Abaddon's Gate (2013) (The Expanse, #3) by James S.A. Corey

There's a cardinal sin of fiction in which the writer (or in this case, writers) stop using their characters to work through questions and predicaments they find interesting, and begin using them to lecture their readers and pontificate instead on the solutions the writers believe to be correct. If I want to be instructed, I'll read non-fiction. When I pick up fiction, it's to exercise my empathy muscle and to gain valuable context to use via the lived experience of others, so that I may arrive at my own conclusions with as much information and emotional experience as possible. Fiction provides this in a way which non-fiction does not; it allows us to experience emotions that we'd never be in a position to experience in real life. I will likely never travel in a space ship. I will surely (hopefully?) never come into contact with alien technology. I will likely never be in a crew like the one in the Rocinante, nor will I experience a political conflict like the one between Earth and Mars. I read series like Expanse to try and sample how I might apply my own moral compass in reaction to such things. I don't read it to have the authors tell me how I should be solving the problems that arise within this world.

I bring this up because a strength of Corey's Expanse series is its characters. The crew of the Rocinante work really well together on the page. They have a really endearing dynamic, and each are memorable in their own way. They call forth a Kingesque vibe of the lovable losers; people who are altogether competent, but have suffered some downturn in their lives which have placed them on the path of the less fortunate. It's enjoyable riding along with them and watching them grow. They feel like friends.

Unfortunately there are notable instances in this book in which certain characters stop talking like themselves, and start speaking with the voice of the authors. You can feel the writers' hands on the scales as they artificially manipulate dialogue and character interaction to make a point, which is never good. Nobody wants to feel like they're reading propaganda, and at times that's what Expanse feels like. Of course, some great writers do this quite often, but James S.A. Corey—in my opinion—are not skilled enough writers to pull it off in a way which feels natural. Done wrong, it's crippling. And in Expanse, it's jarring and immersion-breaking, causing me to wonder where the characters I've known and grown to like have gone, and why the authors are choosing so obviously to insert their own voices in these characters' mouths. Characters will pull a complete one-eighty on a decision they've just made in less than a page, and suddenly say something like "wow, jeez, I am such an asshole! That was wrong of me!". This is clearly not a natural piece of character growth—it's the author appearing within the story, and letting the reader know they think their character is being an asshole and is wrong. True change in a deeply held opinion does not occur like this in human beings; people will often break before they bend. True change in opinion requires catastrophe, pain, tragedy, and James S.A. Corey do not seem to understand that. When things like this occur in the story, it breaks the characters completely, rendering them flimsy cardboard cut-outs of the human beings they used to be to us. And it's frequently glaringly obvious why the writers are doing it—They want to speak from on high to their readers by creating a contrived situation in which their character does something the writers find distasteful, and then continuing by lecturing their readers on how wrong it is through the mouth of said character. It's insulting and amateurish. Allow your characters to be human, and grant your readers the benefit of the doubt in that they might read the situation correctly. The best fiction presents complex, inspired problems and allows its characters to approach solving these problems from various different positions. If the writer is writing fiction to teach their readers a lesson, their fiction is probably shit.

Although I do enjoy the characters when they're themselves and not James S.A. Corey, Expanse's strength has always been in the fresh world Corey have created. It's nice reading a space opera which preserves the laws of physics, rather than handwaves them away with technology so advanced it may as well be magic (looking at you, Mass Effect). Expanse's political dynamic between Earth, Mars, and the belt is engrossing and intriguing, and it plays off of very human aspects such as prejudice, fear of the unknown, and greed. It all works really well and it's the single strongest aspect of this series that keeps me coming back.

In addition to their falling victim to speaking through their characters' mouths, Corey are not very skilled writers of prose. Maybe this is just me donning my book-snob hat for a go at the new and popular thing, but there are notable instances of clumsy prose that seem, to my ear, to require editing (and if anybody's an expert on shit prose, it's me, lemme tell ya).

It was the smart thing. The wise one. He was neither smart nor wise.

 

An hour or two with some structural steel and a couple welders and the place could be almost defensible. He hoped it wouldn’t need to be. Except that he hoped it would.

Egad.

I can excuse some shoddy sentences if the book is strongly plotted, and Expanse usually is. However I've noticed, particularly in Abaddon's Gate, that the authors have begun to press a thumb on the scale in their plotting in the same groan-inducing way they tend to speak through their characters' mouths in order to lecture their readers. There are multiple instances in Abaddon's Gate in which the plot is clearly manipulated by impossibly coincidental circumstances that challenge the reader's suspension of disbelief in order to get the plot to where the writers clearly want it to go. Characters will make unlikely jumps to conclusions in order to facilitate the decision the writers want them to make. Characters will show up just in the nick of time to save someone's life.

There's one particularly egregious instance at about the midway point of the book in which one of the key character's lives is at stake. At first I congratulated Corey, as killing this character would have taken admirable writing cojones, and the waves created from the character's death would have significantly impacted all of the characters in the story, thus changing several major characters and putting them on a darker turn and presenting them with new challenges that I'd have found fascinating, and further propelling them down the road of change.

But it doesn't happen. Instead of being a fantastic, growth-inducing moment, it's played for a cheap thrill, because ultimately, that's the kind of story Expanse is. When the chips are down, Corey make it clear that their story has no real aspirations of affecting its readers in a profound way. Instead, it becomes a schlocky, disposable network television soap opera. A character who has no reason to spare their victim suddenly hesitates for no reason, then another character shows up, coincidentally, just in the nick of time, and prevents the murder from occurring. It's really too bad, because such a turn would have been really intriguing.

