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What'cha Reading?

Finished Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter, which has been on a lot of recommended lists and sounded cute, cozy and fun. I was... so bored. The overall setting, a cat shelter in 1920s Montreal in a universe where there is magic but it's generally considered dangerous and is frowned upon, sounded so unique and interesting. But I think the writing might just have been too flat for me? It felt both repetitive and I don't feel like any of the characters were super distinct from each other. Also the plot tries to be weirdly high stakes but just didn't work for me at all.
 
Violentvixen said:
Finished Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter, which has been on a lot of recommended lists and sounded cute, cozy and fun. I was... so bored. The overall setting, a cat shelter in 1920s Montreal in a universe where there is magic but it's generally considered dangerous and is frowned upon, sounded so unique and interesting. But I think the writing might just have been too flat for me? It felt both repetitive and I don't feel like any of the characters were super distinct from each other. Also the plot tries to be weirdly high stakes but just didn't work for me at all.
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I haven't read it because my wife found it super disappointing after loving Emily Wilde.
 
Just read the first trade collection of Absolute Wonder Woman (written by Kelly Thompson, art by Hayden Sherman, letters by Becca Carey, colors by Jordie Bellaire) and it rules. A friend of mine hyped it up for a while before my library finally got copies, but it lived up to all the praise. I've already got the second collection on the way.

Next is Erin Morgenstern's second book The Starless Sea because I enjoyed my reread of The Night Circus in the book club last month.
 
I continue working my way through my backlog... a lot of this came on when I got a new bookshelf about a year back and filled it and realized all the books I'd picked up over the ages but never got around to reading.

Finished City of Thieves by David Benioff, listening to my boi Ron Perlman doing the reading for the audio book. He really fit the tone of this perfectly, I enjoyed that quite a bit. Makes me want to find more stories he's performed. Here's my review!

This was a pretty quick at 260ish pages, but I found it affecting. The way it depicts a starved-out, desperate, Nazi-sieged Leningrad felt true for a place where the only remaining people are those that chose to stay behind for one reason or another, or couldn't flee to the country. Lot of people here because they had some plan that fell apart when a parent died or the food stopped. Everyone's emaciated and weak, realistically unable to do the kind of shit you'd expect in an adventure story. What they eat feels authentic, on the exact line of what you can consume and keep down and derive some kind of nutrition from. There's little details about how they're grabbing handfuls of snow all the time to eat, and how they resent themselves in the past for not reveling in the abundance, that I felt did a lot of good work to set the scene.

Some things I assumed were made up for the story, like a group that tries to lure them in and are revealed to be cannibals, but, nope, that was real. I quite liked the two main characters, their banter is enjoyable and feels close enough to the tone of the beleaguered Russian citizens of the time, and I was pretty interested in the various divisions that had cropped up from the revolution or the usual bigotry against romani and jews. A lot of this book is about survival, both before and during the siege, how the person you intend to be changes when survival rises to become your dominant interest, and what you choose to hold on to.

There's some dumb stuff here and there that was a distraction - there's a pointless framing device of a guy writing this book that didn't need to be there, there's this runner about how a character hasn't been able to take a shit for five days and, I dunno, I don't think you physically can avoid shitting for that long, and the sniper character they introduce later (while a good character overall) is very strangely popped into the story in the middle of a pretty tense scene, diffusing all tension to explain her various talents, none of which really come up again. Still, none of it pulled me out of the story for long.

Would recommend, I liked this one.
 
Read Shutter Island by Denis Lehane. Pretty spot on with the movie, except the movie added one bit of dialogue at the end that wasn't in the book, which I found was an interesting choice. Then read The Great Movies by Roger Ebert, and I just now completed Conqueror's Blood by Zamil Akhtar
 
Finished This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, a story I'd been recommended by a whole lot of people. Here's my review.

Mmm didn't really like this one to be honest! I think the writing is quite pleasantly poetic and saccharine, but I was never able to really grow to feel anything for either of these characters, as they were not interested in the titular time war, they were not interested in their worlds or cultures, and were very similar in character and voice, leading to a situation where they don't really grow or change in a meaningful way, and you wonder why there is the backdrop of the scifi elements at all.

A pleasant enough read, but I really really hungered for something more substantial.

One thing that I had to come to accept was that the titular time war is not something the author or the characters within are interested in, so it is implied you're not supposed to care about it either. You may have some questions about how they can commit so many war crimes to so many across entire universes, for so long, but you're quickly shown that you're not supposed to care about that stuff. You may have questions about how the characters feel about their fate not being their own, or about living in such endless dire conflict, but that isn't really explored either. You may be curious about how infinite universes - Threads - exist at the same time, and be warring for supremacy for a "one true timeline", but that isn't discussed either.

