The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik 
3.0 Stars
12-20-2021
Fine. It has the same strengths as the first story in the series, but also the same flaws. On the strengths side you have inventive spell/monster design (though not quite as impressive as the first book), solid and distinctive characters, and moments of satisfactory melodrama. On the flaw side there are thematic/story beats that get repeated way too many times, and the world building fundamentally doesn't make sense as it would require every wizard family to have 20+ kids in order to make the child mortality rates work out. Oh and the protagonist is the worst person in bed; she's contemptuous, and selfish, and her boyfriend literally kills himself after sleeping with her once.
There is no Anti-Memetics Division
3.0 Stars
12-10-2021
Not as clever as I first hoped, but I was still affectionate towards the book at the end. The basic idea is that there is an Anti-Memetics Division that is supposed to deal with artifacts/creatures/ideas that can erase themselves from human memory, or which can threaten/destroy people purely through being known or comprehended.
The book originated as fan-fic in the SCP universe, a fan-fic that was gradually extended and collated into a full story told through a number of vignettes over the years. The series has flaws; some low quality writing at the start that only gradually shapes up, plenty of comic book logic, too many thematic elements (ghosts? aliens? spells? orbital cannons?) overly-broad strokes, and as mentioned above not being as clever as I had hoped from the title/conceit. Still! Despite the list of imperfections the story often had a pleasantly gonzo vibe, and was perfectly happy to go through any number of framing devices as it travels backwards and forwards through memory and time.
Codex, by Lev Grossman
1.0 Stars
12-7-2021
This was a superficially normal thriller/mystery, about an investment banker between jobs who has been hired to look for an ancient and possibly mythical book inside a forgotten library. This normal story is then paired with more high-brow literary attempts at adding various meta-textual strands to the story. Unfortunately, none of it works. The story is terrible as a thriller, and it is terrible at trying to do anything new or clever with the meta-text. My assumption is that big-brain Grossman saw the massive success of Dan Brown's **The Da Vinci Code**, thought that he could easily duplicate that low-brow book and rake in the cash, and then completely failed. It's not so easy when you're in the driver's seat!
So, in more detail. The first thing you notice about the book is that basically nothing interesting happens in the first 100 pages. A bold choice. Also, most of the characters in the book range between asshole, cringy, or unmanic pixie dream girl. So that does not help. Later on in the book more interesting possibilities open up, and then absolutely none of them pay off:
E.g. 1) there is an adventure-type video game that the main character plays, and at points the adventure in the video game seems to duplicate or rhyme with the adventure that the protagonist is having. And then you pair that up with the object of his search, a book from the 1400's, of which only second hand and incomplete versions exist, and those versions seem in many ways anachronistic? E.g. the old text has odd and varied creatures, characters die and come back and seem to randomly change in motivation, scenes and countries dissolve and reshape, etc. And it kind of sounds like the description you would get if a 1400's person were to see a modern video game (Fortnight?) and then try to describe said video game. So maybe there are time shenanigans going on? Maybe the author of the ancient text is immortal, or prescient, or had contact with a future person or artifact? (Spoiler, none of this is happens). Tying into this theory, the protagonist meets the creator of the video game, a singularly brilliant, monk like, extremely short dude (it was mentioned earlier in the book how short a 1400's Englishman would be) who speaks in a weird accent, like he learned modern English by watching TV. Maybe he is the author of the Codex as well? (Spoiler, no).
E.g. 2) At one point, the protagonist has reached a fail state in the video game, and also seems to be at a dead end in his investigation. This was interesting? Like what if you had a mystery novel where the investigator simply makes the wrong choices and fails to solve the mystery and the novel just disolves around them. And it would explain the poor quality of the novel, as a sort of shambling mis-production that falls further and further apart (e.g. something like like Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading, or the BBC's A Christmas Carol). This does not happen, the investigation gets back on track.
E.g. 3) The protagonist is seeking a book for a rich English Duchess, and apparently the book contains a secret that is extremely relevant to the modern day. The secret turns out to be that the book **implies** that 600 years ago the Duke of Wentworth's ancestor had an affair and a baby with a commoner. Which is just the most underwhelming thing ever, and that nobody would care about in the present day except the most neurotic of nobles.
