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Non-Work

Non-Work Reading

Items that particularly stood out are in bold.

[ 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 |
2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010--2006 ]

2024/03

  • Have You Seen Her. McKenzie. A revenge tale of abused women carried out in Yosemite. I got hooked into reading this by the SAR aspect, but it's at best a tepid story. The writer constantly explicitly tells you "There are secrets and I'm not telling you!" to which, yeah, duh, it's a thriller novel. Very much reads like crappy TV shows telling you repeatedly what they're going to tell you, then going to commercials each time, before eventually getting around to it. Much worse, the end has a huge twist that is really unearned and comes out of nowhere. The resolution gave key figures skills that were unrealistic and had no basis. Lots of magic hacking and GPS devices with implausible capabilities. Then there's another unresolved twist right at the very end setting up a follow-on. A lame book that throws away the time invested in reading the earlier portions.
  • Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind. McGhee.
  • Ascension. Binge. Epistolary science fiction about an expedition to a tremendous mountain that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the ocean. Though set in the modern era, with the action taking place in 1990 and some wrap up in the 2000s, the tone feels a lot like an HG Wells tale with some Lovecraftian elements. It moves along well and the characters are interesting enough, but I don't know how long it'll stick with me.

2024/02

  • The Way of Kings. Sanderson. Stormlight Archives book 1. An epic epic fantasy novel---something like 1200 pages of swords & sorcery. This book is good, but it falls heavily into a pitfall of much scifi & fantasy writing: It's long for the sake of being long. A clear warning sign is that almost every review and blurb opens by talking about its voluminousness. It's fine for a work to be as long as necessary, but it's a problem for me when length is itself part of the ostensible appeal. This book is massive, yet it's only the first of a planned ten books, of which four have been published. It's a "superteam assembles" story in which by the end of its many many pages only about half the team has actually assembled! The end is reasonably satisfying, it's not a dire cliffhanger, but, still, damn... That is a lot of setup and a huge GRR Martin-style commitment, complete with most of the work being just vague plans for years to come.
    Unfortunately, ultimately I think the story's not particularly worth that effort, though it's also not definitively not worth it. The plot is compelling enough, most of the characters are engaging enough. But it's a very very long road already well trod. There are some elements to the story that could be fairly novel. But the foremost of those (e.g., the current state of the Voidbringers) only appear at the very end, and some of the other possibilities (e.g., why doesn't soulcasting render the society post-scarcity?) are not explored. Regardless, those bits though are set in a thick plate of comfort food, a story that's neither boring nor challenging---good guys struggle with doubt but rise to the occasion; smart women uncover long forgotten truths; many many nameless people are killed; great battles are held in interesting places, and fine feasts staged afterward to celebrate! But so...? The book stops short of really engaging with the consequences or morality of any number of goings-on. The violence is sanitized and the whole book conspicuously chaste. I would very much classify it as young adult fiction.
    So, yeah, The Way of Kings is fun and I'll probably read the next in the series at some point. But I don't have a burning need to do so, and some trepidation about its effort versus reward ratio.
  • Best Backcountry Skiing in the Northeast. Goodman. Non-fiction. Second edition, 2020.
  • Four Against Darkness. Sfiligoi. Gaming.

