Reviews and Comments

A beautiful book that powerfully illustrates its key claim: that the Native history of Seattle may be dramatically changed and challenged, but it's neither past nor complete. A few things I particularly appreciated:

The vivid description of the multi-ethnic Seattle of the early pioneer days. It made me wish that hadn't been wiped out, and wonder what kind of hybrid culture could have emerged in a Seattle or a Vancouver that had allowed it to keep flourishing.
A clear sense of how the contemporary Tribes of the region relate to ancestral and language groups.
A much clearer portrayal than I've seen elsewhere of who "Chief" Seattle really was and why he commanded so much respect and attention.
Many mentions of individuals and families who weren't necessarily individually notable. A lot of them are very brief sketches, but they still mean much more than just saying "we know there were Shilsholes and Muckleshoots working at this mill", etc.
The powerful sense of continuity of Native Seattle even among all the hardship and forced change.
The atlas section at the end that brings the immediate pre-Settler period to life though its list of place names and explanations of their significance.

That atlas was what I thought the whole book would be, but it's actually much more interesting in the context of all the stories that precede it.

If Robinson were better at writing characters, this could have been a book I'd really love. It has an engaging sweep of a plot, it makes Mars feel more real and reachable than anything else I've read, and all the politics & ecology running through it feel at least possible, mostly plausible. But the characters are so painfully thin! Each is either a pure vessel for an ideology (and at times their arguments made me feel like I was reading the lefty Ayn Rand), or a nation profession combo caricature. By far my favourite parts of the book are the long sections in which Mars itself is the main character, because in those this flaw recedes. And the worst parts are the interpersonal drama because I could so readily slip into dropping the names altogether and just reading it as "Japanese gardener talks to Russian engineer", and so on.

Overall I enjoyed the book enough to keep reading, but found it frustrating enough that I went and read the synopses of the other two in the trilogy because I can't see myself getting around to reading the actual books. The strengths of it left me wanting to hear speculative non-fiction from Robinson, but his weaknesses as a writer of fiction undermined this book pretty badly for me.

This book is a lot of fun and quickly sucked me into its world. There are some ideas I wish it had expanded on. Ironically it seems a bit thin about some of the ideas that the author--as a USian convert to Islam who lived in the Middle East for a while--is more qualified than most to talk about, like the ways it plays with the contrasts between "western" and "Islamic" ways of seeing the world. I have to wonder if there was some fear, from editor or author, of putting off American audiences by going too deep into those. Still well worth a read, though.

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.