Tyson Vaughan > Recent Status Updates

Donna Tartt was apparently a teenage boy in a previous life.

Also, what an amazingly textured and realistic biography, not just of a grieving boy, but of grief itself.

Dear authors: PLEASE organize your books into numbered or meaningfully titled chapters. I like to switch back and forth between the ebook and audiobook, and that's really hard to do with this one. So I end up not reading it for long stretches simply because of the extra effort it takes to figure out where I am.

I wasn't sure if this would grab me, but it did. At least so far. My mother still lives, thank god, so I don't know what it's like to lose a mother at age 13. Or I didn't, until I read this book. This portrayal of a 13-year old boy's struggles with the loss of his mother is breathtakingly realistic. If grief is a painting, this book is a high-power loupe, revealing the textures of paint and canvas in minute detail.

creeping my way through this thing. I might finish by the end of 2026. It's kind of entertaining. But it saddens me that DFW lived in such an anodyne age, and thus wrote about such anodyne lives. I feel like this is his great theme: contemporary culture is so anodyne that it is dehumanizing, robbing us of authentic experience. Or at least it was, before civilization started collapsing.

My first Rushdie read. Clever and witty writing, but the storytelling is constantly going on expositional tangents, and it's unclear whether these tangents really matter to the main narrative or merely add a bit of color and humor. I still have no idea who or what this story is about.

Wow, this grabs you emotionally from the get-go.

Fun and funny but also brutal and horrifying

Genetically tweaked humans board generation ships and colonize other worlds. Meanwhile, Earth develops jump gate technology. Xenophobic Earthers call the colonists "subhuman terrorists." Corporate overlords sell remotely piloted war-mechs to Earth's "true humans." The mechs are sent to exterminate the colonists. This story is from the colonists' perspective.

I expected this to be a murder mystery set in the fantasy world of The Goblin Emperor. It is that, but it's not only that. There are several murder mysteries (which presumably will eventually connect in some way), as well as some side adventures involving ghouls and ghosts and politics.