I liked the writing and the structure, and I realize all the author can do is put down his thoughts and memories of the experience, which is necessarily heavily solipsistic due to the conditions weathered and lives lost. But the most interesting thing about it to me is how little I actually cared about any of the people involved.

I think part of this is to show just how much of an arrogant ass you need to be to attempt the climb, let alone do so without adequate preparation. Every one of them at one point or another put themselves and others in peril and some of the mistakes were costly, some were mortal. It is utterly baffling why people who go do this thing to me, and it’s overwhelmingly affluent rich people doing it. By all means rich people, go die on a mountain. I just feel bad that the fools put other people in damaged, such as the poorly paid actual indigenous people.

How could it not be resoundingly from a western perspective and mixed with grief and memory from the author, one of the most personal pieces of nonfiction I’ve read, especially of a disaster. I think to knock it for that, especially since in the well narrated audiobook, the author outright admits as much and cites people who wrote in criticizing his initial piece, is pretty disingenuous. So, it certainly exceeded my expectations. Even as it remains probably one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever read. It’s not at all hard to believe that these things happened. As the author states: It wasn’t even a year when more people died than normal.

Why would you go someplace you know you won’t think properly, saddle up untrained, unskilled climbers for a life threatening expedition? Oh, money, of course.

The penultimate collection. It does make a lot more sense, not having to read these issues months/years apart; go figure. I can see how it got to the “apocalypse” much better, but because the Fable finale is before it, I remember being pretty confused last time. This has some nice plot threads tied up from way back as well. The worlds splitting at the seams really was bound to happen. Excited for the last trade, I don’t remember what happens even a little bit.

What an enthralling and wild ride this is. Grim dark grotesque city with a dash of literary influence. Bug people and humans, and an amalgamations of the two, living in a fairly literalized organism of a city. Tied together with a fairly simple plot that becomes intricate and cyclical, thematically. Even the romance angle worked for me.

It is 100% filed under authors who have done so much comprehensive worldbuilding and want to show it off, stylistically. Which will be only for some. Personally, I appreciated the hard world building techniques and how information was rolled out. Both evocative and informative, without being overwhelming. You can always tell when someone is flying by the seat of their pants with soft world building (Harry Potter), and sometimes it works, but for something this different, I really think it would have lost some of the magic.

The only thing I did not like that much was a part of the ending. While it had a open at the close satisfaction, it sure felt overly hard nosed and not really following the fiction as established. Like an editor said it needed to be more punchy at that particular spot, and so it got the gauntlet. Still rounded up to a 5 from a 4 and change. But it did curb my enthusiasm slightly. However, all the times I was completely mesmerized by how different and awesome the imaginative powers brought to bear about seemingly every single detail of the setting, as well as how far I read quite a massive book, really does point to it still being a 5 star read, I think.

No idea how to evaluate this really. I’ve read like 5 books of poetry, and every time it’s been clear it’s not how my brain is really wired. This, though, has a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish sometimes— as an exercise I tried processing what was there. It’s just not how my brain works. And that feels like a pretty central tenet of consuming this, so I won’t rate it. Wouldn’t know what to rate it, otherwise. Some of the times it was moving, some of the time it was meaningless.

This is really great at developing interesting, nuanced interpersonal dynamics—but then leaving them underdeveloped, for some reason. When the book ended I actually thought it was a mistake. Where is the actual resolutions to her mothers flashbacks or what happens with Cindy. I forgot the protagonist even had siblings and a wider family beyond her own until the end of the story, when they become pertinent and appear. There feels like one crisis and obstacle was inserted and then the resolution, and then, much like the end of a Hitchcock film, the credits rolled.

I feel like I could have spent double the audio time with the story and felt satiated, which is a compliment to the flow and qualities of the writing that work. Though, because it is YA, sometimes the dialogue and how explicit everything has to be, is kind of annoying—I still undoubtedly wanted to spend more time with everyone. And kind of expected there to be a lot more about where the homophobia actually comes from, but it is elided.

