This is not a subtle book. All of the heroes (and they are pretty interchangeable) are smart, snarky, and capable; the villain is unapologetically amoral and can be seen coming a mile away. Narrator Jamie, laid off from a food delivery gig during the Covid-19 pandemic, is offered the chance to work with an “animal rights organization” and snaps it up. Turns out the animals being protected are kaiju, in a parallel dimension accessible with the onset of nuclear power. Scalzi knows what he’s doing; the writing is smooth, the story moves well, and the dialogue is snappy. The monstrous kaiju and the other inhabitants of their crazy jungle biome are also lushly and enjoyably described. Nothing deep here, but solid entertainment.
Author: librarykat
Blackcurrant Fool, by Victoria Goddard
Book 4 of Greenwing and Dart; how silly I was to think that all of Jemis Greenwing’s problems were resolved in the previous book. He and Dart travel to a bigger city, where corruption simmers beneath the surface and opposing groups jockey for power; all they want is to do their business and be gone, but Jemis’ vindictive ex-girlfriend from university has gained quite a position of influence in the city and isn’t as interested in putting the past behind her. They find themselves entangled in a tricky situation where Jemis’ doctoral dissertation on architectural poetry, and his vulnerability to a dangerous drug, merge to move the story in unexpectedly poignant and urgent ways. I loved this but the plot definitely took an interesting turn towards the end (and there are still so many unanswered questions about the city). I’ve been trying to parcel out the Greenwing and Dart books slowly, so as to savor them, but it’s going to be hard to wait an entire month before I pull up the next one.
Stone Speaks to Stone, by Victoria Goddard
Novella, book (as the author says) 1.5 of Greenwing and Dart, though I liked having read it between 3 and 4; it fits a lot better there. This one is about Mad Jack Greenwing, Jemis Greenwing’s father, and details his heroics during one part of the war. I liked how Jack’s actions were unquestionably brave, but his internal narration made it clear how much effort it took for him to put himself in danger, knowing he had a wife and young son back home.
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells
Back to novella length for Murderbot, a nice compact mystery. Murderbot is currently adjusting to Preservation, a place where humans and bots live alongside one another and bots are granted a certain amount of autonomy and free will when sponsored by humans; however, the people of Preservation (particularly the security personnel) are understandably unenthused about granting those freedoms to an armed and (presumably) dangerous security enforcement bot. Murderbot isn’t terribly interested in trying to win them over, either, or in being some human’s pet bot. However, when a dead body turns up, both Security and Murderbot are interested in finding the killer; it’s great to see them try to combine their resources and work together. Murderbot’s narration is priceless as usual; I love how piercingly observant it is of other humans, set against how determinedly it refuses to analyze its own reactions.
book collage, May 2022
This was the month I figured out that my Ottawa Public Library card actually gave me borrowing access to a few other Ontario libraries, and all of a sudden I was drowning in holds: the best of problems. I am loving the selection of YA out there, which now seems to feature LGBT characters more often than not. Take that, State of Virginia (and Florida, and whoever else wants to ban books based on sexual orientation). Kids these days want books about the world around them as it actually is, with characters that they can actually recognize themselves in, and I am so glad that authors and publishers are making that happen.
In Order to Live, by Yeomi Park
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Outside, by Ada Hoffman
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper
This Place: 150 Years Retold
Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire
Whiskeyjack, by Victoria Goddard
Beautiful Country, by Qian Julie Wang
Network Effect, by Martha Wells
The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier
Legendborn, by Tracey Deonn
The Verifiers, by Jane Pek
Phoenix Extravagant, by Yoon Ha Lee
We’re Not Broken, by Eric Garcia
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber
More than This, by Patrick Ness
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
This universe of this book is well-crafted and interesting but the theme is super dark, almost unrelentingly dark; the heroine’s determination to survive, to find small victories, was what kept the read going. Mehr is the Governor’s daughter and a nobleman, but she is also the second-class daughter of his first wife, who belonged to a tribe of magic-users that is being vilified and forced from the empire. She lashes out at her situation by performing some of her mother’s forbidden magic, and attracts the attention of dangerous people, which places everyone she loves in jeopardy. Because she never stops fighting, her character arc is actually not the interesting one; instead, it’s the man that she meets partway through the book, whose journey was even darker than hers, who grows and develops the most because of her intervention. Very smooth writing; I liked the themes, which revolve around familial relationships, compromises, and the choices people make when they need to stay true to themselves.