The story is simply the exchange of love letters between the two top agents of this war, and though they are technically enemies at the start of the story, they are fully turned on their leaders and are revealing their darkest vulnerabilities to each other by the third chapter. From that point on, they just Are Lovers. They pine for each other for the remainder for the book, but their longing (as wonderfully worded as it is) is a thing you are told, you never feel.

This might've just been a result of a story where you are only seeing letters between them, but I wasn't able to form a connection between these two very similar characters. I craved those moments where they would show, in action and in words, what they felt and how they felt it. Some kind of conflict or struggle wouldn't have been unwelcome either. As it was, they are stated to be one thing, and are that, all the way from the start to the end.

I think people just like how the writing is done, and like seeing a sapphic romance in a high-concept scifi scenario. Boy howdy do I love those things too, I wish I got to see them here.

On the positive side, there were a lot of great world-building details about Garden, the plant-based entity one of the lovers was grown from. I would've killed to see their way of thinking and interests shaped by their origins as a grown plant-like being, but well, they turn into a regular human way of thinking pretty quickly. I also loved the way that communication could occur through food, spores, bee stings, things like that, any time they would dip into the stealth technologies on either side, it was quite nice.

I think I'll check out Amal El-Mohtar's next book, because I think with a more substantial story and the determination to affect the characters, she could really write something amazing.
 
True Grit by Charles Portis - It was alright. Didn't blow me away though. Saw the remake when it came out and enjoyed it
Living with Shakespeare by Susannah Carson - Essays written by actors, directors, scholars, etc. about Shakespeare. This one I really enjoyed
Ministers of Grace by Jordan Monsell - Ghostbusters as done by Shakespeare. Most excellent
 
Been doing a bunch of cleaning recently so I'm going through books a good clip.

Finished In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield and honestly liked it a lot more than I expected. I'd say the most interesting takeaways were how some atrocities were made conceivable to the public by reducing them into a miniature display, like a popular slave ship miniature diorama that really helped drum up public outrage as it made its rounds, and another one about a Nazi concentration camp that helped people sort of grasp the scale of the Holocaust. Here's my review.

Some of the more interesting miniature models and such include:
 
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Finished off April with Fox by Joyce Carol Oates, a really disturbing (but really good) story about the possible murder of a pedophile that works at a boarding school, and then All You Need is Love by Peter Brown, interviews done with the Beatles and others he used as material for his memoir The Love You Take, which I might eventually read. Shutter Island was my favorite book of the month
 
Mothra said:
Been doing a bunch of cleaning recently so I'm going through books a good clip.

Finished In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield and honestly liked it a lot more than I expected. I'd say the most interesting takeaways were how some atrocities were made conceivable to the public by reducing them into a miniature display, like a popular slave ship miniature diorama that really helped drum up public outrage as it made its rounds, and another one about a Nazi concentration camp that helped people sort of grasp the scale of the Holocaust. Here's my review.

Some of the more interesting miniature models and such include:
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These are very cool.
 
Finished reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Holy moly, I loved this, what an excellent scifi book. Here's my review.

This is probably now my favorite science fiction novel! I was enthralled all the way through.

Though I thought the story was overall good, the best parts are definitely the alien-ass aliens, and the setting. A lot of the best parts of the story are simply showing the implications of the setting and the species in it. Our characters are all very rational and do their best to work a problem that is well outside of their league, which makes for some great fun.

The aliens of the novel are weird and utterly inhuman, which colors their society and social structures and technology in a way very few stories tend to even try. There are, for example, the psychic dog-rat Tines, which share "processing power" in packs to form one mind that is the sum of all the dogs in the pack, so if they take on a new member their personality changes by that addition. It's really really cool to see characters change into literally new people throughout the course of the book as their pack changes, including their motivations, their fears, their inclinations. For as much time as the book spends with the Tines, I wanted more, and maybe as a result of having so many concepts in one book, none of them feel all-the-way explored. I would often find myself thinking about the implications of this or that, and those things are not usually explored, instead following a more realistic (and less dramatic) result.

The setting is an extremely interesting division of the galaxy into four "zones of thought" that presumably prevent young races from being destroyed by vast intelligences in the Beyond, like humanity might destroy a species of bug or plant. This means people can hide out in the Slow Zone where FTL or sentient AIs aren't possible, or push up into the outer rim, where they are very small fish in a big pond. It's such a great element of the story that you never understand the motivations of the Transcend species that have some reason to dive down to our level. I love that these beings are merely things to be survived, like animals might survive a highway.

