Mandy

wow this book was just so unnecessarily long. I felt like it could've been easily halved.

idek where to begin so here's just a thought dump. I can't believe emily ended up with valancourt in the end. what the hell was the point of du Pont then?? why was he introduced as another suitor like 70% of the way through only to be discarded at the end? I actually feel like I may have liked the ending more if we had seen a complete degradation of valancourt and we see emily learning to esteem du Pont with a more rational kind of affection. BUT NOPE.

the irony that this is called mystery of udolpho when barely anything mysterious happened at udolpho. sure, a lot of annoying, dangerous, dramatic things happened but not exactly mysterious. the chateau le blanc chapters were far, far more interesting, mysterious, and potentially horrifying than the udolpho chapters.

I felt like this book kept beating dead horses. st aubert takes ill, he's close to dying but takes soooo long to die. Emily is tortured by her aunt, and then we just keep seeing more of the same instances of how Emily is tortured by her aunt.

the book felt like it kept beating dead horses and going around in circles. sequences were just endlessly draggy. I didn't need to keep reading about montoni's cronies one more time, or how much mysterious music and singing emily hears at night. in particular, I feel like a lot of the moments of suspense felt very contrived. emily sees a line in her father's documents and is so horrified that she tries to forget it as she burns them - but we literally never find out till the end of the book what it is. emily opens the veil at udolpho and is terrified at what she sees behind it - and again we never find out till the end whst she saw. perhaps this is a modern sensibility thing but I don't find that this keeps me on the edge of my seat, I'm just annoyed that this protagonist whom I'm supposed to experience the mystery and suspense vicariously through, now knows more than I the reader so we're just on unequal footing now.

overall I still give this 3 stars cos the story was not bad and fairly entertaining - if it would just be condensed into half its size.

I was dreading starting on this despite having bought the book a while back, but it was a more engaging read than I thought it would be. It's probably well known by now but I'll reiterate that this book is really complex and demands a re-read if you really want to do a deep dive into its themes and messages, but it's probably easier if you do a superficial read-through of the book (and probably the whole series) first to get a hang of the overarching plot. Nevertheless, I was not disappointed and I like the direction that this book is setting up for the rest of the series.

The long and short of the story is pretty simple. Paul Atreides is heir to House Atreides, one of the Great Houses that governs whole planets in the name of the Imperium. They are transferred from the water planet Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis, which, though nigh uninhabitable, is still a gem to the Imperium because it is the only source of melange-spice, a coveted resource that is harvested and exported for a ton of money all throughout the Imperium. However, Arrakis was previously governed by House Harkonnen, sworn enemies to the Atreides, and it's unlikely that they'd give up an actual goldmine that easily.

There is really good, nuanced, layered, and complex storytelling here. There's a ton of philosophy to be unearthed, a lot of plots within plots (that's sometimes too veiled for me to even understand), and you can really just go on deciphering this book forever. I appreciate that kind of depth in any book. When you first start the book, it immediately plunges you into the world without any “tutorial” scene, which I actually appreciate. I enjoy that level of immersion in a new world, and Herbert did a great job in writing it such that the reader is just immersed enough without being too overwhelmed. Though there was a list of terminology at the back of the book, I didn't want to refer to it at all and just let the story explain the terms to me, and I thought it did this marvelously. I was super engaged by the book in the first third, but it started dragging for me after that, ramping up again in the last maybe 20%, and only dialing it up to 11 in the last two chapters, whew.

For characters, I was generally quite bored with Paul who seems to be a pretty obvious hero/saviour type, although I'll grant that nothing in this book is really that black and white, and thus Paul doesn't quite tick off all the checkboxes for that sort of trope. But being bored with Paul was a little alarming considering this entire book pretty much revolves around him. I thought almost every other character is more interesting, but I was particularly interested in Lady Jessica, and some other female characters (Alia, Chani, and even Princess Irulan). I don't know if it's any surprise or coincidence that they're mostly major female characters.

That brings me to a huge theme that I paid a lot of attention to going in: the representation of women. I have heard a lot about that (and not exactly positive things) from some others who have attempted this book before, and had gone in really hesitant. Reading this book hasn't quite changed my mind on that, although once again I'll grant that things aren't black and white there either. There were some bits that discomfited me when reading, like when Harah was trying to offer herself up as wife to Paul after he had killed her husband, and protesting that she was "still young", or at the end when they were kinda just treating Irulan as a pawn instead of a human being, or really anytime when any woman in this book, no matter how powerful she might be, is always relegated to being either mother, lover, or wife, and never having any kind of power that doesn't have to do with those functions in relation to men.

But at the same time, the book isn't straight up female objectification and misogyny either. I liked that the female characters were often very powerful (more so than their male counterparts), and sometimes even more relatably portrayed, like Lady Jessica vs Paul. They were also more enigmatic and interesting and often didn't fit into archetypes, like Alia being a complete wild card for everyone vs Paul who is the obvious hero/saviour. I was even intrigued by Chani and Irulan more so than Paul/Feyd.

So i guess the tl;dr is that this book isn't easy reading, but it's quite likely an engaging one. It'll certainly demand multiple reads if you really want to fully understand the whole thing, but even just an initial superficial read of it is still going to be overall enjoyable and action-packed, even despite the slower sections. The female representation on this book isn't quite so straightforward, and so I'm kinda sitting on the fence on whether I enjoyed that bit or not. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm keen to visit the rest of the series, although I'll have to give myself a bit of a break first.

This is a really weird 4 stars to give. I couldn't tell you exactly what happened in this book, it mostly read like a chaotic fever dream from start to end, but it was not only readable but surprisingly engaging. Every chapter made me feel like, “Gosh, this is too chaotic, I'm going to skim.” but I generally end up pretty gripped by the action of what's going on.

