Harold's Blog

I Who Have Never Know Men

Jacqueline Harpman

02-03-25

First things first, I loved this book. A perfect little horrific, dreamlike slice of a thing. I went in totally blind, knowing nothing but the loose "dystopia" marker and even that was somewhat of a red herring. I recommend you do the same.

The mystery goes deep, and stays deep.

This book defies genre, or at least doesn't fall into the easy rhythms of genre convention. There are so many points at which this could tip into "feminist dystopia" or "speculative sci-fi" and pulls away from the edge each time, lending the whole thing a sense of mystery right down to what kind of story you're reading. It demonstrates a massive amount of restraint and trust in the work, to keep it wholly isolated from traditional genre landmarks and if you like reading something that feels confident and unique, I can't recommend this book enough.

This feeling of dislocation, adrift in the work itself, no sign of land, is something I love in my fiction. I often find myself making judgements based on my expectations of the story as opposed to letting the work do it's own talking. It's a habit I'd like to break, and one shortcut is to read something so untethered that it bypasses comparison altogether.

The main character of this book is an archetype I love; doomed by fate but determined all the same. March or vigil, it's always a fascinating, scary thing to think about — the psychology of seeing the fixed path ahead of you and ploughing on anyway is intoxicating, and this book embodies that better than anything I've read recently. Love a doomed weirdo.

This book feels at once sparse and dense, shallow and deep. It feels like a buddhist koan; a vessel for you to think your way into and out of, an object to turn over in your hand and carry with you, or not. It's greatest strength is in it's ambiguity. This is not a book about feminism, or men, or women for that matter. Well, it is, but it's not the prescriptive moralistic tale that I've come to expect from a lot of modern literature. It's a story that asks something of you and will wait patiently for an answer.

A really special book that I'm glad was recommended to me. I'll be doing the same.

Dune Messiah

Frank Herbert

25-02-25

I liked the first Dune book well enough. I started reading it ahead of the film coming out a few years ago, agreeing to book-club it with my housemates at the time. I was the only one to make it more than 100 pages into the book, aided by the Gom Jabbar podcast's readalong discussions. I enjoyed the book, but was mostly spurred on by the smugness of reading this big ass book where my friends had given up.

I came away from Dune with... fewer hot takes than I expected. I assumed I'd have Big Thoughts this fabled, complex, weighty book but ultimately came down thinking that it's not nearly as confusing or difficult as Dune Enjoyers would have you believe. There are some Proper Nouns that I guess people find annoying (?) but to his credit Frank doesn't really dwell on the things that don't matter, he'll repeat the important things a dozen times and if you get scared when reading a single reference to the Crystal Forests of Parnch then perhaps you should just read books about the street you live on. Sorry.

Anyway, Dune was fine! But didn't really earn any of the superlatives that had been heaped on it by The Culture, I don't think. And I kind of felt the same way about the film, it was fine! It sure was an adaptation of part of something I also thought was just okay! No huge highs, no huge lows. I just don't think I'm that interested in Dune.

I thought I was done with this series until a couple weeks ago when I was loaned a copy of Dune Messiah by a coworker after a brief discussion about the series over drinks. I was probably never going to read the book of my own volition, but you can't just not read a book you've been gifted, so I added it to the pile. Unfortunately, I was burning through Count Zero at a rate of knots and the time to start Dune Messiah came quicker than anyone expected.

One final aside — I downloaded V Buckenham's excellent Downpour last week and put together a little microreview of my time with the first few chapters of this book, here. I'm only mentioning this because Downpour is sick and you should play around with it.

Right, full review time.

This book is not very good! It's a shame that the start of this book is so damn slow and honestly boring because the last few chapters are a hoot of fun strange ideas and big beefy events which it doesn't feel like are particularly informed by the rest of the plot. People talk in rooms, all of them perfectly anticipating how everyone will react, all of them on perfectly equal footing despite their disparate and unfathomable powers of self-control and perception.

I think this Jenga tower of skills and insights and superpowers that each character has is my major issue with this book. Everyone is always talking about their superhuman reflexes, computational brains and uncanny foresight and how does this shake out? Well, it's basically people doing normal human stuff but saying it's insane and badass. It's basically people thinking for a moment while expounding about using their mentat hyperintelligence to sift through everything they have experienced. It's someone fighting a training dummy using their ultraquick hairtrigger nerves and then someone else going "No one has ever fought a dummy that good before!" — I'll take your word for it!

