To Live Forever by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us After accidentally killing a rival newspaper man seven years ago, the Grayven Warlock had to feign his own death, abandon his immortal Amaranth class, and start living under an assumed identity as Gavin Waylock (one wonders why he chose a name so similar to his real one!). Gavin’s ambition is to work his way from the bottom Brood rank back up to his true Amaranth status. Complicating his agenda is the Jaycinth Martin, a newly minted immortal 19-year-old Amaranth beauty discovers Gavin’s secret, conceives an implacable hatred for him as a “Monster,” and Welcome to “Clarges, the last metropolis of the world,” an ancient, futuristic sf uber-city of skyscrapers “tall enough to intercept passing clouds,” tubes, slide-ways, and air-cabs, and myriad shops and millions of denizens. Its outstanding feature (that makes it the most envied/hated city in the world) is being a sealed culture forbidding immigration while offering citizens the chance to become immortal. The core of Clarges’ hyper democratic-capitalist system is the Fair-Play Act, whereby one’s public and social achievements are reflected in the angle of one’s “slope” as determined by the Actuarian computers. Careers are called “strivings,” and the steeper one’s slope, the farther and faster one may ascend through the five ranks of “phyle” (status), each with more years of healthier life than the last: Brood, Wedge, Arrant, Verge, and Amaranth. Amaranth bequeaths youthful immortality on the successful social climber, as well as the privilege of making five “surrogates” (clones) to serve as backups in case something unfortunate happens to you. The Jaycinth Martin was, in fact, 104 and running out of time when she became a 19-year-old Amaranth. The flaw in the Fair-Play Act is that, in order to prevent disastrous overpopulation (which 300 years before resulted in the near collapse of the civilization), people have time limits for ascending to each level, the failure to meet which results in visits from the Assassins. And for each new member of the Amaranth, about 2,000 people must be euthanized from the lower ranks in order to maintain the population at an optimum number. About a fifth of the populace opt out of the Fair-Play system, remaining (Dr. Seussian) “glarks” who live a mere 82 years and have low social status. The stress of striving to ascend through the phyle to Amaranth (“Up the slope, devil take the hindmost”) and of being aware that one’s clock is ticking turns an increasing number of Clarges denizens into unorganized “Weirds” lurking in the shadows to stone citizens punished in the Cage of Shame or into members of cult-like political groups like the Whitherers or to let off steam in Carnevalle, a Las Vegas-like adult theme park where “Compunction no longer existed; virtue and vice had no meaning.” Due to all the mental illnesses afflicting the stressed-out citizenry, Gavin decides to start working at a Palliatory (mental hospital), caring for a ward full of “cattos” (cationic-maniac syndrome patients), reckoning that such work may earn him enough “career points” to move up-slope quickly. Unfortunately for Gavin, the obsessed Jaycinth Martin starts drawing upon the formidable resources of the Amaranths and Assassins to relentlessly persecute the “Monster.” The picaresque story is compact and unpredictable. Vance’s vision of capitalist dog-eat-dog competition whose ultimate goal is immortality is interesting. He writes neat set-piece scenes, like a Pan Arts Union exhibition of the water sculptures of a spaceship navigator and the skits of a professional mime and a Zoom-like meeting for the 229th conclave of the Amaranth society to decide if Gavin Waylock is martyr or monster. He sketches concise, vivid, often grotesque descriptions of characters (e.g., "a bushy dark-browed man crouched over his desk like a dog over a bone") and sets them verbally fencing with his anti-hero, as when the Jaycinth explains her fervid persecution of Gavin by saying, “I'm an ordinary person with strong feelings,” and Gavin warningly replies, “So am I.” Dry Vance-isms abound, like “I find your humor superfluous,” and “Who is hated more than the lucky bungler.” Violence breaks out suddenly and unpredictably. While for the majority of Clarges citizens “Death is the vilest word in the language, the ultimate obscenity” (“transition” being the preferred term), some, like a Whitherer woman Gavin gets to know, suspect that “all people have a desire for dissolution.” Vance’s 1956 novel is an sf satire of 20th-century American culture, with superior health care for the wealthy, almost everyone engaged in a competitive race to the top, and everyone vulnerable to succumbing to a variety of psychological disorders due to the stress of that competition. As a character says, “Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us.” The novel does suggest a path to sanity and viability: looking outward from one’s hermetically “safe” home, including a spaceship called the Star Enterprise seeking new worlds for humanity (which made me think that the Star Trek creators may have read this 1956 novel). The ending feels hurried, but fans of Vance or of vintage ahead-of-its-time sf should like the compact novel, which is well read by audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly. View all my reviews
