witzelsucht

Firstly, the cover is gorgeous. Kudos to Elizabeth Wakou for her work. It's the best thing about this book and this star is for her. Secondly, I hated this book's guts. Feminist retelling this, female rage that – I need to get some female rage off my chest right now. A lot of it.

Feminist in marketing only, Lady Macbeth recoils from everything that made the original character powerful and interesting, offering up a defanged "reclamation" that contorts itself around into baffling misogyny. What is this feministly reclaiming, exactly? What was the author's thought process here? "Wouldn't it be subversive if literature's greatest female villain had no power, ambition, personality, or agency? Isn't that actually doing more feminism? What if she wasn't even a villain, because only men can be bad? What if she was a nubile teenager so beautiful it drove men mad to look at her? What if she really needed a handsome prince to save her? What if her biggest burden was being gorgeous?"

The astonishingly brass-necked blurb says this book "gives Lady Macbeth a voice". Christ. She didn't need one. I cannot imagine the dream-world in which this pablum is doing Lady Macbeth any favours. It's a rebuttal against a version of the character that doesn't exist, against a narrative the author has imagined, to glorify an otherwise nothing story. Reid takes a mature, dominant, challenging, driven woman and mushes her down into soft, bland Teletubby custard to make her palatable and #relatable. This corrective new "Lady" is a demure, gentle, beautiful, naïve, feminine, chaste, goody-two-shoes woman-child who can do no wrong, even though that's all she does.

As well as being a preternatural bombshell, our heroine Roscille is meant to be uncommonly observant and clever, which manifests as her jumping to contrived conclusions, BBC Sherlock-style, and getting dozens of people killed along the way. I started questioning this character's supposed resourcefulness when her first ✨ clever plan ✨ gets a castle full of people slaughtered. She thinks vaguely of this as a minor whoopsie, or even a net positive because the castle would've been full of evil rapist men anyway. No, really. She and the narrative are over it in a couple of chapters.

I feel bad for any Scottish people who read this book. Reid's contemptuous portrayal of Scotland would make a medieval propagandist proud: a godforsaken, barbaric place populated by brutish rapists who speak an animalistic language. The Scottish are essentially written as a subhuman fantasy race. Barely a page goes by without some observation of how they are primitive, uncivil, beast-like, cruel, crass, and loveless. If this was set in a fictional world peopled by monsters, such broad strokes might've been easier to swallow, but, as it stands, this "historical" setting just reads like an American author's lazy Celtophobic delusion. For good measure, Reid drops a jus primae noctis mention in the first chapter. Did her research into Scotland begin and end with Braveheart?

Through the miserable lens of Lady Macbeth, men are all predatory ogres and women exist to be brutalised. I say "exist" loosely, as the book sidelines every woman except our spineless heroine. The women unlucky enough to be described are still trolls next to dainty Roscille, with their big shoulders, small hips, and wrinkles. You could excuse some things as being limitations of Roscille's worldview but, seeing how the rest of the book is so ill-considered, I'm not moved to generosity.

I hoped the prose would at least be good, but it's not. I love lyrical, figurative writing but this just has the off-kilter whiff of an author overreaching for "mature and embellished". Just within the first chapter, the sky is "sickishly vast" and "epithet" is used three times in a couple of pages. Characters have quavering frowns and nickering heartbeats. "A dramatic ordeal of blood" appears, followed not long after by "a great ordeal of blood". The same character is described twice as being "miserly with his violence" – a good turn of phrase when seen once, but slipshod when seen again. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open again. The bloody barbican grinds open again. The barbican grinds op–Christ on a bike! The word you're looking for is "gate" and your editor is asleep on the job. I'm also certain Reid doesn't know what "posthumous" means, because her usage of it is repeatedly mystifying.

The word "canny" is overused, which is very funny for a book that disdains everything Scottish. "Canny as a weasel", "the canny mind of a weasel", "a canny animal", "canny as an ermine", "a canny ermine". Hello, editor? Hello? There are a few too many instances of "[noun] is an [adjective] thing", aiming for literary but giving Lightlark. There are endless yawnsome metaphors about slippery lampreys, bloody consummation, and tiles on a draughts board (pieces, surely) to make sure you get the Themes™ and Motifs™, as if you could've missed them.

The book's entire premise – Lady Macbeth being a helpless, reluctant pawn in her powerful husband's schemes – crumbles at the slightest scrutiny, all because Roscille has this pointless mind-control power. All she has to do is look Macbeth in the eye and it's curtains for him. But oh, woe is her, she just can't do it! I kept waiting for some clever reveal – that her hypnotic gaze was a misdirection, something symbolic rather than literal – but it never came. Nope, she just has actual Jedi mind-tricks that she never uses to help herself. Just, what? Calling it a plot hole seems unfair to plot holes.

