The month's reviews have been, as usual, archived at the main Brightdreamer Books site. Enjoy, if so inclined.
Another year has apparently ended, so it's time for another Reading Year in Review.
January kicked off with Erin Entrada Kelly's middle-grade tale Hello, Universe, which never quite lived up to its potential. More impressive titles included a sci-fi historical thriller twist on the Cold War space race in Silvain Neuvel's A History of What Comes Next, a fascinating look at one of Earth's most catastrophic events in Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, another enjoyable installment in the Singing Hills Cycle of Asian-flavored fantasy in Nghi Vo's Mammoths at the Gates, and the story of one desperate girl driven to rescue a veritable stranger when nobody else will try in Dusti Bowling's Across the Desert. Other titles generally entertained me on some level, though I was notably disappointed by Amelie Wen Zhao's Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, and Stephen L. Kent's The Clone Assassin suffered mostly for being in the middle of a much longer series which I haven't read. The last book of the month wrapped up "A. Deborah Baker"'s (Seanan McGuire's) delightfully retro Up-and-Under fantasy adventure quartet with Under the Smokestrewn Sky.
I sampled a genre classic to start off February, Jack L. Chalker's sci-fi odyssey Midnight at the Well of Souls, and enjoyed some of the grand ideas and imagery even if it couldn't help showing its age. Another classic title, Cujo by Stephen King, held up better. The final installment of Josiah Bancroft's Books of Babel stumbled at the finish line with The Fall of Babel. I started Derek Landy's clever and adventurous middle-grade/young adult urban fantasy series, Skulduggery Pleasant, and knew right away I'd be following this one to the end. I also continued with Michael J. Sullivan's epic fantasy series, Chronicles of the First Empire, with Age of Swords, which nicely scratched the epic itch I'd been feeling, and began the graphic novel "Season Seven" of the Expanse television series (which also neatly slots into a time gap in between Books 6 and 7 in the written series) with The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 1 by Andy Diggle, which felt just like returning to a beloved series with pitch-perfect characters and writing. The month ended on a low note, unfortunately,
with a self-aware young adult thriller that ultimately failed to thrill: Danielle Valentine's How to Survive Your Murder.
Yet another old-school audiobook started March, Terry Pratchett's The Dragons at Crumbling Castle, which collects several stories from the author's younger years; even as a teenager, there were hints of the heights
he would later reach with Discworld and other titles. M. T. Anderson's Whales on Stilts delightfully skewered various genre tropes, kicking off his Pals in Peril series that I hope to follow through to the end
(though unfortunately my library doesn't seem to carry e-book or audiobook copies of the last volumes, dang it). Another fun middle-grade title took on junior detective tales, Mac Barnett's The Case of the Case of Mistaken
Identity, though Kara LaReau's silly adventures of the Bland sisters in The Jolly Regina didn't trigger the giggles as often as I'd hoped. Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse offered a new look at our
extinct cousin species in The Lost Neanderthal, attempting to erase some denigrating myths and misconceptions. I returned to K. Eason's "multiverse" mashup of fantasy and and sci-fi in the Arithmancy and Anarchy
milieu as it moved into darker, more adult territory, kicking off with the excellent Nightwatch on the Hinterlands. Other noteworthy titles included the surprisingly intriguing Domesticating Dragons by Dan Koboldt and the mildly disappointing (given all the hype I've heard over the years) A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny.
April showers flooded into a harrowing story of survival on the Amazon River in Holly FitzGerald's Ruthless River and ended in the fascinatingly intricate epic fantasy city of Kithamar in Daniel Abraham's Age
of Ash. Between, I explored the psychology of fandom in Tabitha Carvan's This is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, ventured through a variety of real-life adventures in Douglas Preston's The Lost Tomb, snickered at the low-brow humor of the classic picture book The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Joe Scieszka and the second Pals in Peril installment The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen by M. T. Anderson, and explored a noir future where the elite literally tower over the populace (yet aren't beyond reach of a murderer) in Nick Harkaway's Titanium Noir. Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children portal fantasy deconstructions returned with an intriguing shop of lost things from countless worlds in Mislaid in Parts Half-Unknown, while the second installment of Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series, Playing With Fire, maintained the pacing and humor (and flirtation with Lovecraftian-tinged horror) of the first book. Top marks went to the gorgeous multicultural picture book The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung.
