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Eindeutig gut

Als Dominique nach 3 Jahren Ehe endlich das Kind zur Welt bringt, welches ihr Mann Claude sich so gewünscht hat, erkennt sie einen Hass in seinen Augen. Was hat ihn enttäuscht?

In brisantem Tempo, wie wir es von Amélie Nothomb gewohnt sind, berichtet die Autorin hier von 20 Jahren, die in wenigen Stunden Lesezeit verfliegen. Die Charaktere werden in extreme Gefühlslagen und zu alltagsfernen Entscheidungen getrieben und bleiben doch nachfühlbar wahrhaftig. Eine feministisch emanzipatorische Auseinandersetzung mit Zorn, Hass und Liebe.

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Does what it sets out to do

This little introduction takes the reader on a (mostly) chronological trip through Friedrich Nietzsche's work. As I'm reading this for its intended purpose—as an introduction before diving into Nietzsche's own writing—I cannot as yet judge how accurate it is. Nevertheless, I feel like I've been provided a good overview of Nietzsche's work, the discourse around him, as well as some of the most important biographical information which will hopefully aid in understanding his texts.

A couple of polemic passages, which probably aim to mirror Nietzsche's own style, make this book not only a quick, but also an enjoyable read.

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Only a ripple in the kiddie pool

“How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them and say they didn’t know about it?” When his students ask Mr. Ross this question, he does not know what to say. Not wanting to leave them hanging, he dreams up an experiment. What if he made his students experience “Strength through discipline,” community and action? What if they joined in a movement?

This novelization of a film based on true events is sometimes assigned reading in schools, especially in Germany. The true events of the weeklong experiment are shocking to hear and have much to tell us about the way totalitarianism works and how we are all susceptible to it. But while the story is fascinating and compelling, this book is a terrible way to experience it.

The story is presented in short sentences and plain language, turning every paragraph into a bore. On a narrative level, the author also aims his efforts at the slowest readers. Every scene and character motivation is overexplained to stamp out any ambiguity. Here's an example:

[Laurie] turned to the reporter who was bopping to his radio. “Alex?” Alex kept bopping. He couldn’t hear her. “Alex!” Laurie said more loudly.

If the author had even a modicum of trust in his readers, he could've omitted the second line completely. On some level, this also seems to be a crutch on part of the author. When he fails to convey an emotion or atmosphere in a scene, he just addresses the reader and tells us directly.

Later sections also explicitly tell the reader what to think of the events described. In this, the book goes completely against its own message. The reader is given no chance to make up their own mind and is instead offered an easy-to-digest moral of the story: “Don't question me when I say you should always think for yourself.”

Lastly, there's the problem of being based on a true story. Some editions feature interviews with Ron Jones, the teacher that actually ran the Third Wave Experiment. But in those editions that do not, the reader is left to wonder: What actually happened? Is this all just hyperbole? When we doubt the validity of the story, we are invited to disregard its moral as a conclusion based on flawed premises.

It seems that the novel is quite close to reported events, but there are some important ways in which it differs. First, this novel is not clear about the very condensed timeframe in which the developments took place. Second, the secret police implemented by Ron Jones is only mentioned in passing. This information network was very effective at silencing opposition and controlling students through fear and plays a big role in my reading of the events.

Rather than reading this book, I would recommend to experience this story either trough watching the 2010 documentary Lesson Plan or by listening to episode 399 of The Dollop podcast.

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Not quite quenching it

The blind man, healed of his ailment, complains about the ugliness of the world. The mother of the healed child complains about how loud and active it is. And the couple from Cana complains that Jesus only turned their water into wine at the very end of their wedding. Now Christ is sentenced to death and lives out his last hours.

In this clever opening, Nothomb's snappy writing mixes with her great sense of humour to immediately draw the reader into her retelling of the passion of Christ. But, immediately after the conviction, the story shifts gears. Jesus Christ reflects on his perspective of these miracles and on his life in general. He will go on to reflect on love, suffering, humanity, and the titular thirst.

These reflections are hit and miss: Some of them are interesting food for thought, or cleverly play on the Bible's teachings. Others take too much space for how banal they actually are. The ratio between the two categories will probably vary from reader to reader, but turned out not that great for me.

