Um...I'm not sure what I just read, but I liked it? Then again, that's pretty much my reaction to all China Mieville, so there you go.

I can't sit here and sagely type to you the meaning of This Census-Taker. Neither its plot or its deeper, thematic meaning. I am full of confusions and questions and speculations. I do know that I was dazzled by Miéville's prose -- which I often am -- but in a new way, a foggy, struggling, back tracking, Joseph Conrad way. I didn't realize it until I wrote those words, but the novel I most closely relate to This Census-Taker has to be Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There is colonization at work her...

Truly, madly, deeply It’s hard to resist the lure of labels and the urge to uncover the truth. But labels obscure as much as they reveal. The truth of a good story isn’t in whether it happened as described, but in the more profound and elliptical lessons it teaches us, whether we realise it or not. That’s why fairy tales, myths, and legends persist through millennia, across the globe, sometimes as sacred texts. What I drew from this may not be the same as what you draw from it. Miéville has famo...

I can't say that I'm completely satisfied with this novella, but I can say that I'm haunted by it. I'm haunted by all the little details that make up this world so much like our own, the hints of wars and magics and strange chemicals and vials and keys that provide people with purpose and a way out or through the labyrinths of their lives... Not to mention a very Schrodinger's Cat view of reality, where murderers are and are not, where the murdered is and is not, where, perhaps, everything is re...

Wow - I really seem to be in the minority here, people loved this book. Me? Not so much. I'll write why as soon as I've gotten over my disappointment... It just seemed so promising.Disclaimer: I may be unnecessarily hard on this book, but that is only because of its lost potential and my belief that the author is one of the most essential writers of this era. There's no denying China Miéville is an extraordinary, challenging writer. I've personally had a slightly mixed-bag experience with his bo...

Atmospheric and oppressive. Compulsively readable. This story, part horror, part thriller, part coming of age, begins with an unnamed boy running down a hill, from where he lives, into a rural town, with his arms outstretched, his hands splayed as if dripping paint or blood, though there is neither of those things there, only dirt common to a boy of nine that he is. He's in a panic, barely able to tell the townsfolk what he knows, what has happened, what violence he has witnessed, especially sin...

Creepy, weird little book.China Mieville is self-described as a writer in the “new weird” genre, and so he is living up to his name. Readers who enjoyed his The City & the City andEmbassytown will know what I mean and he is following along this path in his 2016 publication. Mieville has also stated that he wants to write a novel in every genre and this may be his Kafka entry, as this blends elements of surrealism and absurdity into a complicated narrative set in imagery that seems to be always o...

"You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it." -- China Miéville, This Census-Taker"LORD, if you were to record iniquities, Lord, who could remain standing?" -- Psalms 130:3 (International Standard Version)I would probably consider this to be a bridge novella, spanning the gap somewhere between the shores of novel and novella; a scandal with gravity, perhaps. It weighs-in at just a quinternion over 200 pages in a 5.75" x 7.5" fo...

One of my Hugo Award nominees, novella, 2016. ____A boy runs screaming into a village, having witnessed something horrible.Years later, the narrator tells us, he is imprisoned, under guard, allowed to write this book in a solitary room.There is something, he tells us, that his 'manager' told him:"You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read, and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing....So my fir...

4ish stars. For a horror novella, there's not much horror. At least not that we get any explicit glimpses of. Just lots of creepiness.This is brilliantly written as the memoir of sorts of- well... this guy? Who's writing different books or something? And maybe he's being guarded? And he writes about his experiences as a kid I guess? And his dad may or may not have killed his mom? And there are, like, these magic keys? And then this mysterious dude comes?So basically it's hard to know what actual...

4.5 starsI have not read enough China Mieville. This one is a fairly brief novella which is set in a post-apocalyptic society, although that part is much understated and you pick it up from clues along the way. The beginning of the Guardian review sets the scene very well;“Any story that, on its very first page, redefines its protagonist from third to first person, flips forward in time to offer a view of him from elsewhere, makes a subtle alteration of tense, and announces that the character’s

This book took me by surprise. It draws you in and then meticulously hides the answers. You figure out certain parts - this is clearly the third book, the book one writes because one must, but not one to be read by others. For that there is a second book, the noisiest of the three, of which you get only glimpses. You know the world fell apart, and this world, where machines where exterminated, returned to its pre-industrial stage, dominated by superstition and only a semblance of law. The first

Oh China, I love you - but I love you more when you make a tiny amount of sense.

”I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still. He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger than a baby’s. Its shovel head lolled and its nasty hook beak twitched open and closed to snap faintly with each of my father’s steps. The bird’s broad feet dangled on the ground and bounced on stones as if it were trying to claw itself incompetently to a stop.”There have been wars. Civilization has fallen backwards and stalled in place. People are g...

My beloved China Mieville took some very Lovecraftian elements and some odd Kafkaesque ones and blended them with his amazing prose into a strange, beautiful and sometimes confusing novella. I mention Lovecraft, because it is creepy, ineffable and creates a thick atmosphere of dread and insolation; and Kafka because there is no escape, no clear reason for the way things are in “This Census Taker”.The narration slips from first to third and then to second person, sometimes within a single sentenc...

That’s the last one of the Hugo finalist novellas I had set out to read! The author describes his genre as “weird fiction,” and I won’t argue here. This is a strange book that leaves way too many open questions, and refuses to fit into any single genre. And these are things I normally like! I really admire books that manage to pull it off, but this one didn’t do it, at least not for me. The writing is beautiful, and there are elements I enjoyed – the magical keys, the idea of three books, the wh...

Attempting to describe a China Miéville work of fiction to someone that hasn't read him is like trying to describe the word wet to a being that has never experienced the sensation; adjectives accumulate but they are just glancing blows to the essence. If you are reading this review and are familiar with CM's work I hope I make sense here on why this short book failed me. If you've not read any CM and I do a poor job of conveying the wetness of this reading experience, I only ask that you dive in...

So there's a story about a people with unusual powers that used those powers in some huge way, perhaps in a conflict, and have now spread themselves all over the world. And these people are strange and important enough that every single one of them needs to be tracked down and accounted for.This isn't that story. Instead, this is a story at the edges of that one, told in shifting first, second and third person narrative and measured in love, betrayal, hope and trust of a young boy.There's a boy

3.5 stars.It's not the epic novel China Miéville's readers have been anxiously awaiting since 2010's Embassytown. (That will come with 2016's The Last Days of New Paris.) But his novella This Census-Taker proves that the New Weird superstar has not lost the ability to captivate and unnerve. As with all of Miéville's work, it begins with a city, sprawling incongruously up the slopes of a pair of steep hills (or perhaps small mountain peaks), the gap between spanned by a bridge. Near the top of on...

Ignore the stars. My short review is something like: "shiver; shrug?"