Non-Work Reading 2024

Items that particularly stood out are in bold.

2024/12

• I'm Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe. Gregory. Short story on tor.com.
• The Book of Elsewhere. Reeves, Miéville.
• After the Coup. Scalzi. Short story. I've been tricked! I read this previously on Tor.com. When it popped up as a "book" in Libby, by the time I figured out it was just the same short story it was already over... Still light and entertaining though. A lot like the old Retief books by Laumer.
• The Raven Tower. Leckie.
• Translation State. Leckie.
• The Waiting. Connelly. Bosch #25/Ballard #6.
• All the Light We Cannot See. Doerr. Historical fiction about the bombing of Saint-Malo in WWII and two children growing up before and amidst the war, one French and one German. The story could have easily been too sappy but steers just wide enough around that. I appreciate that there mostly aren't sugar coated fantasy endings. It is abundantly clear though how just a "minor" tweak here and a "small" change there for, say... a Netflix miniseries... and it would be depressingly soft and unrealistic. In some places I still think the book is too explicit in what's happening, e.g., in spelling out the fate of the stone. But it's a good read regardless. The heavy focus on radio makes it standout from many stories and interleaves well with the parallel plotline on blindness, as well as the Jules Verne thematic elements. A good presentation is also made of both individual and societal descent into Nazi madness, while the more sympathetic Germans are presented with reasonable depth---they're not saints either.

2024/11

• Nona the Ninth. Muir. Book 3 of the Locked Tomb. The third entry of this series returns to the more fun tone or style of the first book by mostly refocusing on individual, sort-of everyday interactions between relatable people. It's interleaved with chapters recounting the ancient backstory of Earth's demise, which are interesting but a bit of a drag compared to the primary action. The latter sections of the book unfortunately also balloon into the style of the second book and runs out of steam somewhat. There's a lot of mythos, an awful lot of extremely complex knotwork plot regarding who is actually who. On top of that, it raises the strong prospect that maybe some characters from the series that you thought you liked a lot are not actually likable? But much of the book is one of the best portrayals I've seen of what's effectively a child's mindset and viewpoint, and that works really well.
• Harrow the Ninth. Muir. Book 2 of the Locked Tomb. The first half or so in particular is not as good as the first book. The character interactions in that half aren't as interesting to me, and the mythological-science elements about this universe's version of warp drive and fighting in the River and so on are ok but not particularly compelling and the reveals much too drawn out. The second half is better, it's more concrete and the more interesting characters and gang of friends from the first book return. Harrow's grief though is hard for me to really relate to as she spent so much of her life being so utterly detestable to Gideon. But either way the story is a bit let down at the end by being simply an interstitial one. It's really just setting up plot threads and backstory for the next book, it's not satisfying on its own, which is disappointing.
• The Wild Robot Escapes. Brown.
• Where the Dead Wait. Wilkes. Antarctic expedition horror. Similar in many respects to Wilkes' All the White Spaces but better. The plot is largely much more believable. The backstory is reeled out in a well paced manner, with just enough detail. A good combination of supernatural human, human, and animal menace.
• All the White Spaces. Wilkes. Antarctic expedition horror. Book's good, not quite great. The main character is a woman who stows away on a Shackleton-era Antarctic expedition, and then passes as a man after being discovered and joins the crew. They're interesting, and have a complicated relationship with a childhood friend who has joined the crew with them. Very much a Victorian trans story. But it's hard to believe they could keep up the deception first on the ship and then later on the ice. The horror elements didn't really grab me. A vague supernatural darkness that takes the shape of people's dead loved-ones to lure them onto the ice? That sounds reasonable but somehow never quite worked for me. It's both too concrete and too vague, all at once.
• Disappearance at Devil's Rock. Tremblay. Read this because I saw it recommended somewhere and I have no idea why. Utterly generic, banal mom-in-distress, child-kidnapped-slash-dead mystery. There's some vague supernatural worries salted on top, but they're never believable enough. The basic shape of the crime is clear from the start, and once the eventually-confirmed culprit is introduced there's no doubt it's going to be them. In addition, several of the twists feel largely unearned. The park was searched, but not the pods? WTF? I guess the real horror is supposed to be that parents never know what their kids are up to, who they could actually be. But the kids' twist all feels so slapdash and overwrought and unrealistic. Lame.
• The Wild Robot. Brown.
• The Children of Men. James. A bland middle-aged professor is pulled into a critical mission twenty years after mankind lost the ability to procreate. A reasonable book, though it has a number of deus ex machina, implausible decisions, and unnecessary plotlines & twists. The basic story is still compelling at level of the bigger picture as well as the basic "What's going to happen?" But the movie adaptation is much much better. The plot and set of characters is tighter, characters more meaningful, the social commentary better, and it just makes more sense and is more plausible.
• As Yet Unsent. Muir. Short story on tor.com. Of the Locked Tomb.
• The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex. Muir. Short story on tor.com. Of the Locked Tomb.
• The Unwanted Guest. Muir. Short story on tor.com. Of the Locked Tomb.
• Gideon the Ninth. Muir. Book 1 of the Locked Tomb. Exactly what it says on the cover: "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" A very good book that stands well on its own, it doesn't feel incomplete without continuing on to the sequels. Part of the appeal comes from the book's universe, which is built without over-reliance on pure exposition. I enjoyed having to learn the language and conventions of its aristocracy, and seeing pieces of the larger backstory fit together. That world is also used to create a combination alien-world-adventure and locked-room-murder-mystery story that draws the reader onward. The text can be a little jarring at first in how glib and crass/casual the characters can talk, in stark contrast to some of the very formal and dark proceedings. But that tone shift makes sense and is necessary to make it really sink in just how young the characters are despite their responsibilities and capabilities. Some of the core interpersonal relationships evolve in childishly predictable fashion. But the heart of the book is a study of a rainbow of different intensely intimate relationships, mostly non-sexual. Slowly revealing and exploring the workings of those is quite compelling.
• Ministry of Time. Bradley. Modern-day Britain steals a time machine from the future and uses it to snatch people out of the past. One of these is Graham Gore, a commander on Franklin's lost Arctic expedition. For the most part the book was pretty entertaining but I felt the last third or so to be fairly flat as it shifted into predictable romance and somewhat silly action sequences.
• The Stone Sky. Jemisin. Broken Earth #3.
• The Obelisk Gate. Jemisin. Broken Earth #2.