I definitely feel like I'm missing a lot of historical context here as my knowledge of the USSR, its culture, and the political place it was at is rudimentary at best. Despite that, though, I could definitely see how this whole gimmick of having these fantastical and diabolical characters creating trouble all around Moscow and driving so many of its citizens actually insane, and then how the authorities/militia reacts to this, is quite an obvious commentary in itself.

Overall, a fever dream I'd recommend if you're in the right headspace for some bewildering chaos.

I have come to realise that Shirley Jackson's brand of horror doesn't revolve so much around things that go bump in the night, but really around things that are more real, and therefore more terrifying, than that. This is a 3.5 to 4 star read for me.

Mary Katherine Blackwood, known as Merricat to her family, is an 18 year old girl living a secluded life with her sister Constance and her ailing Uncle Julian in a big, empty house. Most of their family are dead. Ugly rumours swirl around the Blackwood family in the nearby town, amplified by the gulf in socioeconomic class that separates the old and prestigious Blackwood family from the rest of the villagers.

The entire story is told from the perspective of Merricat, who, though 18, has the psyche of a much younger child. It is almost as if her psychiatric state has stagnated from when she was 12, when a major event happens that upheaves her entire family. Because of this child-like voice, we never quite get the feeling that we're seeing anything close to a realistic picture of what is happening - we're seeing the events of the plot through the lens of a child's very vivid imagination.

But the horror in this book, or at least the main source of repulsion for me, stems partially from the cruel persecution suffered by the Blackwoods at the hands of the villagers, without any apparent provocation other than that they are the Blackwoods. Any chapter of the book where the villagers turn up became automatically that much more unpleasant to read. The rhymes made up by the children of the village targeting specifically at the Blackwood sisters just smacked of the thoughtless cruelty that children inherit from their parents.

Another source of irritation was the introduction of cousin Charles, who appears with apparently reconciliatory intentions but quickly reveals himself to be a money-grubbing relative eager to get hold of any fortune the Blackwood sisters may have lying around the house. There is quite possibly some feminist undertones in the dynamics between Charles and the sisters, where he immediately asserts himself as the head of this household he had only just recently invaded, and attempts to control and arrange everything as he pleases simply by virtue of being the only male in his prime in the household and by attempting worm his way into Constance's affections, no matter what anyone else thinks.

If you're looking for straight-up supernatural horror, this is probably not the book for you. But if you enjoy the brand of horror that explores the uglier sides of human nature, this book might be right up your alley.

The plot was excellent, but this book suffered from the weightiness of the prose and exposition.

Sue Trinder is an orphan growing up in the house of Mrs Sucksby, where they get by with petty crimes and selling stolen goods. It's also an informal grooming and gathering place for a number of crooks, the most elegant and big-game of all is one nicknamed Gentleman, who enlists Sue to assist him in a plot he has recently hatched to cheat a lady, the heiress of a hermit book collector, out of her fortune. To do so, Sue has to infiltrate the household and become a lady's maid to Maud Lilly, and convince her to marry Gentleman.

While the story was really good, I think the pacing was a bit off for me. The first arc was all right, it plodded along but it got unpleasant to read at the last part, to the point where I almost DNFed. Then we got hit with the first big reveal. It was a twist which I had called from the beginning, but which I had somehow lulled myself into thinking wasn't possible and therefore had forgotten about, but was surprised to find that I was right all along. That was enough to keep me going though.

The second arc was more exciting for me than the first, or at least the first half of it was. The second half kinda got too lengthy (did we really need like 20 pages talking about Maud's failed attempts at escaping, her going to find Mr Hawtry which landed her in a "house for destitute gentlewomen" and then eventually her going back to where she had begun?). The third arc was the slowest for me and which I skimmed the most, even though so many things were happening.

It's a weird feeling, because the plot twists in this story were really good and satisfying, but there was also just so much filler action IMO. Despite skimming the heck out of the third arc, I still understood the rough gist of what was happening. I can't help but feel that this book would've been way more enjoyable if it had been pruned into 300 or 400-page novel rather than a 550-page one.

Hovering between 4 to 5 stars. This is a very nuanced exploration of what it means for some of us to navigate the very confusing threshold between childhood and adolescence, and having then to come to terms with a bewildering and often very frightening adult self-identity.

Nancy is sent by her parents to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children after she returns from a trip to a magical land altered in almost every way. At first she thinks it's just an ordinary boarding school until she realises that all the students there have been to a different magical land of their own, have come back to the “real” world, and somehow have found their way to the Home to reintegrate themselves.

In terms of plot, there is a mystery that pops up rather unexpectedly, and while it operates decently enough to drive the story and the characters along, my opinion is that the plot really takes a backseat to what I find is the main attraction here: the exploration of each character's growth and individuality.

It doesn't take much to realise that the magical lands these children and teenagers have been through is a thinly veiled analogy for the confusion of puberty and early adolescence. A wide variety of personalities, sexualities, and identities are explored here: our protagonist Nancy is asexual and also probably a bit of a goth, Sumi might have some form of ADD/ADHD, Kade is a trans man, Jack is grappling with gender stereotypes forced upon her by her parents and instead wanting to pursue the sciences, while Christopher is... well, I haven't figured that one out yet.

What the book does best is the way it explores, slowly and respectfully, how each of these individuals navigated their individual journeys, how they felt when they were shunted back into the “real” world, why they each wanted more than anything to go back “home” to the magical land from which they have been expelled, and how they handled interacting with all these other teens around them who have been through the same thing but yet still can be cruel and vicious towards those whom they perceived went through a “lesser” world than their own.

I've never read a book quite like this before and I really appreciated the journey that it brought me on. I'd recommend this wholeheartedly to just about anyone!