This sort of thing happens regularly, and it's disappointing. This series was originally created as a world in which to set a roleplaying game, and it shows, because worldbuilding is the only thing it does truly well. Expanse could have been so much more. It could have been ambitious; the framework (its worldbuilding and character construction) is in place for it to become a space opera with literary aspirations, dedicated to exploring big ideas and challenging the humanity of its characters. Instead, it relies on flimsy and artificial character turns and clichéd, convenient plot turns. It leans too heavily on these ultimately disposable turns that serve only to get the reader's gander up for a dozen pages or so, before dissipating in a typically wimpy manner common to most low-effort fiction. Thus it ends up affecting nothing at all, and the entire series is relegated to an airport-read-for-nerds that will be forgotten just a few weeks after the reader has finished consuming it. 

Expanse is a sugary treat, one which is enjoyable at the moment, but ultimately not satiating in the same way a hearty meal such as A Song of Ice and Fire aspires to, and is. Despite what Corey frequently say, it has no true aspirations to telling a human story and affecting its readers. It just likes to think that it does. And so Expanse is, to me, one of the few works of fiction that makes for a better television series than it does a novel series.

⭐

Kafka on the Shore (2006) by Haruki Murakami

Ah, Murakami-san. I've quite liked some of your work, but the more surreal of your novels have always seemed to fall flat for me. 

Kafka on the Shore is perhaps the most surreal novel of his I've read, and it's trash. I'm sure that statement will ruffle some feathers, and I'm sure some will simply retort that I 'didn't get it', but in my opinion Kafka on the Shore is utter nonsense with very little substance and almost nothing beyond some unique imagery to make it a worthwhile endeavor to carve through its near-500 pages of bullshit.

Reading Kafka on the Shore is like meeting an oddball at a party. A skinny fellow at the snack stand with dyed blue hair and wearing a smart blue blazer and tie, sipping a non-alcoholic selzer-water and eating fritos dipped in honey mustard. What a curious fellow, you think, he must be interesting! You chat him up about all manner of things; turns out he's actually a lepidopterist. Whoa, never met one of those before! He doesn't drink, nor use recreational drugs, because he believes they're poison and wants to keep his body and mind sharp. He has incredibly deep knowledge about things you've never even considered. His job is to manage inventories of cold film storage for classic TV shows, so he spends his days around golden age television cans and regales you with odd stories about Car 54 and Gunsmoke and how TV just ain't how it used to be. You take down his number and want to hang out with him to hear more about these things you've never thought about; to learn more about the dark corners of life experience you've never even considered.

You hang out with this individual a few more times, learning more and more. But eventually, something starts to bother you. Beyond these oddball pursuits, you begin to get a sense that there's just not much there. You eventually learn he simply hates the taste of beer, and he actually does smoke marijuana every so often. He doesn't actually collect butterflies yet, though he is interested in the hobby. At the moment he just likes to read a lot of Nabokov and finds the hobby a fascinating affectation, so he seeks to emulate it. His vocation is not something he's actually passionate or romantic about—he simply works part time on contract at a warehouse that happens to store these classic TV film canisters, and he's caught a glimpse of them before.

You realize he's just a guy. A regular dude. There's really not all that much special about him. He goes to work, he comes home, he pays his bills. The things he recognizes as being cool are pretty interesting, you admit, but he doesn't have such a deep, compelling knowledge of them after all.

He has nothing to say beyond, "Hey man, check this out. Isn't this pretty cool?".

That's Murakami's fiction to me.

Haruki Murakami

On the surface Murakami's work seems profound, different, fresh, compelling. But when you dig a bit deeper, there's very little actual substance there. Murakami's fiction is very light on story and humanity, and very heavy on imagery that doesn't actually say much at all. The more I read his stuff, the more I suspect he's an utter charlatan, carefully crafting his fiction so that what you're reading appears to be the tip of the iceberg when, in reality, it's a cardboard prop painted blue floating along on the sea, depthless.

Writing fiction is a strange beast. In my experience, it feels almost like reverse-dreaming. Instead of sleeping and passively experiencing random imagery from your brain, you are drawing that imagery from your brain and putting it down in order to augment whatever story you're planning on telling. You're actively sorting through your own lived experience and pulling pieces from your subconscious to shape your story and your characters in a compelling, genuine manner. Murakami does this exceptionally well. He's completely honest with himself, and the imagery which seems to fascinate him is often quite enchanting. Often times the quirks he's depicting are enough to carry the scene, alone, and his workmanlike prose facilitates this perfectly by getting out of the way and letting the images take center stage.

But there's just not much else there. Murakami is a poor storyteller. His characters are frequently flat and seem to make arbitrary, nonsensical decisions. Many of his novels feature contrived conflict that isn't really all that interesting, or (as is the case in Kafka), no conflict at all. His pacing is often too blown out because he needs to give himself such space to indulge in these episodes of wading into the odd imagery and scenarios he finds so fascinating. Further—and perhaps most egregious—at times he treats his fiction as if it's little more than an avenue from which to explore his fetishistic interests; eg. young girls' breasts, or being masturbated by your sister. If you're hitting me with your kinks, you better be saying something important with them. If you're not using them as a means to a storytelling end that's going to make your fiction more thematically impactful, then you're just engaging in literary masturbation. It's leaving me feeling dirty, like the writer is pulling a Louis C.K. and sitting in the corner jacking off and I'm standing there in the locked room, forced to watch.

