jayeless's reviews
337 reviews

This is very hard to get into. For the first third or so of the book, I found it mind-bogglingly boring – so boring that trying to read it on the train, I would periodically decide that my own thoughts were more attention-grabbing and my eyes would glaze over and I'd stop reading. If you're not very patient, the book starts out as a hard slog.

But I persevered, partly because the last China Miéville I'd read was brilliant and partly because I feel like a failure if I can't finish a novel. Eventually, I got sucked in.

The thing that sucked me in was the impressive world-building, of course. Miéville has constructed an intricately detailed city, New Crobuzon, partly based on industrial revolution-era Europe but with a lot of fantastical twists. This is a city where humans are not the only sentient species, and the specific part of the book that really set me to begrudgingly liking it was where Lin ponders the history of her own migrant community, the khepri, which we would consider a hybrid of beetles and humans, probably. New Crobuzon has dozens of neighbourhoods whose histories and characters get fleetingly described in the novel – too many to actually remember, which is frustrating, especially when the description goes on too long and you're impatient to get back to some action, but fascinating nonetheless.

I will say that some of the other description, not devoted to telling the history or social situation of the city, got really boring. Actual events in the plot seemed to take forever to unfold, which sapped the narrative of a lot of the urgency I think it was supposed to have. Some of the plot didn't sit well with me, either; in particular, I was really disappointed with how Miéville dealt with Lin

(seeming to kill her off to fuel the male protagonist's growth, then suddenly reintroduce her at the end of the story – only to immediately have her brain half sucked out by those slake-moths leaving her permanently retarded!)

. Considering how male-dominated the narrative was otherwise (there were only two women!), it was a pretty poor way to treat her.

So… as you can see, I've given this three stars. The world-building is fantastic, but the description is excessive and I disliked elements of the plot. It's interesting to note that out of everyone who's rated this book in Goodreads, only half have gone on to rate the sequel…

I really want to give this two and a half… I liked it, but it felt like a guilty pleasure. It's a novel about alienation, about Ari, an unemployed nineteen-year-old boy who takes drugs and has unhealthy, anonymous, vicious sex as a way of life. Tsiolkas injects some politics into the tale – it reminded me a bit of a better, Melburnian version of [b:Less Than Zero|9915|Less Than Zero|Bret Easton Ellis|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1282271923s/9915.jpg|1146200] – but Ari himself hates the world, states at one point that he wants to destroy it all in a nuclear holocaust.

So I don't know. On one level it was a fun read, but on the other… I felt that the political tangents didn't really "fit" with the rest of Ari's drug-fuelled evening, like it was too heavy-handed. There's a lot of "Melburnia", but unlike with [b:The Slap|5396496|The Slap|Christos Tsiolkas|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1330062364s/5396496.jpg|5464024] I don't think Tsiolkas got all his facts right; for example, he had Ari insist that Greek migrants settled here only north of the river, even though Oakleigh in the south-eastern suburbs is the hub of the Greek community. He also listed Bentleigh as a leafy eastern suburb, up there with Balwyn and Boronia, when it's actually just west of Oakleigh and was for a long time a working-class area… populated by people who worked in the factories in Oakleigh (and a little further afield, like in Moorabbin and such).

I guess it kind of bugged me that this was a city I almost recognised, but not quite. Its setting in time had a similar effect – having been published in 1995, it's stuck in that limbo where it's not quite old enough to be considered a representation of a historical period, but old enough that it's quite dated. Ari buys two drinks at a club and pays $5 for them. He has to call people at their homes on Saturday afternoon to plan where he'll bump into them at 1:30am. That kind of thing!

But like I said, overall, it was fun. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll round up to three for that.

After some reading of other reviews I decided to revise down my star rating. Like I said originally, this is another of those books I would rate 3.5 if that were possible, but it's not, so I have to find some way to lean towards.

Look, I really, REALLY liked the first quarter or so; it was extremely surreal but fascinating. But then the storyline slowed the fuck down and after that it wasn't anywhere near as gripping. It was still interesting, just very slow. To be honest, I found I found the main plot – the conflict between the gods – kind of boring. I vastly preferred the more human subplots, like Shadow's relationship with his wife, or the goings-on in Lakeside.