And don't even get me started on how, the morning after Macbeth finally violently consummates their marriage, Roscille goes skinny-dipping in the woods to wash the blood off, and guilt-trips her handsome prince boyfriend into having amazingly pleasurable sex with her. What crusty old man from the 1980s wrote this?

Lady Macbeth is the slickly packaged definition of "go girl give us nothing". As a retelling, it bears so little resemblance to its source, it's not even a distant cousin. As a historical fantasy, it's as shallow as a Pinterest board and insultingly negligent. I don't know why Reid didn't just fully commit to the "waifish virgin bride meets magical dragon prince" story that this clearly wants to be instead. But then there'd be no "feminist retelling" hook to sell it, would there?

This is a compilation of pleasant, cheerleading platitudes to encourage writers, rather than a concrete "guide" to anything. It's very, very slight and the references to writing in COVID make it feel terribly dated already, but I liked that it featured input from many different, diverse authors, and the bite-sized sections made it easy to dip in and out of reading. It contains no secrets on how to actually write 1,000 words a day, just PMA stuff that you already know, really.

An underwhelming, annoying book. I love stylised prose with a wide vocabulary; I don't think a book having "windowpane" or "invisible" prose is praise. But this book ain't it. Lines like "the singsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he’d left the sun" and "jaw sharp as a promise" are twaddle. Somewhere amid all the mixed metaphors is a fun ghost story starring an amusingly messed-up gaggle of exes, but Khaw fails to find it.

Some of this book's sentences are so nonsensical I wasn't sure if they actually contained typos or were just the author trying and failing to be clever. Shouldn't that "every one" be "everyone"? Shouldn't that "poured" be "pored"? Shouldn't "a loci for our celebrations" be "a locus..."? And what the hell is wrong with this first-person protagonist that has her thinking exclusively in tortured metaphors and similes, anyway?

For all the show-offy vocabulary, the author runs out of phrases and mannerisms pretty fast. Everything is sweet, ink, mildew, indigo, froth, rills, and breath. Everyone's mouths and lips are thinning, pinching, slimming, and pinning. Everyone's licking their lips and teeth and running their fingers through their hair. The amygdala, cerebrum, and medulla oblongata are namedropped, just so you know the author's looked at a diagram of the brain and was determined to shoehorn most of it in. The repetitions stick out all the more for how short the book is and how desperately the prose is contrived. A book that consists of around 22,000 words but still manages to make two of them "chiaroscuro" is trying way too hard.

I could forgive the prose's overreaching ambition if it felt earnest, but it's combined with characters who keep ironically lampshading the weakness of the plot. The result just feels like the reader is being held in contempt. If the plot's such a knowing hack job, maybe the author should've spent more time on it, and less consulting the thesaurus? Did they want anything in this story to be meaningful, or to evoke anything approaching real? Is it all supposed to be a big joke, and if so, on whom?

Ugh, whatever. It's short and the cover's cool.

Enjoyably varied mix of stories, only a couple of which didn't land for me. I especially liked the killer inanimate objects and the crossovers with ‘Salem's Lot. Some really imaginative and exciting concepts here, even if many lean on the silly side. Rankings by running order:

FAVOURITE: Jerusalem's Lot, I Am the Doorway, The Mangler, Quitters Inc, Children of the Corn, One for the Road

GOOD: Graveyard Shift, The Boogeyman, Gray Matter, Battleground, Trucks, Sometimes They Come Back, Strawberry Spring, The Ledge, The Lawnmower Man, I Know What You Need, The Last Rung on the Ladder, The Woman in the Room

LEAST FAVOURITE: Night Surf, The Man Who Loved Flowers

An assortment of interesting essays about subjects useful for fantasy writers: jobs for women in medieval Europe, fatal chest wounds, standing armies, cultural exchange between nations throughout history, the origins of chocolate, archery being hard work, realistic hikes, Hollywood horse myths, and much more. Lots to enjoy and mull over, even among the subjects not relevant to my own projects. I listened to the audiobook, which was engagingly read.

A disorganised but gripping memoir by a man so singularly strange, tenacious, and unkillable, he almost borders on supernatural. Your mileage for it will depend on how much Herzog™ you can take (for me, a lot). He's possibly one of the most interesting people alive – the misadventures and idiosyncratic tangents of his life are remarkable before he's even out of his teens. I listened to the audiobook because I could happily listen to him talk about volcanoes, ants, and Michael Shannon all day. I recommend it for the maximum Herzog experience.

An engaging look at the depiction of women's bodies in Western art, mythology, media, and advertising – from Venuses and Madonnas to witches and #sadgirls – and the accompanying censorship, racist stereotypes, gender essentialism, and glorification of sexual violence. It has a fairly light touch but is still thought-provoking. I listened to and enjoyed the audiobook, which was read well by the author.