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Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Dystopic Eutopia; or Having Everything (Except a Meaningful Life) Is Droad In some future on some planet in a dome-enclosed city called Four BEE, the anonymous 25-year-old first-person narrator (who’s usually but not always female) introduces us to the hedonistic, empty lives of her culture’s Jang (youth). Thanks to their post-scarcity civilization’s advanced technology, including robot servitors and QR (Quasi-Robot, or android) caretakers, the narrator and her fellow Jang are immortal and work-free, but without anything meaningful or real to do they spend their time going to the Dimension Palace (to experience umpteen dimensions) or to the Dream Rooms (to design and experience dream sagas) or shopping (and in the narrator’s case shoplifting) or taking drugs like “ecstasy” or eating by “meal injection” or having sex (“having love”) with each other physically or telepathically (though usually they get briefly “married” first). Attended by their personal “bees,” little floating machines who keep an eye on them, they get about via things like the movi-rail or the Body Displacer (which disorients them and may result in a lost mole) or personal bird-planes (which they often intentionally crash). When overly bored, they indulge in sabotage or suicide (the novel begins, “My friend Hergal had killed himself again”). If they manage to kill themselves, they wake up in Limbo in a new body. In fact, they can change gender and physical appearance as often as they wish (including getting bodies with wings or two heads etc.), though the QRs may make them wait for sixty “units” (days) if they’ve donned too many new bodies too soon. The Jang speak their own language—the novel has been translated into our English—with some words remaining untranslated like drumdik (ghastly), farathoom (bloody fucking hell), droad (bored), and derisann (beautiful). Diligent readers will find themselves either learning the slang or consulting the glossary. The Jang may have “makers” (parents) from among the Older People, the narrator’s being “kinky,” not because they’re currently both male but because they decided to stay together with her, though they don’t seem to spend much time advising or educating her and don’t recognize her when she shows up at home in a new body. The novel concerns the narrator’s quest to find a way to live a fulfilling life amid all that “eutopic” ultra-hedonism. This involves her trying to mature out of the Jang category (the QR counselor advises her to wait at least another quarter “rorl” or century), to find meaningful work (the few jobs consist of pressing buttons or turning dials at the direction of computers), to make a baby (the act requiring a male partner she can’t presently drum up), to have an archeological desert adventure (the glar, or professor, in charge just wants to lecture to his volunteers). And so on. She’s unhappy, ending the first part of the novel crying all night after exiling herself from her own social circle. Luckily, she has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, so it’s fun to read her escapades accompanied by her furry white pet, a bit like a dog, a bit like a cat, a bit like a naughty child, given to biting on a whim. As the narrator takes it all for granted, Lee gives no detailed “scientific” explanations for the super technology of her brave new world. She does write some passages of austere, sublime sf beauty, like this: “Night bloomed over Four BEE, and I went out walking along ancient, non-moving paths, the pet dogging my heels, playing with its shadow and mine, blackly cast from us by the big stars and the jeweled signs sizzling between the buildings.” It’s a funny book, as in the following passage: “Anyway, I told him I'm here now so you might as well go on with testing me. I suppose I'll have to pay whatever happens. He looked slightly embarrassed, but rode it well. Of course he could, he said, if it would set my mind at rest. (Bland Diplomacy in Dealing with Jang Female Barbarian.)” It’s a compact novel and for 1976 a bit risqué in terms of gender, sex, and drugs. Lee is exaggerating the late hippy-era culture of the 1970s, free to do anything but unable to find anything meaningful to do. The frequent gender changes and hedonistic future civ recall Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, also published in 1976. Speaking of gender, a dated aspect of Lee’s novel is that they can only make a viable human baby with a soul from half of