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Arundhati Roy might be the best living writer? I don't remember having that opinion last I read this, although I did apparently rate it 5 stars. The bubbling, overwrought prose is on the verge (perhaps past the verge) of Too Much - but it works, or it works for me, or it worked for me. Sweet, quick, lyrical, weird but grounded.

Maybe I am biased, predisposed by the forces of Canonized Culture, to find such great beauty in the stream-of-conscious depiction of a man (two? or just the one?) on an odyssey of his own making in Ireland - but this was really good. Rereading Waiting for Godot made me think that huh, Beckett is pretty good. Reading this makes me think that Beckett, for all his worldwide fame, is under-appreciated? A potentially backhanded compliment: I think this should be on high-school curricula. Gotta love a miserable misanthrope, gotta love a confused bumbler, gotta love these slices of humanity.

In an uncontroversial opinion, I think Jane Austen is quite good.

I think the parts that I found interesting in this book, Liu Cixin did not. There are some intriguing concepts here, I think alien astronomy during the cultural revolution is a cool setting to explore...but there is a also a lot of tired lecturing about concepts that Liu Cixin seemed excited about like dimensional folding, VR, and a do-you-see-the-same-blue-as-I skepticism that drags down the story a bit. Maybe if they were completely unconsidered thoughts I would find the space they take up warranted? But it is just pretty standard scifi tropes, mostly. I may also be a bit biased because the narrator on the audio book kept doing silly voices like the gravelly detective that underlined how little novelty there was here.

I think Isabelle Allende is a Very Good writer, deep and heartfelt, and the book a topical and compelling story of immigration and the toll it takes, especially at the US border. I don't think she is a Great writer, and I struggle to articulate why. I think it is the language - fluid, fluent it compels further reading, but it is almost voiceless, and for that it is less interesting. Perhaps a bit insulting of a comparison, but it reminds me of Steven King; the words come with ease, but don't stick. Her plot and emotional depth is better though, so that's nice.

As a not-teacher who has lived most of his life outside the humanities academy, this book is perhaps not super relevant - but it's good. I enjoyed reading about and thinking about what goes into education and Freeing the Mind, creating environments for thought and discourse conducive to greater understanding and appreciation of lived experiences. On one hand, it is fascinating insight into another profession, like traveling to a country with unfamiliar customs; on the other, teaching is not the only place where it is desirable to create a diverse, interesting environment for examination and proliferation of ideas! bell hooks seems pretty cool!

A favorite trope of mine is the sprawling geneological novel, painting a picture of a culture and its transformation over time through the story of a particular family throughout several generations - it is a trope I don't have many examples of, possibly just One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pachinko, but I think it is a wonderful style of art. The Books of Jacob is not that. But it does come close? Maybe it is a sprawling geneological novel on its side, painting the picture of dozens of characters in a pseudo-familial structure at the intersection of many cultural forces over a very short amount of time. It is an intriguing story of a cult, a culture, a people, a place and time of which I know little, way too many names and everyone has multiple of them.

A bit of an odd coincidence, I did not realize when reading His Majesty's Dragon that it was basically just Master and Commander with dragons. And to be frank, I think the dragons did improve it a bit. I mean, I enjoyed this, it was enjoyable, it was maybe a bit long and not quite as compelling as one might hope the swashbuckling tale of naval adventure would be. I will most likely come back and continue the series at a future date. And, credit where credit is due, O'Brian is the first writer I've encountered with the temerity to use the word floccinaucinihilipilification, so he's really not that bad.

I've been seeing references to Borges' story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote around a bit, for whatever reason (it is the one about Pierre Menard, through diligent scholarship, rewriting and recreating Don Quixote, line for line). And classic Borges it is a wonderfully compelling idea, what does it take to rewrite and recreate the conditions to write precisely the same story? I don't think I have it in me to recreate Don Quixote but I think, given the time and motivation, I could recreate Waiting for Godot line for line, word for word.

Mostly I find discussions of what is and is not a novel to be a bit bland and unimportant, but for the purposes of a review I think it is probably important to stress that The Pale King is not what I would call a novel. It is a posthumously compiled Wallacian stream-of-conscious not of a person but of a place and idea, the place being an IRS processing center and the idea being how waves of humanity crash against pure, unadulterated tedium. Stream-of-consciousness is not quite accurate though, implying a type of fluidity that is a bit counter to DFW's whole thing. Woolf writes a stream of ideas flowing into eachother and mixing together in whorls, DFW plays with a bunch of legos and sharp corners. A Koch snowflake is made by recursively altering the line-segments comprising a triangle so that each has a triangle coming out of it, and each of the lines in that triangle has a triangle coming out of it, and so on. The Pale King likewise has a plot within each plot that kind of makes it look like it follows the curve of a story but is not in itself a story.