The more I read Murakami, the more it feels like his fiction is just a vehicle from which he imparts ideas he finds interesting. That's not a problem, really. The best writers also do this—George R.R. Martin cannot stop depicting romantic hearts stuck in cynical worlds, Ernest Hemingway is utterly entranced with the idea of death and how each mortal man and beast faces it, James Joyce is obsessed with Catholicism and Irish politics. What Murakami lacks, though, and what's so severely damaging to his work, is that there's no storytelling foundation on which all of this imagery might sit, rendering such imagery ultimately meaningless. Martin's characters are so human you'll swear they're standing right next to you, Hemingway's devastating plotting will break you for a full week, Joyce's prose and humor will make you feel the love and the passion of his characters' so deeply your chest cavity will burn with their fervor. Murakami, however, only has his imagery and not much else. His books are a set of really nice windows and skylights sitting on a lawn, with no house into which they might be installed. While they might have augmented a proper story enough to propel it into the realm of profundity, they have zero utility. Yeah, those are some great windows, but who the hell needs just a window? Alone, they're useless. Just like Murakami's imagery.

Kafka on the Shore is a nonsensical story with vast pretentions of grandeur. Murakami gives us two empty vessels to follow; an angsty, horny teenager and a developmentally disabled old man. The teenager reads as if he's written to be intelligent and interesting, though I found him mostly petulant and boring. The old man was the more likable of the two, and his quirk was something I found endearing and interesting, but ultimately not much is done with it. The real problem is that neither of these characters have any concrete conflict driving them forward. There's very little forcing them to change, and so we meander through the plot with them, never fully invested in their struggles, never fully caring about who they are. Murakami hits you with some shit, sure—an incest fetish, some shocking depictions of violence against animals, and various bits of nonsense I find impossible to take seriously (building a magic flute, oh my!)—but without a concrete story to carry it along, it all felt meaningless and silly, like a Jackson Pollock, except it's just random house paint spilled on a driveway rather than something constructed on an actual canvas.

If you enjoy the surreal and aren't a big stickler for, you know, actual storytelling? Maybe you'll like this book. I hated it and I'm eager to move on from it to something else.

⭐

The Dunwich Horror (1929) by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:

"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...." 

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.

Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."

I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.

I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.

The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.

⭐

The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon

Maybe I've begun reading Pynchon at the wrong place. I picked up his short stories as a neat, bite-sized introduction to his work, and found them rather wanting. Pynchon himself seems to consider them of poor quality. Continuing along the same logical route, I chose to pick up his shortest novel to continue getting to know him.

Pynchon's zaniness and irreverence is perhaps the main draw, but such a sense of humor is lost on a stodgy clod like myself, so I've got look for other stuff to enjoy here.

Above everything else, this book is messy. Pynchon just can't seem to help himself from diverting into every boondogglesome alley, as if every single tidbit of a story that forms in his mind must be forced into this book, no matter how poorly it suits the current narrative. A primary offender is the ridiculous play which eats up 10 pages of real estate near the end of the first third of this book, in which we're treated to a pointless and comically violent depiction of Renaissance Italian politics. These diversions might work better in a longer novel, or one with a strong narrative root driving it forward, but they feel far too scattered in a novel of such short length.

The novel is filled with oddball diversions such as this and left me skimming them all before too long. Far be it from me to criticize one of Pynchon's literary stature, but the value of such diversions was completely lost on me. I didn't find them comical or topical, but bloated and useless. Rather than expanding on or enhancing its themes or the story it's trying to tell, it feels unfocused and messy. Pynchon is 50 years too early; he's the millennial with a twitter account who thinks his every passing thought is worth sharing, except he's got a typewriter instead, and a horde of postmodern readers who seem to gobble up such nonsense.

Reading Pynchon often feels like listening to someone with ADHD who just did way too much cocaine, but his talent as a nuts-and-bolts writer is undeniable. When the going's good, I'm quite enjoying myself. His description of Mucho early in the novel felt lifelike and poignant, for example. But he seems to miss much more often than he hits, which makes for a jagged, tiresome experience.

This book is like a literal pile of garbage; there are tons of pieces of random, useless detritus (shown here in the form of disparate paragraphs) thrown together into the refuse bin that is this novel, jumbled up, and then congealed together by the permeating, noisome slime that is its main plot line.

Or perhaps I'm just too stupid to get it?

I think it's time to pick up something lengthier and more substantial next. It's probably not time to tackle Gravity's Rainbow yet, but something like V. or Inherent Vice might be more suitable.

I'm still holding out hope that I one day will be capable of reading and enjoying Pynchon, but that hope seems to dwindle a bit more with each story of his that I pick up.

⭐

The Qur'an (632) by Anonymous

I'm reviewing this in a flippant, irreverent manner similar to the tone in which I examined the King James Bible from cover to cover last year. I realize that this may be offensive to some, and I preemptively apologize for any offense caused, but I find it dishonest to examine this text in any other manner or to soften my own opinions. Feel free to exit the review now if you think such a tone would upset you.

The most noteworthy characteristic, and indeed the downfall of the Qur'an to me personally—an ignorant unbeliever reading for purposes of personal education—is the sheer amount of fatty repetitiveness within.

