Lee Hunts

I just finished reading Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang. I am familiar with Kuang through her Poppy War trilogy, which I have reviews of for each entry. I will link them below. The short of it was that I thought the Poppy War series was alright overall. The second entry was my favorite, with the first being fairly good, and the final one finding itself in a neutral position (a lot of negatives, a lot of positives, and an overall balance as they cancelled each other out). While I enjoyed the grimdark world that was created for the reader, there was also some messy dialogue, New Adult elements in the first entry, and heavy-handed moralizing that I found eyeball rolling. Kuang and I do not share the same political persuasion, if only because I am not hard left wing and I am generally anti-woke. And when I learned that she had another book out (aside from Babel), I wanted to at least try it out, especially when I read the premise for the story. A white girl steals a manuscript from her Asian bes...

This is just the scattered musings that I wrote down as I listened to the audiobook. The general idea is that this is a variation of Critical Race Theory made digestible for a wider audience. Kendi tries to dismiss this, but anyone who has read the basics of CRT can see the basic ideas reflected; at best, he criticizes some of the more obnoxious variations of CRT. Racism is not reducible to individual biases, but is systemic/institutional. This assumes that the ultimate problem is racial disparities. Colorblind policies are racist in the context of the wider system, as they do not work against the system, instead allowing the disparities to persist. CRT is especially known for suggesting that our society is built to be racist, rather than racism simply being a bug within a non-racist system. Kendi suggests something similar at the end, concluding that our modern (2020ish) society is basically stage-four cancer. Cap all of that off with a starry-eyed ending about how things can get bett...

I just finished reading Emperor of Thorns, which is the climactic novel in The Broken Empire trilogy. I pushed through all three of the books in the series, as I was rather captured by Jorg, the main character. (Even as other people are outright repulsed by him . . . I should probably mention that, lol.) This book follows up the last book two years down the line, while also following a timeline from five years in the past. Another inserted perspective is also thrown in, similar to Katharine's from the last book, though this is executed in a different way. The second plotline serves a similar function to the secondary plotlines in the last two books: filling in the information that the main plotline requires in order to progress. Basically, all of this funnels the story toward the climax, where Jorg looks to become the Emperor, with the added tension of the Dead King, as he approaches the capital and wants to consume the world by killing everything in it. No Spoilers I was really le...