3.5 stars. This was OK, a serviceable mystery with a relatively predictable conclusion. I almost wonder whether Beaton deliberately set out to shock people with the character of Agatha Raisin though. I went in expecting something akin to a more updated version of Miss Marple, but instead, Agatha Raisin is the loudest and most non-PC middle-aged London career woman you can imagine. Put her into a rural country village that does somewhat come out of Miss Marple, and that's basically this story.

I'm not sure whether to feel invested in Agatha Raisin or not. She is by turns self-centered and abrasive, but also sometimes shows a bit of her vulnerability and loneliness. I was a little disappointed in Roy's character trajectory however. He was a pretty funny sidekick all the way till the end where he seemed to do a 180. The character of Col. Lacey also seemed a bit randomly shoved in for no reason except to give Agatha Raisin some kind of love interest almost near the end of the book.

The mystery itself is... okay. I had a lot of suspects in mind, all of which I felt would've been more interesting than the one that was revealed at the end. The revelation felt also rather predictable, with Agatha bungling everything up (perhaps that's the point). I particularly suspected the vicar's wife - I felt like she couldn't have been so nice for nothing! But that would've been a Christie-esque ending, perhaps.

I guess I would continue on this series if I was in the mood for something a bit more brainless to read.

Damn, this was... so good. 4.5/5.

Overall, this was a great book with some great themes on not just being human but of being a living thing at all, an organism that essentially shares a common ancestor with almost every other organism on this planet. I don't know what I was expecting going into this book but having half the chapters dedicated to spiders was definitely not one of them, nor was I expecting to become this invested into spider religion, culture, and politics. The premise was really a breath of fresh air too, and thoroughly engaging. it made the book feel a lot shorter than it actually was.

I liked how from early on in the book, we're already invited to see parallels between the wireless communications invented by humans with the way spiders communicate by vibrating the web. “... the signals danced across those millions of kilometers of void...” I'm sure it's no coincidence that this fleeting line about the Gilgamesh communicating with an unknown transmitter in space seemed to be paralleled to Portia and her spider friends also transmitting signals via web vibrations to the local species of spiders in the chapter before this one. It's a really cool parallel and one i never thought of before, how wireless communications that's second nature to us in this modern age isn't so different from the non-verbal ways animals communicate to each other.

This book isn't horror at all, but I really enjoyed the earlier chapters where we see Kern communicating with the crew of the Gilgamesh. Tchaikovsky seems to enjoy this gimmick of having two columns of text that are supposed to be superimposed upon one another (he does something similar in a more recent novella, Elder Race) and it's employed to fantastic effect here. Kudos also to Mel Hudson, the audiobook narrator, who really brought out the horror of Kern's desperate madness in her degeneration into something not entirely Avrana nor Eliza.

In the first half of the book, we also kept hearing a theme of how the spiders keep “thrumming with manifest destiny” and I knew I've heard that term somewhere before in my lit classes. It's a cultural belief from the 19th century that (white) American settlers were “destined” to settle and expand in North America, including removing and eliminating native populations. this is a really, really interesting parallel to draw in this whole situation - are the spiders the settlers, or the new humans? Whose is the manifest destiny? It's also telling that the ship containing the last batch of humans is called Gilgamesh, after the epic story of a king who didn't want to die (which then calls to mind Guyen and his quest for immortality later in the book).

In the last parts, humanity honestly got on my nerves, especially Karst. Any species, including humans, have a strong sense of self-preservation and we get that Kern's World is really their last hope before extinction, but the way Karst went about it was really annoying. Immediately just saying, we're gonna go in there and we're gonna burn down everything, kill everything on it, because now it's *our* home. he embodies the inherent selfish war-mongering nature of humans and it's really annoying to me. It also smacks too much of imperialism and colonialism, and how/why humans have invaded other territories and killed native populations since time immemorial. I also loved that we see the armed conflict from the human POVs. If I had just read this book skipping every spider POV chapter, I would've 100% rooted for the humans to win against the aliens, just like in any other alien monster sci-fi movie or book. In this case, though, we witnessed and was along for the ride with the evolution of the spiders alongside the degeneration of the last human society in their arkship, so allegiances are grayer here. I found myself rooting more for the spiders in this one tbh. They are defending their home planet against humans who quite certainly want to take over for their own survival, without sharing and leaving no survivors from the native population. Weighing that against the potential extinction of the human race was really weird.

Thoughts about the ending: it was a little overly optimistic with the nanovirus being almost a deus ex machina miraculously making the humans and spiders become one peaceful harmonious society with just a single fell stroke, but even if a little convenient, I thought it was still a pretty refreshing solution to the central conflict of the book.

This was a really fun read. It did have some issues that I imagine would not have been issues at all at the time it was first published (in 1990) but seem pretty glaring today in 2023. Overall though, if you take it in the context of the time of publishing, this pushed the boundaries for what was considered “done” at the time.

In fact, the concept of “what is done” is pretty prominent in this book. For our protagonist, Princess Cimorene of Linderwall, she has spent literally her whole life rebelling against what is “done” for princesses. She tries to take up classes for magic, juggling, cooking, etc. but her parents the King and Queen veto-ed this, saying it wasn't “done”. Instead, she has to go for dancing, embroidery, and protocol classes to prepare herself for marriage. The last straw comes when Cimorene is almost forced into an arranged marriage with Prince Therandil, who is princely and handsome enough but Cimorene isn't looking for marriage in the first place. She runs away and comes into the service of Kazul, a dragon.

The first few chapters took a bit of adjustment because there was something “not like other girls” to Cimorene, which didn't go down well with me. She holds herself apart from her sisters and other princesses, who are depicted as empty-headed, bimbotic, and blindly compliant to the expectations of society and the lives their parents plan out for them, i.e. marrying a prince for the sake of the kingdom. This was probably a refreshing take back in 1990, but today it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb. Cimorene is crotchety and pretty much annoyed with just about everyone except the dragons - I don't really know why she finds herself so loyal so fast to the dragons.

