Christian’s Subsection of the Internet

Nightcrawling was a punch in the gut. A punch in all the right ways - but a punch in the gut nonetheless. It’s dark, it’s grizzly, and it’s sad. It’s a really strong story, and a really strong book. The story is told from the perspective of Kiara, growing up in Oakland, looking for ways to survive. Her story is that of hopelessness, in a pure sense of the word, and of trying to find ways to live another day while doing right by the few people that are left in her life. This is a book with themes that essays can, should, and probably will be written on. The overarching theme for me was that of choices. It’s easy to criticize and judge someone’s bad choices, and file the situation they find themselves in as something that’s down to their own doing. And one can easily point to bad choices Kiara makes, as she does herself. However, how can choices be judged as bad when every single option available is a bad one? When one has the privilege of living a life where problems are relatively miniscule, and where almost all choices would lead to various flavours of good outcomes, it’s sobering to read a story - fictional, but believable - of what problems can look like when there isn’t an out. No possibility of a fairytale ending. Only making the best of it, and trying to live another day. The way in which Kiera gradually becomes numb to hope, and stops having much faith in any choice making anything better, is devastating. The way in which she’s mostly right to feel numb is even more devastating. I was humbled by the way in which the book made me think “Do this, trust them, but how about…” followed by gently but systematically showing my why I was just wrong. My instincts, based on hope, a belief in the good in people, and a willingness and conditioning to think stuff like “surely this is the kind of thing that can be solved” just doesn’t apply in this real, fictional, world. There are also characters who represent me in the book. Well-intentioned, but not helpful. Their existence is so far removed from what Kiara is going through that their efforts - while not exactly misdirected - mostly amounts to giving them a feeling of having tried to help. The way the story is told is impressive - Kiara is being exploited, but the book never feels exploitative or like the description of what happens to her goes further than it needs to. The character of Kiara never becomes pitiable: yes, she has flaws, but she’s also so much stronger than most of us could ever hope to be, and stronger than most of us would hope that we would ever need to be. And the way the character is so vulnerable, and so out of control of what’s happening to her, while also being so strong and so in control of herself and her own actions is an amazing piece of writing. At its best, fiction can be an empathy-builder. It can give you an insight into the circumstances of people you otherwise wouldn’t find yourself thinking about. The next time I see a headline about grooming, cover-ups of police exploitation, or action taken against people on the street, I will see the headlines in a different way. This book will always be one of the books I’ve read that makes me see the world in a different way, and that’s up there with the highest compliment I can pay to a book.

For quite a while, David Copperfield was my favourite book. So one could say that I had… Great Expectations… of Hard Times. However, whereas Copperfield drew me in and immersed me in the universe of the story, Hard Times never did. In this case I think the problem I had with it is pretty clear: it’s too short. Or, rather, it ended too quickly, right when I started feeling engaged with what was going on. If Hard Times had been a sequel, or a second part, to a book where the characters and surroundings had already been established, I think I would have been fine with it. We get dropped straight into the action of children being educated according to a very particular idea Mr. Gradgrind has of what is and isn’t an appropriate way for children to think. We meet Lou, Sissy, and Tom, integral characters we will follow through the story. Unfortunately, we get dropped a little too much into the action for my taste - the characters are great, or, rather, end up being great, but they aren’t really established before the story starts happening to them. This made it a very slow read for me: I had to get to know the characters while also keeping up with what was happening to them, and what I should feel about it. Possible, yes, but the way the story was told from the start didn’t do much for me in terms of establishing the characters. I sat with the feeling that I was already expected to know them. By the third and final part of the book, I was finally able to keep up with it, and properly care about it, and I enjoyed the ending a lot. I then wished that the book had gone on - that the summaries given in the epilogue were actually written out as further books. Hard Times is a solid story, and I’m sure it’s worth a re-read, and that I would enjoy the start of it much more if I did. As far as Dickens and Myself goes, I think the longer books might be more for me. Fortunately, that seems to cover the rest of his bibliography.

With Balance this series is back to its best. The book is varied, a lot is happening, but it’s easy to keep track of, characters are having to make hard choices which seem plausible based on how they’ve been built up so far in the series, and nothing feels too predictable. Of course, there are tendencies toward clichés now and then, and dialogue especially can feel a little exposition’y in an action-film kind of way, but that’s part of the package with these books. Balance was exactly what I expect and want from these books - a whole lot of easy, relaxing, exciting, fun.

It’s always interesting reading classics you hope you will like. The potential for disappointment is very much there - but The Importance of Being Earnest very much lived up to my expectations. It’s effortlessly funny, and just on the right side of absurd. A nice definition of the genre “farce”, if anyone were to need one. It’s a very quick, very fun read.

There’s a lot of stuff packed into this part of the story, and, as such, it felt a bit more… varied than many of the other books. This book, perhaps most of the five I’ve read so far, justifies splitting the story into the 6 + 1 books this edition splits them into. There’s a nice balance here between action, character-development, drama, and suspense. There isn’t much to say beyond that. There is probably nothing original about the Lord of the Rings that can be written that hasn’t already been written, and read, by anyone who cares. You probably really like this story, or you don’t. I do. It’s not the most riveting or accessible story I’ve read, but it maintains a cosy fairytale feeling, and it really does drag you into the universe of the story.