2024/10

• Dragons of Paris. Swanwick. Mongolian Wizard #11, short story on Tor.com.
• The Fifth Season. Jemisin. Broken Earth #1. Geo-wizards fight apocalyptic seismic events as well as society's intolerance and imperial institutions. Meh.
• Sea of Tranquility. Mandel. Novella about a time traveler investigating a temporal anomaly recorded at various points in time.
• You Dreamed of Empires. Enrigue. Historical fiction about the arrival of Cortés at Tenochtitlan in 1519 that then gestures briefly toward alternate history at the end. My only complaint about this book is that it's a short novella and I could have read a lot more of it. The whole story is hallucinatory. In-story, the priests, Moctezuma, everybody's trippin' balls the whole time as they continuously consume magic mushrooms and chiles. Meanwhile the Spanish are dazed and confused by a scale and complexity of city and society they've never seen before... and also being dosed with hallucinogens as just par for the course of the local diet. The story moves fast and there's lots of motion but nobody knows what's going on and everything feels fraught. Out-story, there are significant interludes breaking the fourth wall. The characters all speak in modern vernacular, the syntax has no dialog call-outs, and there are frequent unmarked scene cuts, so the text feels much like an extended breathless single take. Together these elements all work to capture well a surreal world-changing moment of first contact between essentially alien cultures.
• Halcyon Afternoon. Swanwick. Mongolian Wizard #10, short story on Tor.com.
• Ghost Station. Barnes.
• The Unwanted Guest. Muir. Short story on Tor.com, part of the Locked Tomb series.

2024/09

• Overstory. Powers.
• What Feasts at Night. Kingfisher.
• What Moves the Dead. Kingfisher.