While May didn't have any outright clunkers, it also didn't bring many brilliant standouts. Opening with the often-gruesome modern riff on Jonah in Daniel Kraus's Whalefall, a mixed reading bag awaited me. M. T. Anderson's perpetually-imperiled young "pals" returned in Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware as the month's only sequel, the rest being standalones (save Steve Cole's moderately entertaining and definitely different Z. Rex and another M. T. Anderson title, the less-satiric, somewhat darker fantasy The Game of Sunken Places). Charles Yu took a surreal, scriptlike approach to Asian stereotyping in Interior Chinatown, while Erica Bauermeister tracked the journey of a debut novelist's breakout hit through various readers in No Two Persons. I ended the month with a memoir by a trans actor chronicling their ongoing discovery of their true identity in Elliot Page's Pageboy.
June started with a disappointment, Sara Wolf's far-future tale of fighting mechas and social injustice in Heavenbreaker, but ended on a better note with Katherine Arden's middle-grade horror tale Dark Waters,
third in her Small Spaces quartet. The month's clear high spot was Shannon Chakraborty's historical fantasy swashbuckler The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, and Michael J. Sullivan continued to impress with Age of
War. After much anticipation, I found myself underwhelmed by Hannah Kaner's Godkiller, and M. T. Anderson's fourth Pals in Peril novel Agent Q, or the Smell of Danger! started feeling a touch stretched but
was still mostly fun.
I began July with a decent little tale of a sapient ink blob in Kenneth Oppel's Inkling. The month contained more than one disappointment, though. Helene Tursten's collection of tales about an old serial killer, An
Elderly Lady is Up To No Good and Stuart Turton's literary look at the twilight of humanity in The Last Murder at the End of the World failed to quite live up to their respective expectations, and the collaboration between M. T. Anderson and artist Eugene Yelchin, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, probably should not have been presented as an audiobook given that doing so cut out almost half the book in the form of Yelchin's illustrated chapters. Megan E. O'Keefe's The Blighted Stars took a little too long to gain traction, but was more or less enjoyable, even though I preferred her Protectorate trilogy. The month's high point was T. Kingfisher's superb fantasy novella Nettle and Bone, with Andy Diggle's graphic novel The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 2 as a close second. Morgan Housel offered some perspective on modern times in Same as Ever, and Scott Westerfield kicked off a science-based middle-grade adventure series with Horizon.
Katherine Arden's Empty Smiles wrapped up the Small Spaces horror quartet and started August off on a good foot, as did the next book, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Other high points
were Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree, The Faceless Ones by Derek Landy, and the epic conclusion to K. Eason's Weep duology in the Arithmancy and Anarchy series, Nightwatch Over Windscar, with
a surprise top mark for Kiyash Monsef's story of a girl discovering her link to magical beasts in Once There Was. I continued Michael J. Sullivan's Legends of the First Empire series, clearing the fourth and fifth entries in the six-book sequence (Age of Legend and Age of Death), which made me question whether there were indeed six novels worth of material in the story he was spinning. A couple nonfiction titles made it into the reading queue, both of which turned out to be interesting in their own ways: an examination of the ways the human brain can deceive itself in Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations and the story of an adventurer's disappearance and likely death in the Himalayas in Harley Rustad's Lost in the Valley of Death. A fictionalized middle-grade retelling of a First Nations legend (Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson's Eagle Drums, a historical fiction tale (Paulette Jile's News of the World), and a somewhat disappointing Korean-inspired space adventure (Elaine U. Cho's Ocean's Godori) rounded out the month.
September opened with one of the month's top reads, V. E. Scwab's gothic-tinged horror/fantasy Gallant, and ended with the lighthearted graphic novel CatStronauts: Mission Moon by Drew Brockington. In the middle
was the usual mix of good and not-quite-so-good reads and genres. Daniel Abraham continued to expand and explore his fantasy city of Kithamar with Blade of Dream, while Derek Landy seemed to slightly rush a series transition point in the Skulduggery Pleasant series with Dark Days. A historical naval tragedy was examined in David Grann's The Wager, my only nonfiction title of the month. I visited the reign of Cleopatra in the historical mystery Death of an Eye by Dana Stabenow, and mostly enjoyed the end of the world with a romantic island vacation gone horribly wrong in Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by MJ Wassmer. Jane Yolen's How to Fracture a Fairy Tale collected many of her fairy tale retellings, some familiar and some new to me, with some extra notes and poems. It also marked the end of an era, as I switched site hosts from iPowerWeb to DreamHost. (The former is a fine host, but both too expensive and too robust for my modest needs.)