I guess it turned out that the goings-on in Lakeside did pertain to the gods, but only at the very end so I won't count that!

As an exploration of "America" and its culture and traditions it was also interesting – I generally liked the flashbacks. I also appreciated that the traditional woman killed in the first 10% of the book to fuel the male protagonist's growth didn't actually go away, although there was still something that vaguely bothered me about the characters. After reading some other reviews, I think it's just that I was never really invested in most of them. Like I said, the human characters were more relatable, but the gods (and Shadow himself a lot of the time) were really detached and blasé about everything, which got boring.

So yeah, I did like this book, but mostly on the strength of the beginning. Admittedly, I was reading the longer "author's cut" rather than the somewhat slimmed-down version that was originally published, and maybe I should have read that one, even if the author himself prefers it longer. I don't know what parts were actually cut out in the original edition, so I don't know! But I do *suspect* that it might have progressed a bit faster, and been a bit more compelling to read.

This is certainly an ambitious book. It spans two countries, half a century, and more characters than you can conceivably keep straight (unless you take notes, which might be your best option). It wants to impart so much thought on Christianity, alienation, murder, etc, etc..

YMMV, of course, but it didn't convince me. I couldn't keep track of all the characters, especially the ones who went by multiple names. While the novel plays around with different formats – sometimes narrative, sometimes letters, sometimes music journalism – the actual "voice" of the many different characters was very samey. It was also really preachy in some parts, which was bad enough when I agreed with the sentiment, and worse still when I didn't. (I just can't buy humanity being inherently evil.) I also did not care about any of the serial killers, bank robbers, etc. whose life stories got infodumped and ended up taking a lot of space in the novel. Lastly, while I appreciate that this novel sets out to include representatives from different social groups that are usually marginalised, I agree with this excellent review that their treatment often seemed tokenistic (I'm thinking especially of the trans band member).

I don't really want to be all doom and gloom, because the writing certainly had potential, and maybe if the themes (Christianity, humans being evil, etc.) had been more to my taste I'd have been able to overlook the other stuff. So, I don't know. I would certainly recommend this for anyone interested in serial killers/mass murderers. Provided you don't mind some fantastical elements like demons thrown in, of course.

This is another of those books that a lot of people studied at school, but not me. It was recently really cheap in the Kindle Store so I grabbed it. It turned out to be a really nice little book, although I'm not sure there was much about it to study at school (so probably a good thing I didn't read it there, or I would've ended up hating it).

The novel has a couple of different threads – one following the protagonist, Stanley Yelnats, at the hellish Green Lake Camp; another following his family history; and a third that really ties in with the second one that follows the decline of the long-gone town that the camp stands on the site of. The three threads all tie together nicely at the end, and the character of Zero really tugged on my heart strings.

This is yet another of those books that really deserves three and a half. It's a lovely children's book, but it wasn't as meaningful to me as an adult as it might've been if I'd read it when I was younger (without studying it at school). So, three it is. But I still really recommend it.

There's usually a comforting kind of consistency with Kurt Vonnegut's books – they're never my favourites, with the characterisation being too shallow for that – but they're witty, left-wing, and usually just kinda fun.

Unfortunately, I didn't find this one as fun. I kept getting the characters mixed up and then it all got a bit silly at the end.

I think I've actually read this novella before, because parts of it gave me some strong déjà vu. Evidently I forgot I'd read it, probably because I didn't think it was very good. It reminded me a bit of "Donnie Darko", although I don't remember that very well so take that comparison with a grain of salt.

Mostly I didn't get what the point of this book was. It didn't tell an interesting story, but it didn't seem to have any other point. Let's hope I don't inadvertently start reading it a third time!

If you like retellings of fairy tales, you will probably like this. I certainly enjoyed reading it, but by the time I was getting to the end I had some reservations.

The main problem I had with the book was that there was no real causality. It was dreamlike in that way. If something bad happened, you didn't have to worry, because ~*~magic~*~ would set things right again in some unforeseen way. The characters were paper-thin, too, so it was impossible to get invested in the narrative. The saving grace was that it was easy to get swept along by the words.