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I just finished The Starless Sea, and I know I’m a little late but I wanted to write up my thoughts. I haven’t read The Night Circus, a friend recommended The Starless Sea and so I went into the book not knowing anything about it.

The Starless Sea is a story about stories. Specially it’s a story about the DNA of stories. Stories are made of imagery. They have themes, motifs, symbols, atmosphere, and affect. Stories are made of tropes. They have love stories, adventure, mysteries, and origin stories. And, most importantly, stories have organization. They have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a climax. They have a call to adventure. They set the scene and tie up loose ends.

And so, The Starless Sea is about what happens when a story loses its organizing logic and becomes deconstructed into just its DNA. The imagery becomes overwhelming and redundant. Scenes are disconnected. Characters appear and disappear without purpose. Symbolism takes over and in doing so loses its meaning.

And the book itself is constructed in just this way. As the Harbor deconstructs, the story itself also deconstructs. The book has a clear, traditional beginning and end, but the middle (and the majority of the book) becomes more and more meandering. The fables repeat the same story on a loop without progressing the story. Our main characters seem lost in the Harbor, drifting from one place to another. The book is both about a story that lost its way and it is itself a story that lost its way.

Having said all that- I liked the idea but didn’t love the execution. Everything just felt so shallow and surface level. And there were just so. many. symbols. And they were all so generic. The keys, the swords, the hearts, the bees, the owls, the cats, the books…. They can’t all be equally important, and so they ended up all feeling meaningless. The atmosphere/ affect just got so boring and repetitive after a while, and again just felt generic. Cocktails, Harry Potter, dusty books, fancy food… it just felt so vague and devoid of any substance.

I also truly disliked the repetition of Zachary’s name and “son of a fortune teller.” It didn’t add anything for me and started to feel annoying.

I read some opinions after I finished and saw a lot of people didn’t like Zachary. I liked him, or at least I didn’t mind him. I think he was basically a blank vessel for the story to deconstruct around.

So! Those are my thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Wow, what a book. Definitely gonna be one of my favorites of the year. Written in 1971, as relevant today as it was back then. On the surface it's an action novel set in the Harlem reinassaince, but it's so much more.

It defies description. It’s like a Pynchon novel from a black POV, creative formatting and a healthy dash of Assassin’s Creed. It’s a cultured take down of American society combined with an action film, a bizarre look into a parallel reality where the Titanic is sailing in 1929 and Moses (of Egypt fame) had a rock band. At times it felt like reading a counterculture pamphlet, or a Freire/Chomsky combined essay, at others like watching a movie Tarantino would rip off and add even more n-words.

In an even more bizarre description, it's what Kuang's Babel tried to do, but by a competent author. It's a real takedown of colonialism and the dominant cultures that has real depth. It's not just a series of stereotypes thrown around. You will come out of this book more educated, asking more questions, with a reading list 5 pages long.

"Fever dream" is overused, but that's what it is. Handwritten pages, unrelated photography, anachronisms, real people weaving in and out of the story.

Has anyone read any other of his books? I understand this is his masterpiece but curious if others match the same vibe.

This book tells two stories. The first story is about a large piece of Jade which is carved into a Ming Dynasty masterpiece and the various places it goes. The second story is a search for that "lost" masterpiece. The story is very well done, and remains interesting all the way through. The ending was an unexpected, yet a pretty realistic surprise. The jade carving touches on a lot of different points of history, but the story doesn't get bogged down in historical details, but all the different historical points does keep the search interesting.