Pet (Awaeke Emezi)

Pet
Awaeke Emezi
Make Me a World
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Once upon a time, the world was full of monsters: not goblins or demons or storybook beasts, but the kind who walk on two legs. They could be anywhere, and look like anything, and they spread their greed and hate and evil far and wide, until the people finally had enough. It took decades, and many things were done which are no longer spoken of, but at last the revolution succeeded. They dismantled the prisons and abolished the firearms that turned public places into potential massacre zones. They turned to proactive intervention rather than reactive punishment, embracing difference and diversity over bigotry and hatred. And the angels, the heroes of that era, still watch over the better world they created in the town of Lucille, one in which the public can at last breathe a sigh of relief, because the monsters are all gone.
At least, that's what the children are taught in school, and what their parents tell them.
Jam did not mean to bleed on her mother's latest unfinished painting. She just wanted to look at it, to ponder the strange, beastly figure of smoke and feathers and horns that had emerged on the canvas. When she accidentally cuts herself, a few drops of her blood somehow wake the creature, or rather open a portal to some strange other place through which it can step into her world. It tells her she can call it Pet, and declares that it is a hunter of monsters, summoned to this world because it is needed.
Surely it must be mistaken; Mom and Dad and all her teachers tell her that the monsters are gone and never coming back to Lucille. But it is quite insistent, and Jam begins to wonder. Would she even know what a monster looked like if she saw one? And could it be possible that one has been hiding in plain sight right in front of her and she just didn't know how to see?

REVIEW: Any book that opens with a prologue explaining its themes to the reader before they can have a chance to read and discover them for themselves is waving a red flag warning that the coming story is not going to tell me a tale but sell me a message. But I'd already given up on another audiobook for my workday and had a very specific window of time to fill, and this looked intriguing. Thus, I waded in.
The early parts have a lot of promise. It takes place in an unspecified place and time, either near future or alternate timeline, where the promise of progressive revolution has borne fruit. All the "monsters" who have warped society for too long, from the child predators to the overpowered monsters who have seized the reins of power at the highest echelons to strangle justice and turn a profit off poisoning the land and murdering countless people, have been cast down, the militarization of police and packing of prisons has ended, and even religious extremism has been nipped, with religion itself only vaguely discussed in school (though the public libraries are well stocked and well staffed and will offer anything to anyone who wishes to learn). Jam is transgender, her parents are different races, and her best friend/potential boyfriend Redemption's extended family includes a parental throuple. This is a future that's as close to an accepting, peaceful utopia as possible, though of course it's not perfect... and, as the book shows, it threatens to become a victim of its own success. Though Jam's and Redemption's parents, and of course the elder "angels" who fought for this society, remember the time before and the many guises of the monsters they overthrew, children no longer understand just how easy it is for terrible people to hide in plain sight. They don't know the warning signs, and when anyone does dare suggest that perhaps there are still dangers in the world, their elders refuse to acknowledge that monsters could ever return; after all, they sacrificed so much and did "hard things" to end the terrors, and they refuse to admit that this is not a battle that can be decisively won and forgotten about. When Jam accidentally wakes the being "Pet" (which may or may not be an angel), she, too, does not want to believe - especially when it tells her that the monster it is here to hunt is in Redemption's home. Her own parents deny the possibility so vehemently that Jam convinces herself that Pet is mistaken, or even lying. Yet Pet insists, while she grows conflicted, then denies any chance of trouble, only Pet insists....
You may sense a bit of repetition in the previous bits. While the early parts of the tale have a certain literary, surreal element - the peculiar being emerging from the painting with its slightly archaic and poetic speech, the way her parents react to its arrival, even the way neurodivergent and selectively mute Jam interacts with the world as much through energy and vibration as verbal or signed communication - it starts getting a little heavy-handed with its themes, and soon sinks into a holding pattern that keeps things stuck for far too long, where Pet insists that it needs to hunt and Jam needs to help it figure out where the monster is, while Jam refuses to take the threat seriously and doesn't really believe monsters are real anymore, only for Pet to once again repeat itself with some variant of "the hunt is the hunt" and "see the unseen" or some other entirely useless phrase or sentiment that fails to convince Jam to step up to a plate that needs to be stepped up to if the story's going to move forward, yet which she dithers about for far, far too long... and even when she does, the tale bogs down more with too much filler and not enough progress. At some point, it stopped being intriguing and started being tiresomely preachy and repetitious, before (slowly) building up to a (slow) confrontation and (slow) resolution, underlain with a religious subtext that felt a little out of place. By the end, my skull was fairly ringing from the sledgehammer blows driving its message home, plus few things irk me more than a sermon mislabeled as a story.

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Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Blackstone Publishing
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the centuries since the Nine Years War ended the old, chaotic, wasteful ways, the world has thrived under a new World Order: inspired by the visionary Henry Ford, every aspect of human life, from conception to death, is carefully controlled and curated like parts on an assembly line. No longer must people strive or suffer or trouble themselves to think or worry; now, everyone knows their exact place and role, from the barely-human Epsilon menial workers to the Alpha scientists and controllers of civilization. Archaic concepts like "love" and "family" and "faith" have been relegated to the past, and the past relegated to oblivion, while any frustration or discomfort is easily dealt with via the omnipresent drug soma. Only in isolated islands and fenced off Savage Reservations do any humans follow the ancient ways, with their disorganized filth and outdated morals, rightly feared and derided by any enlightened mind. But even in paradise, there are those who are unhappy, even if they can't always identify how or why, let alone what to do about it. When the malcontent Bernard and his female companion Lenina visit a Reservation, they encounter John, a unique child of two worlds... an encounter that cannot lead anywhere but tragedy.

