Reviews and Comments

I'm interested in this because of africasacountry.com/2017/03/how-do-we-talk-about-rebel-groups/

Book 2 of this series gets much heavier than #1, as the backlash to Lewis & co's activism starts to really bite. I knew something about most of the incidents it recounts, but there is a real grim intensity to seeing them all put together in one well-told, well-drawn story.

Wow. This is the first real world-building scifi I've read in a while that wasn't a continuation of an existing world, so the first few chapters were a bit of a wade as it set the scene. Then the book took off and I couldn't put it down.

A lot's been made of the way Leckie handles gender, and it is an interesting detail. Personally, I also really appreciated a related part of this world: that languages are hard. So much scifi waves away all language problems with some kind of magic translator, but in this book it's repeatedly made clear that characters have to invest time and effort into learning each others' languages, those who haven't put in the effort simply can't communicate, and those who have routinetly find some things easier to say in some languages than others. It's one of those details that helped make a world in which there's a lot of almost-invincible tech and so on feel that much more real.

Excellent Culture yarn that now feels more like a swan song than I think Banks could have intended, because it deals mostly with what happens when a civilisation feels it can't progress any more. Lots of intersecting subplots hinging around who knows what and the limits to even the god-like Culture Ships' ability to cross space and time... subplots that by the end get woven together coherently.

There's also a strong theme here about whether knowing the truth about things matters. If I didn't know it had been written a few years ago, I could easily have taken it as deliberate commentary on today's society and politics, but I suppose that's just a mark of great fiction: however much it's set in escapist sci-fi utopia it's of course also about people and how people interact.

A lovely collection of reflective, observational poetry. The poet is also a professional naturalist and it shows: about half of the poems are celebrations of the natural world in Cascadia; often of very small elements of it. The others are more interpersonal, with a few particularly heartfelt poems about loss: bereavement, aging, and the loss of folkways.

Total cliche, but I read this over the MLK Day long weekend, prompted in part by the President-Elect foolishly and thin-skinnedly attacking John Lewis. But I had been meaning to read this for a while...

Anyway, it's an important story well told. For me it filled in some gaps in knowledge (from across the pond our curriculum about this era pretty much stops at MLK and Malcolm X), and made a lot of the background feel more real. There's something about the pettiness of the colour line that's been really getting to me lately--all these things that would have been so easy for whites to concede and make black peoples' lives materially so much harder--and this book captures that well. It also humanises some of the key figures who I'm use to hearing discussed in a rather hagiographic way; of course John Lewis himself the most of all, and I love the digression about him preaching to the chickens.

At its best, this book is a wonderfully imaginative "what if?" that takes the ideas of posthumanists/accelerationists/singularitarians seriously enough to think through how unappealing their future might actually be. But much of the time I found myself struggling through too much density of jargon, pseudo-physics and sci-fi cliches to enjoy it.

This book is several things interleaved.

There's a love story with fairly traditional elements of circumstances coming between the lovers.

There's clearly some autobiography, from an author whose own life gives her plenty of material.

There's a lot of exploration of the dislocation of being an immigrant and the ways in which the assumed community of people from the same place easily falls flat. I identified strongly with a surprising amount of that, given that my circumstances are very different from the characters'.

There's a mourning for Nigeria. Just as with Teju Cole's writing, I see so much of my Turkey in the author's Nigeria.

There's an extended essay about race, racism, and especially how those play out in the USA. This is mostly done very well--if the protagonist's blog were real I'd be a subscriber--but towards the end of the US section it starts to feel like a lecture is intruding on the story.

There's an interesting format experiment in which Adichie basically implements Brecht's ideas about giving away the story before telling it so that suspense doesn't interfere with the other things you're supposed to feel. Only Adichie does this far more deftly than Brecht, so it never detracted from the enjoyment of the story.

It does a surprisingly good job of carrying all these elements, albeit at times feeling a little overloaded. I enjoyed reading it and felt at times like it was really hitting hard.

I picked this book up from a Little Free Library, based on a vague sense that Seth was a writer people said nice things about so I might want to read it. I flicked through and saw that it was all in verse and thought there was no way this could be good. Oh, how wrong I was.

