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.
Category: quick reaction
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.
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.
We’re Not Broken, by Eric Garcia
The book’s subtitle is “Changing the Autism Conversation,” and Garcia does this by putting the voices of autistic people front and center, in direct contrast to most autism research which is written by neurotypical people and (he says) is more focused on finding a “cure” for autism, or on forcing autistic people to behave according to neurotypical norms, as opposed to helping them find ways to exist within the world that work for them. Funding for the autistic community also follows those lines. I definitely found it especially eye-opening when he interviewed nonverbal autistic people; without knowing it, I’d fallen into the trap of assuming that people who couldn’t communicate on my terms had little to say to me, which is far from the truth. Garcia also delves into the problems made worse by intersectionality; autism diagnoses (and solutions) have historically been focused towards cisgender white men. Unfortunately the book gets extremely dry and repetitive, which made it hard to get through, but I appreciated the perspectives provided, from people who often aren’t consulted before decisions are made that have a huge impact on them.
Phoenix Extravagant, by Yoon Ha Lee
The narrator in this book, Gyen Jebi, is a nonbinary artist who just wants to make art and would rather ignore the intricacies of politics and war, which allows the author to paper over a lot of the details of strategy and occupation. Jebi is a native of an alternate version of Korea, in a region under the control of an alternate version of Japan; as an alt-Korean, they find themselves without employment options as the alt-Japanese crack down on the local culture and language. To their militant sister’s dismay, they pursue a position with the local government, and find themselves unwillingly helping the war effort against their own people; no spoilers but it’s a really pointed reference to cultural erasure committed by colonizers. Jebi tries to find ways to express their rebellion, despite their pacifist artistic temperament and their inconvenient attraction to a certain deadly swordswoman. I really liked the characters, particularly the mecha steampunk (silkpunk?) dragon which reminded me a lot of Temeraire; pity it didn’t show up until quite a ways into the book. Although it would have been easy to make the rebellion into the good guys fighting against the occupiers for freedom, the author instead turns the book into a denunciation of war. Both sides are problematic, violence is terrible, and innocent dragons and dreamy artists are the ones who are the most unready to deal.
The Verifiers, by Jane Pek
I finally listened to an audiobook all the way through without falling asleep! I think this is actually due more to the strength of the narrator, Eunice Wong, who did an amazing job and colored the characters beautifully, than to the book itself which dragged a bit in parts. The protagonist is Claudia Lin, a lesbian Chinese-American New Yorker who works for a detective agency dedicated exclusively to verifying claims that people make on dating apps. She keeps a lot of secrets herself, namely from her mom (who is impatiently waiting for her to find a nice Chinese boy) and her siblings (who think she is still working at the finance job that her brother found for her). Claudia’s narration is peppered with literary and pop culture references, but that doesn’t save her from coming across as annoyingly naive; the mystery that should drive the book is confused and not terribly interesting. There’s a running theme of interrogating the lies we tell ourselves to attract the people we think we need, which gets a bit lost in the unnecessarily complicated plot. What really animated the story for me was Claudia’s interactions with her family; all the characters, as well as their simmering frustrations with one another, come alive in Eunice Wong’s reading, and I liked how their unique inputs ended up meshing with the mystery-solving plotline in the end.