REVIEW: First published in 1932, Aldous Huxley's classic depiction of a society entirely subsumed by shallow consumerism and stripped of all pursuit of truth and meaning still resonates today, though some parts inevitably show their age. In Huxley's future, Henry Ford's assembly line, the way it reduced workers from skilled craftsmen to mere interchangeable cogs in a larger machine, was the first step on the road to a dystopian world government (which looks like a utopia from within), to the point where, when religion itself was erased along with other traces of the "irrelevant" past, "Fordism" filled the void... for the masses, at least. The controllers still have access to forbidden materials and ideas, the better to fine-tune the ongoing manipulation and infantilization of the masses; even the Alphas are subject to propaganda and subliminal messaging proscribing their thoughts and habits, while anyone at any level who shows signs of rejecting their programming is either shipped off to remote islands where they can't infect others with the sin of individualism or executed (though of course it's phrased more politely, for all that citizens are desensitized to death from an early age).
This is a world and story populated pretty much exclusively with emotionally stunted, immature people, the inevitable end results of a system so vast and monstrous that they don't even recognize how they've been psychologically and intellectually mutilated; as a result, the characters aren't exactly pleasant to spend time around, even as they all seem to recognize on some level that something isn't quite right with themselves or with society at large. Bernard, whose oddities many attribute to some unfortunately incident in his gestation (all done artificially; the concept of natural conception and birth, like some animal, is utterly repugnant, and the word "mother" is perhaps the greatest, foulest profanity one can utter), feels discontented and drawn to risks and isolation. Lenina flirts with the dangerous idea of only having one partner; in a society where people are expected to freely sleep around, forming any manner of exclusive emotional attachment is considered a perversion. Bernard's sometimes-friend Helmholtz, a slogan writer for propaganda and government programming, wrestles with strange yearnings that he literally has no words for, those ideas - like all art and poetry and anything that speaks to deeper, truer human experiences - having been excised from their lives and vocabularies. But the most tragically mutilated person of all is the young man John. His mother was a Beta who got lost on a vacation to the Savage Reservation while scandalously (and unknowingly) carrying the child of her Alpha partner; the boy is born among the "Savages", but - raised by a disliked mother who yearns constantly for the comforts of soma and the World Order and has no clue how to bring up a child, rejected by the locals for being an outsider (and because of the trouble his mother causes) - does not belong among them, for all that he's absorbed their habits and spirituality alongside the stories his mother told of the "heaven" beyond the Reservation. For selfish reasons (nobody in the World Order ever acts for anything but selfish reasons), Bernard arranges to return John and his mother to London... but even before departure, the writing is on the wall. John understands pain and longing and sorrow and all other manner of forbidden notions, learning to read via a tattered copy of Shakespeare found on the Reservation (Huxley quotes rather extensively from Shakespeare), his ideas of love twisted by a mother who, as a World Order citizen, has no concept of the term and didn't grasp what her son needed from her. It goes without saying that things do not go well when he gets to London and finally sees the truth with his own eyes.
This being more of a conceptual fable than anything else, it tends to wander and meander, bogging down in details of the false utopia of the World Order and, later, in the ways of the "Savages" on the Reservation; there are some iffy racial and cultural things going on here, and the less said about women's roles and character depictions in either culture, the better, though again the whole book is best considered in the light of allegory, not straight-up fiction. Here is where the tale shows its age the most, though it also is telling that, at the time it was written, the idea that those in power would seek not to simply rewrite and literally reshape humans to serve them but potentially eliminate most of them as unnecessary (automation and "artificial intelligence" doing all the tasks for anyone under Beta, or even under Alpha, by Huxley's World Order standards) did not occur, or was not considered a likely enough avenue to explore. Eventually, all the bogging down stops the story dead in its tracks as John confronts the Controller for Western Europe, allowing Huxley to basically talk directly to his audience about the problems the World Order thought it was solving (at least at first; if there ever were good intentions behind the rise of the Fordian concepts in the wake of the devastating Nine Years War, those were long ago subsumed by the bottomless pit of power-lust and sheer greed and the machinery eating its own tail as programmed and psychologically proscribed Alphas took over leadership roles and the perpetuation of the Order) and the rebuttals pointing out the unacceptably high cost for the stability such a system promises, the stripping away of all basic human drives and needs and all things that make life truly worth living in service to shallow wants and childish whims - wants and whims that aren't even one's own, but programmed into society at every level by higher powers. The final parts just draw out the inevitable ending; I don't deal in spoilers, but this is a classic cautionary tale, so don't expect sunshine and rainbows. In any event, this is another classic that I've meant to get to for some time. I'm glad I finally read it, but I don't expect to revisit it any time soon, especially not while I'm living in a futuristic dystopia myself.

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Me (Moth) (Amber McBride)

Me (Moth)
Amber McBride
Fiewel and Friends
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Literary Fiction/Poetry
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Once, Moth lived big and bold and bright as the sun itself, full of music and dance, destined for Julliard and a wonderful future... until the car crash that took her family, broke her leg, and left her with the scar across her face. Maybe if she hadn't burned so bright, hadn't taken up more than her share of space and energy and life, Death wouldn't have had to balance the books by stealing her mother and father and beloved brother - or at least Death would've taken her, too. Even the hoodoo magic learned from her late gray-bearded grandfather can't bring back the dead, nor can it undo the great mistake of her survival, so she's stuck living as a shadow of herself in the home of an aunt who hardly seems to notice her, going to a suburban school where nobody bothers talking to her, trying to shrink herself small enough to disappear altogether.
Then the new boy Sani arrives in school, mere weeks before the end of junior year. Like her, he is full of music, pencil forever tapping out rhythms. Like her, he is overlooked. Like her, he is filled to bursting with unspoken pain.
And he, alone of everyone else in the whole world, actually sees Moth - the real her, the girl she's half-forgotten she is at heart.
Summer is coming, and though neither will say it, both know that this will likely be their only time together before the world tears them apart again. Can these two broken souls save each other, or will they end up burning each other to ashes?

REVIEW: This is a poem in the form of a story, or a story in the form of poetry, a tale of deep grief and deeper magic - both the hoodoo traditions of Moth's gray-bearded grandfather and the native Navajo beliefs of half-Native Sani - and how very, very hard it is to heal a shattered dream. Moth blames herself for surviving the crash, for the grief that drives her aunt to drink, for having dared to dream so big that she unbalanced the world... until Sani arrives, a kindred spirit she recognizes from the moment she sets eyes on him. He, too, seems drawn to her, though he hides many secrets and secret pains of his own. More than once, Moth must ask whether his light is the moon to guide her or the flame that will burn her, and the answer is never clear or simple; the traumas that bring them together are the same ones that keep threatening to push them apart. Always, though, is the sense that, however strongly they feel for each other, there will be no long and happy life together; they both hurt too deeply and burn too brightly for their love to last longer than the span of a season, and they both feel driven to squeeze as much love and joy as they can out of that time... and, maybe, possibly, enough healing to keep going on with their own broken lives afterwards. The poetic language lends a surreal sheen to the tale, as does the magic realism that forms the bedrock of Moth's spirituality; there is no doubt that her gray-bearded grandfather's rituals and spells influence her life and fate. A twist at the end nearly drug the story down a half-notch, mostly because it's been overused, but it more or less works here.

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Welcome to Night Vale (Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor)

Welcome to Night Vale
The Welcome to Night Vale series, Book 1
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Harper Perennial
Fiction, Humor/Literary Fiction/Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The desert town of Night Vale is a place much like any other, where monstrous librarians stalk the shelves of their bookish domain, where the waitress at the local all-night cafe offers customers invisible pie and fresh fruit growing from the branches that sprout from her wooden body, where every road out of town seems to loop right back to the city limits, and where the ghost of a faceless old woman can be found in every home... just your typical small American town. There are many stories in the streets of Night Vale, many happenings that might be deemed odd or even impossible.
Jackie Fierro runs Night Vale's only pawn shop, though she's only nineteen, and has been only nineteen for decades, possibly centuries. It's a shop as peculiar as the town itself, where people are as likely to bring in cursed plastic flamingos or single tears as watches or jewelry, and as likely to be paid in dreams or secrets as with money. Still, for all the strangeness that she works with daily, even she is disturbed when the man in the tan suit hands her a peculiar sheet of paper that she cannot let go of, no matter how hard she tries - a paper with the words "King City" printed upon it. Who is the man? Where is King City? And why is her ordered, ordinary life now skewing so far out of her control?
Single mother Diane Crayton has been working for many years at an office where nobody quite knows what they do, even the employees, but it pays well enough to support herself and her son Josh. Raising a boy who changes shape daily - everything from new faces to utterly inhuman forms and even inanimate objects - is a challenge, especially now that he's a teenager and starting to ask uncomfortable questions about his long-absent father Troy. The man disappeared shortly after Josh was born, and she hasn't seen him since... until, out of the blue, she spies him in the streets of Night Vale. Only there seems to be more than one Troy, a puzzle further complicated when she has an encounter with a man whose name and face she cannot remember but who presses upon her a piece of paper on which are written the words "King City".
Jackie and Diane have little in common, and don't even necessarily like each other, but as their paths keep crossing they realize that they're both facing a greater mystery, and a greater danger, than either can solve on their own.

