Mike > Recent Status Updates

I love Nora as a protagonist, even more than I liked the one from Ghosts. And this dialogue is excellent. I was kind of lukewarm on Ghosts, but I'm really loving this play so far.

I honestly don't even know what I can say about this book, except that it is a very good reading experience.

I'll be honest: I have no idea what Barnard was attempting to accomplish. The last quarter of the book is very different in tone from the first three quarters, meaning that the book really lacks cohesion. And I have no idea why we're seeing flashbacks, why this book is set in the future, or really why any decision was made. Barnard seems to have something to communicate, but I can't grasp at it.

Y'know, normally I'd mind so much infodumping and narrative summary, but because the voice is so good, and the way Zusak writes the information is so interesting, I don't really care as much as I normally would. A lesson for authors: if you have to get across a lot of dry information, make your writing interesting, and no one will notice how dry it is.

I'll say this at least: I was not expecting the book to go in this direction. The novel still feels very shapeless and formless to me, and I'm still not entirely sure what Barnard was going for. But there are at least some good ideas here.

This is a really good example of capturing a character's voice in a really unconventional way. I was really not expecting this. But I have a feeling that I'm going to really like this book.

Joy: 4/5 A little unfocused, but in general, very evocative and poignant. He did a good job of writing religious discussions in a way that agnostics like me can still appreciate. The Little Shoemakers: 2/5 Subpar translation, too much narrative summary, most of the story deeply tedious. I see what Singer was going for (hence the two stars) but... man, there had to be a better way of accomplishing it.

And now we're in a mental hospital. Great. Look, I don't want to be pessimistic, but mental hospitals are one of those things that authors get wrong nine out of ten times it's attempted. And to be honest, based on how this book has gone so far, I'm not given much reason to think it will be an exception.

In spite of what I said in my last status update, the whole 'Newsouls are victims of prejudice' analogy is really vague and much cheesier than I remember it.

The sections on gender were kind of painful, but at least less bad than they could've been. But on the whole, this is very much a book for middle-class parents. Most of the book assumes that you grow up in a relatively safe environment and make a good deal of money. I imagine that this won't be very useful to poor parents, particularly poor POC.

Gimpel the Fool: 2/5 This is a lot less quirky and more depressing than I think Singer intended. The Man from Cracow: 3/5 We're kept at an arm's length from the story, which I don't like, but the ideas itself are kind of interesting.

Finally, after more than halfway through the story, we get what appears to be the inciting incident. This pacing is very slow, to the point where I'm honestly not sure what Barnard was going for. Also, it's just now occurring to me that Haze is a huge manic pixie dream girl.

It's been a long time since I read something good that I don't have to think too hard about. This isn't mindless entertainment per se - a lot of effort was clearly put into this - but it is less weighty and more fun than what I usually read. Not that the tone is light exactly, it's just dark-ish in a fun way, rather than a disturbing or a depressing way.

The chapter on mental illness wasn't as painful as I feared it might be, so that's a plus for this book. This isn't exactly the most useful and insightful thing I've ever read, but it's not awful either.

I liked the chapter about tobacco - the ones on alcohol and marijuana, not as much. My worry about this book is that it hits a worst of both worlds scenario, where it has too much technical information about the brain to be an accessible parenting book, but not enough of that technical information to be useful for someone studying psychology. It doesn't quite know what it wants to be.

Man, it's been a long time since I read the previous book in this series. But honestly, I'm not having trouble keeping up. The recapping is there, without feeling intrusive or too shameless, which is good. And I have a lot of nostalgia for this tone and these characters.

I honestly don't know what to make of this so far. I'm not really sure what this is supposed to be about so far, or what I'm supposed to take from it. All I really know is that I'm not a huge fan of the artwork. I guess we'll see where this goes from here? I'm honestly at a loss as to how to form an opinion on this.

This writing is so unedited. Oftentimes, Barnard writes a completely different word from what he meant - 'queue' in place of 'cue', 'feudal' in place of 'futile', 'Rowling' in place of 'rolling', ect. Also, I'm still not sure what the plot of this book is supposed to be - there's no underlying tension or goal that the characters have.

I am going to complain about every unnecessary update GR makes until they fix the 'want to read' bars that literally can't be read by some people, or repair the horribly glitchy ordered shelves feature, or do any thing else that actually needs to be done.

So far, Jensen's anecdotes about teenagers not getting help when their friends get alcohol poisoning suggest we should lower the consequences for underage drinking, not that we should talk to teenagers about the dangers of alcohol more. Also, I.Q. tests were literally made to 'prove' that immigrants were less intelligent than Americans, I hate that they're still used in serious scientific literature.

That was around 20 different twists in the last 30 pages or so, and I'm totally lost. I have legitimately never been so baffled by a book in my entire life. What is Swain trying to say? I think Gaia's society was supposed to be an analogue for authoritarian communism, but how does that add to the themes?

Also, we are nowhere close to a natural resolution. How can Swain end this in literally twelve pages?

The pacing throughout the book has been way too slow. There are too many minor characters to keep track of, and most of them aren't very interesting, partly because of how boring and slow-paced the plot is. This climax is failing because it doesn't have any sort of adequate buildup, and the infodumps continue to interrupt it.

Jensen is definitely not a writer, and I'm afraid this book will be a little painful to read due to the sloppy writing. But she is definitely very informed, and I'm glad for an empirical approach to the neurology of adolescence, instead of the less precise approach that most parenting books offer.

This voice is incredibly cheesy. Maybe for an MG book, I could at least say it's cringe-worthy in a realistic way, but for YA, it's inexcusable. Even without that, the writing isn't very good - the dialogue feels forced and awkward, and the prose isn't much better. The paragraphs are in odd places, and Robins seems to use semi-colons and commas interchangeably. Also, the opening chapters were amateurish.

Larbalestier seems a lot more interested in Kelpie than in Dymphna. Certainly, I am - Kelpie is the far more unusual and unique character, to the point where I'm not sure why Dymphna's even a protagonist.

The worldbuilding is next to nonexistent so far. There's some subtle stuff, but for the most part, other than the existence of digital diving and the smog in the air, this world is almost identical to today's society. It feels like a big missed opportunity.

Also, there's not much of a plot so far. I'm not sure what the conflict is supposed to be, and I feel like I should know by now.

I'm not sure if I can even properly rant about how jarring the shift in tone is. Even more than the tone change, it's just a baffling writing decision. What could this story possibly gain from introducing a totally new world in the last hundred pages!? What purpose does this serve? How does this add to the themes? Not only does this fail, I'm at a complete loss as to what Swain was going for.

There's just no tension to this plot. I think the big problem is that Kelpie and Dymphna aren't very motivated characters, and the stakes aren't clear. So Larbalestier is trying to shove tension into the stories by putting them in dangerous situations. But because of the lack of an overarching conflict, the tension ends the second they get out of danger and we see any downtime.

Maybe I don't feel such a distance from Janie. Maybe what I was seeing here wasn't distance, just a more subtle way of being close to her. What I'm saying is, this ending is making me feel a lot of emotions.

I don't even know what I can say about this. This is top notch Alan Moore, absolutely phenomenal. I'm not sure if I'd call this better than V for Vendetta or Watchmen, but it comes close. And the artwork is phenomenal, to boot - easily the best illustrations I've ever seen for an Alan Moore work.