2024/08

• Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr. An imaginative story of five people spanning from the fall of Constantinople in the 1400s to the Korean War in the 1950s to present day Idaho to a generation starship in the 22nd century, all connected by a fictional lost Greek fantasy epic from the 2nd century. The novel opens with gusto as the short chapters bounce between these very different settings and it's not clear at all how some of them will come together. Somewhere in the late middle that mystery is lost, even before being actually resolved, but the novel has shifted to an appealingly sweet paean to books and storytelling. Normally I'm viscerally opposed to self-congratulating media but it's well done here, possibly because the stakes remain largely individual. Doerr stretches his oeuvre a bit in this work to science fiction and it shows: All the historical sections are very good but the lite sci-fi near future and far future segments are comparatively tepid and implausible, although they don't bring the book down. The other storylines are infused with such good characters and the soft joy of story that it's a great book.
• Murder Most Holy. Doherty. Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan #3.
• The Golden Wolf. Hartsuyker. Half-Drowned King #3.
• The Sea Queen. Hartsuyker. Half-Drowned King #2.
• Storm of Locusts. Roanhorse. Sixth World book #2.
• Trail of Lightning. Roanhorse. Sixth World book #1.
• The House of the Red Slayer. Doherty. Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan #2.
• The Bright Sword. Grossman. A story of Camelot following shortly after the death of Arthur. Grossman embraces the popular and modernized side of Arthurian fiction. Characters speak in a more or less modern tone, though without going so far with cliches and phrasings as to break the suspension of disbelief. History is jumbled around as necessary or desired, but again in discrete and traditional ways. For example, Sir Palomides is one of the main characters. He's somehow a Muslim from Baghdad... before Muhammad was born and some centuries before Baghdad was founded. Yet this ahistoricity is well in line with Arthurian fiction---Palomides is traditionally labeled a Saracen, which in the time period would roughly mean a pagan from the Middle East but later came to be synonymous with Muslim---and definitely would not have bothered classic Arthurian authors. In any event, the modern tone and lack of fuss about strict historical accuracy facilitates a quick reading adventure story. Notably for this day and age, The Bright Sword is not intended to be the start of a series or anything like that. There's a coherent story arc that comes to a definite conclusion with the important matters all wrapped up. Major themes include the basic Arthurian conflict between paganism and Christianity; what it means to believe you are fighting for (a) God and to credit your victories to them, only to then suffer catastrophic and final defeat; the migration of peoples and evolution of cultures and lands, in this case from the Old Ones to the Picts and Celts to the Romans to the Britons to the Saxons.
• Devolution. Brooks. Mt Rainier erupts and the secretly resident sasquatches go on a rampage against a nearby town! I picked this up having no idea what it was about because I recognized Brooks (author of World War Z) and it was available to read immediately. This book is... not high literature. But it's an entertaining kind of dumb.
• Mouse Guard: The Black Axe. Petersen. Comic collection. Read with Alice.
• The Children of Red Peak. DiLouie. Fiction about a modern Christian sect evolving into a suicide cult under the influence of... something.
• A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World. Fletcher. A good entry in the somewhat crowded genre of near-future post-apocalyptic road trip fiction. I really appreciate that the book's not about saving the world or restoring humanity or blah blah blah. The central quest is very small stakes in the big picture yet deeply heartfelt and critical to the characters. More media should adopt that mindset. Notable as well is the absence of pure villainy, which I also appreciate. There are bad people, for sure, but in keeping with the small stakes, even the worst isn't a completely inhuman monster or farfetched at all. I also enjoyed the somewhat unusual setting, with the story placed in the Scottish Hebrides and comprised of a mix of sea and forest travel. Ultimately the book is plot driven young adult fiction and there are several twists in the last act and closing pages that felt somewhat unearned and under-explained. But it's a very enjoyable quick-reading adventure story with likable characters---yes, including the titular dog!
• The Nightingale Gallery. Doherty. Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan #1. Locked room murder mystery in 1380s London, with Dominican friar Athelstan and King's Coroner Sir John Cranston on the case.
• The River We Remember. Krueger. Fiction set in late 50s small town Midwest America about the murder of a local ranch patriarch and its equivocable investigation by the sheriff.
• A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Clark. Part of the Dead Djinn Universe.
• The Angel's Share. Cahill. Short story on tor.com.

2024/07

• The Longmire Defense. Johnson. Longmire #19.
• Birnam Wood. Catton. Modern fiction about a group of New Zealand agricultural collectivists bumping up against big tech money. The novel unfortunately ends super abruptly and ham-fistedly. But up until that point I appreciate that there interpersonal relationships are a bunch of messy strands, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities.
• Hang the Moon. Walls. Fiction about a family of Prohibition-era bootleggers. At times the book reads like it's working too hard to check all the boxes for the period. As if the author read a few histories of the period and then devised a story to make all the smart sounding references.
• The Half-Drowned King. Hartsuyker. Half-Drowned King #1. Historical fiction about Viking-age Norway.
• Act of Oblivion. Harris. Historical fiction about the manhunt for signatories to the death warrant for Charles I following the Stuart Restoration in 1660. The book primarily follows Edward Whalley and William Goffe in their flight to and across nascent New England. Harris seemingly adheres closely to the scant historical record, taking mostly reasonable liberties with characters, poorly understood events, and side plots to fill in the story. I found the book to be a worthwhile primer to the English Civil Wars. It also portrays some of the conditions and persecution the Puritans and other colonists were fleeing, particulars of which I argue are generally glossed over in tellings of American history. The tour of prominent people & places in the early colonies inherent to the plot is also both educating and enjoyable. E.g., you can go today and hike the Regicides Trail in New Haven to the Judges Cave where Whalley and Goffe holed up for several notable stretches. I haven't been on that trail but have been nearby numerous times and heard of it, and now I know the whole story.
• Not the Most Romantic Thing. Vaughn. Short story on tor.com. Graff & the Visigoth series.
• Time: Marked and Mended. Vaughn. Short story on tor.com. Graff & the Visigoth series.
• An Easy Job. Vaughn. Short story on tor.com. Graff & the Visigoth series.
• Sinew and Steel and What They Told. Vaughn. Short story on tor.com. Graff & the Visigoth series.
• The Star-Bear. Swanwick. Short story on tor.com.
• On the Fox Roads. Vo. Short story on tor.com.
• Detonation Boulevard. Reynolds. Short story on tor.com.
• The Locked Coffin: A Judge Dee Mystery. Tidhar. Short story on tor.com.
• A Master of Djinn. Clark. Part of the Dead Djinn Universe.

