sethelliott

[sethelliott]

Rocannon’s World

I read this on a plane, feeling quite smug as I started a sci-fi classic while the two middle-aged women in my row spent the flight playing Candy Crush with Despicable Me 4 on in the background.

I was nearly immediately confronted with a character who is humbly protecting the people of a less technologically sophisticated planet, preserving and learning about their culture, collaborating with them to achieve shared aims. There was no condescension conveyed here, an important lesson for me. It’s not fun in the moment, but I’ve always later appreciated being appropriately knocked off a misguided pedestal. I now fondly remember once trying to schedule a second date only to be told part way through planning it “Actually, never mind. You didn’t ask me a single question about myself on the first one.” Young me desperately needed that slap in the face, and it’s been a work in progress ever since.

I’ve spent a lot of time these last ~2.5 years (and I suppose the last 7, but with less intentionality and clarity) wrestling with questions that might share “motivation” as a common theme.

Why do I read what I do? Is it to feel superior to the Candy Crushers?

Why did I train so hard? Was it to climb higher grades than my then-girlfriend?

Am I interested in pushing myself, finding how good I can be at something? I’d answer “yes”, but have not lived that way, at least not in a way that a not-me could recognize.

Why am I interested in a career change? Is it because, as one of my closest friends put it, “the aesthetics of being a ‘builder’” appeal to me in some superficial way?

These questions are messy enough that I don’t yet have my head around the answers to them yet. Or perhaps the questions are simple, but my inner life is messy recently amidst some big life changes that have happened, that are pending. I simultaneously feel the desire to substantively accelerate these changes (should I move to San Francisco? New York?) and the desire to rest and come to peace with these changes, to continue to reflect on my motives and desires before making another big change.

Separately, there’s a scene that prompted me to note down “non-consensual passage of time”, another theme I’ve been thinking about a lot as I reflect on my time in Colorado.

Two other passages stood out:

“he did not want to know his companions’ minds when they were ignorant of his. Understanding must be mutual, when loyalty was, and love.”

“They can send death at once, but life is slower”

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Planet of Exile

I’ve rarely been so tired as the week I read this, which I think is part of why I’ve struggled to generate any thoughts about it that even I’m interested in. But two phrases did stand out:

“she walked as light as ever, careless-wilful” I love this pairing. I hope someone might already describe me this way, at times. Moving lightly through the world, careless of consequences when appropriate, driven in select areas that mean a lot to me.

“but all he could think was that she and he had been born at the wrong time. In the wrong season. You cannot begin a love in the beginning of the season of death.” I’ve only gotten through a couple books without crying this year, and this was not one of them.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Annihilation

Lilting, musical prose. Some searing lines. A few scenes that cut to the core of my greatest fears, my greatest desires.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Dune Messiah

The epigraphs tickled my brain far more than the characters or the main plot, so this was a slow, hard read.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

All the Pretty Horses

I struggled to get into this book. In contrast to Lonesome Dove, I often felt that McCarthy was for the first time trying on phrases, diction, characters whereas McMurtry seemed to have already lived with them for many years.

Bildungsroman is not a genre I generally enjoy, so I’m not sure if this perceived awkwardness is due to me, McCarthy, or our 16 year old protagonists. It can at times be hard for me to empathize with lessons or dreams I first experienced many years ago and have long since internalized or abandoned.

There are some piercing lines here (“The names of the entities that have power to constrain us change with time.” is lodged in my mind) and much of the dialogue was excellent, but I had a hard time with the overwrought narration, uneven pacing, and, most significantly, a general apathy about any of the characters. The amount of care I’m expected to have for their plights didn’t feel earned and, in light of this apathy, I found it hard to engage with the themes of hopes betrayed or unfulfilled, needless evil perpetrated due to misunderstanding, and abandoning idealism. These are themes I’m interested in, but explored here with such randomness and by these characters I did not find my brain tickled the way I’d hoped.

I will read more Cormac McCarthy some day, but I think it will be a while.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

The Lathe of Heaven

Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow if you’d told me the premise of The Lathe of Heaven I’d have been actively disinterested — video games and this kind of “what’s real?” sci-fi aren’t usually my thing. More fool me. The Lathe of Heaven was fantastic.

From the first pages, Le Guin’s command of the language sucked me in. I got chills just now re-reading the end of the prologue.

A day after finishing, so many passage are stuck in my head, jumping off points for thinking:

“The newspaper holder fought his way off and was replaced by a couple of tomatoes on a green plastic plate, beneath which was an old lady in a green plastic coat” — I have always loved this kind of playful inversion of subject and object

“more interesting to the fingers” — toucha da fishy

“a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own” — can I leave this as a code review comment?