E.g. 4) The protagonist has no reason to do any of this. Basically he meets the Duchess once, and after that point he is under a Geass/Charm to seek out the book. His actions don't fit with his personality or his position in life, and every time he speaks with the Duchess it's like an electric wire in his brain. So maybe there is something odd going here? E.g. rather than just being bad writing, maybe there is a super natural explanation? Is this book part of The Magicians extended universe? And you do notice that the Duchess and Duke's other servitors have a similarly slavish quality to them. And then, spoiler, no. There is no interesting explanation. This is indeed just bad writing and plotting, where people do idiotic things that are against their character purely to advance the plot.
Final Notes on the novel: don't have sex while committing a robbery!
The Expanse, Book 9
3.0 Stars
12-3-2021
A fine ending to the 9 books of the Expanse series. This final book has many of the same thematic elements and plot beats as the earlier books, and though they've reached their expiration date, they haven't truly begun to go rancid and stale. So: you have the protomolecule up to its usual protomolecule bullshit, although this time on a slightly grander scale as it's trying to NeonGenesisEvangelionize the whole human race into one sublime and gooey entity. There's also the creatures from beyond, who continue to try and mess with our precious universal constants. We find out a bit more about them; it turns out that this whole inter-universal war is because they are NIMBY's who object to our ring-space uglying-up their universe. And finally you have the Laconians, memorably represented by the omega-asshole Tanaka. The idea at the end of the last book was that it was not necessary to orbitally bombard the Laconian homeworld, since their main fleet was gone and their precursor ship yards were destroyed. Surely this would be the end of things and the Laconians could just return to being one world among many, without the need for committing yet another war crime. Nope! The Laconians are back and in full flower in this book, so, nice going Naomi. Fortunately the Roci is on the case, and wraps everything up semi-neatly. I think the ending has some problems, since the protomolecule is still out there and just waiting to be experimented on again, but eh, whatever.
Overall it is not great? But it is fine, and it is fast reading, and I do still love the parts where the author retreats from hand-wavy alien-tech and just returns to life aboard ship, and the minor clashes among the gunships and destroyers. As with the very first book, the authors have a deft hand for the audible, and for the thrums and sounds of their sci-fi vessels. I want to be in a crash couch when a rail-gun fires! It seems like it would be so delightful and cathartic, like combining the visceral feel of a roller coaster ride with the excitement and danger of paintball with the serene joy of a computer game.
Inspector Garrmosh, #6.5, by Louise Penny
2.0 Stars
11-30-2021
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. These novels seem to be childishly simple in terms of writing and plot. And the portions are small too! This mystery story was only 65 pages long.
It Was All a Lie, by Stuart Stevens
2.0 Stars
11-30-2021
Kind of a mess. This book was brought to my attention by Driftglass, who singled out Stuart Stevens as the sole Never-Trump media figure to fully admit that the Republican Party's problems did not start in 2016, but rather have been building for decades. And this is true, Stevens does admit problems, and he does have a few genuinely funny zingers about his party. Despite that though the book was unsatisfying to me. This is partly because the history of Republican corruption that Stevens lays out was already long familiar to me, and so I wasn't that interested in yet another accounting of those events. Another thorn is that while Stevens is honest and repentant for a Republican, that is still like meeting an enlightened kobold. Yes, he is quite advanced for his race, but he is still below-average when compared to normal people. So you have these bits where Stevens can look at Trump and realize that "yeah, we must have fucked up to arrive at this point", but he still can't bring himself to say "We should all be supporting the Democratic party". Or he insults orange-racist, but he still can't bring himself to say anything good about Hillary Clinton. Or he thinks he cares about campaign finance reform and reducing the corrupting influence of money in politics, but he cannot recognize that Elizabeth Warren exists. Or the opposite version of this happens, where Stevens realizes that something terrible has happened in the Republican Party, but he hasn't really back-propagated that information through the rest of his brain. And so he is still dropping positive anecdotes about these Republican party figures like they were not stepping stones towards ruin. It has an Eichmann at Jerusalem feel; Stuart Stevens recognizes at some level that killing millions of people was wrong, but he does still very much want to tell you about how nice some of his co-workers were and oh take a look at this medal he got for making the trains run ahead of schedule.
In summary, Never-Trump Republicans are a good example of why Stalin had to send landlords and shopkeepers to work the farms. These people have spent decades steeping in conservative propaganda and it has left their brains raddled and useless. They need long years of de-programming, reflection, and radical introspection just to bring them up to the level of a reasonably intelligent ~20 year old.
The Barrow, Book 2 and Book 3, by Mark Smylie
4.0 Stars
11-15-2021
Great, but also greatly deranged. Continues the story of Stepjan Blackheart, a power-hungry power-bottom who lives for drama, as well as a cast of 100+ other characters as they slowly, ever so slowly, advance the timeline of the Known World.