Disappointingly, the way this story plays with the Bible's account of things turns more and more annoying throughout. While the opening pages are a joy to read, later sections proudly contradict the Bible in a way that mostly feels spiteful—Luke's account is labelled a “misinterpretation” and John is accused of “spouting nonsense.” Sympathetically, these remarks could be read as the human side of Christ shining through. Given his situation, spite and anger are quite understandable emotions to feel.

Other areas demonstrate Christ having become man much more expertly though. At one point, we follow Christ's thought process as he deals with all of the pain, fear and self-hatred he's experiencing on the cross. After multiple pages, he finally arrives at a place where he is ready to forgive himself.

Overall, this novel just barely falls on the side of me not liking it. But this verdict might change on a reread.

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Delicious, but could've used a couple more minutes in the oven

After Ji-won's dad left for another woman, it didn't take her mother long to also find someone new: George. But Ji-won and her little sister Ji-hyun see what there mother doesn't, that George is a racist and sexist piece of shit. As her mother keeps deluding herself and her sister keeps suffering powerlessly, Ji-won develops a mad appetite for human eyes that could free the three women of their oppressor.

This novel manages to paint a hateable, yet believable villain in George. His racism against and fetishization of Asian women gets your blood boiling early and makes you long for the catharsis that the title and blurb on the back of the book promise. To avoid serving its just deserts too early, the book instead invites us to follow Jin-won's slow descent into madness, which makes her later actions much more believable. At points, this descent is a bit too slow and some of the fat could've been trimmed.

Next to the main course I teased in the opening paragraph, we are also offered a smorgasbord of additional characters and digressions, which mostly succeed in expanding the palette and layering some additional complexity onto the characters and story. Jealousy, academic pressure, friendship, and even a bit of romance find their way into the story.

Still, there were some sour notes. Many passages could have used another pass to fix some clumsy text flow or switch out repeated phrases. A second edition could hopefully take care of couple of typos, a paragraph that was right-aligned when it shouldn't have been, and the worst and most baffling choice in layout I've ever seen: To use block text, but instead of adjusting the spacing in between words to fill the line, the spacing between letters grows and shrinks, making some lines r e a d l i k e t h i s. That almost drove me to such levels of madness as the ones our protagonist reaches.

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Umm, I've got some notes of my own, buddy

This thin book is divided into three parts: Complexity, Complementarity and Holarchy, and Consciousness. This might be the first hint, that this book does veer away from the topic of complexity as an academic field of study quite quickly. But let's take it step by step.

In the first section, “Complexity,” the author tells us a lot of anecdotes. Stories, on one hand, of intelligent people making revolutionary discoveries that sound interesting, but are never explained here. On the other hand, we get stories of how the author himself got into the field of complexity and how cool and important it is. In the end, this section reads like an extended, badly told ad for actually learning about complexity, which I thought I was going to do by reading this book! It could be forgiven as a longwinded introduction before we get to the meat of it, but that's not the case either.

Section two, “Complementarity and Holarchy,” wants to sell the idea that “all is one”. Not only in a New Age woo kind of way, but really, scientifically! Going down through cells, atoms and the quantum level, and back up to planetary and universal scale, we are told how everything interlinks and separation is an illusion. This isn't wrong per se, but the way it's written does read very unpleasant. First, it's long winded, with very specific details at each level being highlighted and explained in full. The general point could surely have been made without going as deeply into these arbitrary particulars. The second reason this section reads unpleasant, is that the author has a very maladjusted sense of how much to explain certain things. Sometimes, a great many words are spent on explaining the simplest concepts, while other times a difficult idea will be inadequately presented in just a few words. Lastly, in this section, and the following, the author presents his banal and clichéd philosophical ideas (“We're all one”, “Isn't life beautiful?”) in such an arrogant and self-important way, that it becomes very difficult to fairly consider that little new, which he adds to the conversation.

All these problems continue into section three, “Consciousness.” A whole chapter is devoted to retelling the biography of Kurt Gödel, another few pages are spent explaining that correlation does not equal causation—in agonizing detail. And finally, the author presents his theory, that there's one “big-C Consciousness” that our own individual “small-c consciousness” taps into to get our thoughts from.

It's quite the achievement to stack this many non-sequiturs onto each other to arrive at a conclusion that somehow still feels like the whole point of the book. I cannot judge whether this grand conclusion is correct, interesting, or helpful, because I simply did not understand any of it. And not for lack of trying, but due to the aforementioned problems in the author's writing.

In conclusion, the title is misleading as this book talks little of complexity, and the eclectic and patronizing writing make it a chore, even to those open to its New Age ponderings.