The concept of dragons having princesses to serve them is also somewhat problematic in this time and age. Cimorene stumbles into the dragons' den and volunteers herself to be a princess for one of them to avoid getting eaten. The whole system is founded upon the fact that dragons kidnap princesses (except Cimorene, who only volunteers under duress anyway) who then have to serve them pretty much like a slave. Though Cimorene serves willingly and happily enough, it's clear that princesses aren't allowed a choice in the matter nor are they allowed to run away without consequences. The only way a princess can leave a dragon's service is either by escaping themselves, or waiting for a prince to come and save them. Perhaps this is trying to turn the trope of “dragons holding princesses hostage” on its head where we have a princess who is enjoying her time with the dragons, but it doesn't quite endear the reader to the dragons in 2023. Even Kazul, undoubtedly the dragon we get closest to in this book, does sometimes bristle at the thought of Cimorene “running away”, and also never once asks Cimorene whether she wants to stay with her or leave. Dragons keep princesses as a sort of status symbol, as described in the book, which just smacks a lot like a system of slavery even if it's heavily sugarcoated with our protagonist sidign with and eventually saving the dragons at the end of the day from the intrigues of the real antagonists, the wizards.

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the writing of this book. The characters were vibrant and lively and there were some truly comedic moments in here. The setting and plot was a little absurd, almost in the vein of Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones, so fans of these authors may still enjoy this book like I did. The story does subvert a lot of classic fantasy tropes at the time, and does a good job at it. It was a short, easy read, meant for middle-grade audiences, and was also light-hearted enough that it helped me through a reading slump.

Honestly kinda conflicted about this book. On one hand, Clarke's writing is unparalleled and I am a huge admirer, semi-academically. On the other, I just frequently got bored through a lot of these stories or felt that they ended anti-climactically.

The best story in this lot is also the very first one listed, the titular “Ladies of Grace Adieu”. There's proper magic, there's a great storytelling trajectory, a small mystery underlying the whole thing, and a satisfying conclusion. That's pretty much more than I can say for most of the other stories. Some of them were really promising throughout (”On Lickerish Hill”, “Mr Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower”, for e.g.) but then just had very unsatisfying and sometimes abrupt endings. Others (”Tom Brightwind”, “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner”, for e.g.) were just so bizarre that I had trouble following along and skimmed through a lot.

Don't get me wrong though. I haven't read any contemporary historical fiction writer that is able to more accurately replicate an early 19th century writing style than Susanna Clarke and there's always a perpetual awe when I'm reading her book. It really feels like I'm reading something actually written by someone living in the early Victorian times, but then with our very modern concepts of magical realism thrown in. Her stories are quite often pretty dark, morbid, and even gory, but with an outer coating of Regency/Victorian aesthetic, so there's almost a Tim Burton thing going on here. I've really never read anything like her writing before or since. I'm, of course, basing most of this from reading her most popular novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. For Ladies of Grace Adieu, I'd recommend only reading it perhaps after JS & MN - though it is shorter, it is not exactly a good primer for Clarke's writing style and might be just too eclectic for people new to her.

Man, this book hit a lot harder than I expected it to. The only other book I've read by Doughty is [b:Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And other Questions about Dead Bodies 52672113 Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And other Questions about Dead Bodies Caitlin Doughty https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1593186716l/52672113.SY75.jpg 68120089] which delivers death facts in bite sizes and presumably to children as a target audience. I kinda expected this book to be similar, just specifically about crematoriums. Boy, was I wrong. This book was instead more like a semi-autobiography of Doughty's time working in a crematorium in her early twenties. It's clear that this time was a transformative one for her, both in her attitude towards death as well as crystallizing what she wanted to accomplish in changing the modern American attitude to death. In turn, it brings us the readers just that little bit closer to that conversation and confrontation with death and mortality.We are all just future corpses.Preparing for death and how we would like one's body to be disposed after that is undoubtedly a difficult conversation to have with any of our loved ones, and probably an even more difficult one to have with yourself. In this book, Doughty raps hard on the “death-denial culture” that has sprung only in the most recent century or so, calling back on historical times when death has always been a lot closer to people, to homes, to families, and had been an integral part of customs and traditions. She argues that being in denial about what is essentially a fact of life is what is making death that much more traumatizing and difficult to accept and confront when it does happen. I love how she took as an example Siddartha Gautama, who attained enlightenment and became the Buddha of Buddhism because he went out in the world to witness life, suffering, death, and how we all become ashes and dust in the end, and not because he stuck to his sheltered life in the palace without any and every reminder that pain, suffering, and death exists.There has never been a time in the history of the world when a culture has broken so completely with traditional methods of body disposition and beliefs surrounding mortality.It's so timely that I'm reading this book while a Muslim wedding is being held at the public ground floor space of the residential block opposite mine. Because it's public and under government housing, that space is often used for Chinese funerals (wakes) as well as Muslim weddings, baby showers, etc. These occurrences have always been an everyday norm for me but which, I think, might be exactly what Caitlin is trying to advocate here in being less in denial about death.Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.This passage in particular was so impactful to me and my own denial about death. I'm probably not alone in fearing mortality and having to confront it, both in myself and in my loved ones. I'm still not 100% there and still in the middle of the process of fully accepting it, but I'm glad that Doughty, through her Youtube channel as well as this book, has kickstarted me in the journey of accepting this ultimate and inevitable outcome of life.

