I #JustFinished The Road to Somewhere.
It tries to explain the rise of populisim perticluarly in #Britain
While I don't agree with everything in the book, it is pretty interesting.
It works hard to avoid blaming the affluent (and never saying rich like it's a four letter word).
But even while not saying the quite part out loud, it implies that both rich liberals and conservative are leaving the young and the poor behind. Which historically has not had the best results.
#JustFinished Where Peace Is Lost by Valerie Valdes.
Very different from her series starting with Chilling Effect, Where Peace Is Lost is much more serious. It reads as a quest to save a world, a journey or personal forgiveness, romance, and anti-capitalist philosophy. That's a lot to cram into 12 hours. It's all well done though, not seeming patchwork at all. Thus I zoomed through the story in two days.
#JustFinished Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice.
Rice weaves a gorgeous follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. About 12 years have passed since the power went out, and the Anishinaabe in what was the northern Ontario province are in need of a new home as local resources are dwindling. Moon of the Turning Leaves follows a group south and east as they search for a better place, preferably in their ancestral lands.
#JustFinished The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
This was a great book! Graeber and Wengrow integrate new archeological discoveries with anthropology and turn common belief on its side. In the same way that we used to think that evolution was a progressive march to new and improved species, we also thought that human development was on an upward arc to better things, with capitalism and
This is a lovely, slow book. Reynolds takes us through the time of a life lived on repeat, through the unraveling of the mystery, and to the hope of happy endings. Quite masterfully done.
Pretty long, kinda slow, but compelling. A crew of miners are called on to chase an alien spacecraft to the edge of the solar system in order to find out what they can about it before returning home. This is the story of how they survive when things inevitably go wrong. Reynolds gives us a realistic and yet optimistic view of humanity and our foibles.
#JustFinished the third book in Tad Williams Otherland series, Mountain of Black Glass.
3/5 stars, I wish I could say they're getting better with each book. Don't get me wrong, they're still good, but the more I read the over descriptions of the virtual environments are getting to me 🤔
It was an interesting book, and a decent sequel. I never felt the main human romance was really believable or rooted in anything other than plot though. The interactions between the main female character and her alien companion were much deeper.
The politics were rather heavy handed, but the societal impacts were, sadly, quite well done. Humans would be a shit show of xenophobia and power...
#JustFinished Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
I feel like he spent too much time working at being cutesy and not enough at internal consistency. It was an amusing book, however. Taken as a light historical fiction about the run-up to modern life, it's good enough.
One example of the issues with the book follows:
He sets up the straw man of biological essentialism, then knocks it down with social consctructs.
#JustFinished Elves, Trolls and Elemental Beings a collection of Icelandic folktales.
The stories were so so in quality even if I always find lore interesting.
But I found myself curious the theme of missing people? Was children and people going missing super common in these times? Because why else would it be such a common theme in the folktales?
First contact! Conspiracies, government agents, conspiracy theories, warring alien factions - this book has them all in spades. And yet, the story almost seems languid for much of it. This was not a drawback for me. I liked the slow burn for much of the novel, with the reveals coming slowly.
#JustFinished A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong
The library told me it was SciFi. It was only that insofar as it involves time travel. It was a period mystery with a modern detective. I don't usually read mysteries, as I'm not particularly a fan. As such, I found this only meh.
#JustFinished Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
A ghost story/mystery set in the 1920's in NYC. As the third in the series, it wraps up some storylines while bringing others to the forefront. It ranges across the city and involves a cavalcade of characters living their lives with psychic abilities. They save the city from the ghost invasion, but there is sadness and loss along the way.
This is a diificult book for me to review, as I had mixed feelings throughout the book. It was written as an update to 1984 told from the main female character's point of view.
Initially, I thought it was a great reimagining of the story. Newman makes Julia more intelligent than she was cast in 1984, which does make the character more interesting. As the book went on, Julia is so cynical
What if proving sentience to the other inhabitants of the universe was just like Eurovision?
This is the first goofy scifi I've read that actually comes close to living up to Adams' Hitchhikers without overdoing it the whole way through. Parts are wryly cutting, lambasting those who deserve it, like officious governmental cogs too full of...
#JustFinished How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
It is an incisive economic analysis of empire, focus on the U.S., but touching on other modern empires. Starts around the mid-1800s and goes through the fall of that type of empire building and the reasons behind that as well. Late in the book, he gets into the current military-based empire we run. The author used a nice mix of personal stories and facts in accessible prose.
The world is a strange mix of space-faring and Victorian, but not steampunk. The plot twists were actually pretty surprising and more macabre than I was expecting, even given the name of the book is Revenger. The book was creative, and it was delightful to read YA without a romance involved and to just see this young woman grow into who she needed to be. That woman is quite engaging and powerful.
#JustFinished On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard.
This was a foray into what it means to be family and how our mistakes can bring us closer to being good people. I enjoyed it.
The existence of ancestor worship (this is not the first time I've seen in it API books) in the far flung future of this universe made me wonder if there's a similar carrying forward of Christianity in Western SciFi that I'm not seeing due to my cultural blind-spots.
The narrator leads us through a look at Earth and posh English culture from the eyes of an alien. Humorous without stepping too far, it leads into a serious story as the narrator grows. By the end, it's poignant and we're left with the warm fuzzies. Truly a lovely arc of a story.
The finale of the Women's War trilogy, it truly wrapped it up well. I waited a long time for my library to get the audiobook, and finally ended up buying it. As soon as I started this one, the story came back in all its interwoven glory.
In a sense, it's the story of civil war among a royal family. But it's also about social upheaval when birth control comes on the scene. Solid ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for the series.
#JustFinished
the second book in the Otherland series, it came down to the line between a 3 or a 4 star rating.
Much of the book seemed to be spent on the descriptions of the virtual environments. I felt it didn't add much to the story since these environments felt like "throwaways", but in the end I gave it a 4 stars because the overall concept is still interesting to me.
This one didn't hold up well. There were many slurs and some very asinine assumptions.
His dystopian utopia bred people into levels of intelligence and (presumably) drive. Then, forcibly infantilized them during their off-hours with drugs and abundant sex. (I'm not going into the whole squick of the sex games for toddlers and calling having sex all the time a way of infantilizing people...)
I had never read this before. And that was a hole in my reading, given I'm in my 6th decade.
1984 is one of those books everyone should read. Yes, it's heavy-handed. No, it's not spectacular writing. Yes, we all need to be aware of giving up too much power to our government. But there are other things too.
Orwell's discussions of the proles clearly speak to not leaving them with no safety net. (Winston's youth,
🧵 #books#bookstodon#classics@bookstodon
#JustFinished Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Similar in format to How High We Go in the Dark (Sequoia Nagamatsu), in that it's a collection of stories tied together with a framework, I don't feel it was executed quite as well. It is a lovely story of romance and hope, but I felt a little too distant from the characters, as if the writing held a layer of remove for me. I did enjoy it. I just preferred the other.
#JustFinished Dragonfly Falling, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
OK, I'm not sure why, but I thought this was a duology. Oh, no. It's like 8 or 10 books. Guess I'm in for the long haul. Good thing I like the world!
War rages across a continent, sweeping down into the lowlands toward people who haven't run into and don't believe the scope of this conquering empire. Tchaikovsky's world-building is as amazing as ever. Rich, complex, realistic characters. 👌