the american one is so singalongable too! It's got that "everyone could be on a different line and it would still sound vaguely together" quality that all good crowd songs have

I'm not emotionally ready for snow D:

Short stories are SUCH a good way to suddenly have 200 favourite authors. And there's so much different out there in that space too, of which only a thin, relatively homogeneous slice is hitting award ballots

It's ok, I'm arriving at it independently 😅

Here's 10 I should read before turning into a pumpkin

oh no. oh no.

As the owner of a canine container opening savant: condolences

Looks like [my] bullshit's back on the [review] menu, boys!

...The universe heard me. I guess I'm definitely writing about it then

It doesn't change from that tone, definitely not worth continuing if you didn't enjoy the first.

Partly doubling down and partly throwing the good things about that book (which I liked!) out.

I saw someone on Reddit refer to the current one as "Ready Player One: Academia Edition" and while I think that's a BIT unfair, it's closer to that endless reference slop than it is to her stronger work.

If you're talking about a different book by the same author, 1) that's one way of putting it! 2) I think there's a LOT to unpack about sophistication/depth vs. subtlety and I like the way she challenges the idea that they're the same thing across all her work. But it doesn't always land, for sure.

*depending on the expectations of the person perceiving it

Why is it LIKE this! I just don't understand!

I hear you, I'm really trying to unpick and be clear about where I think I'm being "ungenerous" in my assessments (i.e. expecting something the author wasn't trying to write) but it's especially tough with this book for some reason 😅

it's so lazy! unserious! I genuinely don't understand how an author who is clearly quite invested in making big statements and writing deep themes in her work ends up writing something this silly!

Also the big dramatic reveal when these two Cambridge students (one of whom was an Oxford undergraduate so has ONLY been to those two universities) get to hell is "OMG... hell is a CAMPUS" and it's like oh ok so completely unlike the institution it is sort of mirroring in our world then

Right? Like, the author knows it's not a thing in UK academia, so it's never specifically "oh this person at cambridge was fretting about being on tenure track", but when it goes off on academic career insecurities and how the MC thinks about her future it comes up multiple times

Minimal treatment of colonialism. Hell is portrayed as a mashup of Christian, Ancient Greek and Chinese myth - there's a bit of handwaving about how hell changes depending on so it's not "objectively" defined by those 3 (very dominant!) cultures, but it's all the book is interested in showing us