I almost consider my aversion to spoilers as an integral part of my identity, but there is a point where I am so desperate to want to read a book but find myself so unable to that I voluntarily spoil myself so I'd be more motivated to find out how the characters get there.Doomsday Book was just such an example.And guess what, after reading the spoilers, I decided just to DNF it.This was the first book from Connie Willis I purchased because I was so intrigued by the ploy synopsis and it had every element that usually interests me - fantasy, historical fiction, time travel, academia-setting. Well, I found myself DNF'ing it within 10% of the book. At that time, I attributed it to my lackluster knowledge of and interest in the Middle Ages.In the intervening years, two things happened to motivate me to give Doomsday Book another go: 1) I purchased To Say Nothing Of The Dog and thoroughly enjoyed myself. 2) I started learning much more about the Middle Ages and got interested in that period of history.I excitedly started Doomsday Book again, convinced that I would enjoy myself this time. After all, it had 4 stars on Goodreads, right?!I struggled so hard to get to the 25% mark that I find myself at. With any other book, if I find myself thoroughly uninterested and unengaged by the plot and the storytelling by 10-15%, I'd just DNF it and not waste my time. It's reflective of how much I wanted Doomsday Book to work out for me that I persevered past the boring first 10-15% and even at 25%, I was still on this page reading all the raving reviews about how awesome the book was, trying to convince myself to get back to it. At this point, though, I was so bored by the book that I allowed myself to get distracted by a random 400-page book in the library which I snapped up in less than 2 days.After finishing that one, I found myself dreading the prospect of returning to Doomsday Book. Why can't I get through it!? What am I missing about this book that everyone seems to be getting?That's when I decided to read the spoilers and, well, while I'm curious about how certain events unfolded, I decided that the payoff for all the boring build-up is just not enough and I'm probably going to DNF this book for good now.But no shade on Connie Willis though. For anyone who feels the same way as I do, don't write her off as an author and try [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog 77773 To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2) Connie Willis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469410460l/77773.SY75.jpg 696]. Now that was a great book with the same time travel premise, and I would gladly re-read.

wow... a master class in how to concisely illustrate a grotesquely beautiful character descent in just slightly above 50 pages.

the unnamed narrator begins the story in an optimistic tone, having moved into a beautiful house rented for 3 months by her husband, a physician. it's not explicitly stated, but there are hints to say that she's been prescribed a “rest cure” which was apparently a thing from the late 19th century (when this novella was written) to cure some “slight hysterical tendencies” and a “nervous condition” after the birth of her child. the idea isn't as relaxing as just lounging around a resort. she's basically made to keep to her room and not do anything for herself, so she can only stare at the yellow wallpaper in her room day and night, and which eventually becomes the focal point of her mental unravelling.

this was just the right amount of creepy and sad, and was beautifully written to top it all off, and just goes to show that you don't need page count to deliver an impactful and memorable story.

4.5 stars. This was truly a very wholesome and winning book. At first I was a little thrown off by the story when we first start, but I slowly got into the groove of things and really enjoyed seeing how Anne grows up in Avonlea.

The book is pretty straightforward. Eleven year old Anne Shirley gets mistakenly adopted by the Cuthbert siblings, who are getting on in years and had initially wanted to bring in a little boy to hopefully help out with the farm as Matthew Cuthbert gets older.

Anne is a bit of a departure from a little girl protagonist that you might expect from a book written in the 19th century. Instead of being this idealistic version of little girls where she's calm, dainty, and does everything morally right according to her lessons, Anne is almost a tornado in comparison, albeit a good-willed one. Her dialogue, or should I say soliloquy, fills pages and pages of the book as she rambles on about everything and nothing in particular. She's a right drama queen at her first appearance, swooning over how beautiful everything around her is, and insisting on calling landmarks names she made up on the spot, like, “The Lake of Shining Water” instead of just Barry's Pond. Her highest prized trait of herself is her vivid imagination, and something which she prizes other people by as well.

To be honest, I found Anne pretty annoying at the beginning. She reminded me of Marianne from Sense & Sensibility in what a drama queen she was. Aside from her endless chatter, she also formed attachments to people based on a projection of her own ideals (“I really want a bosom friend, therefore I've decided that this person is going to be my bosom friend even though I've never met her before”). Similarly, she also doesn't seem to know how to appropriately weigh situations and its consequences, although I suppose this is a pretty accurate depiction of children as a whole, where rewards and punishments never seem to matter that much once the day passes and they forget all about it.

The storytelling is pretty episodic in nature and we get to have fleeting introductions to the Avonlea ensemble through Anne's childhood adventures. Of them all, we are perhaps closest in action to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, and Diana Barry. Both Marilla and Matthew behave as parent figures as Anne, and they both have their faults while executing their function here, but I feel like I'm more aligned with Marilla than Matthew. Sure, she's way too severe sometimes and her deliberate self-oppression of her emotions gets on my nerves sometimes, but ultimately she was trying her best to help Anne grow up into her version of a proper lady. If Marilla had tried to single-parent Anne, she would've certainly been able to do it, but I doubt the same can be said for Matthew. Matthew's influence was still a beneficial and valuable one to have to temper Marilla's style of child-rearing, but it was sometimes annoying when he shirked the difficult tasks in life and very gladly palmed it off on Marilla.

What I found masterful about the book was really the last third of it:
I semi-loved it when Anne slowly grew up from eleven to fifteen, from a little girl to a young lady in her own right. I say "semi-love" because I felt like Montgomery did such a great job in aligning us the readers with Marilla's perspective. I found it bittersweet that the little Anne I found so annoying all those chapters ago has disappeared in place of this not-so-romantic, less chatty, and more regular-adult young lady. It's not to say that sixteen year old Anne is a whole different person, but even Marilla explicitly asks her what happened to her imagination and her Storytelling Clubs and all that, and Anne casually just dismisses them all. Instead of being driven by romantic notions and dresses and imagined horrors in the woods, Anne becomes driven by ambition and scholarships and a sense of filial duty to Marilla by the end of the novel. These are great developments for any child to have, but perhaps because I'm a new parent myself, it really hits hard that even when your child is following a trajectory you can be proud of, you're still sad that the baby/small child that they used to be is gone forever. The part where Marilla weeps over how the talkative eleven year old Anne she used to be so annoyed with has now vanished was so heartbreaking to read and I'll admit I absolutely bawled during that part, thinking about how even in the best case scenarios, my baby isn't going to stay a baby for long. Any book that can make me cry in earnest is automatically elevated a few notches by my standards.