First the good. At least to my mind, Smylie is an excellent writer. I love his little vignettes, I love his world building sensibilities, and I think he writes great pieces of action-horror. I came into this book with zero excitement, but within ~20 pages I was remembering why Smylie is such a personal favorite. I like that Smylie creates something different; he has a style and a world that is refreshingly separate from the main lines of fiction and fantasy. There were some slight, slight nods to contemporary politics in these books, and while it is nice to know that Smylie is on the good side politically/culturally, I was also saddened to find even the lightest connections between the world he creates and our own dumb timeline. Other notes: a character from the Artesia RPG's sample adventure makes an appearance in the first book, which I know because my brain decided that particular bit of information would be worth preserving for 20 years. Thanks brain, top notch work.
And now, the not so good. As best as I can figure out, Smylie started out trying to write a gigantic, Game-of-Thrones style saga that would cover massive events from many different angles over many different years. He then realized, like a indie-dev trying to make an MMO, that whoa this is actually a vast amount of work and there is no way I will ever finish this. And so in these books we are getting the pieces that Smylie did finish, but they have all sorts of oddities since they are just randomish parts of a much larger, incomplete vision. This comes through clearly in the first book, which is ~200 pages long, and introduces well over 100 characters. Which is simply insane, and could not have been the intent when he started out writing. There's also the characteristic Mark Smylieisms, e.g. the random mixing of in-depth lectures on geography, history, religion, trade, dynastic relations, etc. etc. with action-horror, ultra-gruesome magic, fairly complex deceptions and spy work, main battle, assassinations, and extremely graphic sex. And on top of that there's a complete overload of information, with Smylie dumping out hundreds of character names, place names, details of several religions, the ultra-specific details of dress and armor and armament, etc. etc. Too much, too much! It completely reads as outsider-art, which is part of the reason I love it, but is also part of the reason that people who don't have a 20 year investment in the writer will be turned off. Oh and I think a lot of the action/events of the novel will only make sense in the context of the RPG it is based on? Like there is a mechanical reason that characters occasionally launch into poetry/prayer/song, but that won't necessarily be clear to a fresh reader.
And perhaps over all there is also a feeling of melancholy, in that A) it is very unlikely that Smiley will finish his series in any meaningful way, unless he starts writing more than ~50 pages per year, and B) even the stuff that he is writing is mostly filling the details and side-paths of a time period and location that he's pretty well covered in his earlier books & RPGs. E.g. the same stuff he was covering 20 years ago. Finish it off! Mark a line through it on your checklist, and move on to fresh projects.
Anyway, despite all the criticisms I am happy that I read these books, I would buy more of them, and I wish all the best for their talented and insane author.
Her Body and Other Parties
1.0 Stars
10-15-2021
Well, this is no Tabloid Dreams. I read a few of the short stories and the author seems sad about something? Unclear what it is. Has she tried getting outside and walking more? Would that help? Maybe watch some anime? DNF.
Ancient Dreams - Ancient Ruins
X Stars
10-5-2021
A new entry in the genre of LitTRPG (Literary Tree RPG). Reading this made me deeply ambivalent. One the one hand, it makes me think we should revert to an earlier save. Just erase all the books, movies, tv, and other stories we have created over the last 100 hundred years, and then start again fresh. On the other hand, maybe we should allow every weirdo autist with an internet connection to publish and audiobookize their fan-fictions. Let a trillion deranged and retarded flowers bloom. I'm not sure which course would be better. DNF.
(Book #5 in my Autumn of Auscapism series. Also the last one I think. A random sampling of what the internet likes has brought me only grief.)
Zodiac Academy
1.0 Stars
9-30-2021
Ok, first the good. The author follows the old advice about catching the reader's interest within the first few lines/pages, and starts her story with the protagonist trying to sneak through a window, but really having to struggle because her dump-truck ass is just too wide to fit. Brilliant writing.
From there things go downhill though, as I realize this is not a Fantasy book but rather a "Romance" book. E.g. Terrible people, terrible love interests, nobody has ever heard of consent, Azad Azad, etc. etc. These romance writers are some sick, sick people. They need Jesus, or Tzeentch. Anything really but these same, dumb, terrible, boring patterns. Did not finish.
(Book #4 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
Moarrrr Warhammer40K audio dramas and audio books
3.0 - 4.0 Stars
9-25-2021
The Oubliette: Heresy: sometimes ok?
Deacon of Wounds: A documentary about Florida's COVID response.
