Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in May. This month I read five novels, less than my monthly average, I know, but still. I think I did pretty good, considering that one of those novels is 900 pages long. Here’s what I think about all of them:
1.CLASSIC: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dubbed the greatest novel ever written and Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, the entire 900 pages of The Brothers Karamazov is a prelude to a second novel about Dostoevsky’s main character’s, Aloysha, life that the author never got a chance to write before he died in 1881. The Brothers Karamazov is a philosophical treaty that calls to attention the plight of the man who suffers psychologically; in this case, the man tormented by ideas of religious nature. The synopsis at the back of my edition sums it up expertly: “Dostoevsky’s masterpiece is a complex character study, a riveting murder mystery, and a fascinating examination of man’s morality and the question of God’s existence.”
And though parricide is one of the most heinous acts that anyone can commit, Fyodor Karamazov’s murder serves as the background upon which the story of his sons and four brothers—”Dimitri, pleasure-seeking, impatient, and unruly…Ivan, brilliant and morose…Alyosha, gentle, loving, honest…and illegitimate Smerdyakov, sly, silent, cruel”—is told and their psyches analyzed.
While reading this book, I found out that some people really love this book and others really hate it. Those that love it, recommended I read several passages of the Bible to complement my reading experience (which I did not do, I admit) and those that hate it asked me why I was even reading it. They could not fathom the idea that I would pick this book up by choice but pick it up of my own accord I did and I was disappointed that some of those haters proudly said they would never read it of their own volition and that it wasn’t anything short of torture. I won’t deny it. The book does have chapters that I liked more than others, but after reading passages like The Grand Inquisitor and Ivan’s conversation with the Devil I understood why this book is considered one of the greatest novels in literature. I Really Liked It and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to read it.
2. FANTASY: The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang
This book has had five-star reviews across the board since it first came out in 2018, and I agree with them. It is definitely worth reading, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy in a Japanese-like setting and elemental magic. Truth be told, it gave me vibes of The Poppy War (based on the Sino-Japanese Wars of the last century) by R.F. Kuang and Avatar: The Last Airbender. The difference is that I actually liked the main characters this time. Don’t get me wrong, the main character of The Poppy War, Rin, is a superbly well-written morally gray antihero. It’s just that I didn’t like her character development and who she eventually became, despite the fact that she redeemed herself by the end of the trilogy.
The Sword of Kaigen, on the other hand, is the story of a family. Misaki Tsusano, the mother struggling to suppress her violent past and hide who she once was; her son, Mamoru Matsuda, a young man struggling to grasp his violent future and death while Takeru Matsuda, Mamoru’s father and Misaki’s husband, a man blind to the danger that threatens them all. It is a book about war—between the Kaiganese Empire and the Ranganese Union, reminiscent of the aforementioned Sino-Japanese Wars— and a book about accepting your fate, Misaki’s, to accept and to learn how love the man she married, Mamoru, to accept his own death, and Takeru’s, to become the head of the family. I loved the development of all three of these characters—except Misaki’s romantic past with Firebird—and I found myself at the edge of my seat with this book. Some chapters were hard to read, as books about war are wont to do and I found that I had to put it down sometimes but still. It is a book worth reading, and I highly recommend it.
3. START A SERIES: The Tiger and the Wolf by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This author is mostly known for his science fiction Children of Time series. In fact, I’d heard relatively little about his Echoes of the Fall series, the first book of which is The Tiger and the Wolf. And though I liked it, it was also not my favorite. I will start with the positive. I liked the world. I am not a huge fan of shapeshifters; in fact, shapeshifters high fantasy is one of the kinds of adult fantasy that I read the least but I thought that this author was building a promising world. I thought that the world of the Wolf and their rift with the Tiger was interesting, and a solid premise for the first book in a trilogy, but alas, the author barely goes into this backstory. Instead, he chooses to focus on Maniye, a daughter of both the Wolf and the Tiger, who escapes her father and his plans to control her, only to find herself at war with her two animal souls.
This is fine, though I admit it wasn’t the way I was expecting the story to go. Obviously, Maniye learns to control her two warring animal souls and she becomes the Champion of the North (whatever that means), but what I didn’t like after that is that Maniye becomes a Mary Sue. And a new villain comes out of nowhere from there, and the story takes a completely different direction altogether. Enter Book 2 and 3.
What I also didn’t like: The writing. Not enough description and backstory. I thought that the different types of shapeshifters and their relations with one another could be explored so much more to the benefit of the story, but it wasn’t. And where the story could’ve had a lot of layers and depth, it didn’t and this was reflected in the writing. It was too simple and minimalistic. And this made the story come across as YA despite the fact that it is classified as an adult fantasy.
Two characters that I thought the author did a huge disservice to were Kalameshli Takes Iron and Broken Axe. Both had the potential to be great, but they were both eventually relegated to catering to Maniye.
4. CONTINUE A SERIES: The Bear and the Serpent by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I continued this series because I liked the Bear and the Serpent characters in this story, but eventually the most important scene of the Serpent in this second book wasn’t even included, and I am not much of a fan of pivotal events of a story and plot that happen ‘off-page’. The Bear, on the other hand, does have an interesting storyline and character development but the writing was still an issue for me, and I found that I didn’t have the energy or stamina to read book 3, so I didn’t.
5. BOOK CLUB BOOK: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
While reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf, three things stood out to me: the importance she gives to gender difference, change, and time distortion. The story in this book spans 400 years and when we first meet Orlando in the 16th century, he is a young man living in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. By the end of it, in 1928, Orlando has become a woman and for years now, she has had to confront all the constraints women are subject to in society. For years now, she has not been able to do the things she used to when she was a man and now she must follow a different set of rules of conduct. But, Woolf says, there is a male and female side in every human being, irrespective of their sex.
Change is seen in how Woolf portrays British society from Tudor England to the eve of World War II. But more specifically, in the changes of the roles of men and women in society. As a woman, Orlando is unconventional and she doesn’t really fit the norm. What is more, she transforms into a man when it best suits her. But in the end Orlando cannot escape the chains of conventions and agrees to marry because this is what is expected of her. Time, specifically chronological time, is interwoven in these two themes—gender difference (or fluidity) and change—and Woolf does a superb job in satirizing English society and what it expected from males and females. Frankly, I think that Virginia Woolf is an author ahead of her time. She is an important author to read when it comes to gender and given that this is such a relevant topic in modern society, I understand why she occupies the position she does in literature. But Virginia Woolf is not one of my favorite authors. I don’t want to read everything she wrote immediately (as I have seen other readers do, and that is fine). In fact, I don’t think I’ll pick any of her other books anytime soon.
That is everything for this month. Thank you for reading.
