Review: The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Because I needed my 19th century fix. And also my first George Eliot!

Okay, I get the impression that this probably isn't her best work (need to get around to Middlemarch someday), but as an introduction to Eliot specifically, it's not a bad place to start with given how apparently autobiographical it is. Knowing how much the story mirrors Eliot's own experiences, it kind of amazes me how much insight she was able to pull out of the misfortunes she experienced, as well as the limitations of her own position in society as a woman, which this book is very quick to comment on.

In some respects it feels like a natural progression from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; where Jane was independent in mind but more or less conformed to the social structures of her day, Eliot's Maggie Tulliver definitely does a lot more to poke at the walls surrounding her to the chagrin of just about everyone else in her life. It got really frustrating to see how easy it was for others to attribute these incursions to flaws in Maggie's own character (where they wouldn't be considered flaws by today's standards).

But it's all the more interesting seeing how Eliot deals with this treatment later on, especially when you think about how most people today would probably react to personal injustices. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised towards the end of this book at how certain situations and characters played out. The sibling-dynamic between Maggie and her brother Tom in particular is a highlight here, something that I really resonated with thinking about the relationships in my own extended family, but I can't say much more than that.

To be honest the writing can be a little overly long (so long that I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into at first but just kept reading onwards for the hell of it), and the narrator's sometimes moralistic commentary can be a bit much. And then there were times where I had to reread whole paragraphs-to-pages because Eliot's sentence structure suddenly got complicated and I couldn't tell what exactly she was trying to say, although that is more typical of works from this time period. But then there are moments scattered throughout where the prose moves into something a bit more profound and moving, or even familiar, and then you realize, this woman gets it.

Or should I just quote my thoughts 5 min after the ending: "what the hell did I just read. what. what. what."

Review: The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

~4 stars for the first 2/3rd's of this book. 5 for the last part. Because I wish there were better ways of conveying nuance in reviews here.

One of my coworkers read this series in its original Mandarin and gave a comment to me recently about how its English translation doesn't read that closely to the original in tone, with a lot more "expressive" language in places where the original would've been more dry (considering that the author comes from an engineering background). I get where he was coming from, but I have to say that even with that in mind, there are particular areas in characterization/plotting/prose that might still feel dry, or unusual for lack of a better word.

With regards to the plotting specifically, for a good chunk of this book, I wasn't clear how much I liked the direction it was going in, although of course in hindsight it sort of makes sense. It's one of those stories where it feels like you're dealing with a bunch of red herrings in the process of trying to figure out what the point of everything is (...at one point I even thought the setting was a red herring), and all the while wondering whether or not the diversions are really worth it. In the same manner many characters come and go with varying relevance, and especially for someone who lacks familiarity with Chinese names, it can be hard to keep track of all of them.

The ideas on the other hand are awesome, especially w.r.t. their relevance in understanding the universe and our place in it. It's probably the closest thing I've read to true hard sci-fi; I really enjoyed the realistic aspects of it (like how communication and combat would actually work in space) and also the role human psychology played into all of this at the same time. And I felt chills during certain parts that reminded me of particular moments from sci-fi films-- which also makes me wish this book was adapted into a film so that I could experience that again here.

To be honest, I might still prefer the experience of reading Three Body Problem when it comes to certain parts of this book early on. But it's pretty clear by part three that the predecessor was just world-building/setup for this, and the ending is worth it. One of those few occasions where the sequel is worth reading after the original and also stands alone on its own merits (I remember complaining about this last time with His Dark Materials lol).

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I kinda wish I hadn't been exposed to anything about this book before reading it, because what I did hear set my expectations in a bit of a different place from where this turned out to be. And with that said, maybe take that as a precaution before reading further into this review haha.

A lot is made of Le Guin's unique take on gender with her androgynous except sometimes-male/sometimes-female alien species, and while that is a major focus of the book, the subject doesn't exactly come up right away. The more immediate focus is on our Earth-based narrator's attempt to reach out to these people in the first place and the complications that arise, in ways that strike me the same way a Star Trek episode would. The ambiguous gender relationships factor more significantly in the second half, and even then a large part of the focus is more on our human inability to fully relate to these people. At the end of the day, it's about us.