“My mother's hopes for me were that I would always be happy and thin. My hope for her was that she would never leave me.”

I like Katy Wix's TV work and enjoyed this memoir, insofar as you can enjoy a book that's sometimes very funny but mostly very sad. She writes with wit and articulacy about body image, disordered eating, depression and bereavement, through the framework of different significant cakes from her life. Chapters 11, 12 and 18 are tearjerkers. I listened to the audiobook, some sections of which don't work as well as they would on the page, but which is overall wonderfully read by the author.

A pleasantly light and fluffy memoir. I listened to the audiobook, read (and occasionally sung) with enormous theatrical gusto by the man himself, which added a lot to it. I can see why some reviewers might feel that Ball's a bit full of himself, but to me, in audio especially, he comes across as funny and likeable. His occasional “the show must go on” attitude towards mental health is a bit old-fashioned, to put it charitably, but he's mostly a fun guy. As the title suggests, the book leans heavily on the recent Aspects of Love revival as a through-line, which was amusing but didn't totally win me over, as there are other, more substantial projects I would've preferred to hear more about.

Sillier than expected, for better or worse. Is this really the grimdark guy? I wanted it to be more “Delightfully twisted and evil - The Guardian” than it is – the contagion of exclamation marks is the grimmest thing about it. The prose is sometimes good and sometimes amateurish. I found the catchphrasiness and spelling out of every “Argh” and “Ugh” to be cheesy contrivances, for an author I'd heard praised so much for his gritty economy of language. Along with a dozen instances of the phrase “empty gums”, the vocabulary just felt lacking at times. Repetitious wording is a pet peeve for me, whether by design or otherwise, and something I don't like noticing so plainly.

All that said, I enjoyed the characters (especially Logen and Glokta, empty gums and all) and the slow-building intrigue between them. From the series and author's reputation, I expected more than some bang-average fluff, though I gather this is his worst book even among fans. It felt very much like an extended prologue to something better. I didn't love it like I hoped, but it ended well and was good enough to have me looking forward to more. I would really like to see a fuller world and sharper writing for these characters.

An interesting but mixed bag. It's imaginative and unusual – I've not read anything quite like it – but it ultimately feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. The book is at its strongest in the first half, where, like the protagonist Corwin, we're fumbling to get to grips with the setting and stakes. Amber is an intriguing world and the magic is exciting, though it all feels a bit made up on the fly.

I struggled with the writing style the most. There are multiple layers of anachronism to contend with: the of-its-time voice of Corwin's narration, speaking of digging stuff and getting creamed; his relative antiquatedness when in the modern world; and his equally alien modernity when in the magical world. I'm sure there's a degree to which the use of slang and language is intended to be jarring, and sometimes it works in fun, pulpy way, but it often goes a few degrees beyond that, just leaving me a bit baffled as to the book's desired tone.

I admire Zelazny for gunning for an epic scale while briskly avoiding an epic page-count, but the snappy length comes at the expense of rounded characters and a defined world. I'm curious to read more Amber because I have so many unanswered questions, but if the writing style remains much the same, I'm not sure I'll be sold on the series.

As a massive, life-long fan of Watership Down, I probably should've read this sooner. Without doing down Horwood's originality, it's another story in which the British countryside becomes the setting for a sweeping epic, in which unassuming little animals have a complex social hierarchy, factions, customs, folklore, spirituality, and propensity for brutal violence.

I wish I liked the result more, though. For me, it doesn't reconcile its mythic ambitions with its cast of humble animals as successfully as Watership Down. While that book is my paragon of talking-animal texts, prophecies and deus ex machina and all, I wasn't a big fan of Duncton Wood's use of those devices. Characters wander into each other's lives led by vibes and mystical coincidences, without much connective tissue otherwise. The text tells us that their loves and loyalties are deep and profound, but these are preordained rather than earned through the interactions we see. The result does have an otherworldly appeal, but I'd have liked some more grounded motivations and relationships for the moles. This fatalism sucks the urgency and agency out of an already slow-paced story.

Duncton Wood sometimes gets mistaken for a children's book, and it's very much not. The characters are moles and that's where the cuteness ends. The moles are animalistic enough to be preoccupied with mating and producing litters, but anthropomorphic enough that this incurs a pretty strong degree of sexual violence, incest and infanticide. It's an adult fantasy book that just happens to star talking moles, and is more A Song of Ice and Fire than The Lord of the Rings, to which it's commonly compared. The writing can also be dense and abstract, and there's a lot of evocative but long-winded talk about landscapes, tunnels and weather. By halfway through I found myself skipping over paragraphs of these beautiful, bloated descriptions, which I never like to do.