October appropriately featured more than one thriller and ghost story. It launched with Karen M. McManus's tale of high school social media turned deadly in One of Us Is Lying, a solidly good tale. I was, unfortunately, less enthused by Christina Henry's thriller Good Girls Don't Die, which dropped three women into horrific situations straight out of their favorite fictional genres, and Kelly Armstrong's Hemlock Island, the story of a cursed private home in the Great Lakes. The classics were represented by my first foray into Oscar Wilde's works, the short story collection Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, which had some inevitable dating but were interesting nevertheless. I ticked two more entries in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant series off with Mortal Coil and the less impressive novella Apocalypse Kings; Landy wrote the latter standalone well after finishing the main series, and I think it showed that he was out of the groove. For nonfiction, I revisited several terrible days in history with the time traveler's handy guide How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy, explored how humans inevitably project our own mindsets and moralities everywhere (to the detriment of science and conservation) with Lucy Cooke's The Truth About Animals, and took on linguistic elitism with June Casagrande's amusing Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, which turned out to be the best thing I read that month. It wrapped up with a near-future lunar thriller that was less exciting than I'd hoped, David Pedreira's Gunpowder Moon.
I only managed seven books in November, though they were more or less decent reads. Nino Cipri mashed up parallel dimensions and modern retail in Finna. More genre reads followed, with Charlie Jane Anderson's tale of a planet split by extremes in The City in the Middle of the Night and the story of a math prodigy taking on a psychic supervillain in S. L. Huang's Zero Sum Game, plus the somewhat amusing but ultimately overlong The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. An older young adult thriller had an inexplicable "update" in Lois Duncan's Down a Dark Hall. The best read of the month was also the most timely (and ultimately depressing) Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race? by Keith Boykin; reading this after America basically opted to hand democracy over to a convicted rapist and traitor and openly anti-democratic authoritarian who ran on a promise to violate the Constitution rather than even attempt addressing the inequities underlying so many things hurting our nation added another sad twist of that knife. The last read of the month was Jaime Greene's look at how scientists and speculative fiction approach the matter of extraterrestrial life in The Possibility of Life.
December did not start with me in a festive spirit, for obvious reasons. I tried regaining some hope with a book on the ins and outs of organizing effective resistance, Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Miriame Kaba, though unfortunately not much of it was applicable to my circumstances. Christina Lynch's Pony Confidential was interesting, somewhat entertaining, and occasionally profound and touching, though it seemed misbilled by its cover and official descriptions. Another popular title, Mike Herron's spy caper Slow Horses, intrigued me but had some stumbling points. I sampled a Japanese cozy fantasy about a cafe where one can time travel in a limited capacity, Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, with tepid results. But the end of the month and the holiday season were significantly overshadowed. My elderly father - the man who helped inspire my love of reading in general and SFF in particular - finally entered home hospice care due to ongoing health issues and worsening dementia. Between the time and physical effort of assisting with his care, the emotional toll, and the stress of dealing with both the impending loss and the uncertainty of the "after", I just plain cannot invest headspace in much reading now. I did manage to finish off the "Season Seven" Expanse graphic novel tie-in with Dragon Tooth: Volume 3 by Andy Diggle, based on the TV series and books created by James S. A. Corey, to wrap up the year, though I admittedly read more for distraction than full immersion.
There were some good bits here and there, if I stand back and squint, but overall, as I look backwards from the end of an exceptionally damp, dark, and dismal December, I'd say 2024 was a terrible year and 2025 is unlikely to be better on any conceivable level. But, hey, at least there's books. For now, at least...
