First, reread Nurk to my second-grader. Ursula Vernon is in top form here, with the adventures of a mousy shrew, his snailboat, and a clean pair of socks. At some point I stopped reading and mentioned to my wife that much of the book reads like the adult horror she writes under the T. Kingfisher pseudonym. She does eldritch horror very, very well, even in the context of a silly children’s book.
I also read Autonomous, a near-future pharmapunk novel about evil corporations, AIs, and the usual nonsense. It was pretty decent, but I’ll be honest, I remember very little about the plot, and the characters weren’t especially memorable either. A good one for passing the time if you like this sort of thing, but you don’t need to drop everything to pick it up. If it gets nominated for awards, I’ll be neither surprised nor especially gratified.
Yesterday I finished The Unbroken. Anticolonialist fantasy is getting to be an entire subgenre, and this is one of the better ones I’ve read. The two point-of-view characters are deeply, deeply flawed, beautifully written characters that can’t help hurting people but whose motivations are fundamentally benevolent, no matter how awful they become. I’m not 100% sold on the ending, but the rest of the book was tremendous. This is one I’d definitely love to see pick up some awards.
I was really surprised with this book. I went in totally unspoiled, no idea what it was about other than “scifi and war”. It was not what I expected. It was really more about war in general and does a pretty good job covering one man’s life in the military. Due to lightspeed travel, 1000 years go by in the book, but he only ages a few years.
Anyway, it was really only OK for me. I had hoped it would be better than it was, but it was by no means a bad book.
Next up:
The Catcher in the Rye <–continuing my list of books I’ve not read that I really should have. I just finished Slaughter-House Five and The Forever War.
Mahaloth, sorry you didn’t like The Forever War more; it’s a favorite of mine. In his short story “A Separate War,” you get to see what happened to Potter after she and Mandella are parted in The Forever War. Well worth a look.
And if you’d like to try more military sf, I highly recommend Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, each with a very different take on what it means to be an infantry soldier in an interstellar war.
I really liked Old Man’s War, but I despised Starship Troopers. Definitely they’re different takes. For military sf, my favorites are weird shit like Ninefox Gambit or Ancillary Justice, but neither of them really focus on the infantry.
Finished Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart , by Mimi Swartz. Excellent book, with many great anecdotes about the development of heart surgery, too. I was surprised at how many former NASA engineers went into the artificial heart business. (A surgeon asked an engineer, “Does my idea violate the laws of physics, or can it actually be built?”) Also, I was surprised about how many inventions began with a trip to Home Depot or a supermarket.
Now I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Finished Near the Bone, and really liked it! At first, I thought it was going to be a very serious and possibly difficult book for me to read (I know what it’s like to walk on eggshells around some abusive POS). But I was intrigued. As the story progressed and things became a little less plausible, I lightened up and started to enjoy it more. On Saturday, I picked the book up “for just a couple of minutes” and wound up shirking my chores because I needed to keep going all the way to the end. It was just a cheesy horror tale after all, but that’s my bag.
Started today on a short story collection, When a Stranger Comes to Town, edited by Michael Koryta. The stories are based on the latter part of the proverb, “All great literature boils down to one of two stories—a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” Koryta is one of my must-read authors, as are Joe R. Lansdale and Joe Hill, also included in this book, so I’m really looking forward to this one.
I read the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a gem of a story set in a fantasy ancient China, about a “Mongolian” (?) woman who marries the Chinese Emperor and then is exiled. It’s short and lovely.
I’ve added a couple books to my to-read list based on this thread: Near the Bone and The Guest List.
I just finished Into the Wild last night. It was a great book. The author has an interesting way of telling the story: out of chronological order, and occasionally veering from the main story entirely to tell other interesting stories that are only tangentially related, but it worked. I was engrossed in whatever story he happened to be telling for that chapter.
About 3/4 of the way through The Secrets She Carried by Barbara Davis. It’s a dual timeline book, where the woman in the modern day timeline inherits the plantation where her mother was murdered, and discovers some secrets about the property: forbidden love, illegitimate children, racial and class divisions, that sort of thing. I really liked the book at the beginning, but it’s running out of steam. The writing was beautiful at the beginning, and the characters lively and complex, and everything’s starting to get more trite now.
Also partway through Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. It’s one of those books that is so well-written that it leaves you in a bad mood. Women have become so accustomed to these little inequities that we tend to just roll our eyes and laugh. But why should women’s discomfort be seen as so trivial? Why is it funny than women are perpetually cold in the office while men are comfortable, or women are waiting in long lines with full bladders while men laugh at them and get on with their days? And then when the book starts getting into medical research and safety, ohh that made me mad. But if you’ve ever wondered why still needs to be a thing in the 21st century, boy will this book educate you.
Finished Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Outstanding–one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. Strongly recommended.
Now I’m reading Librarian Tales: Funny, Strange, and Inspiring Dispatches from the Stacks, by William Ottens.
Almost finished with World War Z by Max Brooks. What a unique and fascinating and genuinely terrifying read. It subverts traditional narrative form by telling the story through a series of survivor interviews, people from all walks of life, laypeople, soldiers, those from every level of government all over the world. It’s not like we’ll ever have a Zombie apocalypse but this book makes it frighteningly clear how unprepared we are for a global disaster.
Fun fact : The US military was so impressed by this book they brought the author on as a consultant for emergency preparedness. He’s done guest lectures at West Point.
The COVID pandemic was eerily similar to that book on it’s first stages, it starts in China, most don’t take it seriously at first but then panic, we even had the fake “cure” being sold to dupes.
Except in the book the US political leadership takes it seriously and has a minimum of competence, which err, didn’t happen in real life.
The movie was just another more or less typical zombie movie IMHO.
It would’ve been better to make a miniseries with the same stories we see in the book, but then you couldn’t have Brad Pitt as a protagonist of course.
I DNFed “Women Who Run with Wolves” byClarissa Pinkola Estés. My bookclub is reading it this month, I thought it would be more of a look at folklore and historic women instead of the self congratulatory burble it turned out to be. In all honesty, I probably would have loved this book at age 20 when I was young and felt the world was against me. Now at 56, I’ve settled into the world and it just sounds like a load of verbal masturbation about how awesome the author is.
I was deeply offended to have her reduce the suicide of a woman caught in the Great Depression in the utter hell that was the Dust Bowl to: oh she couldn’t dress up and go window shopping anymore. No don’t put YOUR shallowness onto the victim of a tragedy, madam.
And you would think a PhD would understand that anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence.
Also it feel vaguely TERF to me, she should get out and talk to trans people, both men and women, and non binary persons for a more rounded look at what “women” are.