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You might wanna invest elsewhere...

A man wakes up in the middle of a field without memory of how he got here or who he is. The ground around him seems charred from an explosion and he's holding a badly burned handbook for dimension travellers. Before he can make much progress in reconstructing his identity or past events, he's pulled into a fantasy adventure that pushes him to define his identity anew and to join the fight against colonialist forces.

The story is set in a somewhat accurate medieval England with fantasy elements like gods and magic thrown in. It also contains a couple sci-fi elements which are cleverly integrated.

Overall, sadly, this book is very unexceptional. The characters are different enough to build up a diverse cast, but too bland to remember fondly after reading. The plot is handled competently, but follows a quite predictable YA fantasy structure. The inner conflict of the main character is a bit bland and the insights he gains over the course of the narrative are a bit too simple and cliché for my liking. The ending ties everything together, but left me unsatisfied.

The prose writing is quite good, with sentences flowing really well together and many clever and humorous descriptions. But the humour also managed to overstay its welcome by repeating jokes too often. The only place where it consistently worked really well was in chapters from the in-universe actual handbook also called “The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England”. These were inserted between the narrative at various points and provided additional worldbuilding in the form of supposed marketing material. In these, Sanderson provides some excellent satire on advertising, terms of service legalese, and products for the rich.

A quick read with which you're not really going wrong, but it's also nothing great.

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So divine, you should want to be reading this book

The sixteen short stories in this collection are split into three sections, Mothers, Myths, and Moths. But these section headings cannot do the stories they contain justice. Each of them is such a Kaleidoscope of images and ideas that they will leave your head spinning. While the stories do each have a main narrative or idea that they follow, it won't be long until you'll be yanked on a small digression, that—even when it's often just a sentence long—is so vivid and tactile as to immediately take you with it.

Because the plot and its digressions move at such breakneck speeds, you will encounter tons of imaginative scenes like racoons sailing through a flood, a widow with acidic saliva, a bleeding train, and an aunt flushing her tongue down the toilet. Every single vignette is fresh and playful, even when darker topics like death, addiction or suicide come up.

The strongest thematic threads running through these stories are family heritage and relationships, and gender and queer identity. Most often, the first person narrators of these stories are young American women with Asian roots. Their family members talk about—or even directly embody—cultural myths and superstitions. In some stories the narrator will make explicit mention of their queer identity, which—without being directly challenged—has to contend with these myths and remarks by other characters, which leave ambiguous how much these characters understand the narrator's identity or what exactly their opinion on it is. In one story, for example, the mother of a gender-questioning daughter is offered a son as a bribe. The mother replies “I have a son already, it's just that my son is my daughter.”

While these themes are prevalent throughout many stories, reducing this collection down to these hardly does it justice. These themes are prevalent and interesting, but they never seem forced or take the spotlight. Furthermore, they are hardly the only themes. Each story combines and jumps between a plethora of magical and ordinary themes, vignettes, and emotions. Not for the sake of throwing everything in a mix that exists to please everyone, but to create a fascinating and overwhelming experience.

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Hoffentlich ist das Nächste, was ich lese, besser

Der Scareman und seine Verbündeten brechen auf, in die Weiten des Alls. Nachdem sie das Blau in ihrem System vorerst beseitigt haben, wollen sie nun eine weitreichendere Lösung finden. Sie machen sich auf die Suche nach anderen Überlebenden und dem Ursprung des Blau.

Das Beste kommt tatsächlich zum Schluss. Dieser zwölfte und letzte Band der Scareman-Saga ist besser als der Rest und ein würdiger Abschied für diese Reihe, die ich durchweg schlecht bewertet habe. Ich möchte hier nicht missverstanden werden: Das Buch ist immer noch schlecht und nicht lesenswert, aber es ist immerhin besser, als die elf davor.

Was diesen Band positiv hervorhebt, ist die gute Handlung. Ein paar letzte Stränge werden mit recht interessanten Ideen zu Ende geführt. Nichts davon ist unglaublich originell, aber es ist dennoch interessant kombiniert und bietet auf dieser Zielgeraden noch ein wenig Freude. Es gibt beispielsweise eine Arche die sich erfolgreich vor dem Blau versteckt, einen Klischee-Bösewicht, der sich als etwas anderes entpuppt als zuerst vermutet, und Androiden, die in einer Schleife gefangen sind, da ihre Erinnerungen sich immer wieder zurücksetzen.

