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Quantum Woo Woo, but Maybe It's Smart | The Passenger and Stella Maris | Book Review

The Passenger and Stella Maris are jointly the final novels written by the late author, Cormac McCarthy. I acquired first editions when they were first released, on the suggestion of a booktuber, because he thought that this pair would be the last of McCarthy's life. It turned out that he was right. It has taken me so long to read these two books because I cannot claim to be a significant fan of his work. I have read Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road—and I have mixed feelings about all of them. I think No Country is one of my favorite films of all time, but that is primarily because it removes one of my major problems with the author: his prose. In my Blood Meridian review, I broke down his use of polysyndetons and my frustrations with them. They are emblematic of his style. In either my review of the former or my review of No Country, I criticized his lack of quotation marks, as well. I thought that they gave the stories a dreamy atmosphere, which I felt was in...
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Wounded, Wasted, Scarred | The Wounded Land | Book Review

Countless millennia have passed, and the Land has been Wounded beyond recognition. All peoples are now isolated into closed off tribes, each Stonedown fighting for their own. They engage in regular human sacrifice in order to live off of the land that is now unrecognizable, even from the nadir experienced at the end of the last series. Lord Foul's control is so totalizing, and so corrupting, that his presence is felt even in the real world. This is the setting of The Wounded Land, the first book in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. For Covenant, ten years have passed, and his experiences in the Land have changed him utterly. He has written a number of new books, and they all reflect his changes. But his ex-wife returns to him, and she seems possessed. Lord Foul claims her, and uses her to get to Covenant. The exact nature of this is not understood yet, even by the end of the book. The next element of the story is just as significant. A new character, Linden Avery, is introd...
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The Second Apocalypse Book Tag + Major Development With No-God Series?

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Recently, a group of booktubers decided to do a livestream where they went through a series of questions related to R. Scott Bakker's fantasy series The Second Apocalypse. They didn't tag anyone because they didn't think that anyone would want to take part, but I figured I might do it, just for fun. I was further driven to this video when I found out that Bakker had recently started posting on his blog again. All of the entries are about AI and are political in nature, but in one comments section, he actually responds to some comments about the No-God series that may or may not be coming out in the future. I have a number of the comments highlighted, and I decided I should probably discuss that in a video. This video is the result. A book tag, plus a discussion of his recent comments about the No-God series. Do you have hope? Why did you decide to read The Second Apocalypse? [SPOILER FREE] I originally decided to read The Second Apocalypse through the channel Slowly Red, wh...
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Marketing a Book Into Failure | A Scanner Darkly | But It's Not a Review

I read my third Dick novel. At this point, I am a bit fatigued. I am beginning to recognize the patterns in how Dick writes novels. Worse, I don't think I can actually write a true review. I did not write a review of Ubik, mainly because there wasn't much to say beyond blind praise. I did enjoy that one, so I at least did a short talk about it. I also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I was confounded by some aspects of that one. I did write an extended review of that one, and I talked about some of my frustrations. It is in that review that you will find the foundations of my criticisms for this book. They are my criticisms of Dick in general. However, in this post, I just want to talk about a frustration that I have with the marketing of this book. I feel like it could have compromised my ability to like this novel and even write a legitimate review in the first place. Book Description The back cover description of the book was incredibly misleading. This is fairl...
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First Guy Gavriel Kay Novel . . . Bad? | —————— | Book Review

TIGANA. This is a book that I picked up, not because of the book itself, but because of the author. Guy Gavriel Kay is a widely recognized author in the booktube space, especially for his prose. Not only this, but he writes fantasy standalones, and the lack of commitment is less intimidating. But what is this book actually about? Tigana is about a particular principality in a peninsula that seeks to liberate itself from a sorcerer's curse. The name of their province has been stripped away, from people's minds, from history, from everything. Whenever the name is spoken, it is simply not heard by those who were not born there before the spell was cast. In the Afterword, Kay compares this to the communist attempts to erase certain figures from history. There are the famous (or infamous) examples of photos that have been edited to remove figures who have been deleted from Soviet history books. In Kay's eyes, there is more to human loss than suffering. People can be unpersoned; ...
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