Gavin > Recent Status Updates

Definitely a very slow read, and not just because it's long, but because it's so modernist (like Joyce or Woolf)

I don't know if I'm going to finish this. On a sentence-by-sentence level she's very good, but on the macro level it's a bit of a mess

Really enjoying this so far (gotten through Gregorian chant, into the beginnings of polyphony). The intro says it's aimed at music majors, which I was not, but I'm not finding it particularly difficult -- I think it's more that back in the 60s when the book was written, you would have needed access to a very well-stocked music library. But nowadays we have youtube, and I can find most of the pieces.

I keep reading this series because of how ambitious they are -- Ada Palmer is aiming for some big ideas here. On the other hand, I think they fall seriously short of their aim sometimes.

On to "Circe", one of the weirder chapters even by the standards of this very weird book

The "Sirens" chapter. A very experimental chapter and probably my least favorite, and the hardest to get through on a first reading. But fore-warned is fore-armed, and knowing what's coming makes it a lot easier to get something out of it.

The first two episodes are a fairly simple introduction, although the third is difficult. This time, I just tried to go with the flow of Stephen's thoughts as they flit from place to place, and it worked for me.

It's been too long since I last read "Ulysses," so I'm giving it another go. I actually think the book's reputation for difficulty is over-stated; I first read it with no guide-books, and enjoyed it immensely, even though a lot of it went over my head.

One thing about Tana French that this book bears out hugely is that she's not afraid to take things very slowly. I'm listing to this book on audio, and it takes something like 6 hours for the main plot to begin in earnest.

For me, it's great -- I find her characterization carries me through -- but it's definitely not for everyone.

This is a very hard book to know how to rate it -- I don't know where I'll fall at the end. Some really bravura writing, like bringing in Thomas Hobbes and strengthening the unreliability of the narrator, but also some really clumsy stuff - lots of melodrama

James Tiptree, Jr (pen name for Alice Sheldon) was one of the great writers from science fiction's new wave, but I've never read anything by her. So far, about 6 stories in, this is a very powerful collection. Although very dark.

Another few stories in, and they got much more oblique, raising more questions than they easily answer. Definitely enjoying it a lot.

Two stories in, and this book is proving to be a bit of a disappointment. Still a 4-star read so far, but Kelly Link is normally a 5-star author for me.

I think that the problem is that in my favorite stories, a lot of the strange stuff is in the penumbra of the story -- happening to someone else, or not clear what's happening. These stories, being fairy tales, have everything on the surface.