2024/06

• Breathing Constellations. Larson. Short story on tor.com.
• Between Home and a House on Fire. Greenblatt. Short story on tor.com.
• Judge Dee and the Executioner of Epinal. Tidhar. Short story on tor.com.
• The Other Kelly. Valentine. Short story on tor.com.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Haddon. An affecting first-person story of a 15 year old "mathematician with some behavioural difficulties" dealing with serious family drama. It does a good job of presenting the experiences of an autistic young person (presumably, it's not explicitly stated) convincingly and interestingly, without descending into pity.
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Clark. Part of the Dead Djinn Universe.
• The Last Murder at the End of the World. Turton.
• Death's End. Liu. Finale of the Three Body Problem trilogy. This novel doubles or maybe quadruples down on every negative I could lob at The Three Body Problem, making The Black Forest the definite high point of the series. Death's End is an extremely high concept galactic history from the perspective of humans subsequent to the events of the prior two books. At one point there's a time skip between chapters of eighteen million years... It is written and reads like a tepid popular history of a fictional nation. Entire chapters are purely expository walkthroughs of political and economic systems and history. What little characterization exists doesn't add depth of interest. In addition, the men are all steely-eyed warriors of philosophy, science, and war, while the women are flighty and weak hangers-on. There's a lot of narratorial speechifying about the feminization of society and the lack of collectivism, both of which lead directly to multiple catastrophic failures of humanity. Meanwhile, despite these books' reputation as "hard sci-fi," the physics weaved throughout the story has progressed to the point of absurd handwavium. Long story short, I persevered through the book to finish the trilogy and not be subject to (imaginary) rebuttals of not reading the whole series or just not getting it when I criticize The Three Body Problem. Once more the purpose of my life is to serve as a warning to others.

2024/05

• The Black Forest. Liu. Followup to The Three Body Problem that is a pretty good book almost despite itself. As with the prior book there is a lot of exposition and a number of digressions to include small science-y factoids. There are also several conceits you just have to accept, e.g., people collapsing like anime characters when presented with their foil. Finally, there's a substantial "time is a flat circle" kind of plot element going on but unexplained. But I do like several threads and characters, though many of them don't hardly interact at all. The Black Forest concept and denouement of the proximate threat to humanity is very good. The Wallfacer concept and the struggle to fight such an asymmetric conflict is interesting. Luo Ji's story arc seems like it's going deep into left field, but it comes back nicely in the end. Zhang Beihai comes across as a militarized Spock who can't quite follow through on his cold logic and has a low key great ending. All in all, it still reads like "Golden Age" sci-fi, but compared to the prior book it's arguably elevated to a higher tier of that class. The Black Forest doesn't really have the humanity, texture, and uniqueness of the historical opening sections of The Three Body Problem. But the Foundation-style "grand trajectory of humanity" tale in The Black Forest is much better.
• Oathbringer. Sanderson. Stormlight Archives book 3. An ok read but the Stormlight Archives arc is slowly running out of steam, largely due to over-expansion. There are too many characters running around. Some have interesting things happening, particularly Dalinar Kholin. But compared to the first book the story has shifted more toward grand plot machinations over characters. So many characters have also been given special powers that they all start to feel pretty bland---"You get a shardblade and you get a shardblade and you get a shardblade!" Meanwhile every time a big bad is taken down or reveals their betrayal, another one pops right up or gets to scheming, quelle surprise! One way I can try to express all this is that in the first book Kaladin was an interesting character. By this point though my mental image of him is Xenk Yendar, the righteously proper paladin and representative of an overly serious drop-in player from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. That's a great character if you're in on the joke, but pretty flat otherwise. A few other characters, particularly Shallan, make a number of comments indicating that the author(s) (*) are aware of how upright and flat Kaladin has become, but it's not enough to keep the character vibrant. Long story short, the series continues to be a short story writ long and there's just so many words to it, but without real meaningful depth. So if you really like fantasy epics with a ton of detail and not a lot of complication, this is your jam. Otherwise it's ok reading appropriate to the beach or the airport or something.
  • (*) Quite unfairly, I can't help but read these books as being a production of a small group manufacturing them rather than a single author writing them.
• Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. Petersen. Comic collection. Read with Alice.

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.