There's all this extra scaffolding around the characters to tell us that what they're doing is exceptional without it ever feeling like that. And that's either down to the fact that if everyone's all-powerful then actually everyone is just regular-powerful. Or, it's because writing about characters who exist wholly outside of the conventional human experience is just really difficult. It makes me wonder why it's there at all. I mean I guess it's cool that everyone can control every muscle in their body but when you then have to write the sentence "Not even their Bene Gesserit muscle control training could overcome their reaction." what you end up with is a normal person reacting normally to something, completely undermining the impact of all this power.

Although, all this nonsense does generate one of the coolest images in the book...

Click for minor spoilers

Big dog Paul Muad'dib, having been blinded by a small nuke still navigating and "seeing" everything around him by remembering the prescient visions he's had of all these events happening before, succumbing to true blindness if he does anything to disrupt this timeline and thoroughly freaking everyone out when he addresses people by name with bleeding empty eye sockets.

It's funny, it's chewy, it's fun to think about and it's like the ONLY THING in this book that feels that way!

There's like a single line that starts to dig in to how scary this is, to be functionally locked in to a single destined path, to stay fixed along a terrible path or give up all power. It's almost cool enough to save the book at the last second, with the nuke scene through to the end of the book really being the only interesting parts, largely free from all the half baked politicking that dragged the rest of the book down. But, it's a turn that comes so late that it just left me wishing the rest of the book was as focused.

---

As with the first book, I think there are some really cool ideas and images in this thing, but it ultimately feels like stuff that I'd rather see assmebled differently. The setting simply doesn't do it for me, the scale of the empire is difficult to get a sense of, and I expected to spend more (ANY) time away from that sandy planet and out into the stars that Paul fought so hard for in the first book.

It's not a surprise that I didn't gel with this book, but it felt good to dig a little deeper into this series and better understand why it's not for me.

Too much sand!

Count Zero

William Gibson

15-02-25

What a fucking RIPPER this was!

Not only is this books incredibly dense with ideas, plotted almost perfectly and full of brilliant stuff, but old Bill can just fucking WRITE. Almost every page has some gesture or detail that could be utterly mundane but is elevated by Gibson's ability to take one step to the left with almost all his choices.

The mystery of this book is so fun. It's not one that's sovlable, and I'm not sure it's even solved by the end of the book, but it all feels so close to knowable that it feels like complete comprehension is on the tip of your brain. What makes this all go is that the characters are just as out of the loop as you are, being led by forces unseen and uncertain, but felt all the same.

Like Neuromancer, this book is full of people that just don't have the full picture. They don't know why that bunker exploded either, but we can't stop to figure it out. Get in the jet.

It's a very intentional disortientation, but one that can be a little uncomfortable. I often wasn't sure what was supposed to be a confusing non-sequitur of pure plot, or what was something I had legitimately just misunderstood, but I'm not sure that matters. The important stuff gets straightened out, or it doesn't. The ambiguity feels productive, and forces you to focus on the pure facts of the thing. What actually happened there? Why do you think that happened? What was the motive? We often don't know, and it puts us right in the head of the characters also struggling through and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.

This world of clunky technology, strung together with violence and telephone wire is so palpable and rich that I'd read basically anything in this setting, but this story in particular was such a joy. And the pacing is just off-the-charts good, too. Turner's high-stakes low-tech action, Bobby's dipshit cowboy routine and Marly's ethereal art-mystery are so perfectly balanced, with each chapter feeling vital and like some new aspect of the world has been revealed. There's no fat on this thing at all.

Zipping between three characters in wildly different worlds and watching them all inch closer was extremely fun, and I'm impressed with the choice to not actually lock these three stories together, in the end. It has that feeling I love in complex stories where everything just happens. We witnessed these events, that's how it went. No contrivance, no grand reveal.

I wasn't sure what a sequel to Neuromancer would look like, but this was almost perfect. To be honest, I think it beats Nueromancer just for how focused it feels. Neuromancer, in comparison, gets a little shaggy-dog at times, not to its detrement but I can hold this book in my head much easier than Neuromancer and my emotional response to it was much stronger as a result.

I can't wait for the discussion of this on Shelved by Genre and I really can't wait to read another book in this world.

Also, I didn't read the copy with this cover, but come on, look at that masterpiece.

