Bookish Thoughts

This was one of three free novellas provided by Tor.com this month. It was bundled with A Psalm for the Wild Build and Unlocked which highlighted the similarities between the three stories. All of them concern a future where humanity is grappling with mechanical life. In Chambers' story, the robots achieved sentience and abandoned humans to their own devices, only for a human and robot to reconnect centuries later. In Scalzi's story, robots are provided as disability aids. They're fully controlled by humans who can't otherwise participate in society. This story is a bit more classic, with robots serving as a labor force and humanity beginning to grapple with how to extend rights to them. All three books ask what it means to be a person, but this one asks that question the most directly. A robot has been convicted of murder and a new lawyer decides to file an appeal, believing he didn't get a fair trial the first time around. Questions arise about the equality betw...

I read Scalzi's Lock In right at the beginning of the pandemic. It posits a future world, about twenty years after a pandemic has come through, killing 1% of the population and leaving another 1% paralyzed. It ended up being a lot lighter than I expected, which was for the best given my whole state of mind at that time. But this companion book takes a closer look at the pandemic itself and the immediate response and aftermath. The crazy part is that it was written in 2014, and still got a bunch of stuff right. It's always so weird when science fiction starts to read more like historical fiction. It becomes a fun exercise in looking at which predictions were correct and which were wrong. Scalzi's pandemic hit the globe much more consistently, having started at an international scientific conference. So the initial impact is a lot bigger. But it still comes in waves, like the real pandemic did. And there's still an incredible rallying of everyone. Another interesting dif...

I loved this book, and it's only further fueling my love of Becky Chambers. She's writes these quiet, gentle, speculative stories that deal with heavy philosophical questions. At the heart of this one is the quest for purpose. How do you find it, and do you need to? Is simply living enough? If it is enough, could you call that your purpose?  It's an interesting, circular argument. One that isn't terribly important to me because I know where I stand on it - living my little life in my little corner of the universe is enough for me. I don't need to strive for something more or bigger. But that's not true of the protagonist of this book, who feels woefully unfulfilled and spends most of the book trying to fill a hole in himself with some grand purpose. What I really loved is the mundanity of this hole. Dex cam from a loving family and found a supportive community. They are excellent at their chosen profession and seem to want for nothing. But, somehow, it isn't...

I gotta say, I struggled a lot with this novella. It started and ended very strongly. But the middle was so muddled I had a hard time following what was going on. I think it would have benefited from a longer length, which would have allowed for smoother transitions and some more background information. Then again, the jumpy transitions were kind of the point, as that folded in with the powers of one of the protagonists. I'd probably appreciate this book more if I read it again, though I'm not sure I ever will. I can see that it's important, and I'm trying to figure out whether I'm the intended audience or not. Was this meant to be a teaching book (making me part of the intended audience) or something more internal (and so not necessarily for me). It's probably that it was the latter but sold as the former, which is the root of my unmet expectations. At the least, it has me wanting to learn more about our justice and prison system.

I remember struggling a lot with LeGuin's books when I first began reading her. Every book felt like an argument. I never agreed with her fully, but I had to think hard to refine my own point of view, and I appreciated that. I always came out of her books feeling more sure of  myself for having thought deeper about the issues she presented. This book was different. I'm not sure if it's because my ideals have changed over the past decade or if I know what to expect from LeGuin now or is it's just where she was in her life, but this book was entirely on my wavelength. Like much of her work, it posits anarchy as an alternative to fascism and weaves in a healthy dose of feminism. Whatever it was, I loved this book. It might be my favorite of hers - though I think I also said that about the last LeGuin book. Maybe she's just converting me to her way of thinking.

Becky Chambers has definitely crossed the threshold to new favorite author. I've now read two of her books, and I'm itching to read every single thing she's ever written. This book switches between two timelines. In the present, Pepper is helping an AI, Sidra, nee Lovelace, adjust to living in a human-like body instead of embodying an entire ship. AIs aren't recognized as people with rights, so they have to hide her true nature, and it becomes an interesting journey of discovery as they have to balance Sidra's individual wants and needs with her safety and the safety of her friends.  In the past, Pepper is still a young girl named Jane who was born a clone and lived as a slave until she escaped with the help of an unexpected friend. Jane/Pepper slowly comes to realize just how horrific her childhood was and begins to heal from her trauma. This is really a lovely meditation on what it means to be a person and what it means to be considered illegal. Chambers created a...