“the worsening of the texture of life the more Haber improved it” — it feels, at times, far too easy to optimize for something that’s certain to make you less happy. Life needs texture, grit.

The change in writing style for LeLache’s chapters was so, so good.

“The only solid partitions left were inside the head.” — how much needless suffering do we inflict on ourselves?

“Do you feel you relate satisfactorily to other people, that you have a niche in the emotional ecology of your environment?” — oof, one of the major themes of my year as I’ve questioned this place I live and why it makes me feel insane

“He stood and endured reality.”

“There was a warmth to the man, an outgoingness, which was real; but it had got plasticoated with professional mannerisms, distorted by the doctor’s unspontaneous use of himself.” And, later: “This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply as normal. It was the way he generally had felt, except in times of crisis, of agony; it was the mood of his childhood and all the best and profoundest hours of boyhood and maturity; it was his natural mode of being. These last years he had lost it, gradually but almost entirely, scarcely realizing that he had lost it.” — these two passages made me cry when I first read them and again now as I write, cutting straight to the marrow of the last few years of my life.

“To have accepted an incredible fact as true gave her a rather heady feeling” — how hard it can sometimes be to internalize that something long desired has actually come to pass

As many possible worlds as there may be, we can only access this singular world. Best to seize it.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Dune

Dune was fantastic, and so different from my fuzzy recollections of my years-ago first read. Immediately gripping and ominous, the pace only lulled for a few pages at a time but the momentum remains throughout.

It’s been fantastic to see similar themes treated so differently by perhaps otherwise unrelated authors. The Alchemist and Dune — fate and cosmic purpose. Lonesome Dove and Dune — how people deal with their changing places in the world. Ender’s Game and Dune — the rise from shunned outsider to leader that people will kill for or die to protect.

I regularly wondered at Paul’s apparent lack of active effort to prevent the jihad. Lacking prescience and regularly unable to accept an outcome I know is coming but do not want, I found this entirely unrelatable. Pent-up energy and potential that bursts forth with rage and focus, though, feels intimately familiar and I frequently think about this theme and its role in my life.

Herbert, like Tolkien and in contrast to Sanderson, is content to let the mystery of a gritty and lived-in world remain. The details of the magic system, the movements in both single combat and larger scale battles, the linguistic journey history must have taken to have interwoven Arabic, Spanish, German, and English. Instead we flit between characters, their motives, desires, cynicisms, and words in a way that makes the world rich with both texture and mystery. Characters never explain things those around would already know for the benefit of the reader, and we rarely suffer through any kind of info dump.

We shall see if the momentum gets me all the way through Dune Messiah this attempt. I am optimistic.

(Review written 12 Apr 2024.)

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Rhythm of War

In this second read, I struggled to feel particularly interested in the characters, Sanderson’s treatment of messy topics (which I’m glad are getting addressed in mainstream fantasy) felt very neat and tidy. Everyone’s motives seem either very straightforward or not interesting enough to be curious about. Wit to the rescue as a trope is getting tedious, even though I adore Wit. I just didn’t really have a good time, and would give this 2.5 stars if that was option.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Dawnshard

Dawnshard felt very heavy handed. Sanderson remains a distressingly direct writer, here turning to paraplegia and ADHD. I don’t know much about these things and I don’t think Sanderson does either since they are handled with a Twitter-discourse level of nuance and depth.

Rysn seems quite unlikable for much of the book, often condescending and cocky. I like Lopen, but didn’t think there was enough development to justify the read. I understand that Aimia, the Sleepless, and the Dawnshard will be important in understanding larger Roshar and the Cosmere, but there wasn’t enough here to intrigue me.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Oathbringer

Oathbringer felt like more of a mess than I was expecting, since this wasn’t my first time through it. The sprawl into new viewpoint characters, multiple flashback characters, interludes that even now seem irrelevant to the larger world, and lots of side quest chapters made this a challenging reread at times, no longer driven by the need to discover how the major plot points resolve (or don’t).

There are some wonderful scenes — Nightblood and Lift are delights — but many times I found myself wishing for a deeper or more nuanced exploration of themes that have so much to offer in the hands of better writers: Adolin’s changing social and power standing in a world of radiants, the Kholin family grappling with Szeth’s change of heart and constant presence, the evolution of the relationship between Jasnah and Shallan after Jasnah’s long absence, the personal and social ramifications of the Voidbringer reveal. These and others would have benefited greatly from the more incisive treatment Taravangian gets, instead of Szeth playing Quidditch or half the Avengers getting lost in Shadesmar.

