I accidentally posted something under my 2022 #book thread but it's time to live in the future! So this is officially the beginning of my 2023 book thread!
Baba Yaga was my favorite character in fiction since I was a kid so I pretty much had to read this one. I liked the setting where catastrophe regularly animates houses with gills or wings to aid in survival, but I wasn’t as keen about the glass-half-full angle on genocide near the end.
Sometimes Chambers books are so good. No plot, but they ask "how would decolonial space exploration work?" or "how could anarchocommunists manage immigration?" And then there's this series which is just "you should value yourself even if you're not productive". Profoundly ok.
Really good. Most of these horror stories fall under the plot “boy loves boy, is horrible”. But my favorite was “When Your Child Strays from God”, which is so sweet: A redemption story about a bad mom connecting with her child and truly accepting him for the first time (with hallucinogens and dinosaurs).
Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic by Anthony Almojera #booktodon#books
Surprised that Emergency Medical Services is part of FDNY. More importantly, that FDNY treats firefighters as heroes but EMS as disposable trash. Firefighters are medic first responders, but in 2020 FDNY kept them back while overworked, underpaid EMTs handled high risk 911 calls.
Top notch alien companions, good worldbuilding. The protagonist is an annoying arrogant creep, but once I understood he was---canonically---a plot device for someone else’s character arc I could tolerate him.
Written like the denouement of a grand fantasy, with the protagonist grieving and moving on and building an ordinary life. It's fantasy, but the mundane gets all the intimately detail, so the book is less about magic than about every SF novel Jo Walton read in 1979.
Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life by Alice Wong #books#booktodon
Listened to the audiobook. No ideas were new to me personally, but it triggered some kind of slow ball rolling that turned into me realizing I'd like to write a short scifi story about disability, so I think it gets credit as inspiration. (Only WE can use the "i" word, ableds!)
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild #books#booktodon
I knew it would be bad, but I was surprised by what horrified me the most: I had the impression that Belgium's colonies were the WORST, that colonialism was BAD but they were SPECIAL. In fact, every rubber colony (incl French/Portuguese) saw a similar population decline of ~50%.
I'm a skater so this was pretty much the story of literally every skater I know, but I did NOT know that RollerCon has an annual themed exhibition match of recovered injured skaters called Robots vs. Zombies:
(people with metal implants) vs. (people with grafts from corpses)
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian #booktodon#books
This book destroyed me. After the last brother found out all of his siblings had been murdered, I started crying but couldn't stop reading.
Texas CPS foster policy is to immediately initiate outside adoption in tandem with family reunification. They do whichever finishes first.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany #booktodon#scifi
I love Delany, but was pretty confused by the ending until I found out it was supposed to be a duology. His relationship with the boyfriend who inspired the protagonist ended, so he gave up on it and wrote high fantasy instead!
A Thousand Naked Strangers: a Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back by Kevin Hazzard #books#booktodon
I guess on reflection, make sense that a lot of paramedics are just jerks addicted to adrenaline. Unironically bodes well for the hope that we could find workers for even emotionally and physically difficult hazardous jobs under UBI / voluntary workforce participation.
Great audiobook narration. Really drives home one of my favorite complaints with modern Discourse: therapeutic language makes it easier to justify selfish behavior than to reinforce community through our obligations to each other as family, friends, and humans.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong #books#booktodon
Not even halfway through the year and I can confidently say that this is going to be the best book that I read in 2023. Just incredible work by @edyong209. Hard to choose one brief pull fact. Hungry spiders tighten their webs to detect smaller bugs?
Whether you should read this book depends on your immediate reaction to the phrase "dark academia queer southern gothic horror". Personally, I felt it started out slow, but built to a very satisfying climax.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes #book#booktodon
I should not be surprised that the existence (and membership) of the 'mile high club' has been an obsession of tabloids since the literal advent of hot air ballooning.
Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa #book#booktodon
Apparently the wealthiest country in the world has regions with endemic hookworm, a "tropical" disease you get from fecal contamination of drinking water. so that's cool. Also there's an 85 mile stretch of petrochemical plants and rural black homes nicknamed "cancer alley". cool.
The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice by Rebecca Musser #book
Perfect zone-out audiobook to consume on a long journey. Pretty shocking. At some point she raves about seizing the great opportunity to join a multilevel marketing scheme and I would have thrown the book across the room except that it was my phone and I was on a plane
When I mention to someone that I love brain-body horror, like horror that makes you instinctively clench your sense of self, good chance they will ask if I've read Blindsight. Anyway now I have and it was so good???
When I mention to someone that I love brain-body horror, like horror that makes you instinctively clench your sense of self, good chance they will ask if I've read Blindsight. Anyway now I have and it was so good???
@nsaphra Right? But yes, much. So much so that a content warning for sexual abuse is warranted
But also the outlook for humanity as a species is…not great in those books, which technically share a universe with Blindsight/Echopraxia but the events of each story do not overlap much.
I read Blindsight first, but Starfish is the one I come back to again and again (and inevitably end up re-reading the whole series)
@nsaphra In the case it's what happens back on earth more or less during the events of the first book. Siri's dad is one character. Possibly related but ultimately enigmatic stuff happens involving ummm the same players (and I mean that very broadly in terms of sociobiological and cognitive systems) as Blindsight.
It's good as a follow-on, adding layers if not explanations. :)
Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids by Scott Hershovitz #book
So normally, I can't stand philosophy 101 stuff because it's entirely just ... lexical semantics? But actually it's more fun to think about the meaning of, e.g., "authority" when the author is describing an interaction with a literal child who is learning language.
