{"id":439,"date":"2012-06-18T08:35:30","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T16:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=439"},"modified":"2012-06-18T08:35:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T16:35:30","slug":"the-atrocity-archives-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/18\/the-atrocity-archives-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Atrocity Archives– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The Atrocity Archives<\/a> by Charles Stross<\/a>
\nMy rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

My goal is to read 52 books this year, and it turns out The Atrocity Archives<\/em> is really two books, or maybe even three. But I had no idea, going in, that this was the case. Some other review said \u201cTerry Pratchett mixed with Mark Leyner\u201d and my response was \u201csold<\/em>!\u201d So I jumped in and halfway through, I was on the denouement, wondering how the heck this Stross guy was going to keep it going. I started in on the second story, and couldn\u2019t figure out what it had to do with the first\u2026 and when I got to the end of that one, I realize the bulk that was leftover was an essay on the co-mingling of the horror and detective\/spy story genres.<\/p>\n

So, on the one hand, you get your money\u2019s worth (in the e-book edition, anyway; can\u2019t vouch for others) but on the other hand, I wish I had known all of this before going in. (Which is more a reflection of me than it is of this book.) Add to this that I do not<\/em>agree with the assessment that this is Pratchett mixed with Leyner, and you can get a feel why I\u2019m only giving this 3 stars instead of 5. I\u2019m way too biased by a mild disappointment.<\/p>\n

That said, These so-called \u201cLaundry Files\u201d stories have a lot of potential, so I will<\/em>read more of them, the sequels and such. What I\u2019m hoping to see is better development\u2014the risk when mixing two genres is you get the boring, pedestrian parts of each and no synergy. That\u2019s what I felt was going on here. I\u2019m no Lovecraft expert, and I\u2019ve only reads a handful of spy novels, so maybe, again, it\u2019s just me. But I didn\u2019t get a sense of either genre, really. I did like the inter-office politics that Stross plays up as a major plot point, so I\u2019d love to see more of that.<\/p>\n

I know Stross is getting raves for his more recent works, so if nothing else, reading this older stuff is prep-work to get a feel for his style. The Atrocity Archives<\/em> is readable, funny in the right places, descriptive, and the actions scenes don\u2019t get bogged down in details. Some of the reference to magic and the mathematics of quantum mechanics are a bit glib, but then if he got too specific, the book might become unreadable afterall, so credit goes to finding the right balance.<\/p>\n

\nView all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross My rating: 3 of 5 stars My goal is to read 52 books this year, and it turns out The Atrocity Archives is really two books, or maybe even three. But I had no idea, going in, that this was the case. Some other review said \u201cTerry Pratchett mixed … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Atrocity Archives– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-75","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}