The Girl with the Louding Voice

Abi Daré

09-02-25

Reading this for a work book club, so it's pretty far outside of what I'd pick up of my own volition. I had a good time with it!

I don't think it spoke to me in the same way that other people are saying online, but that often seems to be the case with books like this; books with a very clear viewpoint and message. "Women and girls are treated poorly, often abused by powerful structures around them. Girls deserve their humanity and access to education." are positions I already understood and agree with, so the impact of a story that communicates that is going to be lessened. And besides, having such a clear goal always flattens the story and characters into pure vehicles of meaning rather than complex entities.

It doesn't help that the main character of this book literally speaks a very clear moral into the text several times. "I guess no matter how much money you have, you can still be sad." - "Even powerful women can be abused." Damn, you sure are right. If only the events and characters in this book had some way of demonstrating that!

It's nit-picky, but that kind of blunt-force writing is always a turn off, and unfortunately sticks with me a lot longer than the very good parts of the text. The book is already doing the work! Trust it to convey a message without being so damn explicit!

But I feel like this kind of close-read criticism of the book betrays how much I liked it. I still raced through this in a little over a week, and basically enjoyed it the whole time! Don't let a grouch like me convice you this book isn't good! It's frequently terrifying, disarming, hopeful and heartbreaking, but it wasn't transformative for me in the way that good fiction can be.

Based on reviews I've read, it was transformative and vital to many people, and I'm glad about that.

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

31-01-25

I was first recommended this book about ten years ago, and since then it has loomed large as this indescribable object. Everyone I've spoken to about this has tried and failed to tell me what this book is.

All they can say is that it's amazing.

While reading, I even had someone on the commuter train tap me on the shoulder and say "Oh my god is that The Master and Margarita!? I LOVE that book." After sitting beside them again the next day and saying "Yep, I'm enjoying it!" I had to change my routine. I couldn't bear lying to them about enjoying this book.

It's not that I think this book is bad; it's rich and strange and obviously literary but ultimately I just didn't have a great time with it.

I found a lot of the action to be... entertaining but inconsequential at best. Sure, the antics are fun but after another chapter of the crew being obtuse and fucking with people, it was wearing a little thin. And, now this one's on me, I found it very difficult to keep the characters straight in my head. There were so many names and nicknames and titles for each character that, because I was already making slow progress, never quite gelled for me outside of the few central players.

And I was making very slow progress. A book of this size, these days, will take me a couple weeks to get through. This took me a full month, owed to a combination of generalised distraction and just a pure lack of momentum. I found it so difficult to pick this up and re-remember what was happening in this scene and who was there and what was being said. Is this part a dream? Is this part a story being told? Who is this character, even? I probably would have had a better time with it if I knew what I was getting myself into; If I'd had a crib sheet of characters handy, or at least knew how Russian names function so as to better remember them all.

It's difficult to pinpoint the chicken-and-egg of it. Was I not enjoying this book because I wasn't reading it often enough? Or was I not reading because I simply wasn't enjoying it? Either way, I really struggled, and it became kind of a slog.

Ultimately, I think this is a case of just picking the wrong book at the wrong time. Coming off the back of Neuromancer - another book with a somewhat detatched relationship with reality - I perhaps should have gone for a lighter read before hitting this book. On a good day, I can see this really working for me, but not today unfortunately.

Also, the footnotes aren't even fun!

The Hunting Accident

David L. Carlson, Landis Blair

14-01-25

I often find it difficult to critique graphic novels, especially biographic ones. They tend to slide off my brain a little easier, the details of actions become blurry and my main takeaway usually amounts to "Neat!" in a way that I rarely find satisfying.

But let me try digging in a little more.

I really enjoyed this book. Each timeline was captivating in it's own way, with lies and confessions all feeling appropriately weighty thanks to the fantastic framing/guttering throughout the book. The willingness to use every inch of the the page to communicate and the restraint to do so only at critical moments is so impressive and striking, and the trick never gets old.

I found the prison sections to be the most compelling, something about the story being told from such a distance of time and context renders it practically mythical. Another man, another time entirely. Combine this with the metaphorisation that happens at the climax of Matt Rizzo's blind experience of the prison and it becomes pure symbolism. Comics are great at giving form to thoughts and realising the unreal, and this book does just that, illustrating the sensory experience of a blind man.

A fantastic story about stories, about generational lies, about inheritence, told beautifully.