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Dracula by Bram Stoker
During a business visit to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of …
I read light, but broadly. Currently one of my favorite things is to dig up female sci-fi/fantasy authors from the 70s and 80s. I find it difficult to separate my own personal experience of a book from its "objective" good or bad qualities and rate and review it in a way that could be useful for some hypothetical Universal Reader. I just wanna chat, really.
Still trying to figure this bookwyrm thing out.
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During a business visit to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of …
By the vow of her father and her own desire, Raederle was pledged to Morgon, Riddle-Master of Hed. But a …
"Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose …
House of Leaves is the debut novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. …
@luminaree@bookwyrm.social I loved the Earthseed series as well, such a shame she never got to finish it. I'm working my way through her bibliography right now, and I'd say most of her work is well worth reading, except maybe her really early stuff like Patternmaster and Kindred. (Kindred is good, I just think that aside from its sci-fi twist, it doesn't add a lot to the subgenre of historical novels on slavery.)
Very excited to finally start this novel after it spent about a decade languishing on my to-read list, featuring a main character with one of the most badass names ever. (It reminds me of Fela Kuti, didn't he give himself a name that meant something like "He who keeps death in his pouch"? Always loved that.)
So, I burned through the whole patternmaster series in a matter of months, which is pretty unusual for me. I like to leave big gaps in between installments, so I don't get burned out on a story.
While the series is overall great, I really regret reading the books in chronological order, starting with Wild Seed, and ending with this one, because in publishing order, this is her first book and her first published novel ever. As is to be expected, as Butler's skills as a writer increase, the quality of these earlier and earlier published novels decreases. Patternmaster isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to Wild Seed, or even Mind of my Mind and Clay's Ark. Not to mention that the stories become gradually less ambitious. So, the overall effect is that a series that starts as an epic world-spanning, century-spanning tale of conflict between two …
So, I burned through the whole patternmaster series in a matter of months, which is pretty unusual for me. I like to leave big gaps in between installments, so I don't get burned out on a story.
While the series is overall great, I really regret reading the books in chronological order, starting with Wild Seed, and ending with this one, because in publishing order, this is her first book and her first published novel ever. As is to be expected, as Butler's skills as a writer increase, the quality of these earlier and earlier published novels decreases. Patternmaster isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to Wild Seed, or even Mind of my Mind and Clay's Ark. Not to mention that the stories become gradually less ambitious. So, the overall effect is that a series that starts as an epic world-spanning, century-spanning tale of conflict between two primal forces of nature peters out as a story about a brotherly feud. It's a bit of a let-down.
So, if you read this series (and you should), do yourself a favor and read it in publishing order.
Romilly uses her power to communicate with and control animals to aid the battle to depose the usurper of the …
Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May …
een (vooralsnog) anoniem dagboek van leestekens en voetnoten voorzien door Tonke Dragt
Ik vroeg: 'Welke dag is het vandaag?' 'Dertig …
A Ripple from the Storm (1958) is the third novel in British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing five volume, …
I picked this book up from a Little Free Library, so I didn't know this was the third installment of a five-part series. It was not an issue, honestly, as it's pretty easy to pick up on the events that proceeded the novel. Martha Quest, the main character of this semi-autobiographical novel, has just left her husband and child and is discovering her political self in Rhodesia's small communist scene against the background of the Second World War. The titular storm, of course.
She's part of the secret "group" that consists of - at most - twelve people who intend to topple the colonial regime and make Rhodesia a communist country, in which all classes and all races are equal. Despite this very ambitious goal, most of their meetings consist of lectures on the history of communism and arguing whether or not wearing make up is a sign that a …
I picked this book up from a Little Free Library, so I didn't know this was the third installment of a five-part series. It was not an issue, honestly, as it's pretty easy to pick up on the events that proceeded the novel. Martha Quest, the main character of this semi-autobiographical novel, has just left her husband and child and is discovering her political self in Rhodesia's small communist scene against the background of the Second World War. The titular storm, of course.
She's part of the secret "group" that consists of - at most - twelve people who intend to topple the colonial regime and make Rhodesia a communist country, in which all classes and all races are equal. Despite this very ambitious goal, most of their meetings consist of lectures on the history of communism and arguing whether or not wearing make up is a sign that a woman is not sufficiently committed to the cause. Meanwhile, the social democrats are actually doing the hard work of making frustratingly incremental improvements in the country's racial politics. Or actually, their own party's racial politics. The country is still far beyond their grasp. The "group" is led by Anton, a preachy, bureaucratic guy whose feeble attempts at tyrannical rule are barely tolerated, and only because his status as a German refugee, who had to flee because of his political beliefs and quarter-Jewish heritage, gives him a certain amount of clout within this small community. Really, if you've ever even been tangentially involved with leftist activism, it's all painfully, embarrassingly, hilariously relatable. (Every single person I've explained "the group" to has groaned with recognition. Things, they do not change.)
Possibly because it's the middle of a series, the ending isn't very strong. But that wasn't much of an issue for me. Lessing's almost vignette-like style shines the most in the relationships between characters. She has a knack for capturing these interpersonal dynamics with an ironic understanding.
This book is a very interesting look into a time and place I'm not very familiar with, and beyond class or gender, she also touches on the race relations in this apartheid state quite well. I really enjoyed it, and I'm going to see if I can find the other four volumes as well. Instead of placing it back in an LFL, I'll be passing this one along to my mom who really wanted to read it. I'm looking forward to talking about it with her!