2024/01

  • The Cabin at the End of the World. Tremblay. Pre-apocalyptic fiction about the imminent end of the world and what you might sacrifice to prevent it. A little tough to read through maybe the first third as the story trends just a touch too far toward torture porn, albeit largely psychological. The focus of the book though is really a moral question, but I didn't find that super interesting. What I did enjoy however is thinking about what actually happened. whose reality was correct. The book lays enough concrete points to support both directions and successfully maintains that ambiguity to the conclusion. So there's no "correct" answer, but a neat puzzle to chew on a bit. I have not seen the movie Knock at the Cabin which is based on this book. I might give it a shot because Dave Bautista's a lead and I do like M Night Shyamalan's work. But my understanding from spoilers is that serious plot changes were made, to the negative in my view, and in addition the ambiguity was removed, also a serious negative to me.
  • The Secret. Child & Child. Reacher book #28. A short book that moves along quickly enough to not overstay its welcome, but a decidedly pablum entry in the Reacher canon. My understanding is that this is to be the last book with series founder Lee Child (James Grant) in a writing or editing role, completing the transition to his brother Andrew Child (Andrew Grant). Andrew apparently is by his own statement more inclined to the physicality and action side of Reacher. That seems to be at the cost of working with Reacher's more analytical and numerical abilities, which is unfortunate. I'd also argue Child-the-younger doesn't have a great handle on who Reacher's supposed to be and what kind of stories he should have. In particular, Reacher's supposed to stand up for the little people up against larger forces in places no one else cares about, not protecting the Secretary of Defense in Washington DC as he does here. In any event, The Secret is a flashback to when Reacher was still in the Army. I swear I've read it or something extremely like it before, though The Secret was just recently published. I've been unable to identify which Reacher novel it was, but one of them has an oddly similar setup of flashback-Reacher being called onto a special task force and essentially solving the mystery from his office phone. A very distracting sensation, and doesn't help the formulaic feel of this story. It's been a while since there was a strong entry in this series so it might be about time to let go...
  • Trashlands. Stine. Science fiction about scraping by in early stage climate apocalypse. Very different tone and feel from Stine's previous Road Out of Winter despite also being set in Appalachia. Notably, to me this story codes as predominantly black while Road comes across as white. Either way, instead of never-ending winter, the ecological collapse here is sea level rise combined with ubiquitous, overwhelming plastic pollution. The novel imparts a viscerally gritty feel of drinking water suffused with plastic, using ground-up plastic to wash, wearing clothes made out of plastic scraps, and so on. This is alongside more natural post-collapse everyday necessities like picking bugs out of your food while eating other bugs for food. Set all that in a junkyard fiefdom that's just barely less bad than anywhere else, anchored by a 24hr strip club continuously soundtracked solely by the bass track of a single song, and the scene is bleak. Center the plot on child slave labor in various forms, unwanted pregnancies, dysregulated children, and an omnipresent background of male violence, and it's not a lighthearted book. It is compelling though, albeit in a depressing way, a swirl of characters and relationships at an inflection point.
  • Road Out of Winter. Stine. Science fiction about early stage climate apocalypse and competing visions of new societies forming in its wake. This one's set in Ohio and Appalachia as a never-ending winter sets in, with a young weed grower as protagonist. It's a quick and light book, striking for the competing emphases on growing and winter. The dominant theme though is patriarchy and male violence. I really appreciate the ambiguity of the very last scene.
  • Big Sky. Atkinson. Jackson Brodie book #5.
  • Started Early, Took My Dog. Atkinson. Jackson Brodie book #4.
  • When Will There Be Good News? Atkinson. Jackson Brodie book #3.
  • One Good Turn. Atkinson. Jackson Brodie book #2.
  • Case Histories. Atkinson. Jackson Brodie book #1.
  • Shrines of Gaiety. Atkinson.
  • Camp Zero. Sterling. Science fiction about early stage climate apocalypse and competing visions of new societies forming in its wake.
  • Elder Race. Tchaikovsky. Lighthearted sci-fi/fantasy novella in which a futuristic anthropologist breaks the Prime Directive---again---to help save a human colony regressed to medieval levels. Very much in the vein of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court updated to modern science. The story hints at some depth, mostly driven by the mental state of the anthropologist. But ultimately there's not much to it. However, the book is short and pleasant enough to wrap up well before outstaying its welcome.
  • Great Circle. Shipstead. A combination of historical and contemporary fiction weaving together a number of different characters, with one strand from 1909--1950 and the other in 2014. I almost set the book down getting through the first act. There's just a lot of sexual exploitation, moralizing, creepy men, and assault. But there is a good, complex story through the core of the book about family and lovers and path dependency. The historical settings rooted first around bootleggers and then aviation and WWII & artists are all unique enough to add interest. It's a comparatively long novel and by the end it's accrued a lot of poignant bittersweetness about lost opportunities, impossible loves, fates cut short, societal constraints, and irreversible emotional damage.
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