Well, I Was Planning On Reading Dracula For Halloween/October Too But It Was A Little More Dense And

Well, I was planning on reading Dracula for Halloween/October too but it was a little more dense and longer, I had to work and then I had a trip for a week, so I didn't manage to finish it on time. Maybe I'll read it in-between other stuff this month, but I'm also preparing for final exams so I don't know haha

I didn't have time for pics either this week, I'll see what I come up with

Book Review: The Father Thing, Philip K. Dick

My Review in a Tweet:

In retrospective, I felt like I read it more like a chore, trying to read all five volumes this year. It has some good stories that left me thinking about the implicancies, but it was mostly filled with basic or uninteresting science fiction stories.

Complete Commentary:

I'm back! I just finished the third volume of Philip K. Dick's short stories, "The Father-Thing". I have to say, from the get-go, that it was probably the weakest one so far, with lower lows and not so great highs.

The more frequent topics and themes on this anthology are:

Ideologies and their radical extremes: from absolute polarization of society to political opinions taken to their most extreme realization, the author critizices and explores different ideas of his time, some of them being direct comments on recent publications.

Humanity and evolution: what will it be of humans in the future? The fate Philip K Dick envisions for us is rather dark or depressive in most of his stories.

Technology and humanity as a trait: Our relationship with technology is an evergreen topic in science-fiction, but in this anthology, it has a withered quality.

Clash of civilizations and classes

I'll make a short commentary for every short story, already ranking them from the one I liked the most to the one I liked the least:

Upon the Dull Earth: I realized while ordering up the stories that this was the one I liked the most and not the next one on the list. It feels more like a fantasy short story, but the ending is closer to a (cosmic?) horror tale.

The Golden Man: fantastic pace, fantastic ending.

Shell Game: the absolute paranoia of this colony and the TWIST. Loved it.

Sales Pitch: PKD said many people didn't like this story's ending and that he agreed with them. I disagree with both, the ending is great, but maybe because we like more cynical stories nowadays.

The Hanging Stranger: I love the ending, more themes of paranoia.

The Last of the Masters: it's unusual to read about anarchy, but it was very interesting, specially on the efforts to preserve some kind of hierarchy and burocracy.

Foster, You're Dead!: amazing satire, still relevant today.

War Veteran: I would really like to see this story adapted in a movie or series, it has great potential as a political intrigue/thriller.

A World of Talent: I rank it this high because of how convoluted and complicated the mutants' powers were. The plot itself dragged a bit too much.

Strange Eden: I like the ethereal feel of the story and the kind of "cautious tale" of the ending.

To Serve the Master

Fair Game

Pay for the Printer: I feel like we are headed this way with automated production and the lack of appreciation for manual crafts.

The Turning Wheel

Tony and the Beetles: relevant in today's political landscape.

Exhibit Piece: I despise the nostalgic feeling present in science fiction stories that imagine such a disastrous future that anything is preferred than that present, even flawed pasts. Even then, it's well narrated.

Null-O.

The Chromium Fence: I liked this satire as a valid commentary on today's need to always "pick a side", how pointing out valid critics to either viewpoint is considered as expressing symphaty for the other one. I disliked the ending, it felt like an easy way out.

The Eyes Have It: I liked it because it was fun, but I put it lower on the list because it feels very out of place in this anthology.

The Father-Thing: I liked better the author's explanation of this story, not the story itself.

Psi-man Heal My Child!: after reading A World of Talent, it felt very repetitive and unnecessarily complicated.

The Crawlers: pretty uninteresting.

Overall, I would give this book a:

6/10.

My other 2023 readings.

5. 101 Dalmatians

Feel free to ask about the extra-spicy version 🔞😘🔥

Come on, I know you want to do it.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss

My Review in a Tweet:

I haven't been this enraptured, this mesmerized, this captivated by a book in years, and I don't say that lightly. It's great on every aspect you could think of, and then some other you couldn't even conjure. Can't believe I neglected it for so long. Highly recommended if you like fantasty of any kind.

My Full Review:

I had it sitting on my bookshelves for months before I decided to start reading this book. It felt menacing, despite it being the pocket edition. The sheer volume, the brickness of it felt like a challenge I hadn't the courage to face.

But once I did, I realized the real danger was being unable to let it go: I was prisoner of the author, being held by his marvelous ability to thread the story of Kvothe in seamless chapters, that natural the flow of the story felt, you couldn't even tell where he jumped from present to past and back.

The vivid images still dance in my mind hours after I finished reading the book. I rushed past the other reviews I had pending so I could write this one because I neded to talk about it. My copy of the book was a present from a friend so I texted her inmediately, but that didn't suffice, I had to write longer than all caps screaming to each other.

The rich world the author builds feels vast and mysterious, with a lot of hidden things lurking just beneaht the surface waiting for both the writer and the reader to discover them. I really hope (haven't looked it up yet) that there are books in the vein of the Silmarillion and Tom Bombadil where the myths and tales of this universe are further expanded.

The prose of Rothfuss is so elegant, filled with clever descriptions and unexpected analogies that not even the most fictitious elements of his story remain ungraspable to the reader.

The characters are so diverse and interesting: each and every one of them leaves a perdurable memory, no matter how brief and casual their impact and presence on the story is.

Kvothe is our main character, but he gets to be a narrator of his own story whenever we dive into his past, becoming a somewhat unreliable narrator. The whole book feels like that: we as readers submerging in the story narrated by Kvothe himself, gasping for air during the interlusions where the omniscient narrator takes the job back to move the story in the present time.

A wonderful work of worldbuilding, characterization and narration only hindered by the bittersweet taste of finishing the book eager for more. I hope to get my hands on the sequel soon, but I probably should let this world rest a little before diving in it again.

9/10.

My other 2023 Readings.

The Library, Osterley Park. Middlesex.