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This is a master class in worldbuilding. But the pacing could stand to be a little faster; there's no sense of urgency to the plot yet. We'll see where this goes.

I feel like Castle is trying to make this novel less boring. I appreciate your efforts dude. But this isn't a dystopia - that might've been interesting. This is just a plain old utopia. There are, sad to say, no cool secrets behind it.

So far, I'm liking this. The prose is great, this is a compelling premise, and the worldbuilding is done quite well. I think this is going to be pretty good.

This book in a nutshell:



Fraizer: *says something about Walden Two*

Castle: You're wrong!

Fraizer: *proves that he's actually right*

Repeat ~300 times

Meadows' writing is so atmospheric. I think that's probably the best book - it's such an immersive experience to read. It kind of reminds me of Amelia Awater-Rhodes in that way.

Okay, so far, this actually kind of sucks. Lots of very clumsy infodumping, and the characterization makes this feel like a John Green rip-off. (I honestly never thought John Green was that bad at writing nerdy girls, mostly because he didn't try that often. But the people who imitate him? INSUFFERABLE.)

Prediction: This is going to be awesome. I normally don't get my hopes up like that, but I've been looking forward to this book for a while.

Part of the way this book is dated is that we know a lot more about developmental psychology than we did when Skinner wrote this. So a lot of his assumptions are based on the idea that children are basically just mini-adults, and if they act like kids, it's because we've socialized them badly, and they haven't learned yet. So I doubt that marriage at 15 would work, because kids aren't psychologically ready.

This isn't a perfect book, but it's easily good enough to prove to me that Darnielle isn't just a lyricist trying something he can't actually do. I would definitely read another John Darnielle novel.

A nonfictional book would've worked so much better for Skinner's purposes. This is painfully boring in comparison. The fact that this is a novel seems to be entirely so that Skinner can hand-wave more easily and avoid citing his sources.

I kind of wish the novel didn't stay so contained in Sean's head. I get that he's an isolated character, but we see so few of his actual experiences that it's hard to follow the chronology. If I hadn't been told beforehand, I wouldn't have even known that the story was told in reverse. It's pretty good other than that, though, so I'll keep my hopes up.

As far as utopian societies go, this one seems at least sort of plausible. I'm kind of wary of any one person claiming to have all the solutions, but I can imagine this at least being a viable starting point. Incentives to work that are based around community instead of competition, with mechanisms in place to make sure undesirable work still gets done... I like it.

As a novel, this still sucks.

Henne Fire: 3/5 Not sure why, but this one just didn't make a big impression on me. I guess that's a consequence of how much narrative summary Singer uses - if the topic doesn't interest me, there's nothing to make me remember what's happening.

This appears to be structured like Tallahassee, where the story comes from how you piece together the vignettes. Not necessarily a bad thing - Liar was structured the same way, and I love that book. And I'm liking the main character so far. I wasn't sure what Darnielle would be like as a novelist, but this seems to be working out so far. I am cautiously optimistic.

You know, I should be evaluating whether or not I buy this as the utopia that Skinner wants me to buy it as, but honestly, I'm too bored. The furthest I've gotten so far is that Walden Two is to civilization names as Renesme is to baby names.

Man, I had forgotten how bad the artwork was. I'll never complain about David Lloyd's art in V for Vendetta again. I also feel like I'm missing large parts of the story because so much of this is in German. Such a weird decision for an American audience to not even translate it. It's a shame, because this action sequence actually seems pretty cool, and there are a lot of interesting ideas.

So, how much of this novel do you think is going to be written in infodump? The first 30%? First 50%? Maybe just the entire damn thing? Take your bets now!

So, this is not terribly well-written. I guess the prose isn't bad, but the beats that the story has hit so far are very predictable, and the pacing is a little rushed.

I picked this semi-randomly from a vintage book store, and for all I know, it could be the best thing I've ever read, or entirely awful. Only one way to find out.

Skinner clearly has little to no experience in writing fiction. The structure is amateurish and awkward, and the prose mostly feels like it came from a technical report, despite ostensibly being first person.

I am going to petition to Congress for editions of classics without tedious introductions.

That said, as unnecessary intros go, this one isn't too bad. Skinner's values seem to match mine in a lot of ways. I'm just concerned that this fictional novel opens with nothing but an explanation of the allegory. I have no problem with fiction with real-world implications, but like... it should also have a good story.

This is probably the weakest volume in the series so far. It's honestly kind of a weird decision to suddenly go back in time like this, especially given how interesting the previous events were. Not that there's any individual chapter I dislike at all, they just don't fit together well.

It's such a delight to be early on in this series. I am so glad that I have ~20 volumes left, rather than only two or three.

The Slaughterer: 4/5 Very well-written, even if the themes are a bit boring to me.

The Dead Fiddler: 3/5 Seems a bit redundant, given that it's pretty similar to the previous story, but I still enjoyed it somewhat.

It's books like this that make me wish I had a better lit class so that I could understand the context behind this and why someone would write this. That would be truly fascinating.

I am surrounded by beauty without the means to appreciate it. (Alright, more like without the energy, but still.)

Seriously, I am going to reread this book someday and absolutely love it.

Zeidlus the Pope: 3/5 Not a bad story, just kind of hard to distinguish from Singer's other stories.

The Last Demon: 4/5 This one does a much better job of expanding on the themes Singer tends to reuse.

Short Friday: 4/5 Some very nice dialogue, more than Singer usually offers.

The Seance: 3/5 Meh. It stars out promising, but it doesn't end up being very memorable.

I feel like trying to discuss this book in my Lit class is going to be overwhelming.

I see we've reached the 'tediously explaining everything' part of the novel. Maybe if I had been following the series more closely, this would be more interesting, but as it is, this feels like the most boring possible way Meadows could've imparted this information.