Week Eleven: Modern Romance

Another winner, easy to read and mostly digestible without leaving a bad taste in your mouth. Most 'relationship' books fall into one of three categories: Funny (and can't be taken seriously), Academic (and dry and divorced from actuality) or opinionated claptrap selling a franchise of ideas as a silver bullet once you accept the authors patented approach to it all.

Modern Romance is the only one (I've read) I can recall that is both of the first two in that list but with none of the third.

Funny and erudite, it does a lot to fill in the gaps on human behaviour while backing it up statistically and anecdotally with real world examples. Mostly drawn from his time on the road talking to the wider, younger public (who go to his shows, so that demographic anyway).

Another highly recommended read.

Week Ten: The Buried Giant

A book full of symbolism, allegory and recollection. So it's not an easy read, even if you're just trying to follow the plot. It whips back and forward ever so slowly, but each transition is jarring and yet gentle.

A book of contradictions, beautiful language and plot delivered inside dialogue. Often Ishiguro will recall conversations between people and events, so you jump to a new chapter and there are people and things that were not there before, then a character will recount how that happened. Occasionally hard to follow, worth the effort though.

Never really sure where it would end up, who was important and who was not, and what it all meant. Until the Buried Giant is revealed and the Ferryman remains unpaid.

Week Nine: MegaTokyo Vol 01 to 03 Datapack

Weirdly a long hard read even though it was originally an episodic web comic.

I used to really enjoy reading this online, but in a collected volume like this it really suffers, OR, it was bad and seeing it all in one go highlighted that?

Hard to know, starts well but seems to lose it's way with plotting, character and the underlying themes somewhere after the 3rd year or more.

I've had this for ages and struggled to finish it and it's close to 400 pages of pure storyline before all the special features kick in.

Unless you're a fan or ... well only if you're a fan I think.

Week Eight: The Spaceman of Bohemia

What a great book. This is the kind of Sci Fi I really like, it's not about science OR fiction, it's centered on big ideas that you can only come to via a story that uses both these things to show more about reality from a surreal angle.

Ostensibly it's just a story, similar in plot to Gravity, but instead of Sandra Bullock, this is a protagonist flawed and deeply scarred, though not aware at all. Until he runs and falls to ... well no spoilers, but it's well done.

A story of love, revenge and pirates (no wait, thats the Princess Bride)... it's surprising and light, logical and deep.

Loved this.

Easy to read, easy to immerse yourself in someone else's tragic backstory and marvel at the author who weaves a complex, intersecting web of real people into a simple narrative, with an extraordinary premise.

So yeah. Loved it.

Week Seven - The End of Mr Y

Started promisingly enough, ended poorly. In the authors own words it could have been viewed as a Shaggy God Story.

Because it was.

Tarted up in Philosphy and Pseudo Science.

Well written and constructed in one or two different ways, and I'm sure it appeals to some others, someone reccomended it to me some years ago and I never got into it. Hence on my list for another reading year.

I can see its appeal.

I can also see it's conceit and pretention.

Oh well, I was a conscious effort to read and as such it worked.

Week Six: The Three Body Problem

The first book I think I have read cover to cover on my phone as an E Book.

I have a IP7 Plus but even so it was a bit of an ask... anyway.

The book was intriguing at first and the more I go into the mystery of it the more intriguing it got. The book started to fall apart when it became less mysterious and the explanations were forthcoming, then it started to be annoying.

Motivation carries a lot of weight, and in the case of this you have to suspend disbelief a TON to make the story work. Not because it's Sci Fi, and not because the premise is hard to fathom, but because human beings don't just act like this, well not to this scale anyway.

And aliens, don't act like humans do they? I mean as a trope they do, but this seems like the perfect opportunity to explore possibilities that don't require everyone to be dicks.

Sigh.

But. Part one of a three-parter and I kinda want to know if they fix that in the end?

Warning: A lot of Math and Physics and Philosophy that does kind of make sense, but doesn't really. Nothing new there, I guess.

Week Five: My Name is N

Well that was disappointing TBH.

Not sure why all the fuss, just because the protagonist (who's not really because everyone is not who they say they are... sigh) is Gay or Bi or Metro or just a Sociopath who can't make up his mind?

Too convoluted. Too coincidental. Too planned. Too clever by half.

Or it tries to be all these things, but isn't good enough to be any of those that well.

I mean it was ok, but it was mostly just blandly trying to be the Usual Suspects.

All the furuore when it came out was probably just to hide that averageness of it all.

Not a waste of time, but not necessarily a good use of it.