Reviews and Comments

Didn't really click with the characters, too much people saying how terrible they were and doing terrible things because they were working for something they couldn't explain. Then the explanation is very obvious, and has the logic of a game rather than a story.

Was interesting to read, and got some useful ideas from it about apocalyptic endings and visions, but it is quite a densely argued piece of literary critique that makes a lot of references to many different texts I wasn't familiar with.

Recommended by a friend following some earlier reading (Heart of Maleness) this is an interesting feminist angle on popular science tropes. It takes aim at the science, from Darwin onwards, that's been used to "prove" women are inferior to men, and that sex differences are somehow innate and unavoidable. Across a range of different areas, Saini exposes how some big scientific findings are based on very shaky ground. Weak science and patriarchal beliefs have led people to take tiny studies and blow them up out of all importance to reinforce stereotypes, and those working to correct and challenge these assumptions are left to the fringes. Ocasionnally a bit frustrating as she takes her time to debunk flaws that are obvious in the way she describes a study, and she perhaps gives some people a bit too much of the benefit of the doubt, but still well worth reading.

Though I guess that's what you could say about humanity as a whole, right?

Anyway, this is a story about how the next million years of humanity begin with a shipwreck on one of the Galapagos islands, leading to the few people surviving it becoming the ancestors of the next stages of humanity, all narrated by a ghost. But of course, being Vonnegut, it's not really about that, it's about evolution and the dead end of thinking our "big brains" will solve everything for us. There's some good lines and some interesting thoughts in there - this is Vonnegut, after all - but it's slight and unfocused, unsure of what to focus its attention on.

Rare for me to find a sequel more interesting than the original, but this was one of those occasions. It takes the world-building from Memory Called Empire and then allows the characters to step further forward in the story. After being at the heart of the Empire before, we're now at the fringe, where it faces a threat and a potential war, with politics at play that might lead to a catastrophe. Really enjoyed watching how this all played out and the way the characters grew and developed through it.

This is a very interesting essay and brings together a lot of different ideas and within it. It's definitely a challenge to modern masculinity and men's view of women, but perhaps because of the length of it feels like there's more missing from it. Yes, men's attitudes towards women are terrible and are rooted in a terrible history, yes, women need to be freed from the constraints patriarchy places upon them but in concentrating on these issues he doesn't reach the "heart of maleness" of the title, or only uncovers one aspect of it. What it does is mostly very good, but I wanted more on how maleness is a trap in and of itself, a ridiculous idea that traps men into toxic behaviours beyond misogyny, but I'll need to look elsewhere for that.

An intricately detailed novel, where Robinson attempts to depict what life would have been for a prehistoric tribe during the Ice Age. No explicit date or location is given, but context indicates it's about 35-40,000BCE. It's an impressive mental leap to get that far back in time and depict the early days of humanity, but the problem is that it often reads more as imaginative anthropology rather than a novel. Robinson often descends into morasses of description instead of plot, and this has the same issue: after Loon's wander concludes, very little happens in the first part of the book. Any novel like this is going to end up being compared to Golding's The Inheritors, and for me it comes up short in that respect. Golding's world felt stranger and rawer, this one becomes mundane too soon.

I always find short story collections - especially if the stories weren't planned to be collected together - somewhat awkward reads as there's always some that catch my attention and leave me regretting that there isn't more, while others don't engage me at all. Which is the case here, there are some that I really liked and others in that tradition of short stories where nothing much really happens but it's all very immaculately described.

Picked this up from a bookshop in Keswick. It's a nice little collection of local history tales, with some fascinating stories in there, especially some of the more little-known snippets of Cumbrian history and politics. It gets a bit unfocused at points, some of the chapters aren't much more than summaries of information, and the organisation within chapters is sometimes confusing and needed better editing, but the interesting tales keep it going.

I first read this as an undergraduate in the early 90s, and have read it again about once a decade since. It's still fascinating book, breaking away from the conventional eurocentric approach to nationalism to focus on the rest of the world - but also to show how developing national identities there would later influence the development of nationalism and national identities in Europe. Understandably dated in a few parts - Anderson himself notes that the late 70s conflicts in SE Asia weren't as important in the long term as they seemed to him then - and suffers occasionally from dropping in large chunks of untranslated text which assumes the reader is impressively multilingual, but still a fascinating read.

As Scalzi says in his afterword, this is a three-minute pop song of a novel, not a complex symphony. However, even the lightest of pop songs needs effort to make it work, and this does work on its own terms. It's a fun book that rattles along at a good pace, throwing enough big ideas into the mix to keep you reading and not asking too many questions about whether it all makes sense. Spends a lot of time setting up for not much plot, and relies a lot on coincidences to give the ending a personal stake for the protagonist, but does what it says on the tin and people who like this sort of thing will like this.