I do think middle books are challenging to write, especially when they still need to do so much world building (as here) and are constrained by both prior and planned novels (as always). But my preference would be a much more focused installment that interrogates the roles and relationships of the complex characters Sanderson has already established instead of a more superficial exploration of many new cultures, locations, and characters.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Words of Radiance

My least favorite of the initial four — Shallan’s flashbacks are a bit tedious, Sanderson hadn’t figured out how to write the Parshendi or Renarin yet, the lack of Jasnah as a foil, Shallan’s confusing interest in Adolin, the moral “dilemmas” that seem to have very obvious right answers, incessant use of “little one”, “son”, “my boy” and other patronizing terms, et al make this one not really work for me.

In an initial read, as you’re discovering a world alongside its characters, it’s easy to be swept along by the mysteries. In this re-read, I instead found it tedious to spend so many pages with confused characters and misguided organizations. This isn’t a problem per se — I don’t think authors should prioritize the quality of a re-read over the initial wonder — but it does make things less

The themes I mentioned in my notes on The Way of Kings are present, but perhaps not developed as well as they should be in a sequel, and we’re starting to see some of the overused tropes Sanderson has been criticized for at length.

But I learned a new word (great word, “apricity”), some of the key scenes are masterfully done, and Zahel is a delight. The middle books of a series are always a challenge, and I do think this one does a reasonably good job setting up the other middle books of this series.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

The Way of Kings

I think it’s been about 4 years since I last read this, in advance of Rhythm of War’s release, and it feels like getting drinks for the first time in ages with a friend that you have both more and less to say to than you once did.

I remembered the plot reasonably well and wasn’t particularly interested in figuring out easter eggs or digging into fan theories, so some scenes plodded. But there’s a lot here about depression, healing after trauma, how force of personality can impact your relationships and the actions taken by those around you, knowing when to stop investing in someone or something. My mind is chewing on these topics constantly of late, whether I want it to or not, and it was nice to have different flavors of them to sample without having to sit for a multi-course meal.

Sanderson is a heavy-handed writer, saving all nuance and mystery for the overarching plot lines rather than the motives or internal lives of his characters, and I’d give this 3.5 stars if I could. But I remember this series feeling important to me back in 2016, a horrible year for me in some ways, so generosity it is.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas is the only Iain M Banks work I’ve read and I’m pretty disappointed. Where are the challenging ideas? The quandaries only made plausible by technological or scientific breakthroughs, counterfactuals, or contact with beings we can’t currently interact with?

In Consider Phlebas, they are crammed into a few paragraphs at the end of the book, in an appendix: (1) what role should humans play in a society where all material needs are trivially met, where major challenges like climate change and renewable energy have been solved? And (2) is it good or bad for an advanced society to bludgeon or nudge less advanced cultures along towards Progress.

Initially, at 4am in a stupor, I found the clear presentation of these questions in the final pages so jarring that I was certain I had not been paying attention while reading. But no, after letting it sit for a day, skimming through the book again, asking a couple online acquaintances if I was missing something, and even reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia I couldn’t find them.

—————————————————————————

I didn’t know the reference the title was making until after finishing the book and so was not prepared for such a nihilistic presentation of the world — 851 billion deaths in the “small, short war” being insignificant in the course of history, Horza witnessing the macabre of The Eaters to no purpose (if this chapter were omitted entirely, would anything else about the novel have to change?), all of the female characters dying with no impact on the lives or mindset of the other characters.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that none of this matters. We do what we want to and die and in the course of history nobody will remember the small role we played. But nobody actually lives that way and I find the idea entirely boring to read about.

—————————————————————————

Some other, more minor things, didn’t do it for me either:

“Bora Horza” is a crappy name (unless there’s a pun I’ve missed).

Fal ’Ngeestra’s description of her love of the mountains felt like it was written by someone who hasn’t spent much time in the mountains.

Adverbs like “Horza said reasonably” snapped me out of the scenes where they popped up.

Women putting their hands on their hips and stamping their feet in arguments made me roll my eyes.

This felt like a collection of short stories that didn’t really have much to do with one another (which would be fine if this were a collection of short stories, but it’s supposed to be a novel). This isn’t my favorite style of worldbuilding.

more than once I found myself thinking “this is a mashup of Alien and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but doesn’t have the magic of either”. The suspense and humor didn’t land for me — I care more for Jones the cat than any of Banks’ characters, and “much the same way that bricks don’t” is funnier than any line here.

(Review written 6 Jan 2024.)

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Ender in Exile

Better than Ender’s Shadow, but not a star better. There are 3 or 4 incredibly abusive mothers here, which makes me wonder if Orson Scott Card hated his?

