whoischels's Reviews (116)

First Neil Gaiman book I've read after hearing about him for a decade. Hard to tell if this fantasy book is a children's or adult novel, which I suppose is part of the appeal. Well written, self-contained story which didn't bog itself down with world-building or anything. At this point in life, I really appreciate that from a book. Gaiman writes convincingly from the point of view of a man writing from the point of view of his seven-year-old self. The nature of occult beings in the story didn't necessarily have to be explained in any sort of detailed, scientific way, and Gaiman didn't attempt to do that. It's just a built-out fairytale, and we're to accept the magical elements sliding into the real world. 

Definitely struggled with this. A full understanding of the events Chomsky describes would mean an historical understanding of the trade deals under consideration in the 1990s. One definitely would get more out of this with a foundation in understanding how dominant neoliberal forces viewed the specific deals and aid situations that Chomsky critiques.

Some high level takeaways:

Giving 3.5 rather than a 4.0 based solely on my ability to understand all this, which is based more on the context in which I am reading the book rather than the actual merits of it. I am not in college anymore, I am not reading this in class, and I'd prefer not to have to go digging on wikipedia to augment the books I read.

Really enjoyed this book. Reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado's stories, but with a bit more of the wild in them. Armfield writes about what sort of violence women may unleash upon men when women turn over the wild animal-nature in themselves. Armfield treats the violence that unfolds appropriately as horror, but the women who inflict it grow from it and come into their own because of it. Horror in these stories is tied to women's power, rather than with women's oppression, which I think is a really interesting way of turning the genre on its head.

Mantis 5/5
Tells the story of a young girl entering puberty and her struggle with a condition that causes her skin to slough off, her hair to fall out, and her body to be fragile.

Metaphorically explores the ways in which our mothers can make us feel worse about ourselves, among other things. The condition worsens as she approaches puberty, but when she finally finds a boy who is interested in her, and proceeds to have sex with him at a party, her skin sloughs off entirely, revealing her to be...normal. It tells us something about how the affections of another person can help us accept our bodies, and can empower us to become something more. In the narrator's case, the implication is that she becomes something more powerfully sinister and man-eating. Remember that female mantises eat their mates.

The Great Awake 4/5
People become sleepless in the City, and when they do, a strange entity joins them, their "Sleep." The Sleeps largely stay with the person they are tied to and do their own thing, they rifle through stuff, they dance, they watch TV, but they never interact with the sleepless person they belong to. The narrator describes the changes that come over the City as more and more people wake up and never fall asleep again, accompanied by these weird living shadows. The narrator charts the course of their relationship with a girl named Leonie in their apartment building, who writes an advice column. Leonie doesn't have a sleep and feels left out of the moment, at the same time writing advice for people dealing with problematic Sleeps (falling in love with them, being annoyed by them, etc.).

As the narrator and Leonie's relationship develops, we think it's a love story, but ultimately, Leonie absconds with the narrator's sleep, leaving them alone with an ordinary sleep schedule. A haunting story that is sort of about betrayal, I guess. If read as a queer story, with the narrator as a women, it could be read to be a metaphor about being another woman's "experiment with women," with half-hearted flirtations and finally being left with nothing.

The Collectibles 4/5
Three roommates help each other through their break-ups, but one takes it too far.

Jenny begins to Frankenstein together the "perfect man" in their basement, first by gathering fingernail clippings and bits of hair and dead skin from men she likes in public places. Then she goes out at night to dig up graves. In her pursuit of the perfect man, an all-encompassing project she loses herself in, her ex no longer has sway over her. However, the implications of the horrifying task she has undertaken are changing her. Armfield does a great thing where Jenny's attitude while working on her "project" is actually quite sunny and likeable. Engaging herself with the hideous has arguably made her a more self-sufficient and happy person. In the end, the pizza delivery boy who normally comes to their apartment comes no longer, but Jenny's Frankenstein in the basement has his bright green eyes.

Formerly Feral 5/5
When her parents divorce, the narrator lives a squalid and dirty life with her dad. Then her dad remarries a woman who owns a pet baby wolf named Helen. The narrator's father and stepmother treat Helen like another daughter, and the narrator is expected to as well. Schananigans ensue.

The narrator slowly becomes more and more like Helen the wolf as they get closer. She and Helen sleep together at night, and she grows hair on her body and is more prone to fighting other kids at school. Helen is protective of her, ultimately mauling a boy named Peter (ha) who shows interest in the narrator.

Very uncanny exploration of where the human and animal begin and end in a person. Told indistinctly enough that it could be read as the narrator being unreliable, e.g. Helen is a human and the narrator is too, or the narrator is a wolf and Helen is too. I think it is supposed to be a little of both. The story poses a chicken or the egg question, but it's really "which came first, the wolf or the girl?"

Note that Peter does not "tame" the wolf like in Peter and the Wolf, but he mauled by her. The girl could not be tamed, and Helen will not allow it.

Stop Your Women's Ears with Wax 4/5
Mona is a videographer for a well known touring girl band with a rabid pack of female teenaged fans. But something occult is going on with the band. They seem to be casting some sort of women's empowerment spells.

Asks the question: can women, if allowed to only speak to other women, empower other women to act on their darkest impulses? If so, are those women causing the havoc, in their immense power, still women?

Granite 3/5
Maggie is very picky about men. She finally finds a man she loves, but her downstairs neighbor fucking hates him.