If I had any gripes, it's that the main characters don't really make any decisions that aren't simply the most rational thing to do in a given situation, which is realistic and reasonable but can be a little disappointing when you want to see x or y concept explored more. Ah well, there's two other books, I'll definitely be reading them.
 
Mothra said:
Finished reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Holy moly, I loved this, what an excellent scifi book. Here's my review.
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I head about this book somewhere else recently and found it interesting, and now that it's come up again I wanted to put it on my "for later" list at the library. Went to do so and discovered it was already on there. Was surprised, but on a hunch searched this thread and found a lot of glowing praise for the book in 2023 including me saying I'd put a hold on it although apparently I didn't get a chance to read it and shifted it to the "for later" at some point.

Violentvixen said:
Well I have now put a hold on A Fire Upon the Deep after all this chatter, I'm intrigued!
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So maybe this needs to move up the "to read" list ha.

At the moment though I have two book club books I'm starting so want to make progress on those. The first is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, which I am sure I read some or all of in high school and am excited to revisit as an adult. The second is Eve by Cat Bohannon which is for my work book club. I suspect a lot of the examples of historical dismissal of women will be things I already know, but just from a glance it's all being framed in a very interesting way. Also excited to discuss it with other scientists/engineers, I don't get to do that much!
 
Burned through Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain very quickly, it's not a super long book, but it's also very pleasant to listen to, and very interesting, so I devoured it in a few days. Here's my review.

There's a great air of authenticity to this book that I appreciated. Unlike Heat, I didn't have to keep this distance of having to separate what was his real feelings vs what he wanted to be heard saying. I'm sure there is plenty of that going on here, but the feel of it is - as he states in the final chapter - a book he pounded out on his one-day-off-a-week, which he did not have a lot of time for, and thus, had little time to analyze or craft. I liked that.

The feeling of the book is of a guy with 25 years of experience in an incredibly high-energy business, throwing it all on the page, sorting it into anecdotes and chapter subjects, and then moving forward to the next thing. I liked what he chose to spend his time on. Sometimes he would be looking backwards, wistfully, on his messy first few jobs, and I liked how little romance there was there: It was sometimes bad, it was something great, it was often the two of them at the same time. That carried forward into the present, in how he described his best jobs, his most tragic ones, his more mind-numbing and pointless jobs. They all meant something, and they were all things he had to choose to stay with or leave, with this notion that he had finite life to live and wasn't about to live it on a job that didn't excite him.

Tons of great, useful information here. Exactly what you might hope in picking up a book like this. I was impressed, and am going to check out what else he ended up writing.

Also, I really liked the introduction by Irvine Welsh at the start, a segment written after Bourdain's suicide. I'm a fan of his and he clearly had great respect for Bourdain, and it's just nice hearing an author you love talking about someone he respected too.
 
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Finished The Silmarilion by J R R Tolkien having seen the re-releases of the LotR at the cinema. I first tried many years ago and didn't so much find it dry as arid and bounced off it hard.
Armed this time with a bit of foreknowledge of the general mythology I completely adored it. It's an incredible feat of myth making that makes Arda feel like a real place and LotR better by adding layers and layers of depth on it.

Genuinely sad it's over, I guess I'll have to get some more Tolkien stuff now.
 
Wrapped up Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone. I wasn't nuts about it as a story but I found a ton to like about the world it was set in, and I'm overall glad I read it. Here's my review.

A lot of very interesting world-building here, set amid a moment where steampunk technology and magical sciences have progressed to the point where the gods humans once prostrated before are now seen as different forms of familiar life, ones that can be understood and even surpassed in some ways. It's cool seeing the artform of lawyering pacts replacing blind faith, and the unease with which divine beings consider the encroaching and clumsy human experiments in their realm. Also fun seeing a good variety of life, with gargoyles and vampires and litches, things like that, all co-existing in various ways.

I was pretty underwhelmed by the story itself, which is, at the end of the day, still a murder mystery, where one evil individual or group is responsible and everything is to that plan. A good amount of the mystery is just telling the reader new things the Craft can do, such as changing bodies or mind-controlling others, and you don't really get all the pieces to how their magic works, you're just told them at various points of the story. It's kind of like, how do you make a murder interesting if it's in a world where anything might be possible? I think I would've liked to have more explained about the Craft before so much of the story revolved around knowledge of it.

The main character's pretty quippy and doesn't really undergo any kind of change throughout the book, so she's more of an agent of action than someone I could get invested in. That said, I enjoyed the character Elayne Keverian at lot, really relishing the rare moments when she'd get a scene to herself, or be given something fun to do. I'm told one of the later books features hear more prominently, so I'll definitely be checking out that one.
 
