Status Updates From Secret Life

The stories I read recently:
The Festival of the Freshwater Squid ~ 4 stars
The General Who Is Dead ~ 3 stars
Ghost Dancing With Manco Tupac ~ 4 stars
Learning To Leave the Flesh ~ 3 stars.
Good stories but some of the earlier ones were more my thing. I do think this is a short story collection MANY readers should read just for the story The Secret Life, & think many others I rated 4 or 5 stars are cool too.

*Bone Carver's Tale* was good, would've been a 5 star story but suffered from an authorial decision to end it "too literature-ish" - a bit of a letdown tbh ~ rather than end it with the genre-fiction bang it needed. I've read several writers works that have done this, unfortunately. Haven't read Mieville but I hear he does this too & George RR Martin does this a lot, luckily, w/ his CHARACTERS ONLY. Just my opinion.

Except for the first story, which was more of a 1 pg comic + accompanying 1 pg text, all the stories so far have been 4 to 5 star entertainment + the bonus of being as much literature as genre fiction. Not even 1/2 way done.

Reading the story, The Bone Carver's Tale, and though I think I know where it's going, really wonderful, memorable, with amazing imagery I can envision clearly. I think the mixed reviews on this book are ONLY for the formatting and inside layout. The stories themselves have all been fantastic.

Really like the story *Secret Life*. Glad I decided to read it in the order it should be read. From part to part minus the distractions of unrelated short stories in between.

I decided I can't read this book the way it was layed out. I do't like when a story is broken up into parts and after getting into the beginning of it they veer off to some new story and then take you back to the other one. In a novel, it makes sense. In a short story, DUMB AS F___! So, I'm now reading the story, *Secret Life* from part to part & will read the other short stories after I'm done. Really liked story #3

Love the cover & like Jeff but this book has articles & stories haphazardly pasted all over the place that's a real turn off. Strange for an author who's well known for collecting rare, strange, coveted books; you'd think he would've made a better editorial/layout decision. The good news? After scratching my head on the 1st illustrated story that was about as linear as a crazy straw, the next strange, the 3rd great!

The stories set in Veniss and Ambergris are fucking great - even though a few of the latter are set post-'City of Saints and Madmen' and so I'm a little more lost in them than I'm even meant to be. A number of the others are set during the Conqistadors' invasion of the Incans. At first I was unimpressed and disinterested in them, but as I realized that they were actually interrelated their awesomeness dawned on me

The titular story was brilliant, and I enjoyed the stories set in Veniss and Ambergris, but most of the others have been meh. It's probably that I've come to expect a certain something from a Jeff Vandermeer story and I'm thrown when it isn't as I expect. They're not BAD per se - they're just not what I enjoy about Vandermeer's work.