REVIEW: I have never listened to the long-running podcast on which this book is based, so it's likely I'm missing some context or nuance coming at the story cold. As promised, Welcome to Night Vale delivers a surreal, often darkly comic aesthetic and a tale that bends reality and even causality into five-dimensional pretzels. At some point, though, the story and characters feel a bit lost in the constant firehose of strange happenings and tangential oddities.
With a constant through-line of odd broadcasts from the town's only radio station and talk show, "Welcome to Night Vale", the tale wastes little time laying the weird foundations for what turns out to be a very weird journey. Night Vale exists in a sort of alternate reality, like the far fringes of the multiverse where infinite possibilities begin breaking down into bizarre improbabilities and dream (or nightmare) logic. Time itself doesn't function properly, to the point where each person seems to live their own lives entirely out of synch with their neighbors. Characters who live in a town like this cannot help but be a bit strange, but they're also unfortunately difficult to care about or relate to, even when dealing with relatable themes like family friction and a crisis of life direction. I didn't particularly like either Jackie or Diane, and the town itself was so disconnected from anything like continuity or reality that nothing that happened in, around, or to it seemed to matter anyway. This sense of detachment was not helped by how the nominal heroines often did unintelligent things at unintelligent times, even given the peculiar standards and circumstances of existence in Night Vale. That said, there were several lines that had me chuckling out loud, and some interesting ideas. It had some nice moments and memorable imagery, and I wanted to enjoy it. By the end, though, I found the resolution flat and unsatisfactory, like a very long walk down what was ultimately a short trail to nowhere and back, a story that seemed less interested in telling itself than about relating the strange, silly surreality of its setting.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Blackstone Publishing
Fiction, Horror/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dorian Gray is the very vision of innocent, aristocratic youth, the perfect muse to the London artist Basil Hallward - and the perfect potential protégé of the decadent Lord Henry, who visits Basil's studio during one of Dorian's sessions. When the lord's offhand comments about the fleeting nature of youth and beauty strike a chord with young Dorian, the man impulsively vows that he'd sell his very soul to remain forever as young and handsome and untouched by sin and time as his painted image. Little do any of them suspect that Dorian's wish has been granted. As Dorian falls further under Henry's corrupting influence, pushing himself to experience fully every impulse, every sensation, every desire and whim and darkness a human can aspire to, he retains the visage of purity and innocence... but the painting begins to change...

REVIEW: Once more, I attempt to experience a work of classic literature, and once more I encounter mixed results. The iconic tale of a young man who finds a way to (temporarily) cheat damnation and avoid consequences for his actions remains interesting and compelling, but once again Wilde drifts and meanders and circles around the story as often as he tells it.
From the start, there is something special about the titular portrait, as the artist Basil laments to his friend Lord Henry that Dorian Gray has become a muse, an ideal, and that consequently Basil has put "too much" of himself into the work. Almost from the moment Henry sets eyes on the young Dorian, though, the lord is determined to corrupt the innocence and beauty he sees there, not out of any particular malice or master plan but more as an experiment by a man bored of his own idle richness (and perhaps a touch of unacknowledged jealousy and resentment, his own days of youth and innocence having long since passed by). Dorian, having been sheltered much of his young life, is too easy a prey to resist, taking Henry's cynical, hedonistic, and often self-contradictory orations as gospel truth and inspiration to live his own life as fully and sensually and extremely as he can manage. He does not set out immediately to taste-test the seven deadly sins, but finds his way there soon enough, galvanized by an ill-advised crush on a low-end actress that takes a tragic turn. It is after this incident that he first notices the change in the painting, first realizes that his impulsive vow of long ago has somehow come true... and first comprehends that the painting might serve as either a guide to keep him on the moral path or a "get out of jail free" card that will allow him to indulge every impulse without consequence. The artist Basil and Lord Henry are the angel and demon on his shoulders respectively, though it's clear from that first day in Basil's studio which voice will ultimately win out over Dorian's conscience. There are a few moments where Dorian is presented with options and a chance to turn around, but he remains too convinced that he'll never have to pay the ever-mounting bill of his ever-more-depraved lifestyle, until a final and fateful reckoning.
As in other Wilde works I've read, the tale is heavily embroidered and padded with long side-trips and scenes that ultimately go nowhere but are full of rich sensory details and/or clever high-brow banter. Much of Dorian's descent is less explicitly stated and more implied and hinted at, with dark rumors and reputations gathering like storm clouds over him despite his eternal good looks and charm, the increasing toll of broken lives in his wake. I am glad I finally got around to this one, and I did enjoy the memorable imagery at several points, though once more I found myself wishing it had encountered a somewhat less timid editor at some point.

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Billy Budd (Herman Melville)

Billy Budd
Herman Melville
Dreamscape
Fiction, Literary Fiction
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Young Billy Budd was a perfect sailor, uncommonly handsome and beloved by all who knew him... or nearly all. After being conscripted to a British warship, he inadvertently ends up on the wrong side of John Claggart, the man of arms and de facto enforcer of shipboard law, a one-sided conflict that inevitably must end in tragedy for all parties.

REVIEW: I try to expand my reading horizons on occasion, which includes tackling the odd classic. That said, clawing through the unabridged Moby Dick was one of the most trying reading efforts I've undertaken; despite some interesting parts and characters and some beautiful passages, I am firmly of the opinion that Melville would've benefited from a stern editor. (I'm well aware that this likely marks me as functionally illiterate. If this is an issue... well, it's my book review blog, and there are countless others.) So, given that impression, why did I try his work again? For one thing, this was a short enough work to slot into a slow work day. For another, as mentioned, I found some of Melville's writing intriguing, even if a little went a long, long way. And for a third, my library's Libby app inexplicably listed this as a "fantasy" title, not just a literary fiction title. If there was a fantasy involved in Billy Budd, it was not one that was clear to this reader.
The basic story covers, at rough guess, less than half or even a third of the total narrative, from Billy's conscription, his time aboard the Navy ship, and the tragedy of justice that concludes the affair. The rest, in Melville fashion, weaves around, under, over, and through this rather skeletal framework with asides, backstories, digressions, philosophical diversions, histories, and more. (I looked online, and discovered that Billy Budd was actually an interpretation of an unfinished work by Melville after his death, compiled by his widow and numerous editors from scraps of source material described more than once as "chaotic"... and I am very much not surprised, given how far over the metaphoric map it ranged before eventually, maybe, in a fashion getting back to the actual story it was ostensibly telling the reader.) Billy is described as nothing short of angelic in breeding and countenance (putting me in mind of a "Gary Stu" character, someone so inexplicably perfect and beloved and jealousy-invoking in bad people that he almost has to be an author self-insert), while his enemy is unfortunately "flawed" in countenance and soul, which may be the roots of the envy and resentment that blossoms into a dark scheme to knock young Budd off his pedestal of perfection. Throughout, there are threads of bloodlines and ancestry and class as being determinants of one's innate worth (particularly if those bloodlines involve good white English stock); though a foundling of unknown parentage (perhaps even literally celestial; there's a naïveté behind his oft-described handsome face that almost seems impossible for a flesh-and-blood human working the high seas), it's often noted how everyone just knows he must be of noble bloodlines, while Claggart, though not precisely ugly, always has some mark of an inherently flawed and low-born and perhaps even criminal nature that can never been concealed or expunged. The symbolism's about as subtle as a cannon blast, as the perfect yet tragically innocent Budd fails to comprehend the deceit and conniving of Claggart, unable to understand evil when it's looking him in the face, while Captain Vere finds himself torn between human empathy and immutable maritime laws (laws all the more important and harsh in the wake of recent revolts in the British Navy by ill-treated conscripts). It ends with yet more symbolism (and almost groveling praise for the better-than-this-world Billy Budd), and then three final chapters that do little but muddy the waters surrounding the fallout and legacy of the whole incident, none of which seem profound enough to justify building an entire novel around. At least Moby Dick ends with a cataclysmic tragedy, one that well explains why Ishmael felt compelled to tell others (like the reader) about it...
Long story short, this is another instance where I just could not connect with a piece of classic literature.