a female maker and from half of a male one, which seems odd given all the gender switching going on in their future. And you can only make a baby by combining the “life-spark” from two different genders AND from two different people: you can’t give half of your self as a female and then later change into a male body to give the other half. After all, it’s a binary gender world. Although anyone can change gender back and forth any number of times, everyone is always either male or female, with one or the other gender being “predominant,” such that the narrator usually chooses female bodies, her friend Hergal male ones, and so on, but nobody chooses gender neutral or gender ambiguous or hermaphrodite bodies. It ends up feeling confining rather than liberating (which may be the point). Finally, Lee’s future world is a dystopia because the “good” elements are oriented around appearance rather than fulfillment, so that even though the benevolent QRs want the best for their human charges, they haven’t devised a way to make them happy by providing them meaningful things to do or vital ways to grow. The novel is a plea for authentic, living life, as opposed to our virtual realities of media and art, as when the narrator, in the desert outside her dome city for the first time, says, “It’s all beautiful and real, and throbbing and singing and alive!” I’d like to see what Lee does with all this in the sequel, Drinking Dandelion Wine (1977). View all my reviews
Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Tale of Two Families—and Revenge—in 1882 NYC On one side are the Shanks, living in a pair of adjoining houses on West Houston Street in the Black Triangle, a notoriously sordid and crime-ridden neighborhood in NYC. Led by 5’3” 200-pound Black Lena Shanks, an illiterate, one-eared German immigrant widow, ex-con, and fence, the Shanks, comprised of Lena’s daughters Louisa and Daisy and her twin grandkids Rob and Ella, are all involved in the family businesses: providing (usually safe) illegal abortions, running a pawn shop as a front, and fencing stolen goods brought by women (Lena refusing to do business with men). Included among the Shanks is Maggie, a refined octoroon prostitute who receives only gifts of jewels and clothes for her services and is married to Lena’s brother (currently being held in Sing Sing). On the other side are the Stallworths, living in well-appointed manses in tony Gramercy Park and Washington Square. The Stallworths are comprised of the patriarch grandfather Judge James Stallworth, his son the Presbyterian Pastor Edward Stallworth, his two children Helen (a deeply religious young lady who abhors New Year’s Day as a pagan festival) and Benjamin (a mentally weak young man with small ears and an egg-shaped head, too gormless to be a true black sheep), the Judge’s daughter Marian Phair and her husband, the up and coming lawyer Duncan Phair, and their two little kids Edwin and Edith. The paths of the two families were set on a collision course when, near the end of the civil war, Judge Stallworth sentenced Lena’s husband to death for arson and Lena to seven years in prison on Blackwell’s Island for pickpocketing. She’s forgotten neither his cold blue eyes nor his merciless judgments. In addition to those characters, we have supporting players like the Sapphic Pugilist Charlotta Keego, who tattoos on her body the jewels she cannot wear in the ring; the prostitute Weeping Mary, who is good at crying and at posing as an Irish nursemaid to rich kids; and the veiled widow Mrs. General Taunton, who brings succor to the sick and impoverished in the Black Triangle and staffs her house completely with mutilated or handicapped servants because her husband was a one-legged man before he died in a Civil War battle. As the Stallworths target the Black Triangle and the Shanks in their campaign against vice in NYC as a means to advance their political and social ambitions, they have no idea that they’re provoking a dish best served cold. As the Shanks receive blow after blow against their members and livelihoods and lives, we have no idea how they’ll survive, let alone eat a dish best served cold. Our sympathies are with the Shanks because, although criminals, they are spunky and female-oriented rogues (Lena helping poor women in trouble, Daisy helping her abortion clients), while the ostentatiously law-abiding Stallworths, are, apart from Helen and the little kids, arrogant, entitled, cruel, smarmy, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing thugs. Throughout, McDowell’s depiction of late 19th-century NYC is vivid and appalling. I like little touches like how people refer to the abortionists as “angel makers.” The political motivation of the Stallworth clan is interesting: a fanatical drive to bring down the Tammany Hall democratic political system dominating the city. The themes on gender seem a bit ahead of the novel’s time of publication (1980). One reason Judge Stallworth is