mars2k's Reviews (226)

What is there to say about Blindsight? I admire its ambition, its musings on the nature of consciousness, its surreal mindfuckery, its depiction of neurodiversity. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. And there’s a vampire! In space!

As much as I enjoyed the philosophical and scientific discussions, I did find the writing a bit inscrutable at times. I struggled to visualise scenes and to feel connected to the characters. That may have been intentional, incorporating Siri’s whole “Chinese room” thing into the narration. Still makes for a tricky read, though.

CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, abuse, torture, body horror, psychosis, existentialism, and death

“Every judgement teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous.”

Children of Dune is... a lot. It’s a story about change and ensuing identity crises. It’s a story about suicide, metaphorical and literal; (ego) death. It’s about what makes a person no longer a person and makes them, instead, a monster. It’s about the future and how far some will go to pursue a particular vision.

And that’s just the main characters. Half a dozen others take the spotlight at various points throughout the narrative, each advancing their own agendas, their allegiances questioned and their beliefs put to the test. As in Dune Messiah (and, to a lesser extent, Dune), the POV shifts constantly. Messiah, however, was more confined and contemplative – a series of character study vignettes, as I said in my review of that book. Children of Dune weaves multiple dramatic and emotionally charged plot threads simultaneously. I’m not sure it quite comes together.

Something must be said of the pacing/structuring of this book. At times, the story flows well even with the shifting perspectives (eg:

Farad’n is intrigued by Idaho’s recent (false) suicide attempt → the Preacher (survivor of a false suicide) delivers a passionate sermon about “moral suicide” → Idaho argues with Jessica in a similarly incendiary tone

). It makes sense, it feels right. An example where this is not the case:

Jessica realises that Alia has been possessed by the Baron → the twins wander in the desert, anticipating an ambush.

Why is that sensational, pivotal scene followed by suspense? Surely it would make more sense to swap these scenes around, so the tension can build up to that oh shit moment. Even though these are two separate plotlines, there could be an emotional throughline there.

All in all, I was enjoying the book well enough until the last quarter, which is when things started to get weird.

Leto becomes one with a school of sandtrout (sandworm larvae). I understand that this was his way of sacrificing himself, of ending his (human) life and becoming something monstrous in service of a grand vision. I can also appreciate how it mirrors Alia’s fate. But also... huh? The Dune franchise can be very strange, but for some reason this stands out to me. I don’t know...

And, speaking of Alia,

her death was so disappointing. If she had to kill herself, she could have used a gom jabbar, at least, as she did when killing the Baron at the end of Dune. Throwing herself out of a window was just weak. And why did Leto swing her around like that?

For a long time I thought I’d give Children of Dune a solid four stars, but the ending did bring it down a little. I think it’s fair to say it’s more or less on par with Dune Messiah.

CONTENT WARNINGS: drug use, overdose, hallucinations/visions, psychosis, intrusive thoughts, possession, some body horror, violence, murder, suicide, imperialism/colonialism, racism, eugenics, incest, beefswelling 

“It’s not soft all the way through, babe. You gotta take it slow.”

Tender. Tough. Bittersweet. I love the artwork – it manages to be well thought out yet organic at the same time, and the melancholy atmosphere is captured perfectly in the blue-grey washes.

CONTENT WARNINGS: transphobia, queerphobia more generally, religious trauma, depression

if it sucks, hit da bricks

Nevada is something of a cult classic, a landmark of trans literature. Does it live up to the hype? Hard to say. I want to say something pithy like “Nevada walked so Detransition, Baby could run” but, while there is some truth in that, I feel like it undersells Nevada. It’s a good book in its own right. It’s not for everyone but it doesn’t have to be; I appreciate that Binnie wrote a book that’s a little unorthodox, instead of taking the radical idea of “trans fiction by trans authors for trans readers” and compromising to make it more palatable to a wider audience.

The stream of consciousness writing style and the abrupt ending may seem off-putting but they work. The POV characters, Maria and James, are stuck in their own heads, and they’re unable/unwilling to communicate effectively or to form meaningful relationships with others. They’re not irredeemably awful but they are certainly flawed, and they do make you want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them sometimes. I suppose that’s how Maria feels about James. Her plan to

tell James he’s trans because he reminds her of her younger self, and to essentially redo her twenties through him

is silly. It’s understandable on a purely emotional level but it was a doomed project from the start. Of course it doesn’t come together with a neat and tidy resolution.

Nevada is a book about failure. If you expect anything else, you’ll be disappointed.

CONTENT WARNINGS: sex, relationship issues, transphobia (largely internalised), dissociation, drug use 

“Would ya rather have loadsa people hate ya an’ loadsa people love ya, or not be hated by many people but also not be loved by that many people?”

