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The second installment in The Final Architecture series is smartly crafted with good pacing, action scenes which are able to keep one's interest, and well thought-out character details which increase the interest we have in the primary and secondary players. It is all quite a feat. We spend maybe a third of the book in the viewpoint of the brain-hacked Intermediary navigator Idris Telemmier who is the target of galactic powers who want to possess him. He manages to become indispensable in yet another way straining credulity somewhat, as more light on the nature of Unspace and the hostile Architects is shown by means of a mysterious artifact. There is a galactic war, ruthless gangsters, sympathetic aliens, and sassy robots too in case the Architect plot grows dull. It all comes together in the end as a massing of forces for the third installment of the series but for me this wasn't a letdown. Of the main crew, there aren't any permanent losses, though some extended abductions helped keep up the tension. A couple of new, unfamiliar sorts of character were introduced, proving to be interesting challenges for the narrator, Sophie Aldred, who came up with I felt were ingenious approaches to the experience. It is a long story befitting a space opera written by one of the current leading figures in science fiction. I am giving it a high rating for the craftsmanship while recognizing it would not be to everyone's taste, not great as a standalone book for a newcomer to the universe. It won't be long before I pick up number three in the series to delve into.

This is the first collection by an author who has won nearly all the important science fiction awards for fiction. All the stories are dark, but the interessing thing is how different the dystopias are from one another while the down-trodden characters are all coping with things in similar fashions. I could not listen to all of them in a few marathon sessions because of the deep gloom they all display. There a a couple of stories which made me angry, too, though the problem was not the writing but subject matter. Some readers might need warnings about content. The author has a gift for constructing an imaginary world so detailed in its claustrophobic aspects which constitutes a cruel trap for the characters who often are driven to violence by their situations. The two novellas The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man were in my opinion the best, each inspiring the author's longer work, although in some ways the title story is the saddest. The global crises driving the plot - predatory capitalism, environmental destruction, antisocial genetic manipulation - have become more important issues in the fifteen years since this was published, I think, joined by others.

The audiobook narration was excellent and did a good job to immerse me in the story. A couple of the tales were written too slowly for my taste, but the best ones were fantastically breath-taking pieces of storytelling.

Like many of my contemporaries I watched the Merchant Ivory film made from this novel when it came out years ago, but I wanted to take this in as an unabridged audiobook of the Booker Prize winning novel. I was already listening to another audiobook at the same time, but once I started this one it grabbed me so completely I just wanted to listen through to the end. The evocation of the inner life of the main character, Mr. Stevens, through very precise diction is simply masterful, along with the switches between the recollections from the pre-war episodes and the narrator's present-day were deft and illuminating. Stevens is the most polished sounding unreliable narrator imaginable, voiced perfectly by Nicholas Guy Smith in the audiobook version with just enough inflection to guide the listener to the meaning that likes just behind the words. The film concentrates most on the unrequited love between him and the Miss Kenton character, but in the book even more time is devoted to the Anglo-German relations in the lead-up to World War II, with lots of intrigue and secrets. Stevens evaluates what he has done all his life by the end of it, which hits home for me now that I'm of a similar age to what he would have been, and seeing that things might have turned out happier, has to conclude that it doesn't matter because the past cannot be changed, decisions that were taken cannot be unmade. He spent so much his time suppressing emotion that it cannot make sense to try to salvage emotion at the end. I found the novel to be moving.

This book is a survey of the writing style known as prose poetry from its early inception in the 19th century up to the latter part of the 20th. It takes pains to draw out the important techniques and methods used by prose poets and their popularity and it uses short quotations from a number of prose poems as it goes. Of the poets mentioned there is good representation of underrepresented communities and women.

The first problem is to define what poetry is, for many still feel that the name is a contradiction in terms. And in recent times it has become even more difficult to distinguish it from ultrashort prose items such as flash fiction. There are questions of whether prose poetry is distinct from poetic prose and whether the piece is necessarily brief. The simplest definition states that prose poetry is just poetry without imposed line breaks, but it can sometimes run afoul of those cases which do mix in lineated poetry along with blocks without line breaks.

There was also mention of the fragmentary nature of many prose poems, though also point out that there are other kinds of prose poetry which are more cohesive, yet still distinct from narrative prose. And they talk about the idea that the shape poem on the page in a way can evoke other art forms such as painting or architecture. No one thinks about how narrative prose as being confined by the margins of the page and yet prose poetry with its fanciful and artistic content seems to play with this idea of being constrained by a container or box. They take up the idea that prose poetry achieves some of its density because of metonymy, alluding to larger topics indirectly in a way that makes the reader work at unpacking the implications.

In the last 30 years post poetry in English has gained prominence because of some celebrated works by writers such as Charles Simic and John Ashbury which have received much discussion and awards. And yet this does not mean that all poets who are budding poets try to imitate them. Rather, it seems to be a field where there is still lots of wide open experimentation: graphical effects, very long or very short sentences, and other ways to break the form. This was an ebook version of this work which seem to keep up pretty well with the short prose poem extracts, maybe one or two short paragraphs each, but which did fail when it came to the sprawling semi-surreal work of Arthur Rimbaud, a combination of concrete and prose poetry with lines sprawling across the two page spread. This seemed to reach for a very different kind of rhythm than the prose-poem adjacent work of someone such as Walt Whitman. For while Whitman's work is broken up into lines, there is undoubtedly a very strong prose element that he introduced into American and English-speaking poetry. Perhaps the long discursive lines were presented this was so as not to break with the accepted forms of poetry then rather than being dictated by breath and by rhythm.

Prose poems have always had the ability to shock and upset readers because they may come to it unaware that the author is not engaging in straightforward narration and substituting something odd and unsettling, with word choices and repetitions characteristic of poetry. Some authors find this to be an aspect to the form which complements the message that they're trying to convey. The authors cite previous works on prose poetry and I am happy to see that there's been so much literary analysis of what remains an obscure branch of poetry.

I've experimented with the form and even have a few pieces published but having read this book now I have more ideas on which ways I could take it into different directiions. I learned quite a bit about some of the more fanciful aspects of prose poetry than what I knew coming in to this work.

I was surprised to find that the text of the ebook comes to an end about 60% of the way through, the rest of it being taken up with the end notes. Maybe the abrupt stop is appropriate for such a subject.

This was a series of lectures by a philosophy professor and social critic from City University of New York which is intended for someone who might have heard about Stoicism but does not know what it is all about. A certain amount of repetition is to be expected in this format, unlike what you might expect from an edited hardcopy volume (which has been published under the same name by the author). The emphasis is on pragmatic application of Stoic thought rather than comparison to other systems of belief, though there is a section on this included. It does address popular misconceptions of the philosophy by those who espouse it as a path to wealth and fame over the last few years. The audio comes with a pdf going over the points in an easily browsable format including suggested readings and questions for the student. I found it a pleasure to take in, though challenging to apply to everyday life because of the way reason takes a back seat to emotion when we encounter difficulties. To me, it sounded like a strategy for achieving harmony the way Cognitive Behavioral Therapy might be, though I had to imagine for myself how to mesh it into the rest of my own belief system since I am not looking to to take it as the sole strategy to address everything in life. Its rejection of any point to leave a legacy after one's death was novel to me, not just because of the insistence that there is no afterlife; saying also there is no reason to seek lasting fame or influence as an individual after death. It sounded like one practices virtue for its own sake in the moment, not to be remembered by anyone else, which is so unlike the modern tendency.

I'd started reading Seneca's letters previously and now am motivated to take them up again, along with Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius for what insights they contain. I might want to look up the book version of this work too some time.