Chris > Recent Status Updates

There are some very strange turns of phrase, and loads of native names for animals that are somewhat hard to track.

That being said, generally, this is compelling and enjoyable thus far. A bit of a low starter though.

The introduction is just utterly devastating. The prose is gorgeous and poetic. Fuck - this is so sad and horrifying.

Welp, apparently my reviews of the previous two books have disappeared. Um. Thanks for that, Goodreads? Why can't I find my own reviews???

"Komura always felt his tension dissipate when he and his wife were together under one roof; it was the only time he could truly relax. He slept well with her, undisturbed by the strange dreams that troubled him years in the past. His erections were hard; his sex life was warm. He no longer had to worry about death or venereal disease or the vastness of the universe."

I knew I needed some marriage in my life.

Obviously, I'm not great at choosing light, cheery summer reading!

Christ, this is just so sadly oppressive.

Is Corinne a selfish bastard and terrible parent, or am I entirely off-base?

Yikes. Aren't there like a dozen books in this series? I hope I'm not in for another ~300 pages like this in just this first book.

"I don't have a problem with treason. I can stop any time." - John Perry

Okay, as utterly stupid as this plot may be, the humor still gleams.

Colonists: "Ayyy, we're at the planet, where should we park?"
CU: "Just send your ship straight into the sun."
Colonists: "Uh. We'll be stuck, with no way to talk to anyone in the rest of the universe. And the ship is like a billion dollars, probably."
CU: "It'll be worth it."

What.the.fuck.

The entire premise has jumped the shark. This series is fun, but has lost all touch with reality.

This is kind of surprising me in multiple ways. I hadn't really expected PKD's scathing criticisms of war, and some of his more traditional approaches to sci-fi are just downright brilliant.

I hadn't expected so many good stories to be a part of this collection. Highly recommended thus far, though there are a couple of lesser stories.

I didn't particularly enjoy Ghost Brigades, so why am I giving this series another shot...?

I've been playing too much Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and I don't know that I can handle something all that cerebral at the moment. Space lobsters and explosions? Sure, whatever.

This is absolutely fantastic. The experiences are just so far beyond verbal articulation. It's horrible and lovely and the human connections are just incredible.

But, I've also gotten horribly sucked in to Elden Ring, and summertime to boot, plus a horrible project implementation at my job - I'll absolutely finish Endurance soon, but I surely could use a donation of free time at the moment.

Uhhhh. I'm not sure why I grabbed this, but.

I mean, I like a good ghost story, so fingers crossed?

...what the fuck. Why is this still going?

The inconsistent pacing in this book is killing me.

The papist and Catholic fuckery is the worst.

I like a good apocalypse story. All of the Christian trappings of this one are just tedious. Oh gosh, the anti-hero died and is damned? It's formulaic. Just skip to the salvation bollocks.

I don't know how I'm going to rate this - I don't even want to finish it.

Seriously though, how can this outgrow the long shadow cast by Between Two Ferns? I keep waiting for the jokes.

It has been at least twenty years since I've read this series; I had a lovely hardcover set of the trilogy, and I probably gave it away when I wasn't really interested in historical fantasy fiction.

/Deep sigh

Anyway. It's every bit as good as I remember. The Last Kingdom series must have drawn a lot of inspiration from this series - plain as day.

Also clear why I started wearing a mjolnir pendant. Good times.

I don't... understand.

Why did "Breq" drag Seivarden through all of this and expect any other outcome?

Breq comes off bitterly cynical - EXCEPT in this, where Breq has this naive blind spot miles wide.

Also, how did Seivarden survive that fall without armor?

Generally: da fuq??? This story is just fucking bizarre and unnecessarily complex.

The power went out at my house for a couple hours yesterday, so I actually made some progress on this. 🙄

I'm enjoying this... Though it is a bit meandering and slow. It's certainly cerebral. Which is not exactly what I'm in the mood to read at the moment. 😅 I may set this down and try again some other time.

Okay, so the difficulty with Uhtred's narrative is acknowledging what a bastard he is.

Being his narrative, he's likeable - and I tend towards granting him a bit of leniency. He's still a terrible and deceptive, disloyal murderer.

Because that's the real difficulty of this series, innit? And I don't care for the sympathetic and saccharine Christian bollocks.

Though history is a series of hard lessons...

Amen?

These stories are a little shy of "great" thus far.

They seem to be riddled, even more than King's usual, with odd little regional expressions.

I'll never not-love Stephen King - maybe it's my age or all of the loads of other shit I've read and grown into... but I just don't feel the same way about his writing anymore.

Still intending to finish this, and enjoying it - but it's not peak King.

This is quite good so far.

It really reminds me of Harry Harrison's excellent The Hammer and the Cross series. I also wonder how much it influenced Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea series.

There are a lot of very familiar character-types shared between these series.

Anyway. Good so far!

I think it's unlikely that I'll finish this one - the religious elements are so heavy-handed, it's unbearable.

Sam's mother is awful, and I suspect I'm supposed to feel the opposite.

This feels like a John Irving novel, though even less capable of subtlety and thicker on the melodrama.

In fact, I think I'll quit right now. Ta-da!

One of these days, I'm going to need to read Starship Troopers, eh?

John Scalzi sure did liberally borrow from The Forever War, and the aforementioned Starship Troopers - the imperialist ideology isn't quite so obvious, but it's there.

This is good. I need to stop reading this dystopian stuff until/if the world heals a bit though. It's just too close to home.

"They’re wandering around in a library of books written in an unknown language, and just looking at the colors of the spines… That’s how it is!"

Lem is fantastic, as always.

"We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled."

His insight is just stunning at times.

Solaris is brilliant.

Okay, so, I lied. I like this.

But it's like A Clockwork Orange - strapped into a chair with your eyes pried open and forced to watch awful, traumatic things for page after page without much relief.

But, it's my bad that I expected anything else.

It's a horror novel. It just so happens to have been written by the same guy who wrote DCC. Any resemblance basically ends there. Mostly.

Don't expect fun or fluff.

This is... Unexpected. Very dark. It feels far slower and more labored than DCC.

It's also sickeningly gory and demented.

I'm not not-enioying it - but it lacks levity or fun. It's just brutal and disorienting.

I'm glad this didn't become a series. It has merit, but there are strange malapropisms, try-hard run-on sentences about serial killers, and lots of poor editing.

I like it, but it's pretty bad.

While I'm enjoying this novel, it's also dreadfully tiresome. The persistent whimsy and eccentricity, the constant astrological observations, and general pedantry read so fucking ponderously.

It's observant and brilliant and humorous; however, the qualities that make it so are also downright obnoxious.

I intend to finish this, but I anticipate a struggle to get there.

"With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communications, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation." and etc. This is fantastic.

Though the astrology is unbearable.

"...I am a great proponent of 'better'. In the absence of 'best'.
Which is how we live now."

These statements - so direct, but at the same time so circumspect. The economy of language is just striking in all that it communicates.

Sofa king good.

It's really singular, when you need to describe how your broader circumstances have deteriorated as a society - it's just so shameful and depressing and profound.

Something about this feels... safer.

There are so many unknowns in Gilead that are becoming known. The terrors and the oppression and the fear just seem to have fallen away.

This really doesn't feel like a sequel. It feels like something written in the same universe, from different perspectives, without such a heavy sense of consequence.

That being said, Testaments is exceeding my expectations thus far.