I expected a religious treatise and instead got what seemed to be an unrehearsed and unedited yet carefully transcribed rant. Nearly every single surah ("book", in biblical terms) within includes similar diversions into rants on hypocrites, unbelievers, the mercy of god, etc. I suppose perhaps this sort of commonly shared content between surahs reads far more poetically in its original Arabic, but for my reading purposes it served only to wear me out and force my eyes to glaze over. With each surah it became more and more tiresome. I was ever ready for this book to sell me on the beauty its followers constantly profess that it contains, but it never came close. There are, of course, countless moments in the latter half of the Qur'an in which it threatened to dip into poetic verse, only instead to revert back to its comfortable, constantly repeated diatribe against unbelievers, those who don't listen, the hypocrites, and the blasphemers.

I fully believe that were you to rip out everything that...

- has already been told in the Bible
- has already been mentioned once in the Qur'an
- qualifies as a rant and amounts to little more than filler

...that all of the original thoughts and commentary contained in the Qur'an would only add up to about 50 pages. I have no hard metrics or data to confirm this hyperbolic statement, of course, as such a project would require an effort equal to that which created the Jefferson Bible, and I thought about this not until I had actually completed my read of the text and so had no opportunity to do so without rereading the book (which I'm not willing to do at this point). Such would make an interesting project—perhaps something for the future.

It's my belief that there's a significant problem with religious texts taken as the word of god in that every word of them must be taken as sacrosanct. If you accept that the Qur'an was dictated to Muhammad by god, you're powerless to disagree with any of it. You may genuinely feel that a part of it is wrong, but your own internally guiding logic will always be overruled by the call to instead be faithful, and you'll dismiss your own reasoning to instead adopt a view which clashes with your own beliefs. Perhaps this is why religion never appealed to me—I find it impossible not to value logical thinking over all else; something I view as a luxury of being raised in a liberal Western 21st century society.

This isn't something unique to the Qur'an, as the Bible suffers from this problem as well. There are many portions of both the New and Old Testament that are genuinely worthwhile; as spiritual guidance for the construction of personal morals, as parables of wisdom, as intriguing storytelling, or just as sheer prosaic beauty (with specific regards to its King James version, which I find quite aesthetically pleasing). But during my read of the Bible these positives were often polluted by instances of lengthy archaic rules of worship, calls to genocidal violence, and extreme punishment for what unbelievers would view as rather minor offenses.

I began reading the Qur'an with the honest intent of allowing it to surprise me (as I did with the Bible), but thus far I (an atheist without a clear bias for either religion) have found fewer redeeming qualities in the Qur'an than I did with my cover-to-cover read of the Bible last year.

Most surprising, perhaps, is that the Qur'an's god is the same as the one found in the Bible. Thus much of the Qur'an ends up being a retelling and a commentary on the events of the Bible, rather than its own independent religious text. I find it amusing to consider the Qur'an somewhat like The Aeneid to the Old and New Testament's Iliad and Odyssey. I was surprised to learn just how much of the Bible is not only mentioned in the Qur'an, but reaffirmed. Adam and the Garden of Eden, Moses, Abraham, Lot, and even Jesus as Mary's son and his status as a prophet are all retold in the Qur'an, which was written 600 years after the New Testament. A key point of the Qur'an is the failure of the people of the book to properly heed the words of god. The Qur'an very early takes shape as more of an admonishment than its own holy book. I found it similar to the Old Testament in this manner, as god spends quite a bit of time being cross with the Jews for failing to adequately follow his laws. Perhaps the largest difference in belief between the Bible and the Qur'an is the level of holiness of Jesus of Nazareth—the Bible, of course, touts him as the son of the Judaeo-Christian god. The Qur'an disagrees, but still considers him a holy figure and a prophet. Aside from that, the Qur'an is actually shockingly similar (in a purely mythological manner) to the Bible.

Noteworthy to me in these early books are just how harsh the Qur'an is against "unbelievers", regularly referring to us as evildoers and constantly reminding us we're destined to burn in hell: "Beware the Fire whose fuel is mankind and stones, made ready for the unbelievers".

These kinds of calls to violence are often quite blatant throughout the Qur'an:

Women 4:87: "Do you wish to guide one whom God had led astray? Whoso Good leads astray, you shall find no path. They long for you to blaspheme as they have blasphemed, thus becoming like them. Do not take them for friends until they emigrate in the cause of God. If they refuse, seize them and kill them wherever you find them..."

Man 76:3: "For the unbelievers We have readied chains, collars and a raging fire"

The Qur'an is often not kind to the modern notion of egalitarianism across genders, either:

"Your women are your sowing field: approach your field whenever you please"

But, of course, the Old Testament isn't much better. Both clash with classic liberal notions of liberty, and perhaps this is where the Qur'an drew its influence from.

What is the deal, with unbelievers and hypocrites!?

There's an ever-present tone of combativeness throughout that I found off-putting. I often found my Tarif Khalidi translation wanting, as it includes odd anachronisms such as "What is it with these people?" (a phrase which, each time I read it, would call to mind the voice of Jerry Seinfeld), and lacks any historical annotations, preferring instead to let the text stand on its own. This is a mistake for my purposes, as the book has thus far come off as more of an impatient rant than anything else, and I found myself craving additional historicity the further I got through the book.

The Muslim god does seem to be far more forgiving to his followers than to unbelievers, something more akin to the tone of the New Testament than the god of the Old Testament. It's constantly stressed that he is forgiving so long as his followers repent, and I recall the Old Testament god being far more vengeful and punishing in contrast. This warmth and magnanimity doesn't seem to extend to unbelievers, though, rendering a lot of what is said with an unfortunate air of intolerance.