Overall, it's not a perfect book, outstaying its welcome by a couple of hundred pages, but it's a vivid and memorable entry in the small niche of talking-animal xenofiction for adults. I gather that the later books are less rapey, but even longer and more religious, so I'm not sure I'll continue.

As much fun as the first book. It steps back in time from its predecessor to establish more of Vlad's past, such as meeting his wife (she stabs him in the kidney - it's lust at first sight) and managing the general admin woes of being a (literally) small crimelord on the up. Like the first book, it's essentially a crime mystery in structure, with Vlad and friends cracking a conspiracy using smarts, networking, and meetings over dinner as much as combat. I really like that. Looking forward to the next one!

This book starts well but meanders off the rails, as many of Lamott's anecdotes and examples are not as useful or amusing as she seems to think. When it's good, it's one of the more enjoyable books about writing that I've read so far. When it's bad, it's a toxic cocktail of condescension and insecurity that comes off as more repellent than relatable.

I started out taking notes, then stopped. By the end I was just relieved not to be Lamott's friend or student. Whether she's jokingly wishing cancer scares on her successful peers, likening being a writer to having a mental illness or autism, pouring scorn on students who dare to dream of being published, describing a Chilean author's work as “like primitive art”, or saying that people at the Special Olympics all “bear a familial resemblance”, her off-putting tangents quickly outweigh the usefulness of her advice. Add a dose of irrelevant God-bothering and it's like she set out to get on my last nerve.

At one point, Lamott describes receiving a note from a magazine editor, which says, “You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting.” She says it was mortifying, but it clearly wasn't mortifying enough to prevent this book.

Anyway, the advice boils down to: persist with writing, even if it sucks, and don't be afraid to ask for help. You already knew that.

It's difficult to rate a book that's an incomplete story. The “Volume 1” isn't just an aesthetic titling choice here – this is one half of a story that doesn't stand up as a piece on its own, cutting off on a cliffhanger with no resolution for any of its storylines or characters. If I'd read the book without that foreknowledge and without having Volume 2 to hand, I'd be hopping mad.

But Volume 1 is still a good book. Kaoru Takamura's attention to detail is meticulous and forensic in a way that is truly impressive, albeit not always bags of fun. Pretty much the first half of the book is slow-burning setup of the characters' lives, career histories, and financial circumstances; it's serious, intricate, and almost documentarian in its approach.

Once the downward criminal spiral begins in earnest, unfolding in equally rigorous detail almost minute by minute, the effect is satisfying and immersive. You feel the weight of all the socio-economic and psychological factors behind the characters' decisions like a rolling boulder. And then it stops! Thankfully I've got Volume 2 ready to go.

Totally gripping but jumps the shark as it goes on. It was a razor-sharp five stars for me at the beginning, but by the end could've been a two. Overall, I really liked it, but it left me feeling like it didn't know how to end and didn't fully do justice to any of its many ideas. It's still Kuang's best work for me, and the one context in which her too-onlineness is an asset.

I loved most things about this. Violent, visceral and gross - it's totally unsubtle. I was left cold by the ending - I wasn't sure if it was intentionally undermining the story's manifesto, but I found it so. I think Ursula K. Le Guin's quote about [reinforcing] the masculinist idea of women as primitive was directed at exactly this - but nonetheless I really enjoyed reading about a tired mother just biting stuff!

A great book about writing: to the point, well written, actionable, and with some compelling advice I hadn't heard before. I enjoyed how Bell laid out his process from the big picture right down to word-level detailing (going as far as making hit-lists of hackneyed words/descriptions that he avoids, e.g. “chiseled features” and “manicured lawn”). Motivating and engaging.

Even after finishing it, I'm unsure whether this is an interesting fantasy story burdened with a series of unfinished essays, or an interesting series of essays burdened with a unfinished fantasy story.

The themes are commendable but Kuang's spoon-feeding and footnotes came across as defensive and grating to me, as if the author was watching over my shoulder, butting in after every scene to make sure I definitely, definitely got the message. I wish she'd given the reader more credit and let the story speak for itself.

I liked and disliked it pretty much equally in the end; despite the above, it could also be intriguing, gripping and enchanting. Three stars for ambition and for doing something inventive with its etymology- and translation-based magic, which I did really enjoy.

—

(Oh, and one thing that bothered me, for a book that's well-regarded for its research: One character is repeatedly said to specialise in Gaelic, and jokes that she was born too late to have “grown up around Gaelic”. But what's “Gaelic”? Scottish or Irish? Because those languages are not the same. I assumed from her name that the character, O'Neil, is Irish or of Irish descent. O'Neil is later mocked for being “so English” due to serving boring, boiled... potatoes. Um...)