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Saturday, December 28, 2024
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 3 (Andy Diggle)
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 3
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth series, Issues 9 - 12
Andy Diggle and James S. A. Corey (creators), illustrations by Francesco Pisa
BOOM! Studios
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Media Tie-In/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: It has been ten years since the sleeper "dragon tooth" agents left behind by General Duarte and the Martian defectors - currently on the far side of the Laconia ring, under complete radio silence - caused trouble for the system, but that does not mean they have forgotten their old master and their standing orders... or that they have not been working toward the destruction of Earth, Mars, and the Belters. When an Earth diplomat dies under suspicious circumstances while en route to Luna, it signals the coming end game for the saboteurs - and possibly the end of everything that Avasarala, Drummer, and the aging crew of the Rocinante have labored to rebuild.
REVIEW: The "Season Seven" story arc wraps up in a suitably explosive, action-packed finale with this third and final volume of the Dragon Tooth storyline. With another time jump, the characters are showing their age, continuing to fill the gap between the sixth and seventh novels but on the parallel timeline established by the television series. The core cast is distinctly older but no less capable or determined to protect the hard-won peace of the system... just as their enemies are no less determined to see it all destroyed. As the crew of the Roci race to identify the threat, the sleeper agents are perpetually one step ahead of them, leading to a nail-biter climax and a fitting final scene that segues well into the events of Strange Dogs and Persepolis Rising, the next books in the greater arc. I almost thought the characters felt a little short-changed in the rush to tie up the storyline, but this is primarily an action plot, and everyone has their own parts to play in the unfolding crisis. It earned the extra half-star for continuing to capture the feel of the series, which I've missed more than I realized.
On an unrelated side note, the tail end of December may have seemed a little sparse on reviews. That is because many of my reviews are audiobooks that I listen to at work, and I have had to take some time off due to a family crisis. My elderly father's physical and mental health have been worsening for some time, and a recent medical crisis finally tipped things over the line from controlled decline to the final countdown, as it were. As of this review, he is currently under home hospice care. He is the man who helped introduce me to reading in general and science fiction in particular, a lifelong fan who was active in the local fannish community for many years, and his impending loss is a black hole in my life. I should have been a better person with him for a father, and I feel that failure every day. Between this and the horrific betrayal of hope that was the November election, I utterly and sincerely wish with every fiber of my being that 2024 burns in the deepest possible depths of whichever Hell will take it... and it can preemptively take 2025 and beyond with it into the abyss.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Red Rising (Pierce Brown) - My Review
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 1 (Andy Diggle) - My Review
The Stars Now Unclaimed (Drew Williams) - My Review
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth series, Issues 9 - 12
Andy Diggle and James S. A. Corey (creators), illustrations by Francesco Pisa
BOOM! Studios
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Media Tie-In/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: It has been ten years since the sleeper "dragon tooth" agents left behind by General Duarte and the Martian defectors - currently on the far side of the Laconia ring, under complete radio silence - caused trouble for the system, but that does not mean they have forgotten their old master and their standing orders... or that they have not been working toward the destruction of Earth, Mars, and the Belters. When an Earth diplomat dies under suspicious circumstances while en route to Luna, it signals the coming end game for the saboteurs - and possibly the end of everything that Avasarala, Drummer, and the aging crew of the Rocinante have labored to rebuild.
REVIEW: The "Season Seven" story arc wraps up in a suitably explosive, action-packed finale with this third and final volume of the Dragon Tooth storyline. With another time jump, the characters are showing their age, continuing to fill the gap between the sixth and seventh novels but on the parallel timeline established by the television series. The core cast is distinctly older but no less capable or determined to protect the hard-won peace of the system... just as their enemies are no less determined to see it all destroyed. As the crew of the Roci race to identify the threat, the sleeper agents are perpetually one step ahead of them, leading to a nail-biter climax and a fitting final scene that segues well into the events of Strange Dogs and Persepolis Rising, the next books in the greater arc. I almost thought the characters felt a little short-changed in the rush to tie up the storyline, but this is primarily an action plot, and everyone has their own parts to play in the unfolding crisis. It earned the extra half-star for continuing to capture the feel of the series, which I've missed more than I realized.