It's tough to review the Qur'an without comparing it to the Bible. I didn't particularly care for the Bible as a whole, but it's so long and includes so much varied content that it's almost impossible to read through and not find something to like. While the Bible is at times every bit as intolerant, violent, and archaic in its morals as is the Qur'an, there are things that I liked when I read it: I enjoyed analyzing in-depth the morals of Jesus, I enjoyed some of its storytelling, and the King James version in particular features some passages of stunning prose—I'd go as far as to say that I genuinely enjoyed the book of Revelation. Unfortunately, I've found comparably little in the Qur'an to enjoy. There's so much repetition, so much sheer fat in the content included here that I found it rather difficult to bludgeon through the recycled biblical tales and the constant rants against unbelievers and those who feign piousness. It made for a monotonous read in which I constantly found myself to be skimming full chapters, eyes fully glazed over. And that's a problem, because this is an incredibly influential book that deserves a serious, focused analysis. As a non-religious person I'm admittedly a child with swimmies being tossed into the deep end of the pool whenever reading and attempting to analyze religion, and I fear I'm altogether incapable of a quality analysis of this book.

That said, the book makes it exceedingly difficult for readers such as myself to pick it up and gain an understanding of its religion. Take the excerpt to the left, for example. Sure, it's stylized—I get that. And sure, I can see how it'd come off as poetic, maybe, in the original Arabic. Or how it'd be rendered rather lyrical when read aloud at a mosque. But for my reading purposes, carving through an entire surah of this is an absolute chore. And this portion is topped by the final, closing surahs, which read like little more than an intoxicated man's ramblings with little substance therein. These types of things are not something I enjoy. They give me little of the insight into Islam that I crave. Reading them—either shallowly or with depth—not a fruitful endeavor for me. Perhaps that's not true for you—and more power to you. But I personally can't stand it.

So I think this stuff just really isn't for me, and thus I found little to enjoy here. Maybe this renders my thoughts on the Qur'an worth comparatively little, but I'm glad I read it nonetheless, and I will share my thoughts anyway, if for no other reason than to prove I did, at one point in my life, read these kinds of books that are supposedly so deserving of being read.

⭐

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

There's a special king of ire you can raise among fans of the Star Wars franchise by suggesting the whole damn thing isn't science fiction at all, but rather fantasy in space. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 mines a similar vein of having all the trappings of science fiction present simply for genre appeal, but it features none of the intelligence that makes the subgenre compelling in the first place.

Fahrenheit has futuristic fireproof structures, robots who butter bread for their humans, and houses constructed entirely of television-screen-walls. This book has got a glossy coat of science fictiony paint, but peel off that outer layer and you'll find that what's underneath is a pretty bog standard, empty-headed dystopia with very little concern for the actual science (both soft and hard) portion of the science fiction moniker.

This might not seem very important given the book is a dystopia first and a science fiction novel second, but the real bone I have to pick with Bradbury is how flatly this book falls on its face when considering the soft sciences it relies on to build its world and thus make its point about where Western civilization was headed in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the television. Bradbury's book lacks both the intelligent foresight of Huxley's Brave New World and the strong narrative structure of Orwell's 1984 and replaces it with little else but his rampant insecurity and incapable worldbuilding, the latter of which is perhaps what was most offensive about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's creation is artificial, incoherent, and completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 5 minutes.

Bradbury would have us that government has replaced books and classic liberal thinking with television as a control device. He'd have us believe that liberal arts have been all but abolished. Classic subjects in the western canon such as literature and history are no longer taught, replaced with seemingly vapid and obedience-inducing classes on television and sports and various other opiates-of-the-people. A scary thought, especially to his core audience of folks who enjoy reading literature—myself included.

But, with the absence of these classes, which are fundamental to a child's ability to learn in the first place, how are these characters even literate? Why is there a need to burn books at all when such a civilization would presumably be incapable of producing an adult capable of reading one? Further, what kind of education provides the bedrock for a civilization with such advanced robotics and technology as are present in Fahrenheit 451? Who is designing these groundbreaking new pieces of technology when children are supposedly not even taught to think critically in any fashion whatsoever? How is this society still capable of urban planning and complex public transportation? Air flight? War? The extraordinary new technologies our modern society is populated with are far from a given, which is why they've never existed in the tens of thousands of years of human civilization until just the past century. Bradbury's poor worldbuilding betrays a lack of understanding of how a modern, developed society even functions. Ironically, this book doesn't seem to understand the importance of basic critical thinking and open-mindedness to a functioning, wealthy society, despite railing against its potential extinction and rallying Bradbury's readers behind the importance of these ideas. The flimsiness and logical incoherence of Bradbury's world — something that should be the foundation on which the rest of the story converts itself organically via its plot and characters into the points he seems to want to make — wrecks the entire thing. It's infuriating, and I refuse to keep reading it.

It's a popular notion that the best children's literature is also enjoyable for adults. Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite; it's literature for adults that's so stunted and poorly conceived that it could only be genuinely enjoyed and resonant to teenagers. This is straw fiction set up by a grumbling fan of the medium of the novel who views new technology as a perversion of everything he loves. It's a pontification about the evils of stuff he hates that other people are wrong to like. It's a book with a message that works only on the outermost surface and fails at every deeper level within.

