Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Sep 08, 2010

Elizabeth rated it:

China Miéville is Ceridwen's boyfriend, and you know what it's like when you meet the boyfriend of one of your friends?

First, she calls you up, all giddy. I've met someone new! He's so great. Then there is an hour of blah, blah, blah in which your friend gushes about all his good qualities and you think about painting your toenails or doing the laundry, or you look longingly at the book you put down when you answered the phone. At some point, she says, I can't wait for you to meet h More...

38 comments like (78 people liked it)

Mar 06, 2011

Brad rated it:

I see why so many people are underwhelmed by The City and The City, China Miéville's strange and wonderful homage to the mystery genre and his mother.

It is because while The City and The City is both of those things, it is also -- and more powerfully -- a love letter to his fans and an act of oeuvre snobbery of the first order.

What Miéville has done is to build a story upon his favourite themes, and to require that his audience is familiar with other occurrences of these them More...

21 comments like (51 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2011

Stephen rated it:

AN AMAZING, EARTH-SHATTERING MAKE UP ~~SEXUAL~~ READING EXPERIENCE!!

6.0 stars. We all know that relationships have there ups and downs and that spats are going to happen even to the strongest of them. Well a few months ago, after having a couple of incredible years with China Mieville’s books, (i.e., Perdido Street Station and The Scar and ), both of which are among my ALL TIME FAVORITES...suddenly turmoil. The cause of the turmoil was Un Lun Dun, which I just did not like and thou More...

35 comments like (53 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2012

Brad rated it:

My first reread of The City The City was an experience as convoluted as the grosstopography of Beszel and Ul Qoma. A chapter read, four chapters listened to; three chapters read, two chapters listened to; and on. Teaching this book in a town in a different province than the town I live in, across a straight, over a bridge (my adopted country's longest, the adopted country that plays such an important role in the piece, which is itself a nation sandwiched between nations in our always); a soccer More...

14 comments like (21 people liked it)

Oct 24, 2011

Ian rated it:

Urban Recall

I read this almost 12 months ago, which makes it difficult to recall and recount the tone of the writing.
However, I would like to make some general comments about the novel.

An Abstract High Concept Novel

In one sense, it is an abstract high concept novel.
What does this mean?
It's high concept in the sense that it takes a basic concept and explores it in detail.
And it doesn't stray very far away from that concept.
It More...

10 comments like (16 people liked it)

May 10, 2011

Dan rated it:

Tyador Borlu of Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad is assigned to the murder case of an unknown woman. To find her killer, Borlu must go to the neighboring city of Ul Qoma and team with Qussim Dhatt of the Murder Squad. Can the two detectives from different cultures figure out who the victim is and why she was killed?

Wow. The core premise of The City & The City requires some explaining but I think I'm up to the task. Remember those perceptual illusions you were so enamored with when yo More...

11 comments like (20 people liked it)

Mar 07, 2011

Ninja Sock Puppet added it

My wife and I have an open marriage. We're both free to see other people with remarkably few restrictions or repercussions. Occasionally it causes problems, but we work through them like any other committed married couple and we've been happily married for nearly thirteen years now.

Another man might get jealous of his wife's lovers, but not me. Most of the problems arise when she cheats on them with yet other lovers, poor romantic sods who have no idea they're not the only one More...

21 comments like (32 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2011

Adam rated it:

Mieville in his Bas Lag books took the gothic secondary world fantasy of Peake and M. John Harrison added complexity worthy of THomas Pynchon, a vocabulary matching Gene Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy, and grotesque imagery of Bosch and Ernst; and created a series that may have the cultural impact of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. This book features not even a hint of that. He must have lost his favorite thesaurus with all the sticky notes in the right place. If this was handed to me without a cover Mievil More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2010

Jacob rated it:

Don't want to sound shallow, but...that shade of blue really doesn't make me think of China Miéville. The UK editon looks much better.

(Although it does kinda grow on you, so I'll stop complaining)

Obvious fact #1: China Miéville likes cities. A lot. Urban geography, borders and boundaries, the politics and character of city-states that exist on rails, on ships, beneath the towering bones of a long-dead monster. Here, Miéville gives us the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, More...