Fucked up but presented in a “c’est la vie” kind of way. The memoir follows Lees throughout her adolescence, with higher highs and lower lows than most. She’s so naive to begin with. I suppose that only makes it all the more gratifying to watch her mature and figure herself out.

Charismatic. Sympathetic. I’d love to read a follow-up.

CONTENT WARNINGS: homophobia, transphobia, racism, child abuse, adult/minor sex, grooming, violence, drug use, psychosis, suicidality, death, imprisonment

I don’t have particularly strong feelings about this book. I can see what Nabokov was going for (taking the idea of an unreliable narrator to an extreme degree and using that to explore fiction within fiction), but the book just didn’t hold my interest. I considered calling it a DNF but I powered through and yeah, I don’t have much to say about it. I think maybe it’s a little too enigmatic? I don’t know how to read Pale Fire – the poem or the novel.

I don’t know. I want to like this book – and in some ways I feel like I should – but I just don’t care for it. Oh well.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, murder, suicide, delusion, obsession, stalking, implied csa, homosexuality equated with pedophilia, the word n*gro used repeatedly

“if it weren’t for those boots, good grief / I’d bat-fly to bell towers easy.”

I liked some of the earlier poems, the ones detailing Henson’s childhood. They were morbid but with a sweetness to them. The book does lose steam later on (which kind of works? because it coincides with talk of depression and grief); the poems become less distinct and less interesting. Or maybe I just got bored.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death (including the deaths of parents and friends), suicide and suicidality, mental illness, body horror

An easy read – I can see this being studied in secondary schools. But it’s also a difficult read because there isn’t a plot to follow and invest in, just a collection of emotionally stunted characters who refuse to communicate with one another. It’s frustrating. And it makes the talk-therapy dialogue seem even more out of place. There’s this air of reflectiveness that isn’t backed up with real introspection or character growth. It’s surface level sentimentality that goes nowhere. The titular Panenka and the other maladjusted men he’s friends with don’t ever learn to talk about their feelings or take responsibility for their actions, they just wait around until someone (almost always a woman) comes along to take care of them.

While I’m on the topic of sexism I have to talk about Vincent. He makes my skin crawl. There’s a scene towards the end of the book that I’ll outline here:

Marie-Thérèse wants to break up with Vincent because she doesn’t love him any more. Vincent twists her words and reframes everything she says. He gets passive aggressive. He weaponsises their son, Arthur, using him to guilt trip her into staying. At the end of the book, Marie-Thérèse seems to have tricked herself into thinking she must still love Vincent, and they and their son go out for a meal like a Happy Family™.

To me, it’s horrific. But I don’t think it’s meant to be read that way. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s deliberately uncomfortable and what’s an unfortunate oversight on the author’s part. I suppose that’s what you get when you’re so preoccupied with the feelings of men that your female characters get utterly sidelined.

So what is Panenka? It’s a book full of self-pity and teenage middle-aged angst. It’s a book that wants to talk about men’s mental health but isn’t sure what to say. It’s a book I had high hopes for and was let down by. I’m not going to tell you not to read it, but man... it’s sticking with me for the wrong reasons.

CONTENT WARNINGS: chronic pain (migraines), cancer, depression, guilt, grief, abandonment, cheating, men being generally useless and/or nasty, sexism 

Seeing Like a State drags. It easily could have been edited down to under 200 pages, and it would have been a better book for it. Scott gives multiple examples that demonstrate the same thing – it gets repetitive. There is such a thing as being too thorough.

That said, this is not a bad book. Scott gives some valuable insights into modernism and how it strives for legibility, and he clearly lays out the distinction between data and what he terms “mētis” (practical knowledge based on experience; wisdom, knack). The book got me thinking about utopianism; we often use the term to refer to any instance of naive idealism but perhaps it’s more effective in discussing statecraft/city planning, ie: attempts to artificially construct a “perfect” society, doomed by the fact that perfection is a myth and not a viable end goal.

Some quotes I liked:

“In dictatorial settings where there is no effective way to assert another reality, fictitious facts-on-paper can often be made eventually to prevail on the ground, because it is on behalf of such pieces of paper that police and army are deployed.”

“The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.”

“The temporal emphasis of high modernism is almost exclusively on the future. [...] The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future.”

CONTENT WARNINGS: surveillance, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics, references to racism, sexism and various other -isms based on categorisation and segregation (with mentions of apartheid and the holocaust), war, disease, famine, forced relocation, forced labour, police brutality

UPDATE DECEMBER 2024: I'm upping my rating for this book from 3.5 to 4.0. I haven't reread it, but still I want to tweak my review in recognition of the impact it has had on me. It has shaped my thinking and I reference it fairly often. Does it drag? Maybe. Perhaps I should revisit it to check, because I might have just been in a bad mood when I read it the first time haha. But yeah it's definitely a book I would recommend