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).