bookishpriest's reviews
214 reviews

This novella is a satirical, stoner-buddies take on Brexit and those ideas are certainly present. In a world where men are absent and the fate of humanity is being debated in a perpetually-hung parliament, Lana is caught up in her new role as a parliamentary scribe with a difficult fairy taskmaster. The drugs flow freely and Sapphic romance abounds, including a complicated love triangle.

Unfortunately, in spite of an interesting premise and some genuinely funny world-building, this novella just didn't do it for me. I wasn't especially invested in the characters or what seemed a very perfunctory plot. A neat idea that came out as uninteresting. I'm not sure if this needed to be a whole novel or a short story, or something else, but this wasn't quite it.

This quick read was an interesting dip into Jemisin's idea of a city' birth and personality. How cities live, just like other organisms in the world. Probably because of its brevity (22 pages/45 minutes), the story relies heavily on certain tropes (unaware chosen one, wise mentor, etc.) to advance things.

An interesting dip into ideas about the lives of cities, if a very familiar path to follow for a short while.

This is a well-written book with plenty of ideas to share. The writing is accessible and the audiobook well-narrated. The thesis here is that new technologies should be evaluated carefully before being incorporated as recurring parts of our lives. The benefit of convenience and quick communication offered by smartphones, email, and social media, come at a cost and this needs to be carefully considered. In addition to these ideas, Newport offers processes for technological decluttering and evaluation if one wants to pare down reliance on technology.

Generally, I was a fan of the book. The ideas have been widely circulated in the technology and productivity spaces online over the last few years, so most of the content was familiar ground for me. It was good to encounter them at their source and become familiar with Newport's own writing on the subject. Prioritizing personal values over trying to shoehorn new technology into them is an important and useful rearrangement of the lens of assessment offered here. 

I felt as though the anecdotes and examples in the latter two-thirds of the book could have been edited down significantly without losing much, functionally. I had several moments of "Could this book have been a long-form article instead?" Not a deal-breaker, but a feature of many nonfiction books of this type that I don't enjoy.

Definitely worth a read for anyone who is curious or hesitant about quick adoption of new technology. The processes outline for technological "detox" and decluttering could also be very useful experiments for folks concerned about their social media and communication technology usage. 

This was a great collection of short stories demonstrating several kinds of horror. Themes of colonization, racism, poverty, sexism, and white supremacy all crop up alongside supernatural, paranormal, and purely human thrills. A great way to read the work of 26 different Indigenous authors and have some scary fun doing it!

Narcissus is a modern horror novella using the Greek legend of Narcissus as the prologue for some supernatural horror. 

This is a quick read and succeeds in using the myth of Narcissus as a jumping-off-point for a series of creepy events. It definitely takes some inspiration from the Final Destination franchise with the idea of a stalking horror that can't be escaped, only avoided for a time.

There are four main characters who fall into the " overconfident American tourist who gets themselves into trouble in spite of what the locals say" stereotype. These four folks are, sadly, uninteresting people and other than two of them having been lovers in the recent past, there doesn't seem to be anything remarkable about them at all. It's hard to establish deep characters in a novella, but these four felt entirely two dimensional.

For most of the book, the writing is good. Concise sentences contribute to the fast pace and sense of urgency the characters feel as they try to figure out what is happening to them. The first two chapters frequently suffer from writing that seems to be looking for the biggest synonym available for what's being said. There are a few details that don't seem to make sense and were strange enough that I found myself leaving the story to wonder about them.

I can't find any reference to catacombs on Mykonos, but there are famous ones in Milos so why not locate the story where it makes sense? The legend of Narcissus has him die staring at his reflection in a river, so why move the location to an isolated underground pool without even a river running into it? Why is a demigod of Greek legend leaving messages for people in Latin, not Greek?

There were also a couple of hand-wave details that didn't seem consistent or sensible to me.

Why is there a camera with a reflective lens in one police interview room and not the other?

Overall, the novella was an interesting extension of Narcissus's legend into a contemporary horror space. Worth your time if you want to spend an hour or two on a creepy, fun horror romp on a Greek island. Just don't expect to fall in love with the characters or spend a lot of time here once the pages flip past.