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Had a great reading week: Out Law by Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins which inspired me to start my Discworld reread with The Color of Magic and I finally finished The Hive by Ronald Malfi today. I liked it a lot, but it's my least favorite out of Black Mouth and Small Town Horror
 
Violentvixen said:
I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Wonderful collection of essays about combining the theories of botany (she has a PhD) and Indigenous teachings (she's a member of Potawatomi Nation) in everything from academia to raising children. I've loved it all but there were two standout essays to me, one about tapping for syrup and another about removing a serious overgrowth of algae from a pond that was threatening waterfowl.

I'm only about halfway though and can't renew it since a bunch of people have it on hold but might buy a copy since I'm enjoying it so much.
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I was talking with my mother on Mother's Day about the different books we were currently reading. I told her about Palmer's Terra Ignota series, and she mentioned Braiding Sweetgrass, which I just picked up from the library. She said that it may hit more from a feminine perspective, which is probably true, but I think she speaks more to universal human truths than down gender lines. I'm only 20 pages in but I'm liking the little essays, both as history and as a reflecting point for ways that civilization and communication could improve. Definitely outside my wheelhouse but I'm happy to jump outside genre for perspective.
 
Bleh, I got halfway through Empire Falls by Richard Russo and this is going to be another DNF for me. Here's my review.

Like, it's generally well-written, it's a Pulitzer prize winner, but it's always trying and failing to be clever in a mean way that's grating on me. The whole thing is about casting judgement upon its listless and dissatisfied cast of characters, most of whom (including the protagonist) avoid making choices the entire book, and shit just happens to them.

Russo's also just very bad at writing women, they're all scheming and petty and entitled, and beholden to dumb, petty men, so again, they don't make choices, they are just guided around by these men they don't respect. It's just annoying for everyone to be like this, as well-described as it often is.

(Also as a Bostonian, there's truly nothing worse than a New Yorker trying to imagine our mind and talk about Red Sox and living on the coast and whatnot. Sooo perfunctory.)

It's notable that a very dramatic and traumatic event happens at the very end of the book (a school shooting), at the 95% mark, one which brought on a singular chapter of healing and processing and recovering from it over a long stretch of time, and I greatly enjoyed this chapter. It really made me wish this had happened near the start, because it gave some meaning to the book for the first time.
 
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John said:
Braiding Sweetgrass, which I just picked up from the library. She said that it may hit more from a feminine perspective, which is probably true, but I think she speaks more to universal human truths than down gender lines. I'm only 20 pages in but I'm liking the little essays, both as history and as a reflecting point for ways that civilization and communication could improve. Definitely outside my wheelhouse but I'm happy to jump outside genre for perspective.
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Yay I'm glad more people are reading this, it's amazing! That's interesting that she mentioned the female perspective on science. There's been a lot of discussion over the years about differences between male and female researchers. As Robin notes in the book the discrimination initially limited women to certain roles and their data was ignored. But progress is being made.

Overall the book definitely focuses more on the Native American perspective on thinking about plants, but I should consider this more. Neat.
 
I'm going to take the opportunity to plug Beowife's new book Startup Hell, which releases on Tuesday. (I got to read the ARC several months ago.) A junior marketer walks into her boss’s office and discovers her boss summoned a demon, but had a heart attack before managing to sell his soul and the demon is trapped there. Turns out he’s just a junior salesdemon and also very cute, so they juggle romance with trying to find someone else at a tech startup willing to sell their soul so he can make his quarterly projections (and not get eaten). Further complicating matters, our heroine’s mother is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and perpetually disappointed by her daughter’s lack of magical aptitude. This is a musing on what it’s okay to want out of life, a new vision for why demons buy souls, and a scathing send-up of tech startup culture. Oh, and a love letter to New York City.
 
Got through two more... one a lot, a lot better than the other.

Greatly enjoyed The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. What an absolute nightmare (positive). Here's my review.

For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be a work of fiction, but no, this actually happened and I greatly appreciated how much research was put into lining up the various firsthand accounts with their interests and their intended presentation for the eventual review of the British Imperial Navy court martial. The gaps are filled in very elegantly by some informed fiction here and there, usually supplemented by evidence from other sailors and officers of the time, or other explorers throughout history. This results in a book that goes down very easy, despite it being what is essentially a nonstop torture circus where men become as beasts, the social contract collapses and death becomes a numbing routine.