On an unrelated side note, the tail end of December may have seemed a little sparse on reviews. That is because many of my reviews are audiobooks that I listen to at work, and I have had to take some time off due to a family crisis. My elderly father's physical and mental health have been worsening for some time, and a recent medical crisis finally tipped things over the line from controlled decline to the final countdown, as it were. As of this review, he is currently under home hospice care. He is the man who helped introduce me to reading in general and science fiction in particular, a lifelong fan who was active in the local fannish community for many years, and his impending loss is a black hole in my life. I should have been a better person with him for a father, and I feel that failure every day. Between this and the horrific betrayal of hope that was the November election, I utterly and sincerely wish with every fiber of my being that 2024 burns in the deepest possible depths of whichever Hell will take it... and it can preemptively take 2025 and beyond with it into the abyss.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Red Rising (Pierce Brown) - My Review
The Expanse: Dragon Tooth, Volume 1 (Andy Diggle) - My Review
The Stars Now Unclaimed (Drew Williams) - My Review
Friday, December 13, 2024
Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi)
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
The Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Book 1
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Hanover Square Press
Fiction, Fantasy/Literary Fiction
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: There are plenty of flashy eateries in Tokyo, but only one with a unique secret. In a nondescript back alley, down a short flight of stairs, lies the café named Funiculi Funicula. It's a small, quiet establishment where a visitor can get home-churned butter, strong coffee brewed from Ethiopian beans... and, in a chair normally occupied by a ghost, one can travel back in time.
There are rules, of course. They must wait until the ghost leaves the chair on her own or face a terrible curse. Travelers can't leave the chair, let alone the building, so they can only visit people whom they know will be in the café when they choose to arrive. Nothing they do or say will change the present. Nobody can travel more than once, so they need to make their one journey worthwhile. And they must return to the here and now before their coffee gets cold, or they'll end up replacing the resident ghost.
Many dismiss it as an urban legend, and those who don't consider it next to useless: after all, with all the restrictions, what is the point of such limited time travel? But for a handful of customers at Funiculi Funicula - a career-driven woman who may have lost her one chance at personal happiness, the wife who is losing her husband to dementia, a family black sheep seeking to undo her greatest regret, and a woman determined to find out if her greatest sacrifice was in vain - those precious few minutes before the coffee cools are worth their weight in gold.
REVIEW: I was intrigued by the concept and the low-key stakes (I wasn't in the mood for anything big at the moment), and once again the length made it ideal to slot into the listening lineup on my Libby app for a workday. While Before the Coffee Gets Cold does deliver what it promises, it also dithers, repeats, and meanders to the point of irritation, drawing out foregone conclusions and seeming to forget its own time constraints to milk every moment for extra word count, all to the detriment of the rating.
The reader "meets" the café with businesswoman Fumiko and the conversation where she loses the man she'd hoped to marry as he chooses an overseas career over staying in Tokyo... only later realizing the serendipitous fact that her fateful meeting took place in the one place where a do-over was possible. The barista Kazu then explains the rules, including the need to deal with the ghostly woman who normally occupies the special chair and the various restrictions on time travel, leading to Fumiko's transit into the past - where her emotions cause her to hem and haw and quite nearly bungle things worse than the first time around. This pattern hold true for every other transit, even by people more familiar with the café and the whole time travel deal: a woman suffering some manner of heartache or loss hems and haws, finally travels through time, then undergoes such extreme emotional swings and distress they can barely gasp out the words they violated the flow of the space-time continuum to speak. At first it adds to the atmosphere and characterization, but there comes to be a sameness to how the women get overemotional before, during, and after the journeys, and how their stories are drawn out with repetition after repetition after repetition (after repetition after repetition) of dialog, details, memories, feelings, and more. I think the book would've been half as long had just a fraction of those repetitions been trimmed. The last story grinds in the overall themes of personal sacrifice for the sake of love and draws out its foregone conclusions by making the characters too oblivious to clue in to facts so obvious they might as well have been written in neon lights across the walls of Funiculi Funicula.
While I could appreciate the interesting concept, the low-key intimate stakes of time travel on a personal scale, and the decently-drawn characters and situations (when said characters and situations weren't being wrung out like a wet cloth to squeeze every last word-drop out of their fibers), and some of the emotions rung deep and true, at some point I was just grinding my teeth wanting everyone to stop dithering and get on with their stories already. (Especially that last one... one of the fastest ways to make me lose my empathy for a character is to make them less intelligent than the cooling cup of coffee in their hands just to pad word count).