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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).

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Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (Oscar Wilde)

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
Oscar Wilde
Naxos Audiobook
Fiction, Collection/Humor/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: A grim prognostication leads a young lord to desperate measures... an aged and proper English ghost is driven to his wit's end by the new American tenants of his ancestral home... a man consoles a friend about a mysterious lost love... Six stories by Oscar Wilde are collected here:
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: A "chiromantist" - reader of hands - at a socialite's party convinces the gullible Lord Savile that he's destined to commit a heinous crime, so he determines to get it over and done with before his impending nuptials... only to find murder is far from easy.
The Canterville Ghost: When an American family purchases an old English estate, they also inherit its irascible ghost, who doesn't know what to do with the unaristocratic and utterly unruly foreigners.
The Portrait of Mr. W. H.: A dinner discussion ignites a passion for an alternative solution to the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets.
The Model Millionaire: A young man has a fateful encounter with an artist's model.
The Sphinx Without a Secret - An Etching: One man's dream girl hides a mysterious double life... or does she?
The Birthday of the Infanta: A young Spanish princess's birthday party features musicians, a mock bull fight, a puppet play, and a boy dwarf dancer who tragically misunderstands his circumstances.

REVIEW: Once in a while I take a run at classics, which I find sometimes go down easier in audiobook format. This collection gathers a handful of stories from one of the more famous English writers, and while they can still be entertaining, they also can't help but bear traces of their time (quite notable in certain racial depictions), particularly in their tendency to draw themselves out with verbal meanderings that don't always contribute to the story.
The first story is riddled with social satire and caricatures of 19th century socialites (and others), an amusing and sometimes silly send-up of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the glorified palmist predicts Lord Savile will murder a distant relative, he starts going through the family Rolodex (or the period equivalent) to find a suitable candidate, as he can't possibly get married with a future felony hanging over his head... but his efforts keep failing him. Along the way, he inadvertently discovers a new perspective on life as he pushes outside his posh comfort zone.
The Canterville Ghost reads like an old Disney family movie from before Disney Studios existed, with very silly overtones and goofy, slapstick antics. The ghost - depicted as essentially an immortal prima donna actor who has never before failed to master an audience - tears his metaphoric hair as the Americans not only refuse to be properly frightened out of their wits, but treat the phantom as a vaguely irritating house guest at best and a laughingstock at worst. The ending veers away from the borderline-cartoony earlier tale into something more sentimental and philosophical, the two parts not quite matching. Some nice imagery and a few chuckles, but overall it was too dippy for my tastes.
The third tale would've been barely more than flash fiction had Wilde not spent so much time rehashing and reprinting and re-analyzing Shakespeare's sonnets (which his target audience was likely more than familiar with) in pursuit of a fictional alternate theory as to whom the legendary bard was addressing in the sometimes-cryptic verses. The theory takes on a life and passion of its own, ending friendships and even a life or two in its fervor before passing on to the next listener. It seems to be more of a study of literary enthusiasts and the dangers of obsession.
The shortest tale in the collection, The Model Millionaire never really develops its story and still takes too many words to reach an obvious ending.
The Sphinx Without a Secret sets itself up as a riff on the old tale of the lover with the secret that must never be pried into (only for the other half of the partnership to be unable to resist the mystery, dooming their future happiness), but never quite feels like it earns the tragic ending it delivers.
The last story is the saddest, though it also feels like one with the most padding, painstakingly establishing the girl princess's father and deceased mother and scheming uncle and more, then plodding through the majority of the party before arriving at the dancing dwarf who - only recently sold into servitude by his charcoal-burner father after a carefree childhood in the forests, entirely innocent in the ways of the "civilized" world or the cruelties of the aristocracy - fails to recognize the dangers in trusting a princess. The final line twists a knife.
While Wilde paints some interesting (if inherently exaggerated) characters and makes many pithy observations and one-liners, the stories do show their age. Additionally, the whole presentation suffered from prolonged musical interludes - not just between stories, but between "chapters" within each of the longer stories. A quick bit to signal a scene change might've worked okay, but these were far too long and grew rather annoying, especially when I could never be sure if they were signalling a switch to a new story or just a very long pause in the same tale. They helped weigh the collection down in the ratings, even though overall I found them more engaging than I'd expected, given my hit-and-miss history with classics.

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Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend (MJ Wassmer)

Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend
MJ Wassmer
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Humor/Literary Fiction/Suspense
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dan Foster's life hasn't gone nearly how he hoped. Pegged as an advanced student from an early age, he should've been a grand success. Instead, he's staring down his thirties from a barely tolerable job, with little but a barely tolerable future stretching ahead of him. The best thing in his life is his girlfriend Mara, so this couples vacation to the brand-new, all-inclusive Tizoc Resort on a private island in the Bahamas should've been a dream come true. Maybe he'll even work up the nerve to propose.
The sun exploding put a definite damper on the fun.
With communications cut off and the wifi down, there's no way to call for help... or even know if help is available. Tensions are rising, the resort guests are fracturing into tribes, and a power couple consisting of a televangelist and the charismatic head of a popular personal improvement franchise/pyramid scheme are making a bid for absolute control, starting with a midnight raid that seizes all of the resort's food and medical supplies (and compromises the security team). Someone has to stand up and fight back, or at least find a way off the island. Will that someone be Dan Foster, or is he doomed to spend the end of the world as he's spent the rest of his life - failing?