Fahrenheit 451 is "old man yells at cloud" dressed up in fancy clothes. It's old folks in the '30s telling you that jazz is just noise, in the '50s telling you that television will rot your brain, in the '70s telling you that KISS are satanists, in the '90s telling you that video games will make you shoot up schools. If this book succeeds as a cautionary tale or a prompt towards open-mindedness, it does so accidentally, in showing the dangers of becoming so secure in your own bubble that you end up dismissing new forms of media outright, rather than considering the potential strengths of such new media. Look at what television has done in the decades since Bradbury penned this novel. Some of the most successful creations of artistry have been created in this new golden age of television.

I've had one run-in with Mr. Bradbury in the past and found him so reliant on simile and purple-prose as to be unreadable. I suppose the best thing I could say about Fahrenheit 451 is that it's far more readable than Something Wicked This Way Comes, but instead of trying hard to be literary with its prose, it tries hard to be literary with its themes. Unfortunately, it fails in this manner just as badly.

Sorry Ray, but I think I hate your work.

⭐

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury

This review's probably going to make a lot of people mad. I'm sorry if you like this book; really, I am. But I couldn't stand to read any more of it. And yes, I know I'm just some random idiot on a website. Far be it from me to criticize a legendary writer like Ray Bradbury, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Bradbury's writing is so egregiously fat with purple prose that if you had showed me some of these paragraphs and told me that a try-hard high schooler had written them I'd have believed you. Seriously, even I don't try this hard to be artful and profound in my dollar-store-website reviews. I found myself reading some of these lines multiple times just trying to grasp what the fuck was even going on in the damn scene since Bradbury had described it in the most obtuse, impenetrable way—for the sake of no more than making the sentence as amusing and pretty as possible. I can only hear about a tattoo artist described as seated rapturously alongside his ceaseless melancholy, stinging himself with a dagger of bees! so many times before my eyes roll themselves right out of their sockets. In the beginning I was struck by Bradbury's endless, artful adjectives and his rambling nature, considering the book nearly more poetry than prose. By page 100, though, they were beginning to wear me out. And by page 150, they were absolutely unbearable. Maybe there's a decent story in here somewhere, but I couldn't dig my way through the piles of lard to find it.

I realize this is very much up to personal preference. If you like extremely stylized prose then you'll probably love this novel. I didn't hate every second of it, but I do hate it.

⭐

The Gold Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

19th century writers and ruining their stories by depicting unintelligible dialect phonetically; name a more iconic duo.

Look, I finish almost everything I read. And I really do like Poe. But I just can't do it with this one. There's probably a very good story in here somewhere, but Legrand's African American servant Jupiter's illiterate dialogue is so frustratingly constructed that I simply can't bring myself to continue bludgeoning through it to get to the good stuff. Reading The Gold Bug is a miserable chore and I have much better things to do with my time (and better books to read) than to waste it decoding this nonsense.

"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate --de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d--d good beating when he did come --but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all --he look so berry poorly."

Pardon my French, but: Fuck this shit, Edgar. You're better than this. It goes past style value. This is bad without even applying the lens of 21st century ethics and criticizing this in a racial fashion. I'm not reading this for literary purposes, but for enjoyment. And this sort of dialogue is such a chore to decipher that it completely destroys my ability to read and enjoy the story.

When it comes to dialect and dialogue, let's have more Twain and less Poe, please.

⭐

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) (Dupin, #2) by Edgar Allan Poe

I really love Poe, but this is just too damn dry.

Perhaps this much dry detail about a murder may have been intriguing and curiously morbid in a society less permeated with all sorts of depictions of bloody viscera, but for us modern folks steeped in true crime fiction, slasher-horror, and everything in between, there's a distinct lack of humanity and emotion in this story to attach ourselves to.

Poe's knowledge of the science of violence is not trivial considering the contemporary era in which he lived (where 'miasma' was the hot infection theory, and actual germ theory was still just a budding, abstract idea), and it serves him well in much of his other work, but you can see why the storytelling polish present in Conan Doyle's later Holmes stories were a necessary, welcome evolution to the detective-mystery fiction of Poe's Dupin. I wasn't a huge fan of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it's still superior to The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

I assume this isn't skippable if you want to read the (apparently) far superior The Purloined Letter (I haven't read it yet!), otherwise I'd be comfortable urging Poe fans ignore this entry entirely and jump right on to the final—and perhaps most famous—Dupin episode.

⭐

The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

My issue with this book isn't so much the ideas it presents but the way in which it presents them. It's very short and pretty readable even for the economically uneducated, but it exists in this form because it's a classist call-to-action to those not educated enough to see past its persuasiveness. And I despise that about it.

This book wasn't created to teach, it was created to galvanize. It's what people think the Bible and the Qu'ran and every other religious text are: The Manifesto is, more than anything, a call to commit aggressive violence. I can't say whether Marx wrote it to be self-serving or whether he truly believed it would benefit the human condition. Cynically, I prefer to believe the former. Either way, The Communist Manifesto, like Mein Kampf before it, is a book that's worth reading so you're better equipped to disarm its tactics and counter its ideas.

My final, petty revenge on The Communist Manifesto is purchasing this stupidly pretty Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, clocking in at a scant 112 pages, for a whole $15, when I could have just downloaded it for free anywhere since it's in the public domain. I was free to determine that the value of this pretty paper copy of the book was worth the money, so I gave a bunch of bourgeois pigs some of my money I earned in exchange for selling my labor and The Communist Manifesto arrived on my doorstep two days later.

Ain't Capitalism grand?