4 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jul 22, 2011

Evan rated it:

First off, China Mieville is very brainy and gives good vocabulary. I can see why Ceridwen is dating him as a literary boyfriend.

The plot revolves around a detective investigating a murder in a city shared by two distinct nations. One society, Ul-Ooma, seems to be Turkish, Middle Eastern, Chinese, or North African. The other society, Besel, seems gray, depressive, and borrows words that are vaguely slavic. So, maybe Besel is council estate England and Bulgaria.

The two cul More...

9 comments like (9 people liked it)

Oct 24, 2011

Ian rated it:

Urban Recall

I read this almost 12 months ago, which makes it difficult to recall and recount the tone of the writing.
However, I would like to make some general comments about the novel.

An Abstract High Concept Novel

In one sense, it is an abstract high concept novel.
What does this mean?
It's high concept in the sense that it takes a basic concept and explores it in detail.
And it doesn't stray very far away from that concept.
It More...

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 16, 2011

Richard rated it:

When I finished this I first gave it four stars, but as I thought about it and pondered what I had to say here, that rating kept nudging up. Oddly, I think I liked this book more than it deserves.

First, the obligatory synopsis: Miéville has presented us with a fable set in contemporary times. The novel is a murder mystery and police procedural: a young woman has been killed in Besźel, and the story is told from the perspective of the investigator of the crime. Besźel is a struggling More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Mar 14, 2011

Michael rated it:

Inspector Borlu of Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad investigates the murder of a woman whose body was found naked at a park, a mattress thrown on top of it. At first he believes it to be a local prostitute. However, as he investigates, things quickly get more complicated, and more dangerous for Borlu.

While the body was found in the city of Beszel, Borlu realises the murder was done in the city of Ul Quoma. Ul Quoma is a city which occupies the same physical space as Beszel, but is 'un More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Shanon rated it:

My head is spinning after reading this book. Bear with me while I try to explain. Two fictional cities somewhere in Europe exist on the SAME land. How that works – no idea! But these two cities dislike each other SO much that they are not even allowed to acknowledge the citizens of the other city – wait it gets more confusing – they have to ‘unsee’ each other which I guess is worse than not acknowledging them. At one point a phone call was placed from one city to the other (mind you same ar More...

6 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2011

William Thomas rated it:

So, I first heard of China Mieville through a Neil Gaiman review of Perdido Street Station. I thought the review was exceptional and wanted to read Mieville's work. I found reviews on this site to be somewhat polarizing. He is either beloved or dismissed. I, however, with this book, found myself in the exact middle of spectrum and when I finished this book I said, "Meh." It was no great shakes and I do not for the life of me understand the Hugo Award for it.

If you take Mic More...

10 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 18, 2011

Knowledge Lost rated it:

If Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick wrote a book together it would be very similar to The City & the City (if you throw a little George Orwell into the mix). China Miéville calls his novels fantasy/weird fiction and this is no different, though I think I would consider it more Science Fiction. There is a complex plot full of twists and turns in an even more complex couple of cities. These cities are confusing and very hard to navigate, you feel like a complete alien in them and China doesn More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 15, 2010

Sarah rated it:

Most totalitarian governments eventually figured out that the most efficient sort of mind control is the kind that is self enforced, and that self censorship, carefully instilled, is the most effective way to control public discourse. A similar form of self policing occurs today, despite our free societies. Urban anonymity coupled with the internet allows us to only associate with the like-minded (as many other people have more gracefully pointed out already). No longer forced to congregate with More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Sep 08, 2010

Amy rated it:

I enjoyed this book, although it was not as mind-bending as Perdido Street Station. It's much smaller in scope and in the complexity of the ideas explored.
I've been reading quite a few mystery novels lately (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Anne Perry's Charlotte and William Pitt novels) so this one blended in with the rest of my reading.
I liked the way the two cities were juxtaposed - it created a situation that reminded me in some ways of the North Korea/South Korea divide. It also More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Jason rated it:

A masterpiece, and the standout of Mieville's already extraordinary literary oeuvre. A noird police procedural unlike any other, built on the highly original premise of overlapping societal borders, and the ontological bureaucracy created to maintain those boundaries. Set grosstopically in the interstices between Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma become a wide-ranging crime scene for Inspector Tyador Borlu, who must solve a murder mystery whilst treading the si More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 22, 2011