While there technically is some action, most of the real story here is introspective in nature, with myths and other background stories interspersed between chapters to make you ponder on things a bit further. I found myself zoning out a couple of times ironically during the actual main plot chapters when the occasional description of manual labor and land travel came up, and consequently was a bit disappointed when the book finally ended.

For such an introspective book, I felt like there could've been even more interesting exploration of the ideas presented, had it not been as caught up in the more physical/day-to-day details of life on Gethen, as well as the narrator's own (author-imposed) limitations in understanding-- but I get that Le Guin is trying to craft a believable whole other world here. Or maybe it's just that the story ended sooner than I expected it to, just as I was starting to get really invested in understanding the particulars of this other society.

All in all, definitely worth reading for the concept. But try to stay for the experience, as limited as it may be.

Review: The Return of the King

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I regret not finishing these books before the films came out (almost two decades ago, wow).

That said, I probably would've rated them higher back then had I finished them, except for maybe parts of Fellowship (ugh Tom Bombadil). But finishing these books also made me revisit the movies and realize that they weren't really as good as I remembered either, except for maybe parts of Fellowship again lol. But when you're young and impressionable and experiencing the fantasy genre for the first time through this, it's bound to leave an impression.

As far as the books themselves go, the writing's all right, although it tends to plod at times. And in spite of that, I mean: the film trilogy would lead you to believe that LOTR is an action series... but it really isn't. Some of the best moments in the books are in the slower moments, such as when Tolkien is building on the details of his fantasy world in places like Moria, Isengard, Minas Tirith/Morgul, etc, or in the dialogue-heavy confrontations with the likes of Saruman and Gollum (and boy, do I love Gollum’s dialogue in these books).

But at the same time, there’s decent amount of extraneous detail in the midst of the main storyline that doesn’t really contribute a whole lot to the final result otherwise, unless your ultimate goal in reading is just to become more lost in this world than anything else. Bombadil is probably the most egregious example cause he literally kills the pacing where he’s at, but even some of the random songs and genealogies and constant references to people and places that aren’t directly relevant to the main plot— I mean, it’s nice to have backstory, but after a certain point you want to avoid the pitfall of having backstory just to have backstory.

Sure, I get that Tolkien was trying to make his world feel alive and full in the way some of the biggest historical epics were, but after a certain point—and this may just be my age/time consciousness speaking— I really just don’t care as much anymore? Self-contained stories like the fall of Numenor are still interesting, but outside of those, I can’t really be bothered to keep track of all of the results of Tolkien’s intellectual exercise (like the nuances of Elvish grammar...). But at least the overly expansive exposition is nowhere near as bad as some of Tolkien's successors who kinda miss the point of how he achieved all this.

All that to say, the real strength of this series (arguably) is in its ideas/themes and plotting, even while the execution of those things can sway one way or another in quality. We can have a whole other debate on the actual value of some those ideas-- I mean, apart from the aforementioned Saruman/Gollum and maybe Denethor, all of the other antagonists are pretty one-dimensional by nature; and his negative impact on the fantasy genre is a whole other story.

But generally speaking, the themes and characters themselves are worth examining: the corrupting influence of power (Boromir/the Nazgul); coping with despair (Theoden/Eowyn/Denethor); personal courage and humility (Faramir/Sam); the nature of ‘heroism’ (Gollum/Sam/Frodo), among other things. I surprisingly found myself enjoying Frodo and Sam’s journey in the books more than than anything else here, compared to the movies where I was mostly into the big battles (Minas Tirith/Pelennor Fields!... didn't care much for Helm's Deep in either version lol).

All in all, I’m glad I finally finished this. There’s a lot of things that the movies miss tonally speaking that you probably wouldn’t really get until reading this, in spite of the number of elements that they do improve on pacing-wise. But if you can go in without having your impressions already heavily-colored by those adaptations, the better.