Something eerie begins to happen to the boyfriend, he slowly turns to stone. Is it Maggie doing the turning with the doubts she can't quell (even though it's abundantly clear she loves him)? Is love such a hard thing for her to endure that she has enchanted him? Is the ideal man not a man, but an imprint of a certain man at a particular time? Is the lonely, elderly, and jealous neighbor so intent upon Maggie following her path that she willed this to happen? Good stuff, but the weakest in the book imo.

Smack 4/5
Nikola goes through a divorce, and in a petulant display of rage, decides to camp out in her ex-husband's soon to be sold beach house. Her husband's lawyer is trying to get her out. She is slowly coming to terms with the divorce while hundreds of dead jellyfish wash up on the beach. Nikola is a very irritating character. She buys many trinkets off QVC, doesn't seem to have many hobbies, and has never had a job.

When she runs out of food in the house, she finally leaves the house, walks down the beach and lies down in the sand, expectant that the jellyfish with wash up with the high tide and cover. In her dependence on men, she has lived life as a jellyfish. Fin.

Cassandra After 3/5
The narrator's girlfriend Cassandra rises from the grave six months after her death and, rotting, comes for a visit. The narrator considers what she's done to deserve this. Was it because she wasn't all in on the relationship given it was her first with another woman? This one's a bit heavy handed.

Salt Slow 5/5
Water World essentially. Two people, a woman and her male partner, are on a small boat in the aftermath of a great rain. The world is water. The woman is pregnant, and something inside her is growing.

It is a kraken/octopus thing. The man kills it immediately after she gives birth, but that's not what she wanted him to do. He throws it in the water, and months later, she recognizes it in a giant Kraken they encounter. She is in awe of the horror she was able to birth. Her man is not.

I think Annihilation should have been a stand alone book. In Acceptance, VanderMeer takes on the behemoth task of explaining what the hell has been going on in Area X, but he is faced with a difficult problem. If he provides concretely explained context, the magic of Area X is lost. If he goes for an emo, poetic explanation, readers are asking "why the hell did you spend two books writing about people concretely trying to solve the mystery just to end by not explaining it properly." He goes for a middle ground and doesn't stick the landing.  The following spoiler is a major, major spoiler.

Area X is the result of a spore from an intergalactic fungus-like/plant-like organism whose psychedelic effects are physically manifest on a grand scale. It was created by an alien life form that has long since died out. This histo-biological information is available to Ghost Bird through physical/psychic contact with the fruiting body of the organism. All of the concrete efforts to solve the mystery would never lead to this explanation, because only Ghost Bird can obtain it through, essentially, magic.

Bureaucratic mysteries introduced in Authority and within this text are not solved completely. Though it's possible they might be implicitly answered on a second read. There is just a level of vagueness that makes this very unsatisfying, but at the same time, I have an immense respect for an author who can write an "enemy" that is not actively evil and is just existing and do so in a way that is sentence-to-sentence compelling. 

As a fan of the Miyazaki movie, I felt I should read this. People's complaints with the Miyazaki movie is that it lacks a coherently explained climax and the world building necessary to justify why exactly the war going on is the way it is. Supposedly the book does this better. I am here to tell you it does. Jones avoids the trickiness of war scenes at all, though supposedly thought Miyazaki did it wonderfully. I disagree now that I see the story can hold it own its without that segment of the plot. I also enjoyed the the reveal that Howl is just

some random guy from 1980s suburban Wales lmao?? my dude just wants to do magic and play rugby

That said, this being a middle grade novel, it doesn't quite nail the emotional joy of the found family in the same way that the Miyazaki movie does. For that reason, I still prefer the movie, but reading the book does provide some helpful plot context for the average Ghibli fan.

The rich themes of Annihilation recede a bit when Vandermeer does concrete exposition as to how things got the way there are. Characterization and development in Authority is more textbook "better" than Annihilation, but the series loses its allegory feel because of that. That said, the characters are very well thought out and their drives and reasonings are cohesive. If Annihilation's theme is the horror of nature and de/re-composition, then Authority's theme is the horror of bureaucracy. This is, by definition, less filled with overtly horrific scenes, and makes the book a little boring in some ways. That said, when these office worker characters inadvertently reveal the depth of their derangement, it is satisfyingly shocking. 

Provides a clear description of what someone specializing in the study of venom does, and what this type of person is like. The whimsy with which he recounts his field stories is contrasted with sober reflections on the people he knows who have died on the job. Because the story is told linearly, the reader experiences a kind of whiplash as they read.

But let's talk about what kind of a guy Brian Grieg Fry is. He is an admitted adrenaline junkie, knowledgeable about animal handling and biology, rightly judgmental about how others (particularly in media) handle dangerous animals and film misleading footage, oddly proud of an enduring preference for metal music, reckless with his health, and relishes being viewed as "crazy" and in scaring the normies. His wife is the child of an eastern European politician / mob type family and intensively stalked him in order to date him after seeing him as a guest on a nature show. Despite his knowledge of this, he is deeply in love with her. He seems to be afraid of her as well, which turns him on. This is a weird thing to know about a complete stranger. In sum, Fry is well aware that he a very annoying man in a very likeable way, and he enjoys playing this up. It is weird to read an autobiographical book written by a 45+ year old adult who participates in caricaturing himself. 

The book is not particularly well written or well paced and is a bit childish in that it reads as a simple recitation of events and his immediately proceeding feelings about them. The most annoying thing about this book is Fry's attempts at writing unique, casual metaphors that typically veer so specific, corny, or politically-tinged as to feel run of the mill. I haven't really said many positive things here, but giving three stars because I learned a lot.