Overall, a really great, light-hearted book and I can certainly see why it became a classic. I'm actually interested in continuing the series to see what happens next!

This was really such a trip. A great book and one I would highly recommend to any fan of sci-fi. This is definitely what I'd classify as pretty dense sci-fi though, so if you're not familiar with the genre or not in the mood for it, this probably wouldn't be something you'd pick up.

The premise of this universe was just fascinating. We're here millions of years into the future, where the human scions of time long past have made clones of themselves called shatterling which, while biologically human, could persist for millions and millions of years, their duties to keep watch over the other emerging and falling civilisation around the Milky Way Galaxy. In particular, we are concerned with Campion and Purslane, two clones from the Line created from Abigail Gentian, the house from which cloning technology was invented in the first place. In rushing towards a Line reunion, Campion and Purslane pick up an unexpected guest from the Machine People (essentially robots), introducing himself as Hesperus and apparently with a bad case of amnesia.

This book isn't incredibly long but it felt like it, because there were so many things that happened. It probably also felt long because the chronology in this book is whack. In order to be spacefaring travellers, the shatterlings also have to reckon time on an astronomical scale. Interstellar travel takes light years and this book acknowledges it. They spend millenia traveling around the galaxy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the events of this book spans at least a million years, if not more. I'm an astronomy nut so I was pretty happy nerding about stuff like this, and the imagination of how humans might be able to overcome that hurdle in interstellar travel (in this book, by stasis technology that essentially slows time down for your body alone, so a hundred thousand years may pass in what you subjectively experience as a minute).

So I was intrigued by the premise and technology and universe that this book already set out, but I was also equally fascinated by the plot. We are introduced to Abigail Gentian at the beginning as a little girl, supposedly heiress of a large, rambling mansion, and whose only playmate is a mysterious little boy. We know she is the progenitor of the Gentian Line, to which our protagonists Campion and Purslane belong, but there're all sorts of questions raised about how she came about to create shatterlings in the first place, and how to connect the dots between Abigail and the creation of her Gentian Line.

The chapters in this book constantly shift between Campion and Purslane's perspectives, and I think it was deliberate that the author never explicitly mentioned whose point of view it was, and you had to infer that as the chapter went on. It wasn't confusing or difficult, but it certainly blurred the lines between Campion and Purslane, which I think was the point - they are clones after all. I didn't mind that change in perspectives, but it also drove home the slight unease I felt about Campion and Purslane's romance. It almost felt a bit... incestuous? Nevertheless, despite being clones, they were both distinct enough from each other that I was able to tell them apart most of the time.

Spoilery thoughts: I guess the reason why I wouldn't give this a straight 5 stars was because I thought there were a lot of questions not answered by the end, or a lot of loopholes in the explanations. My hype for this book started fading once we found out from Hesperus about the First Machines. It didn't make sense to me why the Machine People would form such a strong association with this ancient robot civilization that they've never even come into contact with before, simply because they were robots? I just felt like if we ever found out there was some ancient human civilization that got wiped out, I don't know if humans would care that much, honestly. And the Machine People had never been under any direct threat from the organic civilizations thus far, so it felt like they were poking a hornet's nest without any impetus to do so.Also, I'm not sure if I missed it but I don't really know what was the role of Palatial in this whole story? I was expecting there to be some link between the simulation story and the one we saw played out. While we did see certain parallels between Purslane and Abigail as the princess, I was quite confused overall about why we had to go through all the Palatial sequences. I was convinced that the little boy was Valmik, and perhaps he is? But we never really got a confirmation of that. We also don't know which shatterling Abigail became, but I guess that was meant to be a deliberate non-answer. I would guess it's Purslane though.Why didn't we get more explanation about the House of Suns? Who started this House? Who recruits people into this House? What was the point of going through all this effort to make sure all the Lines didn't remember the genocide that they committed? I just struggled to see the point of this secret House and all the stuff they've been doing for 6 million years. I really expected a lot more about them considering this whole book was named after them.Lastly, that ending just felt way too abrupt. I can understand when an author wants to leave a bit of an open ending, but I felt like that was the wrong point to end a story. Hesperus sacrificed himself to save Purslane, we can be fairly sure that the person inside Hesperus is Purslane, and then... what? How are Campion and Purslane going to start a new civilization in Andromeda? It seems like they're essentially stranded there, right?

Nevertheless though, I overall really enjoyed this book and was super glad to have picked it up for my book club, I don't think I would have otherwise heard of it at all. Would definitely check out more from Reynolds.

Many things about this book has compelled me to give it a 5 star rating. It's captivating, but in a weird morbid way like the way you can't tear your eyes off something that is so so weird, out of this world, and quite often disgusting and horrifying. Trigger warnings apply at the end of this review because hoo boy did this book have a lot.

The story opens with the unwelcome and unceremonious birth of the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in the stinkiest spot of all Paris, and indeed in all of France. As he grows, being kicked from place to place, he begins to realize that he has a truly extraordinary gift of smelling things. You'd think that he has dog-like levels of sniffing and teasing out scents, but Grenouille's talent goes far, far beyond that of any mortal creature. Soon he finds himself in the house of a parfumer where he learns the art of parfumerie, and Grenouille has found just the scent he wants to capture - that of young virgin girls.

From the blurb and my above description, it might seem like this book is clearly going to be some sordid serial killing with lots of sexual violence but - it actually isn't. Grenouille is a very strange protagonist. He's almost sympathetic in the first half of the book when everyone around him is either repulsed by him or only suffers his company for as long as they can manipulate him for their gains. While one might chalk up Grenouille's repulsiveness to the fantasy elements of the book, the fact that a lot of it is also ascribed to superstition in the plot feels like it's sending a message. What would Grenouille have turned out to be if he had been raised in a less superstitious and perhaps more loving environment?