The author clearly did a lot of research, she says as much in the afterward of the audiobook, which was well narrated. It’s a shame not more of it made it into the actual book, imo.

So far the strongest offering by the author I’ve consumed, I think. Eileen is full to the brim with contradictions and has an earnest, warped view of herself and others, both men and women. And the illusions as to something come to a head despite her life being completely lacklustre creates a pleasant asymmetry. What could possibly have happened in this boring town to this albeit socially warped and troubled woman? Somehow it’s all very tense. Narrated from a future perspective too, the notion that she’s so candid about her now somewhat blasé perceptions of the world, create a compelling confluence.

And because I didn’t see the ending coming to such a head, and the story was riveting, and Eileen is certainly unhinged, all of this made it much more memorable than my previous read Lapvona, which is numb with shock value and meandering, and that one with the old lady, which I forgot that I’d read, and remember nothing at all but apparently thought was alright. By a country mile this beats them out.

Tight and elegant ending; more than I had expected for such a convoluted story after so many issues, actually.

Really interesting at the start, but quickly starts to retread ground as it starts with the authors story and then jumps to specific years pertaining to the cells taken and how science used them, what was going on, and then paralleling it to what the family was thinking, finally bookending it with the author personal material stuff again. It retreads a heck of a lot for no real reason, as the family more-or-less thought the exact same thing the entire time.

There were specific developments, sure, such as when the misunderstood tissue samples taken from them was to be used to make sure they did not have the same cancer as Henrietta—but there is a heck of a lot of superfluous material here. I guess it paces out some of the more dramatic information, but it muddies the information design overall, heavily. It is certainly infuriating that researchers didn’t even deign to educate the family until many years later, to the point where urban legends emerged about the cells. But I do not need to constantly be told that X family member still had no idea while X thing was happening with the development of the cells in whatever decade. Both sides of the story would have been much better consumed with different organization, imo.

I also found the author adventure parts not as interesting as the push/pull between patient autonomy over their body and the advancement and direction that resulted from the notion that informed consent was not a thing until recently, and still what that even currently covers. Still enjoyed this, though. And think it more successful than not.

This is really great at depicting the COVID lockdown. Lucy is quarantining in Maine with William. There’s ups and downs, and in some ways, this is the most sad book in the series, which is saying something. She once again goes through it. After the lockdown I found it a bit less focused but with a pretty impactful ending.

Lucy is a safe space to explore a lot of emotional subject matter, I feel. Her rumination on various sources of immense dissatisfaction and anxiety, especially timely, in the here and now of our circumstances, does make it a unique vehicle for the reader (for my part, anyway), to contemplate things I think we’d rather ignore, as we look to the future.

Another great instalment. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Oh, William!, mostly because that was the culmination of a lot of themes and a revelation I found to be wildly effective and somewhat revelatory. This does feel like, simply, “more”, but that isn’t exactly falling on my sword, when it comes to this series.

Bit of a weird one for me. I watched the TV show and wanted to see how rooted in the memoir it actually was, which was neat. It is quite candid, with the author being pretty open about their trajectory as they report in Japan, and the emotional and mental toll the beat took on them.

It takes a while to demonstrate why this is actually a thing; as in, why it is being written. For a while it actually isn’t particularly clear. It is narrated by the author and the distant tone and rendering of an already disillusioned approach to the human figures being talked about makes it feel meandering, or even pandering and indulgent as to what the reader may want out of it. Lots digressions into the cultural context of sex, until it migrates to the true focus: human trafficking and that particular story.

This was fine, overall, but feels like a product of it’s time and oddly really generational in its thinking and pseudo progressive outlook toward sex, sex workers, and indentured sex workers imported to the country, which the government and laws just did not serve. It’s admirable doing something about it, but the mix between the professional and personal and those later decisions colours it as somewhat suspect in some areas, and feels more like unfocused fiction than anything else.