I just can’t get on board with how much disbelief this thing wants me to suspend. Every chapter starts out with wild circumstances conspiring, usually, to give a huge exposition dump that has some new shocking revelation, typically from people we’ve never even heard of or seen before. It does no work to connective tissue and opts for gotcha moment after another. But it actually transgresses into more melodrama and soap opera-esk tropes. It’s not good writing and I have no idea why people dig it so much. The twist at the end of this is just another nail in the coffin, for me. So stupid.

I got up to the point where he stole a girls gym clothes and sniffed them and some girl who sits behind him blackmails him as well as shoved him into the girl he stole the clothes from, such that his face hits her breasts. Strong INCEL vibes and just could not care less about the characters or the premise or the art. Another “best of” manga that was completely baffling as to why it makes peoples’ lists.

Not a bad finish. Again concentrated on characterization and notions Grant has, rather than a traditional plot. I did like the ending, though you see it coming. Daughter of Time is miles above the rest of the series though, and I wouldn’t recommend any book but that one, most likely.

Sadly, I’m with the naysayers on this one. I liked Kai as a character and the setting, but everything else was disengaging enough that I couldn’t tell you about a similar event that stood out or even the major plot beats. That’s a shame because the first chapter really killed it. Then, it starts to meander, and it didn’t ever really stop, for me.

The writing isn’t bad, that’s what’s so annoying about this. I wanted to like it. It was just so slippery because I didn’t have the imagination to be thrown into an atypical setting and extrapolate what Wells wanted me to, in order to connect. This kind of writing never much works for me, unless it’s very evocative, and Wells is a pretty utilitarian writer. It’s the same problem Gaiman has in some of his works. He provides too little context, assuming the reader is putting on the fiction like pants - but I do not consume fiction like that. I’m already removed, so when you write from a distance I crave more detail, not less. I’m not here to imagine my own fiction, I’d be writing it myself, if I were.

This is the most 3.5 book I’ve read in a long time. For two days I’ve deliberated on how much this book worked and how much I enjoyed it, and depending on which aspect of it I consider, it could go either way.

If it’s on a character level, seeing what happened to Sasha in the nebulous final pages of Vita Nostra was very compelling. I think she grows in this book as much as you would like her to in the first, which actually makes the outcome of the first book more understandable. The idea of grammatical functions as analogs for constructed reality, yet also being human beings has to be one of the most novel concepts in SFF I have ever heard of. And making it work in fiction, to this degree, is the feat of a wizard. Peoples’ personalities and their interaction with the meta fiction as constructs, even as you’re consuming fiction constructed of grammar, and the struggle of a character parallels the rules of those constructs even as Sasha struggles to be a character and bypass those “rules”.

However, on a plot level, I do feel it is less interesting than Vita Nostra. The reader still doesn’t really know what’s going on, so we follow Sasha in her figuring it out. But the fact that it does answer the largest questions, in some ways, makes it feel like the question is what primarily drove the most compelling aspects of the fiction. There are still some curve balls and the prose, though perhaps not quite as strong as the first book, propelled me along well, once I got used to the style again. But this is a very Middle book of a series novel. More is set up with Sasha and the plot spins the wheel more, while not getting as far. And because Sasha straddles this line of being emotionless as a construct or the push-pull of being human, there are some moments that necessarily don’t land because the emotional context is not present. Things are happening but they feed into this meta narrative. I have to imagine there is another book planned in this new (hopefully!) trilogy.

One of the more successful short story collections I’ve tried. Mostly concerned with morality as a social construct, most of the people are interesting because they serve as a lens to regard how society has enabled them to be bad people, or actively stymie their ability to be, and do “good”. It makes some of the stories merely interesting as a meta, because I didn’t actually care what happened to a lot of these people, such as the circle of pain in a workplace feud between, primarily, two women. Actually, the ones I remember the most are from people in workplace environments doing messed up stuff.

They work, though, because of the conversation they start as functions in larger systems. It’s humorous in ways that work, unexpectedly. It’s coherent enough that I can see why they’ve been grouped as such. And the writing quality is good. I can’t say it really blew me away, but it certainly exceeded my expectations as a person who generally doesn’t get along with short stories.

Much more of a downbeat than I’d have liked. I don’t think this has enough going for it intellectually, to sacrifice the flow of plots for slow intrigue and tactics. The characters, though developed much more than the first volume, aren’t quite believable in that capacity. What’s more, annoyingly, none of it really matters, as gotcha plotting happens to close out the larger arc and move on to a new era. It’s fine, but similarly to the protagonist, I’m not sure why I should care anymore? Do I see what the next arc will be or not? Honestly, feeling a lot more ambivalent about it than I expected after a better last volume.

This continues to improve, actually. The relationship between characters deepens, there’s some fun plot twists, the art has even improved, and it looked fantastic before. The only negatives is the weird tonal shifts, usually around one character who is the kind-of antagonist, a big beefy guy that I hoped would be a one off in earlier volumes. Even he has grown on me a bit more. But it’s still strange when humour is injected when it’s a pretty grim dark tale, generally. I don’t think it assists anything the story is going for, and is more of a holdover manga trope that wasn’t shirked.

Still enjoyable, but half of the volume is essentially one fight and afterward there’s even less time between fights. The asides where it talks about the time period are still my favourite, those seem to be getting less frequent. The humour still works, there isn’t the weird shonen incel & sexualization, and the stories are rooted in trying to be a good person in changing, turbulent, and impoverished times, so it resonates more with me. Plus, the anime may have been my first introduction to the medium, so there’s some nostalgia. I do hope it goes into more character building and less X reason to have a fight, but I imagine the audience wanted lots of fights. Is what it is.

I’d only seen the movie before, so it was interesting to see the divergences from source here. It’s taken me this long because of the artwork, which is… Of Its Time. There are, in fairness, a few great panels here and there. But overall, it just looks quite dated and I’ve never been into this particular old-school look and paneling.

It’s also not particularly Moore at his best. Though, it has plenty of merit in its presentation of propaganda and the nature of freedom and fascism. There is no Good and Bad, except for the absolutes that should be condemned, such as the concentration camps that murdered in the same style as the Nazis, just in pre millennium Britain, spurred by another war. “Queers”, people of colour, were primarily targeted. It’s a very simple way to get a mass audience to think about broad themes that aren’t just super hero = good and a villain presents themselves to be defeated. Who doesn’t like to see fascists killed? No less in a way that also attacks their weak ideology. I especially loved that a queer voice was the galvanizing force for that ideology to be attacked. From that point on, this was always going to be above a 3 star read.

There is an argument that this does feel like it could have been truncated and it wouldn’t lose much of anything. The pacing feels like a serialized issue trying to get people to keep reading, but collected it just feels overlong at three or four junctures. The actual conceit of V being created feels particularly weak; more so than the movie even, perhaps, since everything else is rooted in realism. The change we see with Evey too, at the end, lacked impact. The cycle continues without really ever going into V’s ideology and any nuance there. There’s never a meaningful juxtaposition, and it’s a book of ideas, making it land somewhat with a thud.