REVIEW: Part social satire, part apocalyptic thriller, this is the kind of book that could easily fall flat on its face. Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend actually pulls off the balancing act it sets out to accomplish, creating quirky yet generally interesting characters and moving fast enough to glide over a few weak spots and logic holes while shining its spotlight on class warfare, social stratification, and other ways humans find to distract themselves from the bigger dangers threatening our world and species survival.
Dan isn't always the most likeable guy, but he is a fairly relatable one, at an age where society tells him he should be at his zenith yet feeling like he hasn't even tackled a molehill, let alone climbed a mountain. He takes out his frustration too often on other people, not in a violent way or even an intentional way, but tending to make judgements and sarcastic comments that cut off any potential to actually connect and relate. An exception is his girlfriend Mara, a woman who, as he says more than once, is always her: always compassionate, always acting to help people - even people she doesn't like, always thinking on how to do the best good, never dissembling or presenting a false front. Dan isn't even sure why someone like that would be interested in a guy like him, an insecurity that plays into more than one of his decisions: he becomes so fixated on proving that he's worthy of her love that he nearly destroys the part of himself that attracted her to him, so fixated on protecting her that he fails to realize she doesn't want or need his protecting, so determined that she, at least, will survive long enough to get back to her family that he almost sells out himself and everyone else at the Tizoc. He's not even quite sure himself what he's trying to become, chasing some nebulous, society-endorsed idea of a "real man" that he feels he has failed to embody; only later, after much disappointment, does he finally figure out who and what he needs to be, not just for Mara but so he can live with himself. He finds friends and a few enemies in the dark at Tizoc, including the gay couple next door, an older pair from New Jersey, a trigger-happy guard who seems all too eager for a chance to unleash his inner monster, an astronomer at an observatory on the island with a unique perspective on things, and more. Lillyanne Collins and her husband Pete quickly seize the opportunity presented by the apocalypse to become the presumptive rulers of the island, using a potent combination of charm, religion, gaslighting, social pressure, and strongarm tactics to smash down dissent among the less-affluent resort guests and preserve the power and luxury of the wealthy. Never mind that, without a sun, the rich are ultimately as doomed as the poor; so long as the poor die first and die miserably, the rich will go to their heavenly rewards happy. It's almost a reflex action, a last nerve twitch of a dying body, for them to take one last grab at preserving social inequality, one last kick to stomp down the masses. Dan inadvertently becomes the face of the resistance, despite his protest that he's no radical. Indeed, the first chance he has at shedding the role and possibly buying Mara safety, he reaches for it... but, still, something within him recoils at accepting this too-familiar status quo. Maybe Mara is right and there really is a better way... but how is he going to find it, let alone convince the people around him of it - and will they even have time with the temperature dropping and survival odds dimming?
There are plenty of places where Wassmer could've slipped in this story, but he manages to give the tale and the characters just a little more depth than one might expect, offering a little more insight and some genuine surprises along the way. The ultimate resolution had me waver on the rating a bit, but it plays into the ultimately satirical nature of the overall story; the human reactions might be all too plausible, but the setup was always supposed to be straight out of a B-grade thriller, and the ultimate explanation leans into that. All in all, considering that I had minimal expectations going into it (this was another impulse borrow via Libby, chosen primarily because its runtime would take me through most of a work day), I found myself pleasantly surprised.

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Flux (Jinwoo Chong)

Flux
Jinwoo Chong
Tantor
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: 28-year-old Brandon is a marketer at a once-popular fashion magazine... or he was, until a buyout led to his termination, not to mention a breakup with his boyfriend/boss. Strangely, he almost literally falls into a job offer not long after; after surviving a plunge down an elevator shaft at a mall, a man approaches him with an opportunity he can't refuse, a cushy job at a startup touting a new kind of battery and power generator. With blackouts an increasing problem for the country's straining, aging power grid, this company has the potential to remake the entire energy sector, and Brandon's getting in near the ground floor. But there's something very, very odd about this job. He doesn't actually seem to be doing anything, and he has a hard time remembering just what happens in his spacious office between the start of the workday and when he finds himself back home. The more he digs into the question, the more pushback he meets.
It's only four days before Christmas when 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a terrible accident right in front of their school - an accident Bo blames himself for, because she was coming to bring the boys the lunches he forgot to grab on his way out the door. While his kid brother is too young to process it, Bo finds himself stuck between grief and rage and self-hatred, lashing out at his father, his brother, and everyone around him. His only solace is a detective show from the 1980's, once a favorite of his father's and now a favorite of his, too, about hard-nosed detective Thomas Raider investigating the gritty underbelly of Chinatown, but even Raider can't help him escape his misery.
Twenty years ago, Blue was the whistleblower who brought down a massive corporation that turned out to be a scam - one where three people were murdered to cover up the crimes. Now 48 and mute after a stroke, Blue is about to set foot in the defunct headquarters of Flux for the first time since the trial, part of a prime-time news retrospective. But he has his own reasons for returning, ghosts from his past he needs to confront and a plan that, if it works, will finally give him the closure and peace he has sought most of his life.

REVIEW: Yet another random audiobook selection on Libby, Flux takes a literary approach to time travel tropes while also exploring mixed race identity (and how often the non-white side seems to lose out as younger generations seek to be more "American"), the lingering scars of childhood trauma and family dysfunction, and the power of a beloved franchise to give a person strength and grounding during difficult times.
The three threads mostly focus on Brandon, though of course they're all connected in ways that become clear fairly early on - even earlier if you read the blurb and realize this is a time travel story. (Not a spoiler if it's all but spelled out in the blurb...) From the outset, it's clear that Brandon is an unhappy man in many ways, as well as selfish in that way of people who have been emotionally scarred in the past and react by pushing others away (and self-sabotaging). Even before his termination from the magazine, he can see the writing on the wall, not just for his career - magazine readership has been plummeting across the board - but for his relationship with his supervisor. He meets a potential new girlfriend (Brandon is casually bisexual) while impulsively blowing his severance check at the mall... just before stepping into the open elevator shaft, and the plunge that leads to a strange job offer that seems almost too good to be true, sweeping him into a surreal situation where his new boss doesn't seem to demand any actual work, dragging him to parties and meet-and-greets with the company owner, and time seems to be slipping away from him far faster than his memories can account for. Meanwhile, young Bo crumbles after his mother's death unravels his family, leading to lifelong rifts with his brother and his father - neither of whom truly deserve his wrath, yet he can't seem to stop the flow of anger. Blue prepares for his big interview by revisiting an old colleague from the company he helped the feds pull down, the two reminiscing about the past as the aging man sets himself on one last, desperate task that might finally even the books in a life he has come to loathe... or might destroy everything.
The focus in this book is much more on the "literary" side than the "sci-fi" side, slowly building up the characters and layering in the themes and meandering through the invented cop show's arcs and plot lines and stumbling attempts at racial representation (that come across as very stilted, even insulting to most people viewing it in modern times), and even venturing into the lives of the lead actor and his offspring, before finally getting into the time travel aspect. When it does address that concept, the book recognizes the paradoxes involved, how unlikely it is for anyone to actually change the past or break a loop. The ending feels unsatisfactory on some level, shrugging away questions of how or why.
While Flux is, on some levels, an interesting exploration of a broken biracial man who finds himself navigating a nightmarish situation while somehow having fallen into a life he has come to regret and despise, I also found myself frustrated by the plodding pacing, the tendency to wallow in misery and self-created problems, and a resolution that seemed to disregard previously established rules. I can't say I hated it, but I wish it had lived up to its potential a little better.

