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Aw man, I was way too hard on The Fifth Season, wasn't I? "Harumph, this book doesn't handle its racism-metaphor quite that well, I don't think it's all that Hugo-worthy." Nothing to help you appreciate a fast-paced action-adventure in a truly unique world than a book that... isn't that.

I'm less than a hundred pages away from the finish line, and I am a completionist, plus this book was a gift and I feel obligated, so I will finish this! I just need to talk about it.

It's awful when you really want to like a book, but just can't. "The Priory of the Orange Tree" has so much going for it. A matriarchal world and diverse cast, a really cool and interesting magic system, Eastern and Western dragons and some interesting (but underdeveloped) religious themes. It even does Fantasy Netherlands, which is both flattering and kind of cringe (Look, I get it. I do get it, "Door to the Sea" sounds like a great name for a semi-Dutch harbor city. But it doesn't retain an ounce of that grandness in translation. "Zeedeur" sounds... very silly.)

Okay, rapid-fire complaints:

• There are multiple ancient mysteries that scholars have been pondering without solving them for centuries, apparently. But none of them seem that difficult to me. I'm not saying I'd be smart enough to solve them (I'm not that smart), but I'm not many scholars over the course of centuries. For one of them the solution is to just interpret a mysterious ancient text in the most straight-forward, literal and obvious way possible, and yet we're supposed to believe that no one did this for a thousand years. Another one is the sort of puzzle I could probably solve if it was presented to me in an escape room. I just don't believe that people were stumped by this for so long, I'm not buying it.

• The characters go through a lot of emotions, but I could never fully connect to them. It always felt like their feelings were described to me, while I watched emotion-less puppets act them out. I don't know if this is just me or if other people who read this book experienced it too.

• Most fantasy authors take inspiration from real cultures, that's fine, but this world is such a one-to-one with reality, it feels boring to me. At least Fantasy Italy is livened up a bit by making the Pope a female hereditary position (genuinely very cool!), but from the first "East" chapter it irked me how much the rest of the world is just TotallyNotJapan and Bchina.

• You can fuck up all the above if you write a readable, exiting book. The plot is there, the plot is pretty good. The pacing is not. You cannot write an 800-page book and fuck up the pacing. About every 100 pages I felt like I was finally getting into the story and then I lost it again. By the time I had accepted that this book was never going to read like the page-turner it was clearly meant to be I was too far in to quit it. That's a personality flaw on my part though.

In this surrealist novel, full of images from alchemy and astrology and occult lore, two people try to find each other, but sometimes they can’t even find themselves. The stone door of the title is both a barrier and an opening. Very different in tone from Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, and not a light read. Stories within dreams within manuscripts within stories, with characters slipping across boundaries and transforming into others. Carrington challenges conventional notions of narrative, language, gender, and the self. This is a book I could read many times and get something new from it each time. It has a werewolf, which is always a plus.

@sophist_monster@bookwyrm.social @jamesjbrownjr@bookwyrm.social My interpretation was always that the monster's hideousness was a result of his unnatural creation, almost like this aura of "wrongness". Frankenstein attempted to make him beautiful, give him beautiful features, but the way he's described in the book sounds a lot like a few-days old corpse, with the yellow, shriveled skin and such.

When I read the cover, I expected a mix of normal science fiction and horror. Grass, however, is much more than that. It offers fairly detailed descriptions about the world and features many characters with different motives. Religion, politics, personal motives collide and strange metaphysical events happen. The world on Grass feels much more like an episode from the High Middle Ages, although advanced science is discussed in between. The whole is underpinned by complex family drama. Add to that the danger that is omnipresent on the planet. An exciting read that I didn't expect, even if it was a bit lengthy and complex at times.

A set of loosely-connected stories set in the final years of a color-based enslaving society, the war for liberation, and the messy aftermath.

It’s brutal at times, but not as gut-wrenching as The Word for World is Forest, in large part because the viewpoint characters aren’t the ones carrying out the atrocities, and in some cases are relating them years later. The characters are also given space to exist beyond the immediate situation.

It’s not an exact analog of the United States before, during and after our civil war, but it’s clearly our own history and present that Le Guin is critiquing: plantations, color-based slavery (with corresponding prejudices), the struggle for women’s rights following the struggle for freedom, backlashes, and the ongoing struggle to really clean up the oppression and expand civil rights. All with the colors reversed to drive the point home for white readers.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

@otterlove@bookwyrm.social From doing a little bit of digging on this guy, I've learned that his wife is black (and I'm guessing Nigerian?). My guess is that she probably has influenced his writing,, because there are some things that feel just a little too... insider-knowledge to me, like how he includes a specific beer brand that's popular in Africa. I feel like someone who's not involved with a community at all wouldn't think to include that from just literature research, you know?

I think this is my favourite of Mielville yet! God, the worldbuilding is so vivid and creative, and the plot is tearing along, the politics are uncompromisingly evoking of Marxism in a time of capitalist realism. This is everything I wanted from him, and almost, but didn't quite, get in his other novels. Highly recommended.

I think i could have gotten more out of this book if I'd been in a different mood. As it was, most of the world building went over my head, and I was a bit annoyed by most of the language philosophy.

A horror story about a '70s UK folk band, a pretty amazing era and environment for folk and music in general. Hand made the truly inspired choice to tell the entire story in the form of interviews with the band members, decades after the events of the book, which I'm guessing was inspired by her background in music journalism. It also adds to the realism of this being one of those half-apocryphal, half-confirmed fact music legend stories, and I wonder if it was also inspired by one - specifically the mysterious disappearance of Licorice McKechnie, who sang for The Incredible String Band. Not only is this a great update to the epistolary genre, I also feel it should really play into the current true crime/horror podcast genre that often uses similar story telling devices.

Apart from that though, I found the story a bit mediocre. It's a spooky, very slow-burn about a haunted house, that just didn't really get the escalation to truly creep me out. I like this stuff in film, where cinematography, music etc. can make it all a little bit more effective, but in books I need some more intense horror to get me to shiver. (Apart from, I suppose, true masters of the genre like Shirley Jackson. But her novels I read just as much for her beautiful prose as for the horror.) On top of that, what happens in the house and what could cause it never becomes clear to me. Of course, you want there to be ambiguity in these types of stories, but if you leave too many things unanswered, I think things feel lackluster and you actually miss out on opportunities for scares of the "sinking realization" variety. It's a difficult balance, and there's also just the possibility that I'm stupid and missed out on some clues. I'm sure Wylding Hall struck the right notes (ha!) for some people, but not for me.