Chris > Recent Status Updates

...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.

I am nervous about Testaments - I was very reluctant to read it after my more recent experiences with The Heart Goes Last and Maddaddam (both subjectively bad novels, in my opinion). It also feels like a sequel that just wasn't necessary. Handmaid's Tale has a PERFECT conclusion - I am skeptical that Testaments is really going to be... Erm. Supplemental? Additive? It feels like a bad idea.

We'll see shortly, eh.

"One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words 'In Hope'.
"'In Hope'. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?"

There is such a bruised, aching sadness to this novel.

God, it's just so visceral and so fucking devastating.

"The Guardians aren't real soldiers. They're used for routine policing and other menial functions... These two are very young... The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them."

I'd love to see Atwood's taken on ICE here in Minneapolis. But she already addressed them, basically...

Re-read before I start The Testaments.

I've not read this since college - 2002 or 2003, I think? Absolutely fucking nuts how the world has descended into fascism since then.

I miss those days. I miss college, too.

Pretty slow build-up, but lots of fun, surprising stuff going on!

This is very, very silly. It feels a lot more like a return to Texasville than a sequel to When the Light Goes.

It's fun, but doesn't have much substance thus far.

I get the sense that, much like Carl and Donut themselves, Dinniman has a little more leeway to fuck about in this book.

It's a fantastic romp thus far - simply all of the catastrophic explosive delight I might possibly have asked for.

This is extremely slow. Possibly just relative to what I've been reading lately, but the pace is just crawling. None of the war and personal combat seem to occur in real time. Hrm.

Not to say that it's not good. It's Le Guin afterall. But it's still not my favorite thing ever.

It has this certain sense of inevitability and dark fatefulness. It's quite sad in that way.

But ugh, it's so fucking slow.

Uhhhhhh.

Wait a sec, wait. What the helllllll.

This is a journey right here.

Curious.

I'm starting to pick up a genuinely anticapitalist sentiment in this novel. Perhaps I'm late to the party, this being the third book and all. I've certainly been accused of being slow before.

Regardless. This gets the nod of approval. If anything - I'm even more in to it now.

Kill, kill, kill!