I think it's that constant scattershot death that stuck with me the most. Men would become sick with some horrible malady like scurvy and cling to life for months, only to die in a room full of other sick men when the walls of the vessel are breached. Men go scavenging and simply die on their feet, as if the presence of their fellow shipmates were the only think keeping them together. Men die to simple hopelessness when realizing their recent torturous efforts were for nothing - one dude, upon realizing they had backtracked two weeks in error in their shitty overstuffed life boat, stood, let out of a cackling madman laugh, and died on his feet. There's this element of purpose and luck being the only things that will keep you alive, and if you lose either, you're dead. Having any reason to keep going, any hope at all, will literally keep you alive. I was frequently moved by this as each new cruel pox or disaster befell them.

Great read, I'm definitely going to check out Grann's other books.

I also finished Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison and you know what? I think it's a good title because this guy literally just whines about every little thing that annoyed him - like feminists, pro-abortion activists, his jewish mother, vapid people - in the form of a ham-fisted and mean-spirited short stories where his complaint takes the shapely form of a woman (whom he then has murdered). Here's my review.

I mainly picked this up to get a sense of if I liked Ellison’s writing style when he was forced by format to keep it succinct and carve down to just the meat of the thing. Turns out, he’s just a baby with a poopy daipey about everything he writes about. There’s occasional sentences here and there that had a nugget of potential, but nothing made up for entire stories being naught but misogynistic rants and paper-thin one-sentence gags stretched like an SNL sketch. This felt like he was just trying to get words on the page for some magazine or publication, and this meant any annoyance he’d encountered recently would be tortured into a shitty monster story. Uggghhh.

I appreciate the role in played in getting Babylon 5 off the ground, and I do intend to read both I Have No Mouth and Repent, Harlequin, but man, I really dislike his style, and he is too mean to be funny, and though everyone that's even known him has said it, the point of most things he seems to write is that everyone who is not him (the narrator) is a moron and deserves whatever cruelties can be brought to bear. I read into it a bit and eventually JMS was able to convince him to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, so this guy (like many in his generation) was just raw-dogging manic episodes his whole life. I think this explains a lot about him.
 
My hope is that the further away from his world and his time the story gets, the more removed from it his "persona" as narrator is, and the better the story will be. But yeah, I'm braced accordingly. No Mouth might honestly benefit a lot from AM being so hateful that Ellison is dissuaded from adding on top of that a misanthropic narrator? Like perhaps it drives the arc of the story toward ultimately hopeful? We'll see.

Plus... he'll probably write a good villain.
 
I had similar hopes after being totally turned off by an Ellison collection, but mine were dashed. I hope you get more out of it than I did. For what it’s worth, I remember “Repent, Harlequin!” being better, but it’s been a long time.
 
Finished The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and greatly enjoyed it. Written way back in 1956, originally with the much more fitting title of Tiger! Tiger!, this was one of two banger novels Bester penned before turning to TV for more or less the rest of his career. Here's my review.

I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. I'd heard it was very influential to the cyberpunk genre but I had no idea that it originated a ton of the core elements we've seen in the 70 years since. Honestly too many to list, you start to realize the coolest ideas in Babylon 5 or Edgerunners or Neromancer or Blade Runner or The Expanse were largely drawn from this book. Crucially, though, they're all used well, they are introduced and they are used to great effect to enhance the story and add dimension to the action. For as many great ideas as this book packs in, they all add to the whole in a creative way, they have rules only as far as are needed. That's a rare thing.

Very much appreciated how this book treats the reader like an adult, that expects you're able to parse morally grey people in their moments of monstrosity and moments of nobility, even going so far as to make it core to the story. The main character is a vile barbarian driven by rage at the uncaring world that left him for dead, and man, it is just really cool seeing how this anger at the world never leaves him, despite growing in intelligence and capability and experience, and his ability to navigate each space of the have-nots and the haves in his unrelenting tiger hunt. The ending of the book took me by surprise in the best way.

I could go on forever but this is how it's done. Every outlandish idea adds something, but does not distract from that core message, that beating heart. Looking forward to checking out The Demolished Man soon.

Content Warning: I have put at the end of my review up there a section for content warnings, and if you're interested, definitely take a look. Though I think the moral grayness of this book is handled well, there's an instance early on that potentially triggering and in my opinion should not be in the book (though it is not graphically described). Just fyi.
 
the stars my destination is in my opinion one of the absolute best golden age sci fi books all time.
 
Whalefall by recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus -- this book has a lot going for it, and I liked how much science there was in the story, but ultimately I felt it was a little too torture porn-y to be fully enjoyable for me. It moves along super briskly, though, so it didn't outstay its welcome. I'm planning to read Angel Down whenever the 100 people in front of me at the library are finished.
 
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