Non-Work Reading

Items that particularly stood out are in bold.

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2024/04

• The Three Body Problem. Liu. High concept science fiction about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the consequences thereof. Though massively hyped, this is a fairly bland novel. The first quarter or first third or so are interesting. From an American perspective it's refreshing to have a story set in recent Chinese history, especially in the countryside, rather than modern-to-near-future urban cyberpunk, triads, and/or espionage. There is also a lot of nuance in that aspect, as the book is clearly critical of the Cultural Revolution and the Communist Party but also endorses basic tenets we would consider communist and even authoritarian. These sections of the books also have a number of potentially very interesting characters and relationships between them. But the later sections of the book mostly shunt all that aside in favor of long expository monologues expounding on a combination of vaguely scientific ideas and the history of an alien race. Unfortunately we're not given much reason to care about that race and the science-y mumbo jumbo is less than captivating. In some aspects the book reminds me of Andy Weir's novels to date---The Martian, Project Hail Mary, Artemis---which range in that order from fine to meh to atrociously bad but all "feature" way too much made up technical greebling and science-y-ness. But even more so, The Three Body Problem feels like reading "golden age" science fiction from the '40s & '50s (roughly speaking), most of which is... not good. That literature similarly expends great time conducting lessons on various science concepts that are then stretched too far in application, almost always at the expense of character development. A lot of it also hinges on singular premises that ultimately just come across as silly. Specifically, The Three Body Problem feels very much like a Chinese version of Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, an ostensibly classic 1953 novel also about first contact that also has some interesting ideas but reads pretty flat and to my taste is overwhelmed by a mostly unnecessary but very goofy plot conceit.
• Fire Weather. Vaillant. Non-fiction.
• Edgedancer. Sanderson. Stormlight Archives book 2.5. A large portion of this novella is repeated from one of the intercalary chapters in Words of Radiance introducing the character Lift. It then continues Lift's parallel story up to just past the end of Words of Radiance. Personally I find Lift a tough character to assess how I regard them. They are sympathetic and likable. But it's also an intentionally extravagantly childish character and that gets tedious. However, Edgedancer does present a slice of Roshar outside the faux-European mainline of the story, which is welcome albeit it's a somewhat paper thin and cliched faux-Middle East. The story also has an interesting antagonist. On the whole it's a quick read, and the preface to the third Stormlight book, Oathbringer, is adamant that Edgedancer be read beforehand, so I guess if you're going to read the former you should read the latter.
• What Lies in the Woods. Marshall. Fairly generic "improbably complicated web of small town secrets spiral out of control decades later" murder mystery with a heavy dose of fictional true crime thrown in. The protagonist's voice is ok but not great given the internal whining every fifth page or so "There must be something wrong with him if he likes me, I'm soooo broken! Waaa!"
• The Secret Hours. Herron. Spy revenge thriller entwining current day London and early 90s Berlin. It's a well told blend of modern and "end of the golden age" espionage that stands well on its own and is marketed as such. Ultimately though The Secret Hours is, and packs a lot of punch as, an origin story for several elder characters in Herron's Slough House/Slow Horses universe. The tone is a bit different from the mainline books, not quite as heavy on the caustic modern black comedy, which makes sense as it's mostly set in a different era. Several previously teased mysteries are revealed though and a lot of compelling backstory added to the series. Can't say much more without ruining potential surprises but suffice to say, although ostensibly somewhat outside it, The Secret Hours is probably the best Slough House book so far.
• Properties of Thirst. Wiggins. Historical fiction with two main threads, the establishment of the Japanese American concentration camp at Manzanar, California; and the the devastation of that region by the City of Los Angeles' usurpation of all the water throughout. The story also connects to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl; early Golden Age Hollywood; initial stirrings of La Raza as an organized, uppercase concept; and other historical notes. The point of view is largely from members of a ranch family with substantial inherited East Coast manufacturing wealth, and a second generation American Jewish lawyer from Chicago tasked with founding and administrating the concentration camp. Stylistically the writing plays a good bit with absent punctuation, rapid unmarked switches in speaker, and partial sentences, which I enjoyed. Plot-wise in just a few places there are big, heavily telegraphed and conventional, but arguably textually unjustified, shifts in some of the characters' relationships. The characters are interesting though and the novel seems like a reasonable window into an important time & place in modern American history.
• Half Way Home. Howey. Young adult novella about a small group of teenagers unexpectedly tasked with colonizing an alien planet. Lord of the Flies meets a WB network drama... in space!

2024/03

• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. McBride. Fictional portrayal of Pottstown, PA, circa 1920--1930, initially rooted in Pottstown's small Jewish community but eventually shifted in focus to its Black community. The book leans heavily into McBride's abilities as a raconteur: The story is in many ways less important than the telling of it. In this way it's much like his novel ``Deacon King Kong.`` Both have characters and situations that evolve, and even a little action, but they're really about communities and their people. The bulk of the story by volume of words is relating connections and history between people through many seamless digressions. It's not just about something that happened, but about the woman that saw it and told her friend who's having a beef with her aunt because of their feud over each other's chicken recipe and so she told her brother from over the hill and down a ways when he stopped by because it was a Friday and he was running deliveries to the big city and and and and... At that it's a very enjoyable read, which is good because the humor prevents the story from being overwhelmed by the anti-semitism and racism and ableism and poverty endemic to Pottstown at the time.
• Words of Radiance. Sanderson. Stormlight Archives book 2. The super-team continues to assemble! After another thousand-plus pages following up the similarly weighty The Way of Kings, about half the members are actually all in the same place now! Great battles are fought! Heroes go through the whole hero's journey cycle of belief, failure, self-doubt, and redemption! This continuation of the series is even more overtly a young adult novel, particularly highlighted by the budding romances among the several young protagonists. Closely associated with that, I frequently found myself put off by the modern sounding dialog. The speech patterns, words, and conversations just feel like they fit better in a high school down the street than a years-long existential war set amid gigantic ruins on a cataclysmic plateau in a low-technology, vaguely medieval society. More importantly, after the first book largely ignored the personhood of the opposing forces being slaughtered wantonly, the second book works to justify it by turning them into literal monsters. It's increasingly a bit tough to sit through even the "good" characters blithely cleaving their magical doomsday swords through entire crowds of them.
• A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns. Bongiovanni, Jimerson. Non-fiction. 2018.
• North Woods. Mason. A supernatural history of a small plot of land in New England over the past ~300 years and into the near future. It's not a particularly emotive book because it moves through so many characters as time progresses. But the characters and the telling of the story are interesting and entertaining and it's a good book. It starts as a fairly straightforward story with just a hint of mysticism but by the later chapters it's a full blown ghost story. The very end is perhaps a bit too overtly a climate change parable, but it's a short coda.
• 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. A surrealist fiction critique of capitalism: A near-future government has established a program to help businesses maintain & boost productivity by having agents interfere with workers' dreams---literally, as in while they're asleep---and vacuum out any disturbing elements. This of course creates a vast tableau of potential abuse and unintended consequences. The titual Jonathan Abernathy is one of these agents, forced into the role by crushing debts (especially student loans) and a lack of any particular talent. You could also probably put together an interpretation of the story rooted in the opioid crisis: Much of it is about Jonathan and others slipping away as they spend more and more time in the dream space. Jonathan is both an interesting and a frustrating character because he is a sympathetic figure who just keeps making the wrong decisions. To me the book's a bit obvious and repetitive in its anti-capitalist diatribe---I could envision this book showing up in high school curricula as that seems to be where it's aimed---but the interactions among the small cast of characters make it worthwhile.
• 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.