Vanyo666 > Recent Status Updates

86 pages in, counting the extensive intro, I have already thrown my arms up in despair like six or seven times. I cannot read into the devastation of this brilliant mind. It is the detailed record of mystical delirium induced by too many drugs, and not much more.

Started this on a whim, not knowing what I would find. Pretty soon it turned into a thriller/ghost story with some very realistic horror passages, but then it morphed into a pink romance novel. The book alternates all these registers adding "cute" small dog capers.

So why do I go on until the end? The premise is more or less OK and I need to see how the bad guy gets nailed after everything seems to be lost.

Despite some rigid dialog and thin characterization, this is interesting enough.

This is so much more interesting than the comic

This guy is one of those eternally dissatisfied people. They can't want what they get. I mean he does not even like London Calling, hates Sandinista, and only liked the singles from Combat Rock. All the time he's whining about Strummer's hipocrisy and lack of consistency but he is pissed with Socialist politics. He sounds like one of those "modern" libertarian shits who only go on about their Freedom.

The author is a royal world-class prick and he doesn't care to even appear likeable. He certainly is a damaged person, who was beat up by his father for fun, had a cold, indifferent mother, and later became an acid casualty. He cheats and steals at work. And then through sheer bad attitude, he manages to become a guitarist for the short-lived, ill fated Clash MkII. Whines and bitches all day long. That's for a start.

And after all the coming and going with the Doctor who could not be true, Melanctha gets a betting man, gets spurned by him, gets spurned by Rose and then very suddendly gets sick but does not die, and then gets sick again and does die.

What a hard trudge of a book this is and for what.

I am so tired of Melanctha and Jeff, of Jeff and Melanctha and their endlessly repeated conversations about their relationship. I wish this would end soon or I will have to throw this book against the wall.

It started as an interesting look at the life of a poor but educated black girl. Then her doctor boyfriend gets to learn she had been "bad" in the past and he can't handle it.

The style and language of this book is kept deliberatly simple to a fault. Mostly short, periodic sentences with simple vocabulary. The characters are repeatedly described exactly the same way and their speech is reported or quoted directly as also very simple and idiosyncratic. The effect is that of a nursery tale for adults where much is implied but little is said outright.

The transcription of the Mokni (Mock Cockney?) pronounciation takes some getting used to. Like in Feersum Endjinn or the future bits of Cloud Atlas and other books depending on a phonetic transcription of a peculiar way of speaking, this can be either charming or irritating. One usually congratulates himself on being able to figure it out.

The idea of a less than sacred book created unwittingly has been done before.

Cuentos cortos con ideas de enfant terrible. Se hace un poco cansador el tono de mercachifle de los narradores.

1ro que leo en papel en mucho tiempo. Volumen frágil y finito, temo desencuadernarlo (creo que ya lo hice parcialmente encima es prestado).

Desconcertante Aira con su manera extrañada de narrar que no parece seguir más lógica que una interna y que va cambiando a medida que avanza el texto.

El planteo me recuerda en gran medida el "Paycheck" de Dick, solo que no son cosas elegidas a conciencia.

No es curioso que la autobiografía de Gabo se parezca demasiado al clima alucinado de "realismo mágico" de sus novelas más famosas. Y parezca, en definitiva, un recuento altamente ficcionalizado de su vida. Nadie recuerda tantos diálogos, descripciones, situaciones y sentimientos en detalle, creo que no es posible.

This is getting tedious with the longest whodunnit in history, and the love interest is a bit grating to me. To be fair, it is also a "whydunnit" and a solar-system scale political intrigue. The "Lists", "Extracts" and "Quantum Walks" still do not cohere anywhere for me. Maybe at the very end?

Such a messy hodgepodge of ideas, clumsy narration and thin characterization. 60's sci-fi at its worst.

Brilliant as usual, sometimes the descriptions necessary to set the stage are just too big in scale to wrap my head around. The shift in points of view is bewildering at times, I do not understand if the war Djan is hacking is the same in which her father died or not. Guess not.

Getting more used to the language, maybe just skipping where HM gets too dense for me. Maybe he's just mostly finished with contextualizing naval life in the times of the tale.

It is painfully obvious that the villain has repressed homosexual tendencies and is in love with Billy. Or, as it also can happen, Billy represents what he wishes he could be himself, and hates the guileless boy for that. The old Dane got it.

I am having a hard time understanding what this book is about. As a fellow reader put it in his review, I guess I am being "put off by 19th-century diction" and having trouble with the nautical terminology which "isn't so thick that a modern-day landlubber like myself can't understand it well enough to follow the basic narrative".

I am put off by both things and the historic recap of naval battles and mutinies.

The narrator is highly obnoxious. He is like the filpside of the negro protagonist in the previous book.

At this point, I am tired of descriptions of new worlds, clouds, sunsets, strangely adapted life etc. And I am also tired of the soft porn descriptions of our heroes entanglements. Guess the fascination of the first two books has given way to a lot of half-baked mysticism, which is what happens when writers tackle this kind of weighty ideals on evolution. I am even tired of the evil of the Church.

This book seems to be mostly about the machine-like quartet of core golems. It has a lot of vatican politics, too. I am still puzzled about the inclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright as Aenea's "teacher". What could a tech messiah possibly have to learn from this odd architect? The next 82% of the book has a lot to answer for, as I am sure it will.

Surprising how little I remembered of the previous two books when I started this one. I even doubted I had read more than one. That is what leaving a saga alone for five years will do to you... but where those first two books were exhausting with concepts and compressed ideas, this is more of a (concept-dense) adventure romp. At least so far!

Thinking about page 40 and that bit about "the potential of what sai King might be able to create". It made me feel King had dropped the ball completely in this 7th book. I meant, God, what an awful God-complex!

Now I am beginning to understand that he writes he does not create anything, he's just a conduit. But in any case, his self-importance is too hard to countenance.

The premises are preposterous, the narration is stiff and full of characters who will launch on endless discourse for tens of pages about ideas that are clearly the author's. Rand's portrayal of any idea linked to actual progressism or "the common good" are inevitably evil, and knowingly so. The poor capitalists who cannot help producing riches are defenseless victims. Yum. Still I keep going because it's kinda fun.