so inveterately hostile to the Shanks is that they are a family of criminal women. One reason Helen’s father is so unable to listen to her desire to alleviate crime by alleviating poverty is because she’s a young lady. The women fighters are probably same-sex partners, though McDowell sketches their relationships with a light touch. There are plenty of neat lines, some ironic, some straight, like, “No city has a shorter memory than New York,” or “There was something distasteful about victims,” or “Moral turpitude in a high place was at least as interesting as corruption in a low one, and there was no one could not feel satisfaction at the overthrow of a hypocrite, especially one of standing and influence.” Audiobook reader R. C. Bray is capable and appealing, though his style is pretty monotone. Gilded Needles is an entertaining novel! It is also at times violent, with some graphic scenes, which break out unexpectedly and take the story in unforeseen directions, but the violence is more appalling than gratuitous. I am impressed by how different the book is from McDowell’s The Elementals, and I will read other books by him. View all my reviews
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Is it over now?” “Oh, no.” The Mirror and the Light (2020), the last novel in Hillary Mantel’s wonderful and bleak Cromwell trilogy, begins and ends with executions. Neither one is a surprise if you know British history, but the first is disturbing, the second devastating, because of Mantel’s ability to render historical figures fully and complexly alive. Even Duke “Uncle” Norfolk, the proud blue blood who looks like a piece of half-digested gristle, goes off on foul foaming rants, and loathes Thomas Cromwell, cogently explains at one point a key aspect of King Henry VIII: he sees courtiers and servants not as people but as tools like siege engines, to use when needed and discard when not. Like the first two novels, this one concerns Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith-brewer’s son from Putney who rises to be the right-hand man of Henry, serving as Deputy of Church Affairs, Master Secretary, and Lord Privy Seal and becoming a Knight of the Garter, Lord of Wimbledon, and Earl of Essex, with his son Gregory married to the sister of the only one of Henry’s queens to provide him a viable son and his nephew Richard knighted and his protégé Rafe Sadler a King’s counselor, and so on. What could go wrong? Well… Cromwell is a man of enemies great and small and owes all his status, wealth, and power to Henry (“I am where my King put me”). He knows that he’d be all alone without any potent ally or friend should Henry turn against him or die. As Mantel says in the illuminating interview with the reader Ben Miles after the audiobook version of the novel, one reason for the appeal of the trilogy is that it is both a rags to riches story and a fall from glory story. A third of the way into the 16th century, England is a backwater island nation poised on a knife’s edge, with hostile powers abroad (France, Spain, and the Vatican) and antagonistic cultures close to home (Scotland, Ireland, and papists). Not to mention the people of England rising up in an ad hoc rebellion whose target is the vile jumped-up Cromwell and “his” greedy taxes. Henry’s break with the Catholic church has led to the dissolution of the monasteries, but the King is unwilling to embrace Protestantism and is just as likely to burn a “heretic” Lutheran as to hang an inveterate papist. Will Cromwell ever see his dream come true of an English Bible being read by the British people? Cromwell is a great protagonist! Skilled at coercing damning evidence from suspects and witnesses and racking commoners when hurried, he tries to avoid cruelty and would prefer no one to be burned at the stake. He saves numerous people from execution and or mutilation, even when saving them is not in his own best interests. If he vows to protect your child, he will not fail you: “That’s the point of a promise... It wouldn't have any value if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.” He sees the ghosts of those he has helped destroy or failed to save. He habitually puts his hand to his chest to feel his trusty hidden dagger. He scorns Catholic relics and saints and is engaged in dissolving the monasteries of England, supposedly to give more land and wealth to the Crown, but he is not averse to funneling such spoils to his family and protégés. He keeps half his wealth in banks abroad but also pays for many royal expenses and saves Henry money in transactions with French merchants. He knows multiple languages. He has a self-deprecatory wit: “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets and sits in the corner with his quill blunted wailing and ripping out his curls.” He will lapse into vivid memory: being beaten by his father, finding work at an Italian banking house, loving a Low Country widow, reviving Henry after he fell off a horse, being