You Might Also Enjoy:
Flux (Jinwoo Chong) - My Review
11/22/63 (Stephen King) - My Review
Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) - My Review
The Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Book 1
Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
Hanover Square Press
Fiction, Fantasy/Literary Fiction
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: There are plenty of flashy eateries in Tokyo, but only one with a unique secret. In a nondescript back alley, down a short flight of stairs, lies the café named Funiculi Funicula. It's a small, quiet establishment where a visitor can get home-churned butter, strong coffee brewed from Ethiopian beans... and, in a chair normally occupied by a ghost, one can travel back in time.
There are rules, of course. They must wait until the ghost leaves the chair on her own or face a terrible curse. Travelers can't leave the chair, let alone the building, so they can only visit people whom they know will be in the café when they choose to arrive. Nothing they do or say will change the present. Nobody can travel more than once, so they need to make their one journey worthwhile. And they must return to the here and now before their coffee gets cold, or they'll end up replacing the resident ghost.
Many dismiss it as an urban legend, and those who don't consider it next to useless: after all, with all the restrictions, what is the point of such limited time travel? But for a handful of customers at Funiculi Funicula - a career-driven woman who may have lost her one chance at personal happiness, the wife who is losing her husband to dementia, a family black sheep seeking to undo her greatest regret, and a woman determined to find out if her greatest sacrifice was in vain - those precious few minutes before the coffee cools are worth their weight in gold.
REVIEW: I was intrigued by the concept and the low-key stakes (I wasn't in the mood for anything big at the moment), and once again the length made it ideal to slot into the listening lineup on my Libby app for a workday. While Before the Coffee Gets Cold does deliver what it promises, it also dithers, repeats, and meanders to the point of irritation, drawing out foregone conclusions and seeming to forget its own time constraints to milk every moment for extra word count, all to the detriment of the rating.
The reader "meets" the café with businesswoman Fumiko and the conversation where she loses the man she'd hoped to marry as he chooses an overseas career over staying in Tokyo... only later realizing the serendipitous fact that her fateful meeting took place in the one place where a do-over was possible. The barista Kazu then explains the rules, including the need to deal with the ghostly woman who normally occupies the special chair and the various restrictions on time travel, leading to Fumiko's transit into the past - where her emotions cause her to hem and haw and quite nearly bungle things worse than the first time around. This pattern hold true for every other transit, even by people more familiar with the café and the whole time travel deal: a woman suffering some manner of heartache or loss hems and haws, finally travels through time, then undergoes such extreme emotional swings and distress they can barely gasp out the words they violated the flow of the space-time continuum to speak. At first it adds to the atmosphere and characterization, but there comes to be a sameness to how the women get overemotional before, during, and after the journeys, and how their stories are drawn out with repetition after repetition after repetition (after repetition after repetition) of dialog, details, memories, feelings, and more. I think the book would've been half as long had just a fraction of those repetitions been trimmed. The last story grinds in the overall themes of personal sacrifice for the sake of love and draws out its foregone conclusions by making the characters too oblivious to clue in to facts so obvious they might as well have been written in neon lights across the walls of Funiculi Funicula.
While I could appreciate the interesting concept, the low-key intimate stakes of time travel on a personal scale, and the decently-drawn characters and situations (when said characters and situations weren't being wrung out like a wet cloth to squeeze every last word-drop out of their fibers), and some of the emotions rung deep and true, at some point I was just grinding my teeth wanting everyone to stop dithering and get on with their stories already. (Especially that last one... one of the fastest ways to make me lose my empathy for a character is to make them less intelligent than the cooling cup of coffee in their hands just to pad word count).
You Might Also Enjoy:
Flux (Jinwoo Chong) - My Review
11/22/63 (Stephen King) - My Review
Oona Out of Order (Margarita Montimore) - My Review
Let This Radicalize You (Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba)
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Abolitionist Papers)
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
Haymarket Books
Nonfiction, Essays/History/Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that we're living in turbulent times. The rolling back of rights, the gutting of environmental regulations just as climate change approaches a dangerous tipping point, the removal of any and all guardrails on greed, the rise of state violence, the stripping of viable venues and options for protest and dissent... not just in America, but around the world, it seems that cruelty, regression, greed, and authoritarianism are on the rise. But giving up has never been an option. In this book, two experienced leaders and organizers explore how to effectively resist in a time that seems openly hostile to resistance.