Grenouille is quite certainly psychopathic. I know that term conjures up images of serial killers often with depraved sexual appetites and whatnot, but I mean to describe him in the sense that he has no conception of emotions, feelings, or anything that makes humans human. It's almost as if he is completely separate from the human experience and a lot of times he feels like an alien being with some resemblance to a human. That also means he does not have the same motivations and desires as humans do, including almost a complete lack of sexual interest in any way. He has a weird, almost child-like innocence for most of the book, which is honestly an extremely weird thing to say about a murderer.

The writing of this book was beautiful. I've never been one to appreciate scents in general, but this book did such an amazing and immersive job in describing the scent-scape of 18th century France, from the roiling stink of the cities to the clearer and thinner fragrance of the countryside. The plot itself was already plenty engaging but the writing was what kept my eyes glued to the page. The plot was already madness to begin with, so I guess I was surprised at how it managed to culminate in even more madness still. Yet, the ending was oddly befitting, though it was also a lot of jaw-dropping WTFery.

I would only be a little cautious of this book potentially glamourizing serial killers or psychopaths. This is not just historical fiction, but actually historical fantasy. People like Grenouille do not exist, and it would be a mistake to imagine that there is anything sympathetic about the murders that he eventually commits, nor is that remotely excusable in the real world.

TW: Body horror, infidelity, child abuse, child death, infidelity, references to incest, graphic violence, murder, animal abuse, animal death

I've finished this. 5/5 I don't think I fully understood every bit of it but it was all so beautifully constructed and crafted, every chapter was so distinct from the others and so compelling in their own rights. I've seen books being marvelous with world-building, or character development, but never really quite both at once and this one really did that so well. This book definitely demands rereads. I also liked that it had some really good female characterisation for a book published in the late 80s.

There were a few minor flaws here and there, like the writing could've been a little less flowery and descriptive, but that's also probably my own modern sensibilities talking. I also found Siri's story a bit anticlimactic, it somehow wasn't as compelling to me as everyone else's stories, but the Consul's second part really tied everything together. Some general thoughts of the ending: I really liked that we had a Fellowship moment at the end with the pilgrims being united for one moment in the damn book, and that's *after* they find out who the spy is too. I can't say I completely understand the Consul's motivation yet though but thats mainly cos the politics is so complex that I haven't quite wrapped my head around it yet. I couldn't really choose which one was my fave chapter - they were all really interesting and brought something new and thought provoking to the table.

I'm very glad I read this and would absolutely need to read the next one, also because I can't imagine how they would structure the next one now that we already know the pilgrims' backstories.

I guess the book was... OK?! I kinda lost interest in it at about the 60% mark and scanned through the rest of it. The mystery was not very engaging, the twists were not super twisty, but I'll give it to the author that my initial guesses for the murderer were wrong.

I'm a huge fan of Jane Austen and also really enjoy classic British literature from that time period, so I'm not unfamiliar with how convoluted English writing could be from that era. However, the author dialed it up to 11 when she was trying to replicate that style. It felt overdone and stilted, and really screamed, “This is trying very hard to write like Jane Austen” rather than replicating her style.

The author seems to have a penchant for replacing a perfectly regular “had” for “did”.

Regular sentence: “Had she arrived in a Scargrave carriage, she would have caused a commotion.”Author's sentence: “Did she arrive in a Scargrave carriage, she would have caused a commotion.”

I'm not entirely sure if it's an accurate use, but even if so, she used it so many times that I actually got really annoyed with it after a bit.

None of the characters were particularly endearing, unfortunately not even our narrator Jane. As someone invested in finding out the solutions to the mystery, she jumps to a ton of conclusions and also gets led on super easily by the worst of characters. In fact, every plot twist that comes to her in the end takes her entirely by surprise. I get that she can't know too much, or it would be spoiling the twists for the reader, but then why even make her the “detective” of this series? I was also really annoyed that she was so resolutely confident in Fitzroy's innocence despite learning about his "misdeeds" in London and she gave no reason why besides that he was just oh so noble. I mean, even Isobel, his lover, was completely taken in and we are to believe that Jane wasn't simply because she had a gut feeling. It just felt like the author wanted Jane to be right in something in the end, rather than jumping on the hate bandwagon for Fitzroy only to have to be contrite about it when it's proven false.

There are definite P&P elements in the plot here, and frankly that was a little annoying too. As the author notes in the preface, First Impressions was written way before the time period of this book so it wouldn't make sense to say that, in an alternate universe, the events of this book inspired the events of P&P. Along with some iconic quotes directly lifted from P&P and attributed to some of the characters in this book, it just felt like a cheap homage to P&P. Don't get me wrong, I love P&P but don't shoehorn elements of it into something that's meant to be completely irrelevant. Don't copy and paste quotes from another novel and add it in here just so that we can all have a nudge nudge wink wink, I know that's from P&P moment. It's just a pet peeve for me as a Jane Austen fangirl.

I am also super bewildered by how Jane started off with a terrible impression of Tom Hearst, and despite writing about how she will guard her heart against him, etc., she suddenly feels betrayed when she finds out that he actually got Fanny pregnant. And then what shocks her even more than that is when she finds out that he's actually a wastrel who cheats at cards and has racked up gambling debts (obviously a Wickham prototype), it's only then that she starts thinking, how could I have been so deceived by him? Ummm. There was really nothing at all to even give us the impression that she had been deceived, or any reason why she would like him at all, as she persistently rebuffs all his advances. I don't know, this entire plot point was just so so contrived and unnecessary, and just made Jane look even more silly.

