The truth of the matter is that blogging for the purpose of doing book reviews is weirdly hard. It might stem from my disbelief in any objective criteria for art – which is why I have to hold back my opinions when someone tells me that such-and-such author I absolutely loathe is actually terrific. I hate the notion of giving something as subjective as art a concrete numerical score. I also find it hard to give things a recommendation. But reading this, I pretty quickly came to a solid, one sentence assesment of this book:
“Hey, if you liked the first two seasons of Black Mirror (when Charlie Brooker was at the helm and the didn’t suck) then you’ll like this book.”
That’s the vibe. If you liked that I am reasonably confident you will like this.
I shall now gush for a paragraph or two.
I really this author. I liked his other collection of short stories, and I may have liked this one even more. This is odd, because I actually kind of hate short story collections. On top of that, I didn’t find the title to really be all that inspiring. But even there I was wrong, as the theme of love (however tainted by a sort of bleak undercurrent that colors all these stories) worked really well for this collection. And I really enjoyed how the short story collection actually had some kind of unifying theme that connected all the stories together, while still letting them be distinct self-contained stories. The very thing I think is lacking in most short story collections is some kind of cohesion, and I really that Weinstein hammered that down with this collection. Again, I don’t love short story collections, but I can’t think of a collection that is more well put together in terms of cohesion than this one.
Each story of the collection was rather memorable, but of course some more so than others. There were some that remained with me the whole day, and there were others that I pondered over for the rest of the week. But the reaction to the stories was always positive.
There are as of now two authors who write short stories I actually like. Samuel R Delany and Alexander Weinstein. It’s a pretty limited club.
I will probably commit myself to rereading both of Weinstein’s short story collections over again. I liked them that much.
Failures in Polymathy 