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News of the World (Paulette Jiles)

News of the World
Paulette Jiles
William Morrow
Fiction, Historical Fiction/Literary Fiction/Western
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: "Captain" Kyle Kidd once fought for the Confederacy and later ran a printing press in San Antonio, but for years now he has traveled the wilds of Texas, reading news articles from around the world to paying audiences in small frontier towns - everything from the ratification of the fifteenth amendment to harrowing Arctic survival stories to scientific discoveries to fluff pieces about Pennsylvania ice skaters. In his seventies now, he's starting to feel his age and his loneliness, but feels more at home on the road than he does back home, especially with his wife long dead and his grown children back east in post-Civil War Georgia. Besides, he has friends in many of his regular stops... and one has just talked him into a favor, albeit a well-paid favor, he never expected.
The girl was once known as Johanna, but for four years - since she was abducted by a band of Kiowa natives, her family slaughtered - she has been called Cicada. Under government orders, her adopted family turned her over to Indian agents, to be returned to an aunt and uncle she doesn't remember. Now, she has been handed over to an old white-haired man traveling in a rickety wagon, taking her further and further from the only home and life she knows - even tearing away the feather of her golden eagle guardian spirit as she is forced into strange, ill-fitting garments. She'd rather die than live in this ugly, alien White world with its confusing rules and strange language.
On the long and perilous road to Castroville, Kyle and the girl form an unexpected, unlikely bond - a bond that will be tested more than once, as each is forced to consider their futures in different ways.

REVIEW: I remember being somewhat intrigued by this tale when I heard of the movie (which I haven't seen), and meaning to get around to reading it. Part literary tale, part Western, it's the story of a rapidly changing world and two outwardly mismatched souls trying to survive in turbulent times.
Kyle was a soldier long before he was a man, falling into the rank of captain almost by accident and by surviving when many did not, and for keeping a cool head in combat (again, while others did not). He was happiest, though, when he was running messages between army units, just him and a sealed envelope and a wide, wild wilderness. In that way, his itinerant life in 1870 is a return to those days, as he brings news (and a chance to temporarily escape the harsh reality of everyday frontier life) to the hinterlands of a Texas that still has not succumbed to the taming hand of civilization, where the government hardly seems to care who is cheating, robbing, or slaughtering whom (at least if more brown, black, and native bodies fall than white ones) so long as those at the top can stuff their pockets. It's almost as if Kyle never really stopped living in a war zone, with raiding bands and thieves and corrupt lawmen all too common on the roads. Still, he has always been a principled man, living by his own strong moral compass even if those around him are only out for themselves. It's this moral compass, the unshakable belief that a job started must be finished and a promise to a friend is as binding as any legal document, as much as the money he is offered - a fifty-dollar gold piece - that compels Kidd to take the more-than-half-wild ten-year-old girl Johanna across 400 miles of barely-civilized Texan terrain.
The girl, for her part, has been traumatized twice over in her young life. At six, she survived the brutal slaughter of her family, for all that she does not seem to remember the incident. Then, she was torn away from the only family she ever knew and loved, the Kiowa mother and father and brothers and sisters she had bonded so strongly with that she cannot even imagine life away from them. Whatever English (or German, her parents being immigrants) she ever knew has been forgotten, along with everything she ever knew about White ways. She clings to the lessons and strength of her Kiowa teachings even as she is taken further away from that life and back to "family" she can't even remember. Slowly, almost despite herself, she connects with the kindly yet firm old man she is stuck traveling with. When they are set upon by the worst sort of robbers, their bond is cemented in gunfire and blood... but inevitably their journey must end. Will their bond and friendship end there, too? The decisions they make will test them both, but ultimately ring true for the characters and their world.
The tale moves fairly well, as the pair encounter various characters and different challenges and towns along the way, each part of the complex, sometimes contradictory tapestry of Texan life in the late 1800's. It's a world in a state of rapid flux, the old frontier lawlessness clashing against the rising tide of settlers and their settled ways, where carving out a small pocket of stability and happiness is sometimes nigh impossible but about the most any individual can hope to manage against the greater tides of the world. I thought the ending was a slight bit telegraphed, and the bits after lingered a hair too long, but overall it turned out to be an entertaining, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes heartwarming story of two lost souls finding a connection - and a better future - in a wild and harsh land.

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The Last Murder at the End of the World (Stuart Turton)

The Last Murder at the End of the World
Stuart Turton
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Literary/Mystery/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: The world ended in an unstoppable mist that spread around the globe, full of glowing insects that devoured every living thing they touched. Now, only one island remains, a former military base turned elite science lab called Blackheath, protected by an energy barrier. A village of one hundred and twenty-two people manages to survive under the guidance of the last scientists, the "Elders", and the omnipresent artificial intelligence known as Abi, which sees into the villagers' thoughts and can even guide their actions or alter memories as needed. It is a peaceful life, without the conflicts and prejudices that so poisoned the old world.
Until the murder.
One morning, the villagers wake to find a fire in their village - and among the bodies is that of Neima, the oldest and most beloved of the Elders. Worse, none can remember what happened, though chaos throughout the village hints that something terrible indeed took place. At first glance, it looks like a tragic accident - but one villager, Emory, has spent her whole life asking questions, and she has questions aplenty about Neima's death. When the villagers learn that the barrier that held back the deadly mist has fallen with the scientist, the quest to find the killer and unravel the truth becomes even more urgent.

REVIEW: Another impulse borrow from Libby, the concept intrigued me, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a mystery plot. The execution, however, can waver, and it starts to lose its way toward the end.
Told from the omniscient viewpoint of Abi, the tale starts with a countdown to the potential extinction of the last humans, from those living on the island of Blackheath to the ones in stasis in the old bunkers underground. Despite being on a clock, though, the tale takes its time setting itself up, drifting through various characters as it shows the reader the world of the last living sanctuary on Earth. Just who or what created the deadly mist is never revealed, though there's a strong spiritual/religious vibe underneath things, a suggestion that the mist acted as a punishment against a world lost to madness and sin (and sucks to be any other animal on God's green earth). In the village, Neima has worked hard for over ninety years to create a little utopia for the villagers, who may not be entirely what they appear to be, though the other two scientists seem indifferent at best to the people, each with their own agendas that sometimes clash with Neima's visions. With her death, the island is thrown into chaos even before the villagers realize that the mist is slowly encroaching on their sanctuary.
The most pivotal character, Emory, is a villager who has never really fit in with her peers. Unlike the others, who are happy to follow orders and sacrifice themselves for the good of the many, Emory always asks questions, to the point where she's never found an occupation she can stick with longer than a few months. Even her apprenticeship to Elder Thea, who explores the wilderness beyond the boundaries of the village (boundaries that Abi enforces by literally taking control of the villagers and turning them around if they try to cross without an Elder's permission) for old relics and technology, where her questioning mind might have been put to decent use, ended in disappointment when she wouldn't blindly follow any instruction the Elder gave her and always had to know why. Neima, however, indulges her curiosities, and even lets her read from the handful of surviving fiction books, particularly mysteries (the other villagers have little interest in old-world stories, considering them too violent and "unbelievable" with how people treated each other). Thus, when a detective is finally needed at the end of the world, Emory is there to step up... not without significant resistance, though. It's only Abi's demand that Neima's murder be solved and the culprit named - the artificial intelligence's demand before overriding the scientist's "dead man's switch" that deactivated the barrier upon her death - that allows the village of born-and-bred sheep to tolerate her investigation. Of course, the investigation would not be necessary if Abi were a little more cooperative, but it has its own secret agenda that it alludes to frequently, constantly reminding the reader that it has a Big Plan and everything it's doing (or not doing), no matter how contradictory and how it seems suspiciously like actions meant to draw out a storyline, is in service to that Plan. It gets more than a touch irritating, like the guy sitting next to you as you read a book he's already read, smirking and winking and asking if you've figured out the twist or gotten to "that part - no hints, you'll know it" yet. In any event, Emory's investigation leads to many revelations about the nature of Blackheath, the villagers, and the scientists. It also leads to many meandering tangents and red herrings, several of which seem to emphasize just how superior to modern humanity this last tiny remnant of civilization has become, how all the horrors and tragedy of the mist must've been a fair price to pay for this little flock of holy sheep to find a new Eden. (Early on, Emory's father even carves a statue of the girl reaching for an apple off a tree, because apparently the reader had to be bludgeoned over the head with the Biblical symbolism.) I found myself not really liking the vast majority of the characters after a while, which was the point for a few of them but was probably not intended for so many of them... including Abi.
Anyway, things move along, sometimes at a decent pace with some solid investigation and interesting worldbuilding, sometimes less so as it starts to feel like everyone's running in circles and talking past each other (all with the big extinction clock ticking away in the background, which one would think would spark some slight urgency and compulsion to cooperate in even the most recalcitrant person, but apparently not), all of which feels unnecessarily complicated by Abi pulling everyone's strings (because of course the entity knows full well everything that's happened). The climax of the mystery and the encroachment of the fog coincide to a manufactured degree, and even then revelations are drawn out. The results of at least one of those incidents almost had me rolling my eyes at work. Afterwards, things trundle along toward a foregone conclusion of an epilogue that could've been worse.
The Last Murder at the End of the World has several points in its favor, with some nice ideas and some solid sleuthing (when it lets itself sleuth properly), but it also has some unfortunate word flab and unnecessarily heavy-handed Themes that held it down.