REVIEW: Since November this year (2024), I've been struggling to find anything resembling hope for the future of the country I live in and coming up with little to nothing, not helped by the fact that I'm not in a position to do much, if anything, about any of the innumerable dangers looming in the new year and beyond (dangers that are already here in some form or another). Don't give up, fight back, is the rallying cry on social media and elsewhere. Where? How? I ask, only to be told once more that if I don't do something and just give up They win. I was hoping this title would help answer those questions, or at least give me some ideas... or hope. Did it manage any of that? A little.
From the outset, it's clear that this book isn't quite targeting me. It's targeting current and would-be leaders and activists, offering advice not just on how to effectively recruit and organize people but on how to avoid burnout, mission creep, losing focus, and other risks, as well as some advice on dealing with the inevitable pushback one will encounter when challenging the status quo, legal and otherwise. A fair bit of word count is devoted to the importance of community and mutual support, not just for political or activism purposes but basic life needs. A vital community, one not reliant on social media (which is useful, to be sure, but, as has been illustrated all too clearly with "X" and others, not something one can rely on for privacy or even safe and neutral discussion), is the essential heart of any remotely successful activism group. The authors address the need to learn social skills and patient listening (skills that have fallen out of common practice in today's age of instant digital gratification and intentionally fractured attention spans), finding ways to meet people where they are and seek common cause for mutual benefit. They also emphasize the need to avoid the creep of dread and cynicism that can paralyze us and end resistance before it begins, essentially complying in advance. That's one heck of an ask, especially in 2024, but necessary just for basic survival.
For people better positioned to start or join activism and resistance efforts, this book offers plenty of information and moral support, plus appendices with practical links (such as how to deal with chemical weapons that police commonly unleash on rallies, and how to resist unlawful law enforcement action). That person may not be me for various reasons of life circumstances (plus me being me; there's a reason the number one advice I was given growing up was that the best way I could help was to stay out of the way, as I'm both congenitally invisible and basically useless), but it was still interesting to get an inside look at how more effective people can rally and organize and, every once in a while, actually succeed. That's hopeful, at least.
You Might Also Enjoy:
I'm Not Dying With You Tonight (Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal) - My Review
What Unites Us (Dan Rather and Elias Kirshner) - My Review
The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas) - My Review
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
Haymarket Books
Nonfiction, Essays/History/Politics
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that we're living in turbulent times. The rolling back of rights, the gutting of environmental regulations just as climate change approaches a dangerous tipping point, the removal of any and all guardrails on greed, the rise of state violence, the stripping of viable venues and options for protest and dissent... not just in America, but around the world, it seems that cruelty, regression, greed, and authoritarianism are on the rise. But giving up has never been an option. In this book, two experienced leaders and organizers explore how to effectively resist in a time that seems openly hostile to resistance.
REVIEW: Since November this year (2024), I've been struggling to find anything resembling hope for the future of the country I live in and coming up with little to nothing, not helped by the fact that I'm not in a position to do much, if anything, about any of the innumerable dangers looming in the new year and beyond (dangers that are already here in some form or another). Don't give up, fight back, is the rallying cry on social media and elsewhere. Where? How? I ask, only to be told once more that if I don't do something and just give up They win. I was hoping this title would help answer those questions, or at least give me some ideas... or hope. Did it manage any of that? A little.
From the outset, it's clear that this book isn't quite targeting me. It's targeting current and would-be leaders and activists, offering advice not just on how to effectively recruit and organize people but on how to avoid burnout, mission creep, losing focus, and other risks, as well as some advice on dealing with the inevitable pushback one will encounter when challenging the status quo, legal and otherwise. A fair bit of word count is devoted to the importance of community and mutual support, not just for political or activism purposes but basic life needs. A vital community, one not reliant on social media (which is useful, to be sure, but, as has been illustrated all too clearly with "X" and others, not something one can rely on for privacy or even safe and neutral discussion), is the essential heart of any remotely successful activism group. The authors address the need to learn social skills and patient listening (skills that have fallen out of common practice in today's age of instant digital gratification and intentionally fractured attention spans), finding ways to meet people where they are and seek common cause for mutual benefit. They also emphasize the need to avoid the creep of dread and cynicism that can paralyze us and end resistance before it begins, essentially complying in advance. That's one heck of an ask, especially in 2024, but necessary just for basic survival.