My main gripe is the amount of time developing what feel like throwaway characters and storylines. I would have far preferred exploring Valentine’s desires and motives than Alessandra’s and Dorabella’s, especially because Valentine seems so unsure of them herself. Instead of plumbing the depths of a character whose inner life should be no less nuanced than Ender’s, we get a girl whose development has been stunted by generations of parental trauma. This is a topic I’m keenly interested in, but it wasn’t explored well here.

I am excited to come back to this world for Speaker for the Dead, but will take a break and read other things first.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

I'm Glad My Mom Died

I don’t have this kind of relationship with my mom. I’ve never had an eating disorder. My worst relationship with alcohol was as a hobby during the pandemic that turned into a drink or two or three most afternoons while working from home, almost always shared with roommates. Though I felt a persistent lack of, well, everything growing up I don’t remember my parents ever struggling to pay a bill (though they might have) and there was always food at dinner time, even if it was often boiled chicken and maybe there wasn’t as much of it as we would have liked. I’m reasonably confident that my parents are my biological parents.

I remember my dad as often harsh. His way was the only right way. If you couldn’t convince him your way had merit, you were either forced into his way or he would redo whatever it was later. I never felt good enough for my dad.

I remember my mom as simultaneously a pushover, with respect to my dad, and incredibly supportive and gentle, with respect to us kids. I think she was both resigned to never getting her way, never being able to win an argument with my dad and willing to sacrifice any remaining ambition or desire in favor of the needs of her kids. I viewed my mom as the safe one, the protector from my dad’s severity and judgment.

There’s fucked-upedness there to be sure, but all of this is vastly different from McCurdy’s life. The themes here, in the context of my parents and siblings, don’t resonate. And yet. The year’s long process of slowly realizing you’ve suppressed your desires and internalized someone else’s, and the rage and grief that come with that realization. I have been both perpetrator and victim here, unable to set appropriate boundaries when I cannot reciprocate, no matter how much I’d like to, or over-investing in people who do not reciprocate, sometimes simultaneously, with a single person. I have had versions of this experience with many people, platonic, romantic, and familial.

It is taking me years to figure out where I went wrong, where on the slippery slope I could have turned aside to avoid experiencing so much pain, to avoid causing so much pain. I still don’t know and I’m not sure I’m getting closer to figuring it out. Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but it doesn’t feel any clearer to me now than it did in summer 2021, when I realized that I hated how my first 4 years in Colorado had turned out.

As a victim, suppression of your desires feels easy at first. You cling to so much hope that a person can make you feel whole, that one little sacrifice to make them happy or to avoid a minor disagreement feels like a natural and obvious tradeoff to make. But they add up and “gradually, then suddenly” you no longer know who you are.

As a perpetrator, I think it can feel easy to love someone in precisely the wrong way, by giving hope where you should not, by being convinced that someone else will be happier if they just follow your advice or desires, by fooling yourself into believing that a communicated but poorly enforced boundary can change how the other person feels, what the other person expects.

But these things are only easy in the moment and have led to so much pain and resentment in my life. I don’t know where, exactly, I went wrong and I think it’s not so simple as I’d like it to be in any case — it seems implausible that if only a particular conversation or two had gone differently then things would have been so different. Even if that was possible, I would have needed to have been a different person back then to be able to have those conversations. But I hope I’ve learned something from both my own experiences and this book’s clear depiction of similar experiences in McCurdy’s life.

And I’m very, very grateful that I will grieve when my mom dies.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Ender’s Shadow

I was surprised to see that the People of Goodreads have given this an ever so slightly higher rating than Ender’s Game. I suppose the readers of a sequel, or in this case parallel book, are nearly guaranteed to be the subset of readers of the original who liked it most and are ready to have a good time with additional stories in the same world.

This isn’t as good as Ender’s Game. I found Bean two dimensional in comparison to Ender’s more faceted character. Exploring those dimensions, overwhelming intelligence and a need for recognition and praise, often felt tedious during the lengthy internal monologues prompted by Bean’s comparably greater isolation, via both his preference for spending time alone and his lack of substantive interactions with other characters due to their perceived deficiencies. This gives Card less dynamic range to work with in developing his themes — no matter how brilliant, the inner workings of a 6 year old’s mind can only take you so far. Card knows this: “It slowed [Bean] down to have his own thoughts move around in circles — without outside stimulation it was hard to break free of his own assumptions. One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.” but the book still suffers for it.

And yet, like at the end of Ender’s Game, I cried twice. Here there are themes that resonate, I think, with deep longings of mine that I still need to understand better.

[Originally on Goodreads]

[sethelliott]

Ender’s Game

I cried at the end.

[Originally on Goodreads]