Lee Hunts

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...

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; ...

I remember being assigned The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka as reading in high school. I didn't read it then, of course. I do remember the general idea. I remember some of the questions I got wrong when being tested on whether I read it. But I especially remember the opening line. This was originally written in German, so the exact manner in which the line gets translated differs, but it starts by dropping the bomb: that Gregor, the main character, has become a giant bug. And this is what the book is known for. The book then follows the consequences of this fact. Before, he was a traveling salesman. He would wake in the early hours of the morning and sustain the family, but we quickly find that he is not able to do this now that he is a giant bug, or vermin, as some translations render it. I think there are two main points that I want to talk about in this review: namely the theme, and then the perspective. Theme When I went to look at some of the interpretations of the novel, it wa...

Let's talk about immigration. The fun topic. We can brush up on shit-hole countries, invasions, people in need, and whether we should be more empathetic on this topic. In other words, we can talk about the recent novel, A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver. I have already reviewed one book by this author, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and to this day I consider it among my favorite novels ever written. It has probably some of the best character work that I have ever read, and it compares to Better Call Saul, actually. Just know that she did it first. If you are familiar with Better Call Saul, then you know that Jimmy's development into Saul over time—his corruption—may or may not have been caused by his brother; it is all ambiguous, and this is on purpose. We Need to Talk About Kevin has the same complexity with the central question that it asks: did the mother drive her own son to commit a mass shooting? The reader is left to think over the questions, and put the evidence together....

An epic, anime inspired rebellion, a meditation on grief, a love story? All of it? The Sword of Kaigen, by M. L. Wang. This is a Japanese inspired fantasy, where a woman has long ago retired from her once violent past to become a housewife at the request of her father. She is now in a loveless marriage with a cold man and four sons who all seem to reflect his characteristics to varying degrees—save for one. She has struggled to find connection with her husband, and with her children, but that might be changing with her oldest starting to question the Empire that he has grown up in his whole life. This is the second perspective: the oldest son, practically a prodigy even though he is only fourteen years old. He is entirely fixated on uncovering his family's key secret, known as The Whispering Blade, a technique that is unparalleled in its power. His father is putting a lot of pressure on him, and he is not sure if he can do it. This book is well praised in the book community, though...

I wasn't planning on writing anything for Piranesi, if only because this is one of those books that I thought you should go into completely blind. I'm in agreement with pretty much everyone else on that because you can't really talk about this book without spoilers. I also balked at doing a spoiler review because I tend to do them when I have a lot to talk about, which is usually when I have issues with the book. It is safe to say I did not have many issues. But as I looked at some of the reviews and saw some of the interpretations of the book, I thought I would at least write something providing my take of the ending of the book, and also my interpretation of the story as a whole. Spoilers Ahead Greatest Strength The greatest strength of the book is the perspective shift. I don't mean that there is a shift during the plot of the book (part way through), but that the book's foundations are built on the "shift." We get the story from one perspective, and th...

I just finished reading Ubik, by Dick. You know the one. Frankly speaking, this is one of those novels that I think you should just go into blind. I'm beginning to notice a trend, though I've only read two of Dick's novels. Dick likes to smash his novels full to the brim with countless concepts that could be used to make a novel, all on their own. The mere act of describing this novel would make me look like a lunatic. I commented on this in Androids, and I see more of it here. That said, I do think that Ubik, as scattered as it seems to be in the beginning, manages to tie everything in the novel together in a way that is surprisingly parsimonious, and nothing short of absolute mindfuckery. I loved it. There are some things that are unfortunately underutilized, I can't even mention them for the sake of spoilers, but it really just comes down to the fact that Dick is thick with his conceptual construction. So much is there, so it is inevitable that some elements would ha...

I just finished reading the gargantuan novel, To Green Angel Tower, by Tad Williams. I thought about reading this book in parts, given its length. It's apparently up there with War and Peace in its length, and it is neatly divided into four sections—but I was engaged enough that I wanted to just finish the book. The fact that I heavily used the audiobook in conjunction with the ebook helped with that. This book is not only long, but it is the culmination of a trilogy. It finished The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. I have already reviewed the first two entries beforehand, and I will link them below. To briefly recap, I thought The Dragonbone Chair had potential, and it had an amazing climax. Stone of Farewell was not good, save for scatterings of scenes. It was basically the instantiation of middle book syndrome. But because my critique was simply that it didn't need to exist, I was still committed to moving on to the last entry eventually. Right from the outset, I have to s...