Leider wird das alles unglaublich schlecht erzählt. Exposition wird einfach runtergerattert und teils sogar redundant doppelt und dreifach wiederholt. Die sexistischen Frauenbeschreibungen halten sich etwas in Grenzen, aber es gibt zwei forcierte Romanzen-Nebenhandlungen die selbst in einem YA-Roman kindisch wirken würden.

Ein kleines Lektorat scheint es zumindest auf Sprachebene gegeben zu haben. Dort ist mir nämlich nichts Großes aufgefallen. Auf inhaltlicher Ebene scheinen aber Autor und Lector*in den Überblick verloren zu haben. Nirdis Raumschiff hat plötzlich einen anderen Namen und Akkari, über deren romantisches und sexuelles Verhalten wir mehr lernen mussten, als wir wollten, küssen sich auf einmal doch.

Wenn also selbst dem Autor egal scheint, was in seinen Büchern passiert ist, dann kann ich mich dem nur anschließen und raten, diese nicht zu lesen:

Die Scareman-Saga umfasst 12 Bücher, die zwar alle recht kurz sind, jeweils knapp über 100 Seiten, aber es trotzdem schaffen sich unglaublich zu ziehen. Einige Bücher sind Filler und viele erzählen eine sehr ähnliche Handlung, mit jeweils anderen Oberflächlichkeiten. Die Sprache sowie die Erzählweise sind langweilig. Gegen Ende fehlt dann noch das Lektorat. Mit Ausnahme der Koordinatorin und allen Charakteren in Teilen vier und neun, die beide von einer anderen Autorin verfasst wurden, sind die Beschreibungen von weiblichen Charakteren eine absolute Katastrophe.

Die einzige wirklich originelle und interessante Idee, die Aufgabe, den Fortschritt einer Zivilisation aufzuhalten, wird nie tiefergehend angegangen und ist ab dem fünften Band nicht mal mehr Teil der Geschichte. Stattdessen geht es nun darum eine Deus-Ex-Machina Alienrasse zu nutzen um eine andere Devil-Ex-Machina Alienrasse zu besiegen.

Alles in allem ist es weder ein cleveres Gedankenexperiment, noch ein spannendes Abenteuer. Und da der Protagonist durchgehend auf eine Weise ausgetrickst wird, die die Leser*in bereits Seiten zuvor erahnt, ist es nicht einmal ein zufriedenstellendes wish-fulfilment Isekai. Damit finde zumindest ich keinen Zugang um diese Reihe zu genießen und würde dringendst davon abraten.

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Löst zwar viele Versprechen der vorherigen Bücher ein, aber das heißt ja nix Gutes

Der Scareman und seine Verbündeten machen sich auf, um das Blau in ihrem System zu bekämpfen. Doch die Komplikationen häufen sich, bis die Situation fast aussichtslos erscheint.

Das Gute an diesem vorletzten Band der Reihe ist, dass tatsächlich mal ein paar Dinge passieren. Die Puzzleteile, die in vorherigen Büchern bereit gelegt wurden, werden nun zusammengefügt und die Handlung neigt sich dem Ende. Das alles passiert auf passablem Niveau. Die Bilder und Ideen, die hier genutzt werden sind zwar nicht besonders interessant oder clever, aber sie funktionieren.

Tatsächlich werden im Rahmen dieses Buches so viele Probleme erst aufgebaut und anschließend gelöst, dass sich die Spannung stets in Grenzen hält. Am Ende haben sich die meisten Fragen geklärt, dass nur eine bleibt: Was soll denn noch im letzten Teil passieren? Vielleicht endlich mal ein Lektorat?

Der Lesespaß wird jedoch nicht nur durch einen schwachen Spannungsbogen und holprige Sprache gestört, sondern (wieder mal) durch die Darstellung eines weiblichen Charakters. Die Repräsentantin der Gasweltwesen, Nirdi, wird von allen männlichen Charakteren für ihr Aussehen begehrt. Jede Szene, die Nirdi beinhaltet, liest sich so notgeil, als wäre sie von einem pubertierenden Jungen verfasst, der 2 Wochen keinen Internetzugriff hatte.

Aber was lässt sich auch erwarten, von einem Buch dessen erster Satz lautet “Der Scareman starrte auf Nirdis Hintern und sie tat so, als würde sie es nicht bemerken.”

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