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Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu)

Interior Chinatown
Charles Yu
Pantheon
Fiction, Humor/Literary Fiction
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Being Asian in America often feels alienating. Perhaps that's why Willis Yu sees life as an endless movie where he and all his neighbors are playing roles in modern Chinatown. As Generic Asian Guy, playing bit parts in the background of everyone else's plotline, he aspires to someday be Kung Fu Guy like his father once was (though more recently he's faded to merely Old Asian Man), the closest Willis feels he can ever come to a starring role in his own life. But when the spotlight finally finds him, he discovers that it's not as easy or as wonderful as he always dreamed... and sometimes the things one wants the most are far, far away from the things one really needs.

REVIEW: From the outset, Interior Chinatown - a novel largely in screenplay format - establishes a surreal meta-reality where life both is and isn't a series of movies or TV episodes... none of which, at least in America, seem to have room for an Asian lead. The son of immigrants, Willis absorbed culture as much through TV reruns and their stereotypes as through his parents and Chinatown surroundings. Even when a show ostensibly starred an Asian character, as in the old TV series Kung Fu, it's almost invariably a white man in costume. Still, he grew up aspiring to be "Kung Fu Guy", the most powerful role he's seen on screen and in his life; his father was once the neighborhood Kung Fu Guy, but even that was still just a role invented by white people, another box to put Asian people into rather than seeing them as real people, real Americans, with their own dreams and hopes and histories. As Willis works to rise above Generic Asian Guy level three ("delivery boy", working for the same Chinatown restaurant where his parents worked, the one beneath their run-down apartment and the heart of Willis's community), he finds himself part of a detective show featuring a white woman and Black man, yet more boxes checked... even as, more than once, people step out of and around their roles to talk directly to the reader and/or Willis. As the young man unexpectedly finds a chance at genuine happiness, one beyond scripted scenes, he must confront what internalizing stereotypes and archetypes has done, both to his own life and his community (and the country at large). The whole is a complex examination of what it means to be an Asian in America, a country that has, at various times, tried to criminalize, dehumanize, and categorize Asians in various ways that perpetually brand them, in big ways and small, as not "really" American (read: not white American). At times the surreality threatened to swamp the story, and there was more than one time I thought Willis needed a conk on the skull to get some sense through his cranium, but overall it was entertaining and thought-provoking, offering no easy answers or quick fixes. (It also was short enough not to overstay its welcome.)

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No Two Persons (Erica Bauermeister)

No Two Persons: A Novel
Erica Bauermeister
St. Martin's Press
Fiction, Collection/Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Millions dream about writing the "great American novel", but only a handful actually do it. Writing is a peculiar alchemy, melding skills, talents, perseverance, timing, and a healthy dose of luck... and even then, once a book is released, there is no sure way to predict how people will react to it, no two people ever reading the same story in the same way. One reader's treasured tale is another's one-star trash, and one generation's brilliant bestseller is the next's cringe-worthy and forgotten dust collector. Some books, though, seem to transcend.
After Alice's wayward brother Peter dies of an overdose, she manages to turn her emotional devastation into a novel, "Theo", about a young man struggling with a broken life - a character who is and is not her brother. Her book survives the gauntlet of the slush pile and debuts to solid reviews, passing into the hands of all manner of readers from all walks of life. Each pick up Theo's story with different expectations, and each are changed in ways Alice could never have imagined.

REVIEW: The title refers to a quote attributed to Edmond Wilson: "No two persons ever read the same book." It's not just about different tastes or different reading levels, but about life experiences and expectations. The book one reads at eighteen will likely seem like a different story entirely at forty. Baurmeister's novel, in truth a collection of shorter stories linked by the fictional novel "Theo", explores that idea, starting and ending with the author Alice. In between, "Theo" comes to the hands a variety of people - an agent's reader, a frustrated artist, a recently-homeless teenager, a widower struggling to move on, an actor facing a crumbled career, and more - in a variety of ways. None of them see the exact story Alice intended, let alone glimpse Peter's shadow lurking behind the main character, but all find something in the story that helps them re-evaluate their lives or rediscover something they'd lost or forgotten. As the novel is discovered by more people, some of the threads overlap around the edges, though each person experiences "Theo" as most reading is experienced: on their own, in their own heads and hearts.
This being "literary" fiction, the stories comprising No Two Persons are prone to meandering and slow character buildups; the central novel often doesn't land in their hands for quite some time. There was also a sense of... I don't want to say "sameness", but a familiarity in characters across several stories. I can't quite put my finger on just why that was, and since it was an audiobook I was listening to at work it's not like I can flip back and check my notes, but I found myself feeling a bit "been there, done that" with more than one character. (And I also had to wonder about some vicarious wish fulfillment in the idea of one woman writing not just any debut novel, but the debut novel, the one that so deeply and irrevocably touches so many readers... and is then apparently able to live off that one success for many years.) Throughout are insights into storytelling, writing, and reading, and even audiobook recording. Speaking of, the audiobook version I borrowed via Libby included an interview between the author and one of the voice actors (it was a "full cast" presentation), which was interesting but sometimes felt like it ran a bit long.
After thinking it over for a while, I wound up shaving a half-star off a Good rating for the meandering and sense of repetition, and also the usual subjective "just not my cup of cocoa" reasons that sometimes hold down ratings. My blog, my call, etc. That said, I can see what it was going for and what it accomplished, even if it didn't quite hit the mark for me.