⭐

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad

Less a novella than an essay ruminating upon the man-made hell that was Africa during the colonial era, Heart of Darkness suffers from a lack of readability due to both its framing device and Conrad's seeming dislike of paragraph breaks. Look, I've read some difficult stuff. I'm halfway through the King James Bible, I've read Shakespeare, some Joyce, etc. So although I'm not nearly as well-read as a lot of the more prominent reviewers on this website, I can still stick it out and complete (and enjoy my experience reading) a lot of more difficult literature. Rarely have I ever zoned out and skim, mind wandering, as much as I did in this book.

Conrad can certainly write, as portions of this book are quotable in their beauty, and his foreword in my Penguin Deluxe edition was stunningly well-worded, but it seems to fall apart in most of Heart of Darkness as Marlow, the narrator, drones on endlessly and tends to add details that stall the story more than add depth to the themes he's exploring. I couldn't shake the feeling that this should have been a short story rather than the novella it is. It manages to feel bloated despite its short length.

There are some important ideas discussed here: The evils of colonialism, for sure. And Conrad probably was one of the first to depict it as such. And, perhaps even more compelling since it's as timeless as anything worth writing about: The cruelty men exhibit to their fellow man when allowed to act maliciously without consequence, and the faux justification of such acts provided by faith in racism and misogyny that gave way to the Western pseudosciences of the 19th and 20th century such as eugenics and phrenology. But the process in which Conrad says what he wants to say made it a chore to access his thoughts on such themes and I had to constantly refocus my efforts to the extent that made this 89-page novella feel three times its length. In the end, I abandoned my read at around 50 pages and consulted a summary instead. For shame, I know.

It's extremely rare for me not to put in the effort to finish a piece of classic literature. So rare in fact that I've only ever done it once before, during my read of Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, which I despised. But I just can't do it. I'm sorry, I tried, and Conrad deserves it, but I've failed. I tried in audio form while I work, I tried sitting by the fire with music early in the morning when my brain was fresh, I tried in bed late at night when winding down. But I can't focus my brain enough to trudge through Conrad's bloated, uninteresting prose to get to the good stuff.

I hate calling media "important", but this is probably an important book. It's just too bad it's not more accessible than it is for the mouth-breathers like me. I'm receptive to what it has to teach but I've lost patience for the method in which it does it.

Sorry, Joseph.

⭐

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967) by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream has an intriguing premise, but that's about all. That and torture porn, I guess.

There's not really any science fiction here beyond the premise of an artificial intelligence hating and torturing the final few remnants of humanity in ways that are viscerally horrifying to a human reader. There's no attempt at an explanation as to how it can do the things it does; materializing various objects, mending injuries through mid-air, and altering the humans genetically. Nothing really happens for any reason because there aren't any rules explained to the reader, which causes the climactic action to have little payoff. The characters are shallow and the unreliable narrator never really amounts to anything, but as I read I found I had most problems with the lack of worldbuilding and wanted some basic framework to what was happening and why.

There are quite a few holes, even for a short story. These people have been stuck in here for a hundred years, yet none have thought to commit suicide? The computer can wirelessly and instantly alter their DNA, can keep them from death... Except it can't at the climax of the story? 

Why? Because Ellison decided so?

I'm pretty disappointed with this read as I expected much more. Is it horrifying? Sure, but it lacks any real impact. It reads more like Ellison came up with an interesting premise but didn't know how to explore it, and resorted to shocking tortureporn in place of an actual, impactful narrative—horrifying or otherwise.

It must have been a unique premise back in 1967, and it certainly features some inventive ways of shocking the audience, but its lack of depth renders its attempt at a shocking conclusion ultimately unsatisfying.

⭐

Berserk (1990) by Kentaro Miura

Earlier this year I began experimenting with the medium of weekly Japanese manga. Though Western comics have always seemed a bore to me, I'm a fan of both art, and novels, so why not graphic novels? I ended up exploring a classic of the medium (Berserk), a contemporary favorite (Boku no Hero Academia), and a genre favorite (a graphic novella by horror savant Junji Ito).

I read almost universal praise for Berserk but was greeted with the first volume, which I promptly hated. It read like a 16-year old boy's etching done while in high school math class. Flat characters, rough artwork, and terrible dialogue. Upon further internet trawling I discovered that, in fact, Miura was no more than a teenager when he had written and illustrated the material in this first volume from the late '80s, and is still working on the series today — Now in his 50s.

His fans suggested I keep reading, and so I obliged them and continued to give the series a shot.

It wasn't until around Volume 15 that I actually put the series down for good, recognizing that it did, in fact, improve drastically; both in the areas of art and characterization. The dialogue remained universally awful, though whether that was due to its original construction or shoddy translation, I'm not sure. The series peaked for me around volume 9, when the characters were further humanized and experienced an emotional, existential breakthrough.

Miura is at his best when he's building his characters and utilizing the plot to challenge them. I once had a creative writing professor suggest cruelty towards your characters as the best way to challenge them and force them to grow and change, and Miura certainly pulls no punches in the Martin-esque way that he punishes the poor souls in Berserk. It leads to unexpected depth in the characterization that I've been referring to, something I was not expecting when I picked up manga for the first time.

The art grows in leaps and bounds through just the volumes that I read, and I've peeked ahead at some of the art in the volume that released just this past year and was blown away. The art Miura is producing currently is genre-defying, in my estimation. He's drawing inspiration from Western artists such as Bosch and Escher, and producing some art completely unique to his medium. It's something that deserves recognition and provides a significant boost to the quality of Berserk in general.