Darkly Dreaming:A short and not particularly distinguished drama about a masked ball. Pour one out for Deshi though, the only genial, diplomatic, and self-effacing character in the entire Warhammer universe.
Moar Warhammer40K audio dramas and audio books
2.0 - 4.0 Stars
9-15-2021
Some of the take-aways here are that A) horror stories really lend themselves to audio book readings and B) WarHammer stories do this in triplicate, since they give the authors and readers license to take everything to an extreme and really reap the full benefits of the audio medium. I liked basically all of these stories, even though they did have a certain sameness after a while (hint: everyone dies). Despite this similarity these stories mostly distinguished themselves by enlivening and embroidering their tale far beyond the point a less skillful or enthusiastic team would, and in really just going whole hog with the horror of the different situations. In more detail:
Perdition's Flame: Too angry to die! I'm not 100% sure what was going on here but I enjoyed the squelchy ride. I think there was some more detailed WarHammer lore I was supposed to know which would have made the ending make more sense? (Edit: after further research, the lore is that some GamesWorkshop folks saw GhostRider and thought "That is cool, that should be part of our setting".) But I am always here for a Nurgle story. *heart_emote*
The Way Out: Too cold to die! A fairly straightforward but also quick and varied murder fest, as a crippled ship's crew goes from bad to worse.
The Wicked and the Mad: You have an overzealous commissar (Mad; also the weakest story as it was a bit too long), a soldier haunted by the black deed she committed (Wicked; with a genuinely scary ghost and a brilliantly realized ship and ship's company (also a great narrator)), and then the final story which is sort of WarHammer meets Alien, where a Lvl 1 priest goes up against the steadily mutating warp beast that is stalking the station (Mildly wicked? the main character is not a moral exemplar, but also holy shit was he out of his depth).
Reverie: WarHammer meets Annihilation; an audio book about a gate to the Warp that is slowly infecting and subverting the land around it. Has fan-favorite themes of symbolic contagion, revelatory texts written by madmen, reality slips, time slips, time loops, reincarnation, and bodily liberation. I liked it. It suffers from a common Warhammer problem of being about 30% too long, but if it had sharpened the story up a bit and made the structure of the story a few increments weirder, I think it would have been genuinely excellent rather than just good.
Sepulturum: By far the weakest of the set. The general description is that it's a Walking Dead type series of adventures in a hive city, as survivors of a zemi-zombie plague deal with the undead and each other. The story is undercut by A) the plot makes no fucking sense, B) mixing random elements and themes in ways that make no sense, and C) being too long. The narrator was fine at her job, but for some inexplicable reason there was no indication of when the PoV changes. From one sentence to the next, the meaning of "I" changes and you have to figure out from context that they have moved on to a different thread in the narrative. This was particularly confusing the first few times it happens! To add to the oddness, the narrator does say the chapter headings like normal, it is only the breaks inside of a chapter that are nulled out.
The Dragon's Banker
1.0 Stars
8-23-2021
A comprehensively deranged artistic creation. On the one hand I don't want to criticize the book, since I think that gives the book more validation than it is worth? On the other hand, I also *really* want to criticize the book.
The first thing you notice with this book is the audio-book reader, who is the author, and who has a slight and reedy voice that is always *just* on the verge of cracking. It is uncanny how bad of a speaking voice he has, and it is weird that there was no one in his life who could have told him not to do this thing. The next thing you notice is that the author has inexplicably named his main character "Sailor", so that any number of sentences start with phrases like "Hey, Sailor..." Which makes it sound like it is going to be the lead in to a raunchy proposition? But it never is, because the author is not a fun or humorous person. For the plot of the story, I'm not going to delve too deep into it, but the basic idea is "what if neoliberalism was not bad?" It takes place in a fantasy world, with dragons and renaissance level tech and a protagonist who is an investment banker and supposed to be a good guy. But even in this self created fantasy world the author still can't make his premise hold up. The protagonist flat out murders 50 innocent people by sabotaging their ship, and his dragon friend incinerates another several thousand dock workers. This is why blood-red is the color of Communism, to help you remember that Capitalists have murdered and will murder any number of workers in order to maintain their class privilege.
(Book #3 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
Tipping the Velvet
4.0 Stars
8-20-2021
Lesbians!
...
...
...
Waters returns to form with this book and then some. It is waaaaaaaaaaay more prurient than her other books, and is also slightly simpler and sweeter and more broadly drawn. Kind of like a Dicken's story, but with more fisting. That's not to say this is a simple book though, it's just less of a jagged puzzle than her others.