The book tells a few small stories, of the relationships between yuppies in the Bay Area back when home computers were a novelty and the big business were tied to the defence industry. It tells these stories with astonishing beauty; enough that I cried at the end, over the fate of a character who 150 pages earlier I'd decided I disliked and was the author of most of his misfortunes. That's a strength of the book in general: every character is deeply flawed, but the book holds them all with enough compassion that I still cared what happened to them.

And yes, it's all in verse. Sonnets. Onegin stanzas- intricate rhyming scheme and all. 14 chapters of them, the titles of which themselves make the table of contents into a sonnet that summarises the story. While there are moments at which the brilliance of the craft distracts from the story, they are very few, and the form actually serves the book very well, driving it with a pace and lightness of touch that had me read the book in a week and want to start over again immediately.

This was a fun book. The premise really was just "How far can I run with a pun on changing airplanes vs astral planes?", but that served as a nice springboard for a series of vignettes of alternate worlds. Some were clearly commentary on this plane, others just seemed like an exploration of a little idea, and the whole book is breezily written - light reading that's worth taking time over.

I can't usually stomach books with no likable characters in them. I think it's a testament to Iris Murdoch's skill as a writer that this one kept reeling me in.

I'm not sure quite how to summarise a book like this. The plot is fairly simple--and could be covered by a book a tenth as long--but Murdoch uses it more to develop the protagonist's character and frame her own meditations about eternal subjects like aging, how men treat women, and privilege. In the hands of a lesser writer this would make for a clumsy and tedious book, but The Sea, The Sea is a wonderful, satisfying read.

It's a bit Iain Banks by the numbers, but it also has a lot of what made Banks such a great author in it: believably flawed characters, an adventure blown up a little past plausibility, loving descriptions of a place.

Hugely entertaining book, full of weirdness and references - not only the gods themselves but I could see enough subtle little literary allusions to realise there must be many more there. Also some that I suspect may just be looking too hard, but oh well - they didn't detract anything from the book....

I love the broad ambition of this story, the multiple levels it runs on, and the ease with which Gaiman can switch between those levels. It suffers a little from trying to pack too much in. By the end I was a bit tired of new characters being introduced without development, and wishing a few of the subplots had been explored better. It's both telling and a good move that when Gaiman wrote a ~sequel (Anansi Boys) he picked up one of the second-tier characters from American Gods, fleshed him out beautifully, and told a much more focussed story with him. Anansi Boys ends up being a stronger book as a result.

A few references I'm wondering about:

About halfway through part one, there seemed to be a subtle allusion to Eliot's Journey Of The Magi. I'm not sure if it's either intended or real, but read or listen to the poem: www.poetryarchive.org/poem/journey-magi - it seems to fit, eh?

One thing I was left not understanding at the end was why Wednesday needed Shadow. It seemed that he could have orchestrated the whole con at less risk without Shadow involved, which was the one thing I found unsatisfying about the otherwise very clever ending. I read somewhere that Monarch Of The Glen explains more about who Shadow is, so I'm looking forward to reading that.

The two-man con idea feels like a wonderfully biting allegory about US politics. If so, then Gaiman was pretty prescient - it's a thing that has become much more obvious since.

The two-man con and its motivations also feels like an allegory about the "Clash of Civilizations" nonsense that has potential to be so self-fulfilling. I'm pretty sure this on my mind because I happen to have read the book in a week when anti-Muslim attacks in the US are more prominent in the news than usual, but I wonder if it wasn't also an intended message, given that the book was first published in 2001. But then... that crap didn't get much airtime until 9/11, and this book must have mostly been written before that.

And finally, I really want to learn more about Sammy Black Crow. I was expecting her to be more significant in the end.

I really did take three years reading this - one short lecture at a time. I feel I have a somewhat better understanding of what Zen Buddhism is about, which is probably the most one can ask of a book about a tradition that isn't really mine.

One theme that really struck a chord is that there isn't a distinct compartment into which one puts "practice" or "spirituality", any more than there is for "morality" or even "breathing" - to take these things seriously to make them a ubiquitous part of life. I often need reminding of this.