 I still love this book. I was a little worried, honestly. It's been a few years since I read it. My life has changed a lot. I think about this book a lot, and I wasn't sure if the version in my mind still resembled the actual book. It was possible that in interpreting and reinterpreting this book over the years, I'd built it up so much in my mind that re-reading it would be an exercise in disappointment. But that didn't happen. I loved this book, and I still love it. Everything I remembered was still there. And there were new things as well. References and details I didn't catch the first time through that just added even more layers. I was also surprised by the subtle ways my perspective changed. I remember not really liking the gothic section the last time I read it. It felt overdone and a little too much. This time I understood it better, and therefore I like it better. But the noir section rubbed me a little wrong. The thing about this book that has me the most...

 Murderbot might be one of the best fictional characters out there. Its desire to just sit in a closet and watch tv is at constant war with its compulsion to protect all the humans around it, and it makes for a wonderfully grumpy and relatable hero. I was so excited to finally get a full length novel in this series (and was just a little disappointed to learn that the next book - Fugitive Telemetry - is back to novella size). In the fifth book, Murderbot reunite with ART, which is all I've wanted since I finished the second book. The two team up to save a bunch of humans from weird alien remnants. They fight and make up and learn how to have a relationship. Murderbot's actually starting to get pretty good at relationships. Well, halfway decent. This was a really fun book with lots of action and snarky humor. I can't wait to get my hands on the next one. I hope Martha Wells never stops writing this series.

Reading a novel by Ursula K LeGuin is rarely as simple as reading a novel. When I first started reading her work, it always felt like an argument. She is someone who has thought deeply about what she believes and her work considers a lot of different points of view. I never agreed with her fully, but she was so knowledgeable and sharp that her writing forced me to become more knowledgeable and sharp. Her work never let me be complacent in my beliefs. I always found myself having to defend my own point of view against the one she presented, because she made me consider things I hadn't before. Reading LeGuin is work, but good work, work worth doing. Her books have always made me a smarter, better person. Always Coming Home is a departure in that it felt like a conversation but not an argument. I'm not sure if that's because I've come around to LeGuin's way of seeing things as I've aged or if it's just that this book is so gentle. It's incredibly radical, ...

I got this book as a free download from Tor.com, which is the only reason I decided to read it. I did enjoy the other Charlie Jane Anders book I read, All the Birds in the Sky . And I guess I was expecting more of the same. But that was a subtle story that took me by surprise. And this....wasn't. It's not that it was bad. I'm just not really the target audience for this book. I'm not much interested in young adult books. But it was free and on my kindle and I figured it'd be a quick read. The fact that it took me over two weeks to read this YA novel with less than 300 pages tells you something about how invested I was in it. It actually started pretty strong, with a fun premise, interesting and sarcastic characters, and a plot that kicked into high gear almost immediately. But then the middle of the book got muddled. Parts of it felt more like an outline than a novel, as the story jumped from scene to scene with very little transition, which kept me off balance and ...

Instead of reading The Goldfinch in December like I was supposed to, I found myself revisiting Saga. I read the first nine volumes more or less as they came out over the years, which really spread the story out. While I enjoyed the later volumes, I was occasionally confused by who a character was or why they were doing something. Then the ending of the ninth volume left me hurt and angry and then the whole story went on hiatus for what was supposed to be a year, but which the pandemic dragged out to closer to three years. In those three years, a lot happened. And I came to appreciate the ending. I found myself growing more and more curious about where the story would go next. I wanted to know what would happen to Hazel in the wake of her most recent losses. So I went back and re-read the whole story over the course of about two weeks. The compressed schedule worked really well for this story. Everything flowed much better than the first time through. I was able to hold all the charact...