Daniel rated it:

It is some hours since I put down "The City and the City," and I find myself mulling over the ramifications of the titular cities that Mieville created and then cast in a bizarre state of fusion. I wonder, now, about everyday details that Mieville didn't go into, such as cell phone reception (wouldn't these interfere in close proximity) or parking (surely subject to a byantine set of rules). What about the upper class: do they not play with breach to flaunt their wealth? What kind of s More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2009

Greg rated it:

This book kind of makes my head hurt. Unlike the two previous novels I've read by Mieville, this one takes his outlandish and strange and doesn't put them into their own world, but into ours. Somewhere in our world there are two Cities, they are neighbors to one another and passage between them is strictly monitored and enforced. These two cities are sort of rivals and don't really like each other much, and they actually occupy pretty much the exact same geographical space as one another. Th More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Jun 18, 2011

Sean rated it:

I've had mixed experiences with China Miéville. I read Perdido Street Station shortly after it came out ('before he was famous', to employ a tired supposed-Hipster cliché) and enjoyed it immensely up until its famously unsatisfying conclusion. I enjoyed The Scar a lot less, probably because I read it straight after Perdido Street Station and was feeling slightly burnt out on encountering a dozen outlandishly fascinating concepts every chapter. Un Lun Dun, on the other hand, read so much like an More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 21, 2011

Joel rated it:

More compelling as a concept than it is as a mystery. Though the central conceit is rather confusing at first, once you work out the logistics (and get used to Mieville's thesaurus-assisted writing style -- contumely, ossified, topolganger), it's really a lot of fun just to inhabit his world and consider the metaphysical questions he poses about how much of a role observation plays in shaping reality.

3 comments like (9 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2009

Mike rated it:

LEFTOVER--Only half-way through, but many thanks to Donald (re the author and this book in particular) and Brad--this is damn intriguing.

AND ON TO THE NOW--finished. (And cut all that personal malarkey.) I believe I've posted the occasional snotty aside about the fantasy genre here, making some sweeping dismissal that I'm only half-serious about. But I must admit: there are moments, when I've tried to make my way through some hotshot newbie that my friends are raving about, that I More...

6 comments like (26 people liked it)

Oct 23, 2011

Bill rated it:

The premise is extraordinarily interesting and meticulously developed. The question propounded: what if two opposed cities existed side by side (with more than an occasional overlap) but were separated, not by an actual wall like East and West Berlin, but by the deeply enculturated habit of deliberate ignorance, a studied denial of the other, a fierce determination not to see? The central dilemma: when a murder is committed in one city, and the body is dumped in the other, how do the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 16, 2010

Laura rated it:

Wow, what a book!

I was a little worried at the beginning, I had a hard time getting into the audiobook-- I couldn't get a handle on the world for a while. In some ways, I never did, but I think that was deliberate.

Imagine two countries, cleaved apart at some point in the past. Some event, momentous enough that citizens of each are not permitted any contact with the other, even to acknowledge the existence of a person or place belonging to the other.

Now ima More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2012

Isabel rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 04, 2012

Tony rated it:

Well...

Not my usual fares. I use the plural because I almost snobbishly avoid both science-fiction and murder mysteries. This was a merger of the two forms, but something else beyond that. And it really sounded interesting.

It's wonderfully imagined: A city and another city sharing the same place yet for reasons not entirely made clear the citizens of each are prohibited from seeing the other city and it's citizens. If they are close to seeing, they must quickly unsee. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 08, 2010

Pam rated it:

"Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, and 1984, The City & The City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights." How could I not read a book with that sentence on its book jacket?

Fabulous book and complicated. I had to read the book slowly with a lot of rereading before I truly understood how the two city states on the edge of Eastern Europe shared the same physical space. I enjoyed it as much as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Feb 02, 2009

Neil rated it:

I'm reviewing this in print elsewhere, so I won't say much. I was excited to get this as a review assignment because I loved Perdido Street Station and had been itching to take on more Mieville. The premise of two cities that exist in the same place but are kept separate was fascinating and seemed loaded with potential meaning. Unfortunately, that meaning never really emerged. The lead character was not interesting (nor were most of the others too for that matter) and the mystery in this mystery More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)