The follow-up to Little Brother is more of the same—which isn’t necessarily bad. I think these would make for excellent required reading in school. The characters are a little flat, in a consistently YA way, and they’re obviously ideologues for counterculture ideas around surveillance state and what that now looks like and operates like, in the globalized, online era. I’d hazard a guess most people don’t know about the ways they can protect themselves, or why they should do so, and this book is excellent on that front.

The actual plot, though less… bombastic? to be gouache, is pretty similar to the first. The conflict exists to elucidate a particular issue. The characters relationship continues, turbulent as ever, and is tested again. Yada yada yada. These should be in school libraries and discussed, I think, as they are relevant, and free (as all of the authors works are, DRM free and I believe published in Creative Commons), and still highly relevant. It would be baffling for schools not to take advantage and they are far more pertinent than, say, Go Ask Alice, which we were made to read.

I think I’ve found a more annoying character than Napoleon Dynamite in Frankenstein. What an insufferable, selfish, annoying man. Great prose work propelled this along for me, as well as the many nods that we will never, and should never, empathize with the man, really. It sure feels Victorian to me as well: Wild scene transitions without connective tissue at all; heavily melodramatic conveying of circumstance, no matter what is being discussed (Hello, Wuthering Heights); and a really heavy hand pressed toward The Message.

You really have to be in the mood for it, is what I’m saying. Frankenstein is a science bro rather than a gym bro, and I for one can only take so much of his muling cowardice.

Happily, the ending came to a much more nuanced place than suggested. Boy, do boys need their fathers.

3.5 rounded up because overall I’m positive on it.

This feels like something I’d like a lot more on the page, potentially. Out loud, the style has a grating habit where it constantly reiterates information it just mentioned; presumably for the musicality/cadence of the prose. Sort of like, maybe, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton. Whereas I find her endearing and fitting, this one-size fits all to every characters from a macro perspective is really annoying. To the point where I didn’t care all that much what was going on, because I would get into it and then be jarred right out of it. If it wasn’t a 2 hour audiobook I’d have stopped. Not for me, unfortunately.

This was just completely fantastic, and the audio narrator actually outshined the excellent voice crafted for this. In my head, I was enjoying this—when it was supplanted by the narrator though, it went to new heights.

The plot is pretty conventional: An inter generational story about someone with a specific gene that had them transition to a new gender. You know all of this from the jump. Our narrator does a heck of a job setting things up before diving headlong into a pretty granular account of his immigrant parents’ story. We eventually make our way to our narrator and up to a certain point that the story began at. Finishing at the open, so to speak.

The characters are incredibly vivid and the descriptions in time and place well rendered. But I think this voice could sell me on just about anything. From Chicago riots to idiosyncratic myths of the old country, to runaway teens, I don’t think my attention wained at any point. I was invested in the story and the character in a way I generally am not, even with exceptional writing—because my brain just typically remains macro, even when the fiction shies from it. Maybe because this tricksy narrator likes to bounce back and forth in perspectives? Whatever the reason, this was absolutely entrancing.

This was fairly informative I guess. I really have no way to measure it, and it is what it purports to be on the tin, seemingly.

Charming and a fast read. I think I prefer the movie, since, as far as I can recall, the letters are read in their entirety there too—and it has the benefit of the actors and additional buttressing. But this is absolutely a great read. Fantastic on audio too, with multiple narrators.

Continues to be pretty fun brain Candy with an interesting idea: The Library of the Unwritten being located in hell, as it’s a kind of sin/torture/shame, etc.—as well as books that are consigned to the hell of being published, but forgotten for all time. A former librarian, a current one (who used to be a muse), a fallen Angel, and a villain named hero from a book with “issues” (subsequently giving him issues), all form the core cast dealing with ongoing issues happening to this library.

This go around there’s some interesting revelations and complications. Enough that I think I’ll polish off the last book at some point, but it remains as fun brain Candy I read for the ideas, rather than the characters and overarching plot. The author is a lot more invested in character interactions than I am, leaving me hanging with more things to happen, though plenty does happen. It just doesn’t feel like that sometimes.

Uh oh, I have two other books by Irving. I did like the premise; this idea that this foil character would explore their faith via someone that inexplicably does have faith, and undeniably seems tapped into knowledge they shouldn’t have, despite being, in every other way, segregated to an out-group for his strange voice and undeveloped anatomy, etc.. But the problem is that you can tell Irving is a plot based author right away, it’s all very snug and pat—prescriptive to the whole ten yards, all-in, kind of way. And I found it annoying that the protagonist continues to insinuate Owen is dead right away but we don’t learn how, inorganically, until the very end. It doesn’t work with how the guy’s thoughts work, making the organization of the chapters more suspect than enjoyable to me.

Though, this is well done for the type of story it is. The prose are descent, the characters developed, but, kind of like Franzen, it all feels sterile to me because of how engineered to the core everything is. It overthrows sentimentality in its pitching game and when it goes at-bat, I already know if it will hit or not in a scene, because we already know most of the outcome. I do not get attached to characters like this and the subsequent plot ends with a thud for me, rather than a bang.

Just fine, not great. It’s a way to tell a story, and I can see why people into this kind of thing are into it. Fredrick Backman, Midnight Library guy, aforementioned Franzen - I’d prefer my fiction to be more like a discussion with an open mind, than a conclusion I ought to see by the end because that’s pretty much all I’ve ever been shown. That’s what articles and essays are for, not fiction, imo.

I’m not sure some aspects of young Hannibal make sense for the character we know in later books. There’s a small reveal that initially seems sensical, but when you extrapolate it to later, seems questionable. It’s also littered with some weird exoticism that, when paired with fetishism, feels pretty antiquated and not well thought out. The movie gets away with more because it’s a Hollywood production.

This, though, seems pretty devoid of what makes the first two books, particularly Silence of the Lambs, really great: A better than average depiction of women and a greater awareness of socio-political issues permeating characters. While I bought the reveal of why Hannibal is cannibal, not much else worked, and it has a formula about it derived from the previous books re: the investigator on the scent of Hannibal.

This manages to exceed expectations with me. Granted, I don’t read much nonfiction, roughly 15% of my reading diet, but I found this a compelling, balanced look at Jobs. Both in terms of family life and his work with Apple, as well as Pixar (which I had had no idea about), his impact seems pretty well codified to me. He sure sounds like a complete, thundering dickbag tbh, but it does make for interesting reading and it is already relevant to my interests as a long-term Apple customer.