbuilding and depth of like tone, but I think it's a bit too much. Some parts are pretty slow to get through, and a lot of that is valuable but definitely some of it seems not worth.

But overall I liked this a lot. I might start reading more comics because of Watchmen.

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

3.75

Definitely the weakest of the trilogy. These books set up mystery really well, but they tend not to resolve. The lack of resolution definitely works in this style, but it also generally isn't my preference. This book left me feeling wanting for answers. But of course that was the intention, and even though I wish it had more answers, I really liked the ending. I also think the multiple perspectives, while necessary, is less interesting than really getting into one perspective.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

3.25

Saved by the last 15%.

The bulk of this book is not very interesting. Very little happens that is actually interesting, and it's pretty repetitive. Ender is like mildly interesting. He just kind of does what they want him to do, doesn't really make choices. He tells us he doesn't want to hurt people, but he hurts people because they make him hurt people.

I strongly dislike the worldbuilding. It reminded me of Ready Player One in that a lot of it just doesn't feel thought through. The psychotic fever-dream videogame is nonsense. Sexism and anti-Semitism seem to be worse than they are for us today (there's one woman in the battle school, and there's a stereotype that Jews are good commanders so they get bullied for that or something along those lines). The aliens are called "Buggers". Come on. At one point Ender is

at the top of the standings because he hasn't missed any shots (because he hasn't fired any shots). Nobody with a brain would design standings like that.

The slang is grating. And of course their whole strategy to beat the Buggers is to

send all their ships to an attack that will only succeed if they find a 12 year old genius commander.

This seems like a terrible plan. There's a general sense throughout the book that everybody is really stupid.

"I have this obviously great theory for how the Buggers work but the scientists won't listen to me. WHY? Why have the smartest people in the world not figured out what some random old commander and this twelve year old and us, the reader, can clearly see? Also they discover faster-than-light technology, but the only implication is that they can communicate instantly with their ships. What about causality and time travel? This should be the biggest scientific discovery ever, which completely upturns everything we think we know about everything, but it's just an excuse to be able to command ships that are really far away. AND for some reason they still have pilots in the ships. Couldn't they just as easily pilot them remotely with this technology?

Most of this book annoyed me or bored me, and it was on pace for 2 stars until the end.

The twist that the game wasn't a game is incredible. While I still don't like Ender's lack of agency, I think the ending justifies it. We're led to believe that Ender feels like he has no choice but to go along with their games, but he doesn't want to actually kill anybody. We're led to believe in the end, he will make a character choice to get along with the Buggers instead of killing them or something like that, but instead that opportunity is taken from him. I liked how the Buggers view life completely differently than us, so that they didn't think they were killing us.

I also liked when we get to see Ender strategize. Unfortunately, too often the book likes to focus on less interesting aspects of the world and the story.

In the end, I liked Ender's Game. I liked the were the story ended up. I like Ender's personal journey. I liked the themes at play. I just found the worldbuilding weak, and the meat of the book not especially interesting.