#dnf review

Books I Read in 2022

#14 – Reamde, by Neal Stephenson

• Rating: 1/5 stars

It causes me almost physical pain to do this, but DNF @ 33%. This is the first Stephenson novel I’ve ever given up on.

Okay, I did bounce off Anathem at first, I had to wait a little bit and start that one over, but that was more because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I started it for something even more esoteric than his usual fare. With Reamde, I’m honestly just bored.

How has a promising beginning about the complex ecosystem surrounding a MMORPG designed from its base level to support gold farmers and money laundering degenerate into a jaw-grindingly bland and bloated action-movie script so quickly? Why are there suddenly Muslim terrorists introduced? Let me be clear, I’m aware of when this was published and I didn’t give it a try until ten years later, but I was already exhausted by the ever-present Muslim terrorist plot by 2011, so it’s not like I would have enjoyed it then, either. I don’t want to read something that relies on that overdone antagonist, and I especially don’t want to read Stephenson’s version of it.

I’m also already tired of Zula as the damsel in distress. When I decided to give up, I leafed randomly through some of the later pages looking for hints about what I was missing, and yeah, everybody is still trying to save Zula very late into the book. I’m not interested. I don’t even dislike her as a character, as much as I’ve seen her–she’s obviously intelligent, and is always trying to think of when/how to escape, how not to get herself killed, how to minimize the harm her captors are doing to others. She’s a good person. But at this point she’s the only major female character, as Yuxia is clearly a minor one and I only just got past the introduction to the MI6 spy who accidentally gets caught up in this hullabaloo, so I don’t know if she’s going to be major or not. (Though the sudden divergence from the plot we already know into her backstory and setup actually revived my flagging interest for a bit, because that’s one of the things I do love about Stephenson, the unpredictability of what he thinks is going to capture our attention. But it wasn’t enough.)

There’s a possibility I’ll go back for this someday, like I did with Anathem, but probably only if my husband (also a lifelong Stephenson fan) reads it and tells me it’s worth my time after all. I’ll move the copy to his shelf, and we’ll see what happens in the future, but for the moment it’s time for me to move on.

Books I Read in 2022

#9 – The Emperor’s Blades, by Brian Staveley

• Rating: 1/5 stars

DNF @ 12%. I see, skimming other reviews, I stopped short of meeting all three children of the dead emperor, but I doubt I’m missing much.

I found this to have a fairly smooth and readable style, but not to be anything I felt was worth reading about.

I’m simply not interested in a story that has devoted so much world-building time to pain. Kaden is physically abused, supposedly in the name of teaching him their ways, by the order of monks who raised and sheltered him. The order of elite fighters that Valyn belongs to is apparently so violent in its training that many cadets don’t make it to their Trial, plus the cadets like to beat each other up on top of that. As I didn’t get to the female protagonist, the Emperor’s daughter, I’ve been spared whatever horrible and painful upbringing and daily life she’s got, but I’m sure it’s awful, based on her brother’s lives.

I get that having the protagonists suffer is an important way to demonstrate conflict, but on a plot level “suffering” should mean the much broader sense of them struggling or failing to achieve their goals, or losing something important to them. It doesn’t mean that the characters have to be introduced as victims of abuse, especially when the author doesn’t seem to view them that way (even in my limited reading so far.) They’re clearly supposed to be badasses tempered by their harsh environment, or whatever, but all I see is misery, and I don’t want to keep reading about it.

Also, though I have far fewer examples and won’t go into depth because other reviewers have done it better, there’s some rampant misogyny and fatphobia already on display, even this early. Bored with it, moving on.