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Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer)

Too Like the Lightning
The Terra Ignota series, Book 1
Ada Palmer
Tor
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: On 2400's Earth, power structures and societal norms have been radically altered. Humans no longer identify with geographic nations but with Hives of like-minded people. Nonviolent criminals are sentenced to life as Servicers, essentially slaves unable to own property or acquire money and required to aid any who demand it. The family unit has largely been replaced by bash'es, community dwellings of mates and friends. And, ever since the bloody Church Wars, organized religion has been outlawed, priests replaced by sensayers: those trained in the innumerable belief systems and philosophies of humanity who act as spiritual counselors.
Mycroft, a Servicer with access to some of Earth's most powerful individuals, was assisting the prominent Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' - center of the global transportation system that keeps the modern age moving and nations borderless - when he stumbled across a secret that would eventually remake the world: the boy Bridger, whose mere touch and willpower could bring toys, drawings, and mere ideas to life. As one of the few privy to the child's secret existence, he takes it upon himself to defend him from a world not yet ready for him, and to defend the boy from a world he is not yet mature enough to face... but a series of seemingly unconnected events begin to tip the global balance of power. In such chaotic times, secrets will undoubtedly be revealed, for good or ill.

REVIEW: It's not often that I can say a Bad review is a generous rating, but I had to take into account the fact that, in most ways, this story and this reader were completely mismatched from page one. Given that I could not have been the intended audience, take my opinion with a healthy dose of salt.
This is a literary novel to its marrow, a book where the reader is expected to be conversant in eighteenth-century philosophy and ancient politics and numerous other topics I generally find as fascinating as drying cement, and at least as thick to slog through. Without such interest or expertise, it read like the written version of the Codex Seraphinianus, an art book purporting to describe a surreal alternate world that contains bizarre pictures such as multi-headed birds and transmogrifying humans, but with all text written in an entirely invented, intentionally untranslatable script. Like the Codex, I was presented with strange, often baffling images of a world I could scarcely relate to, with walls of words that meant next to nothing to me. This sense of disconnect was not helped by the writing style, which deliberately (and often aggravatingly) mimicked eighteenth-century styles in its slow, description-heavy pace, frequent tangents, and multiple breaking of the fourth wall to address the hypothetical reader, not to mention a general expectation that I'd find anything the narrator chose to describe gripping; at more than one point, I was supposed to be spellbound as various characters calculated statistics. Characters - of which there were far too many, often with multiple names that I was supposed to somehow keep straight - were universally unlikable caricatures, often twisted (not helped by an unreliable narrator who might be insane), with not a single healthy relationship between them. The future world claims to have cast off gender identity, yet time and again gender-based stereotypes (not always tied to anatomical gender) played out in heavy handed ways - some of which was deliberate given the narrator's proclivities and Points Being Made about society, all of which was tooth-grinding. Most of the cast seemed to be terribly important, Hive leaders and such, but be danged if I cared about any of them, especially viewed through Mycroft's writing. It all takes place in a future that's essentially a bizarre update of the Enlightenment, one where radically altered societal norms merely create new markets for deeper deviations and depravities and hedonism under the surface... but, since I couldn't care about the characters, I couldn't care about the world that their actions and power games might save or destroy. What's the plot actually about? Darned if I could describe it even after reading it, as the plot (a dense and convoluted thing involving murders and possible religious cults and a coming global recession and power plays, all only incidentally touching on the miracle boy Bridger) really isn't the point. Like many literary novels, it's more about the themes, the ideas, the mood, and the various topics the author wanted to lecture about via the loose framework of a book. (I was not at all surprised to read that the author is, in fact, a history professor.) Naturally, as the first in a series, the ending doesn't really wrap up much, making it all the more disappointing.
I had heard many interesting things about Too Like the Lightning. It was a contender for major awards. It had lots of positive buzz. And I can see just enough to understand how someone other than myself would be taken with it (enough for me to soften the rating I almost gave it, to allow for my own lack of literary taste): it does create a very unique future, for one thing, with societal changes on almost every level in ways that some authors neglect. But ultimately I could not enjoy it. My lasting impression is that any book where a character who quite literally can conjure life with a touch is relegated to a half-forgotten subplot compared to economic crises and what amount to board room meeting minutes has gone wrong at some point.

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Animal Farm (George Orwell)

Animal Farm
George Orwell
Signet Classics
Fiction, Literary Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: After years of neglect by their drunken human master, the animals of Manor Farm - heeding the words of a wise old pig, who foresaw a future utopian republic of free animals across England - rebel and take control... but what they fought for is not what they find, as the promise of a republic crumbles into a harsh, new reality on the renamed Animal Farm.

REVIEW: This classic is a scathing commentary on politics, totalitarianism, class warfare, revisionist history, and human nature in general, delivering its messages with the subtlety and repetition of a five-ton jackhammer. The farm animals prove too stupid and easily manipulated to realize they're being betrayed by those they'd considered their own kind, and power inevitably corrupts. It's a story with no real heroes, only villains and fools, plus a few cynics who, while aware of the situation, are ultimately in just as bad a place as the fools and so don't gain much with their cynicism. Is there any hope for a better tomorrow, or any system that won't inevitably succumb to the base greed and manipulation of the Few over the Many? Apparently not. This was likely Orwell's point - a point sadly as obvious and valid today as when Animal Farm was first published in 1946 - though it seems like he took an awful lot of time and effort writing this 128-page fable when he could've said much the same thing in a shorter speech or essay.
As a closing note, the Signet edition I read included a foreword by P. G. Wodehouse, but I confess to giving up on it partway through.

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Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Moby Dick
Herman Melville
Classic Century Works
Fiction, Literary Fiction
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: In the mid-1800's, the heydey of Nantucket's whaling fleets, itinerant Ishmael heeds a nameless urge to sail the seas. When he signs on to the Pequod, he finds himself under the command of the one-legged Captain Ahab, a man who has bent the whole of his being - and the whole of the crew - to the pursuit of Moby Dick, the whale that crippled him.
NOTE: The edition linked to is not the exact edition reviewed.

REVIEW: I picked this title as part of a reading challenge, Moby Dick being one of many classics I haven't gotten around to yet. But for the challenge, and a promising (if somewhat slow) beginning, I would've thrown in the towel before the halfway mark. Melville, through Ishmael and other characters, waxes poetic and profound on all manner of topics, some only tangentially related to the voyage... then, to be sure the audience understood just how profound he was being, he repeats himself. (If you have to explain the brilliance of your insights, your insights can't have been that brilliant. Either that, or you consider your audience to be exceedingly dim.) Roughly half of the book has nothing at all to do with Ahab or the voyage, being dedicated to the history of whaling, cetacean anatomy, and other subjects. By the time Melville remembers the main storyline, most of the characters he painstakingly described and established are just a heap of forgotten names, the story arc and tension shattered in the wakes of so many leviathan-sized interruptions. It doesn't help that much of that painstaking effort establishing characters falls completely by the wayside as Ishmael and others grow increasingly philosophical and fatalistic; for instance, much effort goes into describing the savage harpooner Queequeg and his bond with Ishmael, but they hardly exchange two words once the Pequod's ill-fated voyage leaves Nantucket. (As for rampant racism and Ishmael/Melville's peculiar notion that whales were immune to extinction, among other oddities, this was written in the 1800's...) After agonizingly slow and wordy fits and starts and circular side-tracks, the final 70-odd pages pick up for a decent, if drawn-out, finale. The whole thing, frankly, reads as if Melville badly needed an editor, or at least one good final read of his draft before publication. While there are some few memorable moments and characters, the blubber-to-meat ratio is far too fatty for my tastes.

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