The Watcher in the Rain
4.0 Stars
8-18-2021
I was expecting a long Warhammer40K audio-book, instead I got a short WarHammer40K audio-drama. It was delightful! The audio team leaned into the strengths of the medium and was wonderfully over the top, while the writing was sweetly succinct and greatly gothic. They should really make more of these audio-plays.
Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City
3.0 Stars
8-13-2021
Kind of a mess. The basic idea is that a cynical engineer sets up a bunch of Home Alone type traps to defend a city under siege. Or put another way, it is a _The Martian_ type outing where a super clever engineer and his crew come up with all sorts technical work-arounds that no one has ever thought of before in order to put off death for another day.
This seems like a fine premise for a book, and it kind of works? But it also runs up against a number of long standing KJ Parkerisms. He wants to be super deep into the details and mechanisms of his medieval world, but at the same time he just murders the consistency of his world building on a regular basis. E.g. one of the absolutely key plot points is that there is a navy that wants to relieve the siege, but it can't. Why not? Because there is a difficult shoal that the navy has to go through, and the enemy controls the light house that is supposed to guide ships through the shoals. By pointing its light on the path. Through the shoals. And reading stuff like that it's just like, wow, dude, do you have any fucking idea how a light house works? How did you make it to 60 years of age without learning what a lighthouse does? They are there to orient ships at night. During the day, you don't need them, and at absolute worst you can send some small craft through the reefs to measure the depth and then lead the heavy ships through. So, yeah. There are a number of bits in the book where reading them will just ruin your whole day with how stupid the world building is. Which is a problem! Since as mentioned above, the book is all about this world building, and then also trying to be cynical in this world.
Despite these major flaws, and a few smaller mis-steps, the book does a least have a dynamism from its premise and can work well when it is not absolutely shoving some dumb bit in your face. It's a fun scenario to think about, it's enjoyable to see the cunning & low-class supply sergeant run rings around people, it's fun to see imperial toffs and barbaric invaders outwitted. Etc. etc. The more cynical musings about the world/race/etc don't really work, but, eh? Oh and I can't ever imagine reading this if you are a woman. Finally, kudos to the audio book reader for making the bold choice to say his lines really, really slowly. There were a number of points where I was like "uh, is the mp3 player broken?" but nope it was just an extended dramatic pause. It was a surprisingly nice change and added some unearned gravitas to the book.
(Book #2 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
A Memory Called Empire
3.5 Stars
8-5-2021
"Like a microwaved orchid, this book is sticky and hot" - singer/poet One Direction
So, right away this book has 2 red flags: First it is focused on a sci-fi empire that is based off the Mayans/Aztecs, and second it purports to say important stuff about empires and colonialism. I've been burned by both of these traits on multiple occasions. Oh right, another flag, its plot did not necessarily make a lot of sense/have much meat to it (e.g. one reading of the book is that she is a diplomat, she gets a message from home, she decodes the message with the help of a tech, she transmits the message, fin). Also the book can't seem to make up its mind about what is saying about empires? Also some of the technical/strategic bits didn't entirely hold together.
Despite the flags though, I enjoyed this outing and came away liking the book. This was helped by the book not taking itself too seriously or getting too deep into its technical world building. E.g. there might be a space warship, but how is it powered? what does it fire? how many other ships are with it? the author is completely uninterested in any questions like these. Instead she puts her efforts into colors, clothes, plazas, flowers, food, scents, senses, memories, and people. It works well. I liked basically all of the characters, and I liked the over the top romanticism and sensory descriptions of their world. And because of that affection I could blithely ignore the sentences that were trying to be more serious, most of the poetry, and all of the above mentioned red flags. One sci-fi element that did work well was the imago, a personality recording device that the protagonist's culture uses to record and transmit knowledge down the generations. It's a fun device to bring out the flavor of characters and add a second layer of resonance to much of the story, since the main character's imago is basically investigating their own death, and the main character has an inherited layer of memory and emotion already built up around most of the other characters.
HeartStrikers, books 1 & 2
2.5 Stars
7-30-2021
"Your strategy was so bad that it confused me" - random Starcraft player after I defeated him, ~2014
An odd but not entirely terrible series of books. They're sort of like YA versions of the Dresden novels, with tense situations and magic and adventure and a tiny bit of romance and a lot of dragons. The plotline is that ~50 years ago magic returned to the world, and with it all sorts of supernatural things have woken up from hibernation, including several hundred dragons. The main character is the youngest of these dragons, but he has been raised on too much modern human media and doesn't want to be a sociopathic asshole like the rest of his dragon family, and so he has Spirited Away type challenges and adventures where it turns out being nice to various supernatural entities wasn't quite as bad of a choice as his family is telling him. The books are not great, but there are charming bits and creative bits & they are competently written. There's a couple of beats that are drawn out too long/repeated too often, but it's still a cut above just generic dreck.