I think a most specific, make-or-break facet in the estimation of whether or not a reader would enjoy Berserk is how well they like camp. Berserk is full of camp. Whether it's intentional, or Miura is just trying to too hard to be edgy is anybody's guess. But this series is chock full of gratuitous, over-the-top nudity and violence. I really can't stress this enough. I'm all for realism (I love Martin's ASOIAF, which toes the line between realism and outright camp fairly well, in my opinion), but the levels of explicit sexual content and violence are so over-the-top in this work that they're impossible to take seriously. I'd be shocked if Miura wasn't inspired by a wave of ultraviolent '80s slasher B-movies. If this is your thing, then you'll probably like Berserk, but too often I felt Miura was overly ham-handed in his presentation of this camp, and it contrasted poorly with some of the more serious character work he was clearly putting full effort into producing. When I think about Berserk, I feel a clash between outright ridiculousness, and earnest exploration of existentialism through well-rounded characters. It's an odd juxtaposition that could have been more interesting had it been balanced more skillfully.

The one objective complaint I have about Berserk is that the dialogue is bad. As I mentioned before, this may be due to the translation, as I don't envy the Japanese-to-English translators job in any circumstance, much less when they're trying to fit kanji-to-English into tiny speech bubbles. I'm sure sacrifices needed to be made to get Miura's ideas across, and they serve Berserk very badly. There are numerous instances of awful dialogue that tear you right out of the experience and pile on top of the already troubled mash of campiness and serious attempts at character development.

The best thing I can say about the series is that, coming from a background of Western fiction, it was almost wholly unique to me. The plotting was a rollercoaster -- each time I suspected what was going to happen next, I was wrong. Similarly, the increase in quality of the character writing and art was unexpected. Fans of the series where definitely correct in urging me to stick with it past the first few volumes, and I'm glad I did. However, this just falls solidly into the category of "not for me": I recognize the special things that the series does within its medium, but as somebody who isn't a fan of the medium, has nary a campy bone in his body, and doesn't care much for fantasy, this falls flatly outside the boxes I typically tick when examining what my favorite pieces of fiction are.

Berserk does some things so well, but its flaws — along with the fact that it's simply not my thing — kept dragging it back down for me.

This is likely much more enjoyable to fans of manga, camp, and dark fantasy. but for people like me coming from outside those realms, much less so. For example, I chuckle to think about my grandmother picking up and reading one of these. But its reputation is, in my layman's opinion, well-deserved among manga fans.

I am certainly not an expert in this subgenre, but hopefully I've nailed a general outline well-enough to help somebody make an informed decision.

⭐

The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho

Thinly-plotted, characterless, eye-rolling fare. Overly preachy at its best, nonsensical drivel at its worst. A bad self-help book masquerading as a high-minded literary classic full to the brim of weak fables to be spoonfed to guileless idiots. 

I can't say enough negative about The Alchemist. I hated every moment of it and I'll never understand why folks love it so much. To each his own, I suppose.

⭐

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I feel like I need to preface this review by confirming up front that I don't hate Rand's philosophy or political leanings. I don't even really dislike them. Hell, Bastiat's The Law is one of my favorite works on non-fiction ever. You could call me a filthy capitalist pig and you probably would not be too far off the mark.

What I do hate, however, is Rand's writing.

I've always been turned off by the inherent disingenuousness behind grinding your idealistic axe through the medium of fiction. When you're approaching fiction with the goal of displaying (and possibly trying to convince the reader of) your worldview, it seldom leaves room for the creation of compelling, human characters and letting them react to the intriguing situations that you're placing them in. You're talking through the characters' mouths and manipulating events to display what confirms your worldview and ideological beliefs rather than letting the story unfold organically in a way that's satisfying and reasonable.

I've read plenty of writers whose political and religious views I outright detest in other settings and loved their work. I've read plenty of writers who are verifiable human scum and loved their work. I'd bet that we all have. If a writer is doing their job then their character shouldn't much affect their storytelling. But when you're so obviously attempting said axe-grinding like Rand is with Atlas, it often falls apart into contrived plotting and bland characters, and that's exactly what happens here.

Any book that includes and endless stream of pages worth of a character literally preaching to you in the middle of the narrative, in my opinion, should be non-fiction. In terms of fictional aspects: I related to none of the characters, was not moved by the plot, and was significantly bored as I continued through the book. Rand's prose is flat and unengaging, just like her characters. All that's really here is her philosophy, with all its strengths and faults, and I think that's why most of the hardcore fans of this novel are those who find themselves agreeing with it, while the rest are simply doomed to trudge through and deal with her unlikable characters and predictable plot. If you know Rand's worldview then you can see each turn coming from a mile away and you can guess at the story about halfway through (or sooner).

I do think there's a good story somewhere in here, but sadly Rand wasn't able to separate herself from her beliefs and chisel one out of the block. I've got Sinclair's The Jungle on the reading list for next year, and I'm expecting it to be the other side of the same coin on which Atlas lives, so I'm not much looking forward to that read. But I'll do my best to come into it with a clear head and give ole Upton as fair a shot as I gave Ms. Rand.

I find the philosophy behind Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto utterly misled and viscerally repulsive. The history it inspired is a horrifying black mark upon Western civilization, the results of which we're still feeling today. And yet I still have a copy of it sitting on my shelf. At least Manifesto makes for an engaging, thought-provoking read. Had it been a lame attempt at fiction, perhaps I'd have found it as valueless as Atlas, which no longer occupies shelfspace as I donated it to my local library after finishing.

Too much of this feels like a Trojan Horse for Randian philosophy and the fiction falls apart around it.

⭐