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Mediocre romance with pretensions to literary and historical seriousness

Revisado: 01-05-25

Predictable plot, anachronistic language and attitudes. Not awful, but with badly drawn, improbable characters and a completely unbelievable view of social mobility in Victorian England.

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STOP!

Revisado: 03-01-23

No plot, except to link together rather boring episodes of sexual arousal. Soft pornography. I stopped in distaste.

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Ambitious Success

Revisado: 01-10-23

In Babel, the author undertook an astonishing complex task — to write a fascinating novel with credible, flawed but accessible characters, in an alternative history setting in which the industrial revolution is fueled by silver and by the energy created by the transitions (continuities and discontinuities) of meaning among cognates of words in different languages. The book is an able critique of capitalism, slavery in its many forms, and tribalism. Kuang demonstrates a deep familiarity with nineteenth century Oxford, with linguistics, and with the mechanics of the industrial revolution and its reformer critics, and with individual human motivations and goals. The book is a stunning success on all these levels.
It was moving to hear Chinese words pronounced authentically (I think) with tonal stresses. For me, this underlined the complexities and contradictions within the protagonist.
From this book, I take away lessons about motivations and rationalizations, imperialism, the costs and benefits of capitalism and the challenges to cross-cultural communication. The story is wonderful, and its observations are applicable in the real world as well.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 01-06-23

Saint of Steel #1 is not Kingfisher’s most enthralling story. The hero and heroine are tediously apologetic and convinced of their own worthlessness. The villainy is silly rather than dreadful. The “romantic” story line is explicit but not (to me anyway) offensive, but I found little charm in the characters’ relationship. I did listen to the entire book, however, so it was not as bad as it might have been. I won’t listen to #2.

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Series high point

Revisado: 01-04-23

This is one of the best of Sullivan’s series. Farilane is a credible heroine, and her bittersweet story of skill, frustration, defiance and sacrifice is touching. Loved it.

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Intricate story

Revisado: 11-06-22

I loathed the first two chapters, and continued listening only on recommendation from a trusted source. This description of a Ponzi scheme and its effects on participants is fascinating. There is more good than evil in most of them, and the author differentiates well between their points of view as relationships evolve.

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Spotty science fiction

Revisado: 11-06-22

Characters are likable, but the story is predictable and the speculative elements about science and philosophy are not credible, and the author’s views of the future are neither probable nor imaginative. Characters carried over from The Glass Hotel provide welcome familiarity, but these two books are unlike in genre and outlook.

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Cute structure, plot gets increasingly diffuse and silly

Revisado: 07-01-22

This starts as an epistolary novel, in the form of letters between cousins, and later adds other kinds of “documents.” I liked the characters, but the rules of the magic reality created by the authors were neither credible nor admirable. Even as an escape, this wasn’t worth it.

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Cosy mystery very poorly read

Revisado: 06-21-22

This is a perfectly adequate light story with familiar and pleasant characters, but the performance is very poor. Irritating mispronunciations about — who oversees these productions? Worse, the reader’s voice is high, monotonous, and grating. The American characters all sound like parodies of stock figures, mostly mobsters or country hicks. It’s not the author’s fault, or not entirely, but one cannot become involved in a story full of such dreadful stereotyped voices.

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More true than true

Revisado: 05-26-22

This wonderful book captures the city of New York, and the academic culture of the entire state, just as it was. In one way, this is a depiction of the children of the survivors of the war, their struggles with Jewish identity, cultural identity, assimilation (or not), and deep but often unacknowledged antisemitism. In another sense, it is about the meaning of Zionism and the tension between democracy and exceptionalism. The long discussions between characters on the meaning and political implications of History are compelling — I have seldom read a novel that puts philosophical issues at the center of the plot.
The book is a fictionalized retelling of an incident recounted to the author by Harold Bloom, a giant of literary scholarship and a public intellectual of the first rank, who, as a junior faculty member at an upstate NY college, was on a hiring committee to consider the application of the father of the current Israeli prime minister for a post. The applicant arrived with is entire family in tow — arrogant, grasping, overbearing, brilliant and committed to a personal intellectual and political agenda that, in his mind, preempted every other issue.
The performance was skilled, and a pleasure to listen to, except that it is full of annoying mispronunciations of English words (like Andy-Ron for andiron). How are these performances directed of edited?

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