kissed goodbye by the doomed George Boleyn, etc. His motto is, “Go forward, sir. It’s the one direction the Lord permits.” If he is unhandsome (“He has small eyes and mouth, large nose, the body god afflicted him with”), he is humorous, philosophical, open-minded, organized, brilliant, calculating, brave, loyal. Mantel’s Henry is fascinating: intelligent, shrewd, vain, fickle, manipulative, manipulable. “Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure,” to the point that he believes his lies. He refuses to have sex with his new Queen and then complains that God has decided not to let him have a son by her. He listens to sound advice by Cromwell and then acts on fake accusations by the man’s enemies. As Cromwell says in the secret book he’s writing, The Book Called Henry, you can never anticipate or know the king and should never turn your back on him. Like all princes, Henry “is half god, half beast.” Mantel’s narrative strategy is striking. Her present tense works with her vivid and sensual descriptions to immerse us in the time and place of her novel. Her narrator often says “He, Cromwell” (e.g., “He gapes at her, he, Cromwell, who is never surprised”) even when we don’t need to be told who “he” is, the cumulative effect etching her hero in our brains. Her narrator is like an omnipresent witness to or participant of the events, like, say, a minor member of Cromwell’s staff, saying things like, “But our Antwerp contacts are silent. Perhaps we are missing something.” Such a person could not know what Mantel reveals of Cromwell’s thoughts, feelings, memories, and dreams, but the effect is to ally the narrator with Cromwell. Mantel runs the mirror and light motif through her novel, whether descriptions of light on the Thames or on an executioner’s sword called Mirror of Justice, or moments when Cromwell flatters Henry, “Your majesty is the only Prince the mirror and the light of other kings.” Other themes concern aging, gender, families, and power. Like the best historical fiction, the novel is both universal and vividly particular. We can taste the food the characters eat in early 16th-century England, see and feel their clothes and accessories, enjoy their spicy conversations, and learn their politics. A vital part of the appeal of the novel is the audiobook reader Ben Miles. In their interview, Mantel said that Miles’ questions for a production of the theater version of the first two books influenced her in writing this third one and that his voice became the voice of Cromwell. Yes! Miles is Cromwell as well as Henry, Norfolk, Christophe, Jane Rochford, and all the other characters. Throughout, he shows his deep and sympathetic understanding of the text. With such a big (38+ hours!) and incandescently written book, it is impossible to choose only a few examples of its pleasures, but here are some: Vivid descriptions: “The blade went through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.” “Latimer smells of burning too. The air sparks around him as he walks.” “The afternoon is damp as if it had been rubbed with snails.” Great lines: “But if you can’t speak truth at a beheading, when can you?” “Poets prosper… it is their friends who sustain the hurt.” “She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark. Now she lives in the wreckage.” Witty dialogue: “This will require self-abasement.” Richard Cromwell says, “Shall I go out and find somebody who’s better at it than you are?” “Richard Rich knows the art of creeping,” Gregory offers. “And Wriothesley can crawl when required.” View all my reviews
The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An odd last children’s novel, less appealing than his first two I found E. B. White’s third and final children’s book, The Trumpet of the Swan (1970) less charming, funny, moving, and fantastic, than Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952). It tells the story of Louis, a trumpeter swan who’s born mute and who therefore must find a way to “speak” in order to attract the swan he loves (because male trumpeter swans use their bugling calls to woo and win mates). A nature- and animal-loving boy called Sam Beaver inspires Louis to learn to read and write with a slate and a chalk pencil, while Louis’ father heroically steals a trumpet from a Boulder, Colorado music store and gives it to his son to give him a voice. The rest of the novel depicts Louis’ attempts to earn money playing the trumpet to pay back the music store owner, to woo his beloved Serena, and to find a way to live free with his family. As in Charlotte’s Web, White begins this novel with what seems to be a human child protagonist and then shifts to a young animal hero for the bulk of the story. As in Charlotte’s Web, White loves nature, especially eggs. As he researched spiders to write Charlotte’s Web, White researched trumpet swans to write this novel, working in plenty of information about them: size, color, nests, eggs, flight, migration, names for males and young, etc. It is an odd children’s novel in its emphasis on money--needing it, getting it, spending it, finally living without it, etc.