A large beam of books

Really feels like Miéville wanted to write about blind bug art and trippily sliding across dreams and wretched slimey citiscapes and was forced to build a plot around that, which i support wholeheartedly

the first tomie chapter felt really strange, it didnt feel like many characters were rendered uniquely, but i still love it,, like "girl who everyone is obsessed with and Needs to obey or kill..." is SO potent.

Im 2 chapters into tomie and shes already my bestie

Chapter 11 felt necessary to show the extent of issacs 'cruelty' and scientific ambition, but overall not too interesting. Its been a nice slow roll out, but youve sorta been able to feel this person under the surface for a while. Also fun little Issac Lin details, like hey maybe its for real not safe for them but it does feel like the portion of issacs mind thats constantly on his theories thats getting in the way here.

Kinda enjoying how pausing on purpose to sort thru my thoughts has made me want to pick this book back up more often. Normally id forget about it in my bag but now its in my more conscious mind :3

Hmmmm mixed thoughts on chapter 9. I love the descriptions we get of the city at large, but having Issac talk to ONE guy who can contact the entire underworld and beyond... maybe its supposed to make Issac and this guy feel powerful but tbh its just made the city seem suddenly so much smaller, and not in a cramped way either. LOVE a long post-based bureaucracy scene tho, the very tactile descriptions of all the inner workings of the city feel Great. The way the city is described in the intro and then this chapter serve to position the city as like, definitely the more important character, everyone else is just extensions of what it creates :3

Love the payoff of Issacs wild hypocrisy in Derkhan being like "yeah...its bad... dod you expect something else???" and then issac being like "well time to go deeper!" like girl. This wont be thematically relevant to your journey at all.

Also realising that SO much of the bones of Wildsea are just like,,, in here. Cool 'Races' that arent just humans with different ears but are actually alien in fun ways, cramped streets full of very individual experiences, big leviathan bones that seem to make everything around them sorta worse, a scientific approach to a world that we see as fantastical, and im not very far in!