I'm glad I read this trilogy. There were a lot of neat ideas, a cool exploration of both cutting-edge science and sociopolitical ideas. The writing was occasionally incredible. But this book was so bloated, and it went on way too long. By the end, I was only reading out of spite. A perverse need to finish the damn book. I actually fell asleep with 5 pages left and never went back to finish it, but I'm calling it good enough. And I'm glad that Sax and Ann managed to work out their differences.  But mostly I just want to play Terraforming Mars again, to see how it compares to the books.

When I really love a book, you can tell not just by how many times I've read it, but by how many copies I've bought. Space Opera was just elevated to a book I've bought more than once, simply because I needed both a physical and a digital copy of it. The thing that makes this one of my favorite books it the simple, recurring line: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It resonates with me, especially since my husband was diagnosed with cancer while I was pregnant with twins. 2019 was a fantastic, terrible year, and 2020 even more so. My husband's death is the worst thing that's ever happened to me, but my kids are the best thing that's ever happened to me, and to have them both happening at the same time has resulted in an extreme roller coaster. This book reminds me that it's okay to be happy, to feel joy. Not just in that main theme, but because it's a hilarious book with a whole lot of heart. I keep coming back to it, as I do with most of Cat Valente...

I was absolutely shocked when my book club chose this for our November meeting. It's a huge departure from the mainstream books we usually read. So I guess it wasn't all that surprising when no one in the club actually managed to finish it. But I enjoyed getting a chance to read it again. I followed it a lot better my second time through, and I understood way more of the jokes. The sequel is still sitting on my shelf, and I can't wait to read it, and the rest of the series.

This book was a bit bloated, but I think it ended up being my favorite of the trilogy. It was a decent balance of familiar faces and new ones. The timeline was nice and linear. The science was interesting, as was the revolution storyline. Some of the prose is startlingly lovely, and I enjoyed most of the time I spent on this hypothetical Mars.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness.  This book came highly recommended. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a friend mentioned really liking it, which put in on my radar. Later, someone else said it was one of their favorites, which always pushes something higher up my to-read list. And then I discovered that the board game Terraforming Mars was based on this trilogy, and I knew I had to read it. I'm not sure I'd call this book a favorite, though it was interesting. Sending people to Mars, establishing a colony, eventually transforming it to support life is an incredibly exciting and compelling idea. And these books do it well. The science is in depth, though outdated, and the challenges humanity faces are real and hard. This is a very interesting book. But it's also a very dense and occasionally dry book. It took me a really long time to get through, and I had to skim a few passages that I found too boring. Then again, sometime...

I picked this one up again because I needed something light and quick and happy. It is still all of those things while also being wonderful and fun. This could easily become one of those go-to books whenever I need a bit of a pick-me-up

This was another book about doing what little you can and letting that be enough. It follows a group of nuns living aboard a biological space ship (more slug than ship really) and administering what help they can at the edges of civilization. They perform happy deeds, like marriages and baptisms. They also perform harder deeds, like quarantining planets when plagues break out. They make hard decisions and they each struggle with their relationship with God and the church in their own way. But they all want to help as much as they can, even though they know that they can't change the whole world (or universe as the case may be).

This book was the perfect conclusion to a trilogy that started off as a tale of vengeance and became so much more. There are people figuring out who they are. There are people figuring out what it means to be a person. There's an empire that has grown to large and is starting to crumble. There are people figuring out how to take advantage of that for their own gains. There are small stories writ large and a focus on doing what you can even if it seems small because there are ripple effects you can't sleep.  But the reason that this book is going to stick with me is that it had a perfect ending. I can even share it with you without spoiling the trilogy, which is part of it's perfection. Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster - happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending - always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one...

In the second Imperial Radch book, the scope both narrows and widens. Our narrator is sent to a small station orbiting a backwater planet, where she finds a wealth of problems to contend with. Despite the fact that the story takes place at the edge of the empire, it provides a microcosm of what everyone is going through. The empire has grown too large and leadership is starting to fracture. It's the fall of Rome, on a planetary scale, and it's fascinating to read. This was a good mid-trilogy bridge. The story pivots from the quest for vengeance to something more sustainable, and adds some new wrinkles to everything. It was a lot more fun to read, now that I'm more accustomed to the author's style, but she has a lot of interesting things to say and a lot of interesting ways to say them. She might well become a must-read author for me.