Overall, I actually enjoyed this one quite a bit more than the latest instalments I've been reading from Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. It's got the action and adventure and dark mysteries reminiscent of some early Christies. The writing style is generally easy to follow, to the point where I'm really wondering why I took this long to start on Allingham.

What probably dragged the rating down a bit for me was the mystery being just a tad bit too convoluted and the solution of the mystery packing a little less oomph than I would've wished. I was frankly pretty lost during many parts of the story especially when there's a lot of action going on (I generally can't visualize action very well so fight scenes or car chase scenes really go over my head).

The series is named after Albert Campion but tbh he's not exactly the main sleuth in this one. He does make major contributions to the mystery solving but George Abbershaw was undoubtedly the main protagonist in this one. Campion is interesting but I don't think we really saw him with enough depth for me to feel particularly invested in him as a character.

About the ending: I really really spent half the book convinced that Meggie had been the murderer. She was behaving a little suspiciously cool when George and her were speaking with Mrs Meade and I always thought her little expressions here and there or just how quiet she's being at certain moments, all seemed so well placed for her to be hiding something. Honestly, Wyatt was a pretty disappointing solution, and the motivation was a bit unrealistic, with a random love affair and a really exaggerated sense of self-righteous vigilantism trying to right a wrong that he perceives to have been done to a woman he fell in love with, just cos he thinks this criminal society is responsible for miseducating her and making her dumb? Just what??

I'd definitely still continue on to more Albert Campion mysteries and would recommend this one to anyone interested in golden era cozy mysteries, especially those with more action.

This was... OK? This was serviceable. I felt that the beginning was a bit muddy and I couldn't tell the difference between most of the characters, aside from the central few, but it got more engaging around the 50-75% mark.

The ending was incredibly predictable however. Not that I could've guessed the culprit, but the way we find it out felt a bit contrived (It was a deus ex machina on two levels. First a maid who was conveniently dismissed and therefore missing through the whole story suddenly just tells them she witnessed the whole scene, and then the actual “murderer” herself confesses out of a fit of conscience, I guess? It felt like Hugo and Freya did pretty much almost no detecting at all.).

Not only that, we have an ending “climax” scene which was straight out of a formula. The moment things started happening, I already knew exactly how things were going to play out to a tee. (Of course Hugo would independently deduce somehow that it was actually Guthrie who had killed Selchester, and of course he is unable to reach Freya to tell her about it before she unadvisedly wanders out into murky conditions to find Guthrie and, for no good reason, spill the beans to him and immediately after realise that he is the murderer just before he tries to kill her. Everything was just straight out of a textbook, imo. I could've excused such formula if it was done by, say, Conan Doyle or Christie because they were basically progenitors of such tropes, but in a contemporary book written decades after these tropes have become incredibly overplayed, it was just incredibly disappointing.)

It was OK. I'm indifferent to continuing the series - I didn't hate the experience but I felt like there wasn't much in the story that is appealing enough to me to want to read more of it.

I wasn't into the writing style, especially the overdramatic drop of pronouns: “Stopped what she was doing, heard a rustle.” (quoted almost verbatim from the book)

I didn't feel invested in any of the characters, especially not whiny Sasha or Bran “Mary Sue” Killian. Plus, I didn't understand why she got all pissed at him for not having told her he was a wizard, cos I mean, didn't she dream of him and his lightning bolts? You'd have thought that she'd be the least surprised member of the party. In one chapter, the actual “strategising” on how they were going to search for the fallen stars was relegated to a cursory single short paragraph: “They spent one hour strategising...” (Not quoting verbatim here because I'm too lazy to find the actual quote in the book, but that was the gist) The rest of the chapter is dedicated to Sasha and Bran getting to know each other in a romantic walk on the beach. Gee.

The last straw came after a short dialogue between Riley and Sasha when Sasha asks Riley to teach her “how to fight”.

“Okay, see, you're punching like a girl.”“I am a girl.”“Nobody's a girl in a fight. You're a fighter. ...”

These are two women, by the way.

DNF.

I'm not feeling this book so far at 35% in. the magic system is really fun and all, but i'm not super engaged by the story, and i also kinda predicted that big reveal about Gavin and Dazen having swapped identities in Ch 34, so it wasn't super surprising for me. i'm DNFing for now at Ch 36. i won't rule out picking it back up again, but i have too many books to read this month to press on.

Phew. This is my second Virginia Woolf novel. Although it makes more sense to me than the first (Between The Acts), I still constantly find myself bewildered at what's happening in the narrative. There's so much dialogue, and a lot of that dialogue is typically very irrelevant and flits from topic to topic. I believe that's Woolf trying to make a point, because she does insert a lot of pretty scathing social commentary especially from the viewpoint of Helen Ambrose, who feels somewhat like an author's mouthpiece. But wow, sometimes it's really hard to follow.

The novel first introduces Helen Ambrose, a middle-aged woman leaving her children behind in England while her husband, Ridley Ambrode, and her sail to South America. She is joined by her niece Rachel Vinrace, the true protagonist of the story, and her father Willoughby Vinrace who is Helen's brother-in-law. Rachel had planned to join her father to sail on to the Congo for an expedition, but Helen convinces Willoughby to leave Rachel in her care in the South American resort that she would be stopping at, to which Willoughby agrees. Later, they meet Mr Hirst and Mr Hewet at the resort, who become interested in getting to know Helen and Rachel better.

Look, I can get that Woolf inserts a lot of pretty damn scathing social commentary, particularly on the state and rights of women, in this book. I can get behind that and see it. I just have an issue with how long her dialogue is. However, as with Between The Acts, I feel like that problem's more on me than on her. I can definitely see why others enjoyed this a lot, because when I did slow down to read some sentences closely, it was pretty striking and interesting. But it was also so dense and didn't capture my attention very well. I don't really know why, seeing that I'm usually a fan of well-written prose. Maybe I'm just not in a mood for early-20th C writing now.