phanero

This book was alright. It didn't really inspire any particular feelings in me other than mild interest. I didn't find it too frightening either, and I felt that it relied on a bit of shock horror that didn't really shock me. It was okay, but I wouldn't necessarily care to recommend it to anyone.

Spoilers.

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I found out about the Phryne Fisher mystery series after learning that the TV show adaptation was getting a Chinese adaptation. I'd watched the Chinese adaptation, Miss S, and enjoyed it. I'd heard that it was made to closely resemble the Australian TV show.

Anyway, this novel was a short one but it was interesting and charming. A nice quick read.

Spoilers.

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I can see why this book is as well liked as it is. It was a cool revenge story.

To be honest, I usually find it difficult to engage with classic texts, but I found that this book was fairly easy to follow. So I think I would recommend this book to those who want to dip their toe into classics, but perhaps want something that is a little more action oriented.

Spoilers.

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As all books by Keigo Higashino are, this book started off light enough, in the sense that all of our main characters seemed to have a friendly and cordial relationship with one another. And it surprised me, as the book was called Malice.

I've only read the Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino. And I can understand why Higashino decided to go with a new detective when writing this novel, as the book had a different tone to it than those two with Detective Galileo.

Anyway, I did enjoy this book. I thought it was fascinating and a little chilling too. Another great novel to Higashino's name!

Spoilers!!

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This was only a short story by Liu Cixin but I wanted to read it because I knew that there was a movie based on this short story.. Like his Three Body Problem series, the Wandering Earth was very creative but also very considerate of how people en masse would have reacted to certain events in humanity.

Spoilers.

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Wow, an awesome book. I'd watched the Handmaiden before. The plots are quite similar until about the 2/3 mark, after which the story diverges. But even where the stories are the same, I found myself enjoying the book in a different way compared to the movie, both good.

As for this story, I really enjoyed how it combined romance, espionage, and a historical backdrop. It was a really engrossing story. Would recommend!

Spoilers!!!! And sorry for the sloppy writing, I wrote this while multi-tasking!!!

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This was the first book by Vladimir Nabokov that I had read, and I can definitely see why some people call it his magnum opus. There is a lot of thought put into this book.

The story itself is surprisingly straightforward. It's the language that Nabokov puts a lot of care into, and those add so much detail to the story.
There is definitely a lot that I missed while reading this book. Admittedly I'm not very patient when reading books from another time so some of the writing did fly over my head. And while I did appreciate the annotations provided by Ada Online, annotations were provided only up until part way through Part 2, and often contained spoilers. So I guess this is just a warning that my write up for this book is not going to do the book justice at all. There a lot of stuff that I definitely missed and that says more about me as a reader than this book lol.

I still think this was a fascinating book. I wouldn't recommend it to everybody because of the incest warning and because the writing is a bit dense, but I think those who like dense literature would get a lot out of this book.

Spoilers.

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This book was a lot. The story is relatively short and straightforward, but the protagonist's commentaries on everything that's happening is layered on THICK.

I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it. I did a quick Reddit search and saw that some people were disappointed with the ending. I can see why it was disappointing, since it isn't too "definitive," not something you would expect of a zombie/pandemic story. I considered this book more of an introspective piece, and so while I get the disappointment, I wasn't let down.

Spoilers.

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I really liked this book! I loved how many creative sience fiction concepts Liu Cixin was able to fit in this story, and I also thought the characters in this story were very interesting. I thought it was cool how this book ended on such a finite yet also open ended note. I initially read it as an optimistic end, but I can see how some people can see it as pessimistic as well.

While the Three Body Problem was really good, I think Death's End was a lot more striking in a number of ways. The Three Body Problem was about the discovery of a world outside of the Earth, whereas by Death's End, humanity had already progressed much further beyond that and therefore there were a lot more creative ways to deal with humanity's problems. As well, while both the Three Body Problem and Death's End had undercurrents of dread throughout the story, Death's End had a far more optimistic outlook, and far more optimistic characters.

I know I had my gripes with the Dark Forest, but I've come to accept that that the things I disliked about the book still made sense in the context of the story, and it was a necessary part of the journey, to get from the Three Body problem to Death's End.

Overall, I would highly recommend this series for science fiction and non science fiction fans alike. I was not really a big fan of science fiction, but this book drew me in by how it never forgot to explore the human aspects of these colossal, grand scale cosmic decisions. There was hard science, but it was presented in a way where the readers only needed to understand the basic science.

Spoilers.

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This book was interesting, but I found it more difficult to grasp than the Three Body Problem. I think that the characters in the Dark Forest were not as likeable as the characters in the Three Body Problem, which was why the book wasn’t as engaging at times. While the Three Body Problem was completely focused on the two main characters, there were times in the Dark Forest when the main characters were mainly in the backseat, which made it difficult for me to understand what I should be paying attention to.

Considering how much information was given to us in the Three Body Problem regarding this world, I don't think that the Dark Forest would be very satisfying if the reader hadn't read the Three Body problem. And while I didn't enjoy the Dark Forest as much as the Three Body Problem, I'm still going to read on.

So my opinion for this book was that it had a lot of interesting concepts, but it didn’t exhibit the qualities that made the Three Body Problem such a great science fiction story, particularly its main characters and their strong values.

Spoilers.

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