--including the prices of various things like hotel watercress sandwiches or a postage stamp or an airplane ticket or an agent’s fee or a bugler’s salary for a boys’ wilderness summer camp, etc. It is also much concerned about adult love (even more than Stuart Little), romantic and practical, with plenty of reproduction occurring. White writes verbose, poetic, dramatic, hyperbolic speeches for Louis’ father, and I’m unsure he’s funny enough to warrant the time/space given him, or that kids would appreciate his verbiage (though they might enjoy it when his down to earth spouse reigns him in). The novel favors the child who’s different from others, especially the child who has a “defect” of some sort and tries to encourage such a child to develop alternate ways of thriving, but it never really favors the idea of a child being a complete loner. Also, although the book touts the attractions of freedom, (view spoiler)[a bargain Louis makes with a zookeeper sacrifices the freedom of some of his cygnets. It seems a weird bargain made by White for Louis with Sam as intermediary, promising in return for the zookeeper not clipping Serena’s wings to bring the zoo any future physically challenged cygnets she bears to Louis, unconcernedly sacrificing their future freedom in return for Serena’s and his own. One wonders why White felt compelled to write this plot strand into his novel, given his vivid depiction of Louis’ speech defect, overcoming of it, and pursuit of freedom (and love). (hide spoiler)] The greater amount of popular culture references and slang (e.g., hippies, rock, jazz, country, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, etc.) date the novel more than his earlier books for kids. It has (for White) some surprisingly lame writing. At one point a boy says, “That swan is as good as Louis Armstrong, the famous trumpet player,” when no boy would say that appositive phrase. White is ham handedly and unnecessarily explaining to the reader who Louis Armstrong was. For that matter, calling the swan Louis is too obvious a Louis Armstrong reference. Furthermore, while Fern names Wilbur, and Stuart’s parents presumably name him, for the cob to name his son Louis is an odd rupture of White’s fantasy. The talking animal business is handled by White as follows. His animals (well, the swans) speak English with each other as eloquently as any human beings and can understand human English, and Louis learns to communicate with humans by writing on his slate. But no animals (surely not the mute Louis) can speak English to people. It’s a little like Charlotte writing English words in her webs for people to read, though they take them as miracles and not attempts at communication by a spider. As for Stuart, he can talk with other animals and people alike and they with him, but he “only” looks like a mouse, and whether he’s animal or human is ambiguous. Anyway, in this third novel, White works the language thing inconsistently, having Louis’ father wield an impressively large and advanced vocabulary in his speechifying, understand what people are saying, but then assume that “superficial” means “serious” at one point. The fantasy in this book, then, doesn’t always hold up as convincingly as does the fantasy in White’s other books. That said, there is a great touch when Louis has Sam cut the webbing on one foot so he can play the trumpet! That’s a neat, painful, realistic touch to the fantasy that works well. Sam Beaver, who looks like an Indian and walks like one and has the family name Beaver but is not an Indian, is cool. Intelligent, thoughtful, curious, sensitive, observant, quiet, and kind, he’s like what we could (hope to) imagine Fern becoming if she didn’t instead become fascinated by Henry Fussy, for Sam loves animals and loves watching them and thinking about them and being with them at least as much as Fern does and more consistently as well (view spoiler)[though his final career choice to become a zookeeper seems at odds with the novel’s themes about freedom and wilderness (hide spoiler)]. All this is to say that being a book by E. B. White, it’s well written and has great moments and humor and beauty and is full of the love of life in this world on this earth and the longing to be free from adult constraints, but that it’s less fulfilling and memorable than his earlier two novels. Although I frequently teach his older books in classes, I’ve never thought to use The Trumpet of the Swan. Another reason for that may be that the illustrations are not done by the splendid Garth Williams. The audiobook I listened to was perfectly read by White himself (available in parts on YouTube) and includes real trumpet playing whenever Louis plays the trumpet. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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