Why isn’t everyone talking about this book?? A gothic horror narrated by a parasitic hivemind that controls every doctor in the world. It's got all my fave horror elements:
Solid start to my quest to read every Hugo nom in 2023! Kingfisher playing to her fantasy strengths (romance with a brooding paladin simp). This year's shortlist has more light reads than usual (maybe because they're easier for the expanded Chinese voter bloc to read in English?)
Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy #books#book#booktodon
I kept sending cholera facts to my friends. It kills you by draining your plasma through your guts! Working class Brits thought doctors spread it to get more corpses!
But also, a compelling world history. Ends by arguing that millions of annual deaths are the IMF's fault.
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn #book#books#booktodon
Ok, I knew transhumanism and doomerism mirrored Christian eschatological doctrine. I did not realize transhumanism started as a Christian movement. O'Gieblyn, an ex-fundamentalist seminarian who lost faith, became a transhumanist, then lost faith again, is also a great writer.
Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet by Alice Robb #books#booktodon
Recommend. Every straight man in ballet is the worst person you've heard of. Balanchine's dance techniques are probably responsible for lowering the age of retirement for ballerinas from 41 to 29. One fun fact: Ringling Bros Circus paid him to choreograph a ballet for elephants.
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber #books
The thesis is that the Malagasi and European pirates built an egalitarian democracy and then faked a colonial pirate aristocracy to make it easier to handle European powers. Graeber never convinces me entirely of his thesis, but always convinces me every other history is wrong.
A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold #books
A great memoir, a terrible editorial. Avoiding discussion of the impact of guns in school shootings by framing her son’s suicide as his main goal, Sue doesn’t acknowledge that access to guns absolutely changes the suicide rate.
Something about living with chronic pain that I didn't have words for: you want the body to be a transparent interface to the world, just as you want your relationships to be invisible as you focus on the people themselves. Some things become an object only in their malfunction.
This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Alan Lew #books
If you read my work, you know I love to discretize time. The ultimate discrete treatment of time is holidays, and the absolute pinnacle is new years. I try to celebrate 4-5 new years each year, depending what friends invite me to. This book helped me set my vibes for Elul.
Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures by Stephen Fry #books
I've been enjoying Stephen Fry's Greek mythology series but he is too generous to Theseus, the worst hero (except for Jason who doesn't count since he's just a girlfriend guy).
Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff #books
The nice thing about the audiobook of this is that the narrator---I think it's the author---full on acts out every conversation, crying and hamming it up the whole time.
100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings #books
I couldn't resist the idea that Jennings, a low-key Church of LDS member, wrote an entire comedy "tour guide" to afterlives from mythology and pop culture just to correct misconceptions from the song "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" from the Broadway musical Book of Mormon.
Given how the AI community has been fixated on "nuke as metaphor" lately, it's entertaining to go back and look at the metaphors used for nukes back during the Cold War. And Vonnegut is maybe just my favorite writer.
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher #books#horror
Very spooky but also very funny. I wanted to spend more than one short horror novel with the narrator, a skeptical academic researcher in archaeological entomology, who is stuck in a haunted house.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo #books
I’m not sure I’ve ever read nonfiction that’s at this level of page turner. One surprise to me: William Craft took his advocacy not back to America but to West Africa, where he tried to persuade local leaders to disengage from the slave trade.
If I say, "Chuck Tingle wrote a conversion therapy camp horror story," you already know whether you want to read it. I'm just gonna assure you it's actually good.
A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain by Sara Manning Peskin #books
Highlight is the recounting of an interdisciplinary workshop led by potential inheritors of Huntington's. Premade slides were banned to force everyone to engage fully with an audience of varying backgrounds, and ultimately the meeting led to the modern genetic tests.
A memoir of a perpetual outsider, first a queer South Asian growing up in a wealthy Arab nation and then a hijabi lesbian in the US. The interwoven quran stories were interesting because of the subtle differences from their other Abrahamic versions.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt #books
Charming, though I was slightly disappointed in the octopus narrator. I came in hoping for a truly alien perspective but he was basically a human but smarter and stuck in a tank.
White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link #books
Unlike most feminist fairytale retellings, these read like fairytales not only in style, but in the conviction that love is worthwhile even with unfaithful, fickle, and flawed partners. It felt refreshing and idealistic in spite of the general cynicism.
On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg #books
The important thing is that I now have a taxonomy of atonement (amends, repentance, apology, forgiveness, etc. as separate notions) as well as a refreshing rejection of forgiveness-driven frameworks that prioritize the status quo! I love a taxonomy.
@MrShoggoth It's actually really funny and sad at the same time. And this is pre pandemic. It's really horrifying to contemplate how much worse things are now.
@nsaphra I need to read this. I really enjoyed the show on HBO but it's one of those things were you can tell the book was probably hysterically funny in ways that only halfway translate to TV.
I wasn’t expecting a lot of big thoughts from this book. She’s from an older generation of celebrities with far less agency; Tay is a real trustbuster but Brit isn’t a real anticonservatorship disability activist. Mostly I learned Justin was the WORST! The WORST!!!!
@Kay Will do! I enjoyed Nettle and Bone, I was super into Nona the Ninth, and I am having fun with KPS. They’re all fun books. (Nona is weird and challenging, but not to the same degree as Harrow the Ninth had been, Harrow blew my mind.)
my one disappointment: a lot of the Chinese nominees have never been translated, so I can’t evaluate them, but I’m really hopeful that a nomination for a Hugo means they could get an international translation deal!
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