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I enjoyed almost every scene of this book. A horrible man who thinks he loves women but does so in thoroughly misogynistic ways (Murdoch was so good at writing this type) gets himself into ever more absurd self-inflicted trouble. His combination of self-absorbedness and refusing to ever really question himself make him insufferable, but his adventures are a good laugh.

But from chapter to chapter I kept asking myself why I was still reading. Somehow the whole of this book is less than the sum of its parts. Given that, the circularity of Jake ending in almost exactly the same way he started felt frustrating, when I think if the arc had felt more compelling along the way it would have been a satisfying end.

This is a powerful memoir which has a lot to say about how we (particularly Canada as a resource extraction colony, but also a broader "we") treat the people whose physical labour runs parts of the economy we'd rather not think about. The experience turned out predictably badly for Beaton, but in looking back she maintained empathy for the people involved, keeping a clear on focus on what the context of oil sands work camps does to people.

The letters that make up about half of this book are gorgeously written, and I love the story they tell. The basic idea of the time war is clever, and the descriptions of placetimes the characters find themselves in evocative, sometimes reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I devoured this book in a few days.

And yet... something about it felt a little thin or hollow behind its fireworks. I think it was a good artistic choice to leave all technical details out, but I couldn't help but get hung up on the time paradoxes. Not that it's the authors' responsibility to necessarily avoid or solve them, but for me personally they intruded on the suspension of disbelief.

This is a collection of 80 short essays each by a different writer, each anchored to a consecutive 5-year span, starting with the first documented landing of enslaved Africans in the North American colonies.

The range of voices is a huge strength, with each writer not only having a different style but getting to make dramatically different choices in where to focus attention. Individually, many of the essays filled in gaps in my knowledge, but the whole is much more than the sum of those parts. It helps the book really live up to its "community history" billing - while of course even 80 authors can't speak for a whole community of millions, they can get a lot closer to that than any one alone could.

As should be expected given the subject matter, many of the pieces are very heavy and grim. Certainly some of the things I learned from reading it are further, deeper depravities than I'd already known of how white people dehumanised those they had enslaved. But there are also flashes of brilliance.

I never read more than one chapter in a day, to really let things sink in. That it took me so much longer than 80 days does reflect the heaviness: this is not a book to escape into after a hard day. But it's thoroughly worth the effort.

I love this book for being an alternate history that's not fixated on Hitler. I love it for how carefully it weaves its fantasy into the real history it's anchored in - enough so that as soon as I finished reading it I had to read up on the actual Red Turban rebellion and see how many of the characters were close adaptations. I love it for how much desperate, furious, and yes sometimes joyous life its main characters have. I love it for how viscerally it evokes some incredibly hard times (though be warned, it's a heavy read because of that). I love it for how utterly unsympathetic all the "big people" are.

Around the middle of the book the weight of Fate on both the plot and multiple characters' obsessions started to feel stifling, but the more the narrator complicated that idea the more this stopped being a problem.

I absolutely adored this book. I realise that part of this is that it was a perfect little escape while I was stuck at home with covid, but I do also think it's really wonderful.

It has some similar strengths to the first in the series, in that it's mostly about the relationships between a few outcast characters that become a chosen family and just happen to be in space. But if anything I think it's better written (I guess Chambers getting into her stride with book 2), and benefits from being a more focussed story of a smaller number of characters. And has some weightier things to say about embodiment, the tension between fitting in and freedom, and loyalty & reciprocity.

I am excited about the rest of the series.

I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in just 2 sittings).

But even in this best translation yet, the story frustrates me. However much Headley tries to open it up, and pushes back on this reading in the translator's introduction, it's still a story of macho men bragging and proving themselves with violence, in which womens' main role is to be prizes and servers. And Grendel's mother still gets short shrift. She's the character whose violence is the easiest to justify, but her role in the story is still to be an enemy whose defeat we cheer for.

It's amazing to be able to read this snapshot from so long ago, and this translation is now the one that I'd recommend to people. But I'm still so ambivalent about the actual content.

I don't think I liked this book quite as much as the previous two, but it still sucked me in and I'm not sure how better the trilogy could have been wrapped up. There are a lot of still unanswered questions at the end, which feels fitting but something about the style of this one felt like a tease, where the previous two volumes felt more convincingly like the answers simply weren't there to be had.

I still love and strongly recommend this trilogy overall.

It's funny how of all the books I've read by Le Guin, the one that's set on a baseline plausible Earth-in-my-lifetime would turn out to be the weirdest. Also funny how in what starts as a pretty reasonable extrapolation from 1971 to ~2000 has one repeated glaring error: multiple references to the perfect cone of Mount St. Helen's.

Against that background, we get a story of a man running away from his dreams because they give him a power he doesn't understand and can't control. And another man who wants to channel that power, setting up a modern Daoist fable about the hubris of trying to control too much.

The "Finnish Weird" label that I've seen bandied around fits but also doesn't quite - it had me expecting a bit of a lighter quirkier book than this turned out to be. The first scene or two definitely feels like that, but it quickly becomes apparent that a more serious dystopia is being spun, along lines set out by the cover.

Actually I should praise the cover more: it's one of the best book covers I've ever seen, because it tells a lot of the story but without spoilers since none of it made sense until I had reached the relevant parts of the book.

I started reading this with a group of friends, taking turns to read chapters aloud. For the first 5-10 chapters I was enthralled, finding it an utterly charming satire of essentially the same genre that Monty Python and the Holy Grail sends up. But after that it felt like it kept repeating the same jokes, and started to wear thin enough that I didn't actually finish it.

This collection of stories explores some interesting territory around mental illness and sense of self, but ultimately the standoffish tone of almost all the narration grated on me. For any one story I think it was a reasonably effective device, but across the whole book it really limited my emotional engagement.

This is kind of two books, of which the first half was fun but frustrating, and the second half generally better.

In the first half, we're introduced to two main characters in separate worlds. Nahri the orphan who has some strange powers and turns out to be at least partly Djinn-descended, possibly the last survivor of an important dynasty. And Ali a prince in a brutal dynasty that murdered most of Nahri's ancestors, and who is determined to do something about the cruelty. Nahri has to flee her old life for Ali's city. The writing is clunky at times, Ali's a little too good, and it's too obvious that Nahri's flight will succeed, so the epic battle with every kind of magical demon feels more farcical than exciting. But the book's great strength is that this "conclusion" is only halfway through it.

What made the second half work better for me is that Nahri's arrival is such a complicating event in everyone's life, most definitely including her own. Ali ends up thoroughly compromised in ways that make him a much more believable character, and the interwoven strands of everyone lying to and scheming around each other get much more interesting. And I think Chakraborty just took a while to hit her stride as a writer, which makes sense given that this was her first book and not originally written with publication in mind.

At the end I was still a little frustrated. The hooks for the sequel are slightly too obvious and undermine the completeness of this (already long) book, and there are a few too many deus ex machina. But considering how much better the book got as it went along, I am excited about the sequel.

This was a fun light read, engaging enough to get me turning the pages and worrying that one of the characters I liked would turn out to be the culprit. But it was also sort of formulaic, and could really have done with an editor. The love interest was telegraphed about 15 times before the narrator admitted it, and several important details seemed to be introduced 3 times in 3 consecutive paragraphs.

A lovely amuse bouche for Clark's steampunk Cairo stories, which has certainly left me wanting more of Fatma and of this world.