For people better positioned to start or join activism and resistance efforts, this book offers plenty of information and moral support, plus appendices with practical links (such as how to deal with chemical weapons that police commonly unleash on rallies, and how to resist unlawful law enforcement action). That person may not be me for various reasons of life circumstances (plus me being me; there's a reason the number one advice I was given growing up was that the best way I could help was to stay out of the way, as I'm both congenitally invisible and basically useless), but it was still interesting to get an inside look at how more effective people can rally and organize and, every once in a while, actually succeed. That's hopeful, at least.
You Might Also Enjoy:
I'm Not Dying With You Tonight (Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal) - My Review
What Unites Us (Dan Rather and Elias Kirshner) - My Review
The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas) - My Review
Thursday, December 12, 2024
Graven Images (Paul Fleischman)
Graven Images
Paul Fleischman
Candlewick
Fiction, YA? Collection/Historical Fiction
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Noted author Paul Fleischman presents three short stories centered on sculpted images:
The Binnacle Boy: When the crew of the sailing ship Orion is found dead, the carved "binnacle boy" compass holder from the ship's deck is installed in the town square as a memorial... one that may eventually reveal the terrible secret behind the tragedy.
Saint Crispin's Follower: A cobbler's lovelorn apprentice reads signs and portents into a weathercock shaped in the likeness of Saint Crispin, patron of his profession.
The Man of Influence: A stonecarver takes a commission from a ghostly client, only to learn truths he'd rather never have known about his wealthy patrons.
REVIEW: I needed a short audiobook to fill some empty time at work, and this one was available. From the official description, I expected there to be a little more to the sculptures themselves, a little more of a twist to them, though that's likely a bias from tending to read speculative fiction far more than regular fiction. In any event, the stories themselves are decent, though at times they feel like they're stretching their premises. The middle tale in particular runs long once the characters and central gimmick are clear. I found the third story to be the most interesting, as a sculptor obsessed with the class and breeding of his usual clientele is forced to confront just what kind of people have been paying his bills, and what that makes him for serving them so eagerly for years. It came close to losing a half-mark for that sense of stretching, but I gave the collection the benefit of the doubt.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Quill Pen (Michelle Isenhoff) - My Review
Ghost Ship (Dietlof Reiche) - My Review
Rogue Wave (Theodore Taylor) - My Review
Paul Fleischman
Candlewick
Fiction, YA? Collection/Historical Fiction
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Noted author Paul Fleischman presents three short stories centered on sculpted images:
The Binnacle Boy: When the crew of the sailing ship Orion is found dead, the carved "binnacle boy" compass holder from the ship's deck is installed in the town square as a memorial... one that may eventually reveal the terrible secret behind the tragedy.
Saint Crispin's Follower: A cobbler's lovelorn apprentice reads signs and portents into a weathercock shaped in the likeness of Saint Crispin, patron of his profession.
The Man of Influence: A stonecarver takes a commission from a ghostly client, only to learn truths he'd rather never have known about his wealthy patrons.
REVIEW: I needed a short audiobook to fill some empty time at work, and this one was available. From the official description, I expected there to be a little more to the sculptures themselves, a little more of a twist to them, though that's likely a bias from tending to read speculative fiction far more than regular fiction. In any event, the stories themselves are decent, though at times they feel like they're stretching their premises. The middle tale in particular runs long once the characters and central gimmick are clear. I found the third story to be the most interesting, as a sculptor obsessed with the class and breeding of his usual clientele is forced to confront just what kind of people have been paying his bills, and what that makes him for serving them so eagerly for years. It came close to losing a half-mark for that sense of stretching, but I gave the collection the benefit of the doubt.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Quill Pen (Michelle Isenhoff) - My Review
Ghost Ship (Dietlof Reiche) - My Review
Rogue Wave (Theodore Taylor) - My Review
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)