Honestly probably the most fun and practical cookbook I’ve read in a while. I love Priya’s asides as she tries to condense David’s ramblings into printed form, and how both of them talk the reader through the process of cooking, teaching that it’s more about adapting recipes to your taste than recreating them exactly, and along the way you learn how their separate backgrounds shaped their differing and evolving tastes in food. I am a pretty confident home cook and I still learned a lot of great shortcuts from this book – David and Priya are professional chefs but reading this was like just hanging out with other home cooks, swapping tips you’ve picked up along the way, and sharing recipes you learned from your moms.
Author: librarykat
The Red Threads of Fortune, by Neon Yang
Following The Black Tides of Heaven, this novella follows the sister Mokoya instead of her twin. Where the previous story aimed outwards, the twin brother casting himself expansively towards various causes and cities, this one is very inward-focused, on Mokoya’s PTSD and her battle to understand her powers and come to terms with her own continued existence. I really liked how delicately the plot points were revealed, both to Mokoya and to the reader, and how other characters’ motivations were also given time to exist.
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
I had no idea this was a new release, but it’s definitely timely: for instance, his characters can consult their pandemic apps to gauge their relative safety among others and determine whether they need to wear masks, or distance, or both; and one of the main characters has lost his sense of smell to covid-23 or something. I really enjoyed this book, which I consider Stephenson at his best and most focused; none of the thought experiments were really that wild, the characters were confidently drawn, and the casual references to realistic details (I too know what it looks like to see ski lights floating disembodied above the Vancouver skyline!) made the fantastic elements that much more believable. A great thought experiment about fighting climate change and sea level rise, and just some of the geopolitical fallout that could result.
The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne
A super ambitious book, following three reincarnated groups of characters through three different timelines (Ancient Maya, present day, and post-climate-apocalypse future). Really impressive worldbuilding and character development. I did bog down a little though when it came to the MANY various terms and genders invented for the future, and I also got tripped up by the incorporation of Belize creole. I don’t mind a little Spanish thrown in here and there, but if I have to slow down and mouth the words several times over in order to understand what’s being said, I feel like it gets in the way of the story even if it does add verisimilitude/authenticity. Also, the ending was appropriate to the story, but it didn’t really wrap anything up for me, and left a few too many loose ends for the reader.
Composite Creatures, by Caroline Hardaker
I didn’t actually like the experience of reading this book; I don’t generally enjoy psychological slow-burn explorations, especially if the narrators are not immediately likable. That said, the writing flowed patiently and easily, the musings of a perfectly understandable insecure narrator, but gradually interspersed with growing wrongness underneath. You learn that there are no more birds or bugs, since the earth is dying; the air hurts to breathe without filters; toxins fill the soil. This book is very much like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, in that sacrifice via genetic science is presented as key to preserving the human race, but of course the real human journey is found in the emotional connections.
Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley
Really moody and atmospheric. Starts with two veterans, one human and one alien “Qitan.” They are sharing drinks at an inn, telling each other stories from the war; the story unfolds from that center like a flower. The stories change and shift; the addictive brew that the Qitan makes is more than it seems; the peace that their planets have reached is more complicated than it pretends to be. There’s also a side story with the human’s estranged son that seems like a distraction at first, but then grows to take over the direction of the story. The book has a lot to say about what makes a community vs an individual, and the tales that we tell each other to make our actions palatable. It’s smooth reading, but the dreamlike pace lacks urgency; the action gets really hard to follow towards the end.
Trickster Drift / Return of the Trickster, by Eden Robinson
Books 2 and 3 of the trickster trilogy continue to be crude, hilarious, violent, and still quite sweet. Jared just wants to go to college and study medical imaging, but his heritage includes magic and his family situation is complicated way beyond the normal trauma inherited by Indigenous peoples in Canada. The interesting thing about this trilogy is that Jared doesn’t really grow as a character; he remains the same solid, thoughtful guy that he was at the beginning of the books, except he gradually gets less dependent on drugs and alcohol, more traumatized by external events, and more aware of his magical heritage. Instead, the growth and change can be seen in the people around him: his mom, who gets better at expressing her feelings; his various grandmother figures, who come to terms with his origin; his father figures, who figure out what they really want in life (or in afterlife), and his friends, who become stronger and better people around him.
A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
I loved this book so much. A gentleman is sentenced to lifetime house arrest by a Bolshevik tribunal; his house arrest is to be in the grand Metropol hotel. The main character is everything you want in a storybook gentleman: urbane, sympathetic, and clever; the tone of the book is pleasant but also insightful. Every page was a delight to read, the characters were really well developed, the hotel is painted so beautifully that I really would love to visit someday, and you get a beautiful overview of the first few decades of the Soviet Union.
Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder
A woman who gave up her career to raise a baby at home feels her thwarted ambition and rage building up inside her, until it gradually turns her into a literal werewolf. Hilariously, her newfound lycanthropy doesn’t actually change much about her relationship with her mostly-absent and cheerfully oblivious husband (“I’m sure you’re not growing a tail, how silly. Are you sure it isn’t some kind of cyst? Have you made an appointment with your doctor?”), or the other mothers that she sees at baby activities (“I love your new look, very boho, very Mother Earth”). Her worries are also very mundane, as she searches for her symptoms on Google and stresses over the possibility that activities like chasing squirrels and eating raw meat might have a negative impact on her son’s development. Yoder’s character is really good at detailing her resentment and stress caused by modern motherhood (so many personal flashbacks to raising young children!), while never reflecting that resentment onto the baby that put her in this position. The lycanthropy thing actually happens pretty early on in the story and then the book’s pacing kind of flounders around in the middle, before abruptly finding its way to a satisfying ending.
Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer
To be honest, I skimmed this pretty hard. The narrative voice, that of a person dreamily narrating past events that led to as yet-unspecified disaster, got old really quickly; plus it felt like the character’s super questionable decisions were based more on plot pressure than any kind of logic or rational thought. Cybersecurity analyst Jane, ripe for midlife crisis, is drawn to the taxidermied body of an endangered (extinct?) hummingbird, traces its ownership to a dead ecoterrorist, and abandons work and family to fall down a rabbit hole of threats and shadowy corporate wrongdoing in a near-future world of vaguely-hinted-at environmental gloom. The book never quite felt believable enough for me to buy into the urgency of the plot at any point, and the main character was too much in her own head to tell me much about the world around her. This is supposed to be a “thriller” but I’m not thrilled about marking it as such… I was not thrilled.