More than This, by Patrick Ness
The book begins when Seth is drowning in the sea. Fighting against the waves, battered against the rocks, he hits his head and dies. And then he wakes up, far from the ocean, at what he belatedly realizes is a version of his childhood home. The book is purposefully confusing at first – Is this the afterlife? Is it a simulation? A story? But as Seth feels his way through this newly strange environment, beset by occasional vivid flashbacks to his past, we start to form a theory of what happened to create the world that he’s in now. Love the side characters that appear in Seth’s new present, especially the character of Tomasz who combines snarky insight with vulnerability. It’s very existentialist for a YA novel, thoughtful while still action-packed, and I quite liked it by the end.
Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber
I agreed heartily with most of this book but it was oh. so. repetitive. Many (most?) people work “bullshit” jobs that could be automated, streamlined, or eliminated altogether; however, because they need the paycheck (or because middle managers need a certain minimum number of people underneath them), they find themselves trying desperately to look busy or otherwise justify their positions while despairing over the fact that what they do makes no meaningful contribution to the world. Meanwhile, people who work real, needed jobs (teachers, sanitation workers, caretakers) are deliberately undervalued and looked down upon despite fulfilling arguably more necessary and beneficial roles in society. This book would have been stronger without many of the first-person accounts that crowd the pages; any one would have been enough to illustrate Graeber’s point but he always includes multiple sources, and the accumulation of complaints from people trapped in dead-end jobs weighs upon you as you read. The book is a takedown of capitalism, which is supposed to produce hyper-efficiency but instead rewards bureaucracy (the more intricate your system, the more you can pass money around); it also lays bare the hypocrisy of pretending that if you aren’t working hard and long, you shouldn’t be paid, which forces workers into 40-hour work weeks doing work that could take them one tenth the time. The last chapter proposes a universal basic income, which after reading about all the nonsensical things people get paid for (and all the really vital work for which people don’t get paid), honestly seems like the only logical and fair way forward.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
I was initially meh about reading this book because it sounded like a soapy rom-com, albeit one with a very unique setup. Reese is a trans woman who’s always wanted to be a mother, but her low-income unstable lifestyle makes adoption unrealistic. She gets an unexpected chance when her ex Ames, who detransitioned after a tumultuous relationship when he was living as a trans woman named Amy, gets in touch and reveals that he’s gotten his boss/girlfriend Katrina pregnant; would Reese like to help raise the child? Although it sounds like a fairytale solution, all three characters are deeply ambivalent about the whole situation. The narration actually turned out to be addictively readable, absolutely sparkling with gorgeous phrases and snarky conversation. I know very little about the inner lives of trans women (other than that society makes it so, so difficult), but as the narration jumps back and forth from past to present, I got got sucked into a world completely new to me, and yet so fully realized that I found it amazingly easy to empathize with the characters, especially Amy/Ames who is just a ball of insecurity. Ironically it was Katrina who I found the least able to identify with, maybe because the other two characters were so well-rounded; it felt like Peters did her best to give Katrina a personality, but at the end of the day her primary role in the book is to be the womb. Anyway, it’s a minor quibble; the book was really extremely good.
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
I felt like half the book had gone by before I had an idea of what was really going on (and then I realized it was more like a quarter of the book because this was actually really long for a Gibson book) because Gibson doesn’t explain anything, and his characters don’t really pause to examine why they’re doing what they’re doing (and some of them are really weird). You eventually figure out that the people from the present world (a postapocalyptic climate future, for us) have reached back to their past and opened a line of communication, thus affecting events and splitting off an alternate timeline, except all this is done via electronic communications so it’s almost like both sides are playing video games with real people. (For a bit I thought that was actually the case near the beginning, that some of them were AI. It’s not a friendly start.) I got into it eventually, particularly liking the interactions between the two main narrators, but overall I found this jumpy and more confusing than it needed to be.