The books are oddly structured though in that very quickly they introduce the idea of Seers, characters who can directly see the future and sift through the likely outcomes of people's actions. There are exactly 3 Seers at any point in time (I like this), but they exert an enormous control over events, since they can manipulate events and lives through both short and long term plots. E.g. any direct struggle against a Seer is 100% doomed, since their pawns will be gifted with extraordinary good luck, while their opponents will just slip on banana peel after banana peel. And you can't really run from Seers, since they can just look ahead to where you will go and then meet you there. So real freedom of action only exists in the boundaries between Seers, where their plots are clashing against each other. And this is a really weird thing to introduce into your book from the very start, the idea that the character's actions are mostly blessed/doomed from the start and have been specifically engineered to have the outcomes that they do. It makes the whole exercise seem even more meaningless than usual? And the author isn't really doing anything meta with the idea, e.g. the idea of Seers as stand-ins for the author or some such. Which brings us back to the main character, who has been specifically chosen by one of the Seers, precisely because the main character's decision making is so bad and unlikely that he can introduce an element of chaos & disrupt another Seer's carefully laid plots. So on the one hand the book is saying that "go ahead, be kind, remove that thorn from the lion's paw and he will reward you later" and on the other hand the book is saying that "the only reason this behavior is working is that a thousand year old dragon-Seer has manipulated events to make being nice work out, otherwise you would be dead". Anyway! It's just an odd conceit to structure your otherwise quite standard adventure books around, the sort of conflicting reality-shaping fields exercised by these three Seers, and where and how characters can act to possibly go against this flow.
There's 3 more books in the series, and I probabbbbbly won't read them, since they're a tad too slow and overwritten for the content they have.
(Book #1 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
The Little Stranger
3.0 Stars
6-30-2021
Betrayal! Sarah Waters and I have a deal: she writes slow, beautiful, lesbian romances, and I give her 4 and 5 star reviews. This book though? Zero lesbians. *Zero*.
Instead, I get an ultra-slow burn ghost story set in a British mansion. On the one hand, I like that Waters taps into a under-used vein of horror, that of home ownership and watching this enormously valuable asset crumble around you as it is continually assaulted by heat, cold, rain, snow, winds, accident, plant growth, leaks, mold, etc. etc. It is scary and nerve wrenching stuff. Things become doubly parlous when you are dealing with the famously shoddy and drafty British construction standards. Besides the plus of house-based horror, I also simply enjoy Water's writing. I think she's a charming writer, even when she is just meandering through scenes of people talking and carrying out their daily lives. She also has a real skill at painting people and environments with acuity, making rooms and architecture and gardens perfectly clear, and capturing the shifts in mood and conversation. At the best her characters feel concrete. Like there is no airiness or artifice to them, and Waters is just directly transmitting the lived experience of interacting with them.
On the other hand ... the book has structural problems in that her chosen sub-genre and plot simply do not fit the page count. 500 pages is too long of a run time for a relatively sedate ghost story. The massive page count saps any real tension or terror from the book. Things are not helped by the protagonist being the nicest of nice guys, and as he is the only PoV character, you spend the entire, long, novel in his head. The final dozen pages of the book do have an excellent pay off, and it does kind of make you want to read the entire novel again, but as with most Waters this desire is balanced against the largish length of the book.
Free Will
1.0 Stars
6-15-2021
There was an online discussion about free will, and then on the same day I saw this book at the library and picked it up. Synchronicity? No, Mistake!
There is this phenomena where, for some reason, the published writing about free will is in terribly bad. Pick up a random book or essay on the topic and odds are it will be ass. I think the reason for this is that people who get the correct answer on this subject only need to write a few sentences, while people that aren't able to grapple with the idea need to write endless epicycles in order to try and make their ideas not so obviously wrong. The end result is sort of an extreme Sturgeon's Law, where the only people writing about the topic are the people who don't really engage with it, and just continually slip back into dualism in their attempts to think about the topic. That is what happens with this book: the author continually, implicitly assumes that there is some thing that is making decisions besides the brain. Anyway, obviously, DNF, I just thought the more general phenomena was interesting.