Reading
I read a lot, mostly in the form of audiobooks. I have enough audiobooks that I built an app to manage the files. Here’s what I’m reading, what I’ve read, and what I’m looking to read next.
Read
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Life Out of Order
Finished
I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife. I loved it so much that I even watch the much-maligned movie sometimes, just to revisit that world briefly. I understand people’s concerns about the “grooming” aspect of that novel, but I think it’s kind of hard to discuss outside of the context of time travel and what this sequel frequently refers to as “causal loops.” In fact this book directly (if shortly) addresses the uncomfortable nature of that aspect of the first book.
But this isn’t a review of that novel. This is a review of the sequel.
I really liked it! It’s a very, very different book: where the first one was often cozy, this one feels a lot more stressful, with the looming shadow of climate change, COVID, and worldwide rising authoritarianism – it’s much less of an escape than its predecessor. But I think that’s good. If I wanted that story, I’d re-read that story (or, as I said, watch the movie). By my recollection this book does feel a lot more out of order than the previous one: it definitely keeps a kind of linear progression, but because of the way characters jump around through time, it can feel very disorganized and non-linear. The kind of fatalist struggle with causal loops is I think maybe a bit more directly addressed in this one, and the introduction of a more science fiction subject matter, AI, the interstices, and the future as a whole, lent it a very different feel.
I was a little unsatisfied with the third act,
which early portions really seemed to indicate were building to something big, maybe something very sci-fi, but in the end, the meaning was much more personal than I expected. I was hoping that what Alba was setting up in the first act was going to pay off as something more global, maybe more hopeful after a near-future of dread, cruelty, and chaos in the world. But it was mostly a setup to resolve her own life, and the lives of those important to her. -
The Arcane Arts
Finished
I don’t know about this one. It was much hornier than I expected it to be. I don’t read books for “spice,”1 and this one spent far too much time in the middle third on that for my enjoyment; but more than that, the backdrop of this book is the brutal murder of a woman (and another, less-explained murder of three people) and it felt really uncomfortable to me to be focusing so much on sex with that in mind. Beyond that, BDSM bordering on CNC—perhaps especially with that aforementioned backdrop—is also very much not my thing, and that’s before we get to the (explicitly acknowledge) power imbalance. I think the authors did OK with the sticky issues at play there, but it still wasn’t something I enjoyed.
The underlying sans-spice plot was entertaining and it was compellingly written. But man, there was a lot of stuff that made this book tough for me, and I just powered through it to get to the next book on my shelf.
Footnotes
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I don’t read books for “spice” but I try to read “spicy” books occasionally because a) it’s a genre that’s generally written off as “for women” and that’s dumb and misogynist and it’s worth reading things that are not marketed to oneself b) sometimes they have really compelling plots around the “spice.” And I guess c) sometimes the right amount of spice is still entertaining, even if it’s not something I would seek out. I really enjoyed Danielle Jensen’s Saga of the Unfated duology, for example. ↩
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The Truth You Told
Finished
Enjoyable, but felt a bit like a rehash of the first in a number of ways by the time it all wrapped up. At the same time I didn’t really feel like there were enough breadcrumbs to feel like I could’ve gotten there when the mystery was resolved. It’s ok though. I think there’s a third? I’ll read it.
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A Trade of Blood
Finished
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Five
Finished
I think the vignettes that make up the bulk of this story are all interesting – for me, at least, they all seemed to center around parenthood, and they were mostly difficult but compelling stories. The death that glues it all together was much less interesting to me, and the flowery way in which it’s told, with so many “or maybe”s strung together, little bits attempting to enumerate the many possibilities of mundane life, was just … too much.
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The Neverfear
Finished
This is just such a fun series. Continues to deliver warm, heartfelt, magical adventure without feeling saccharine or false.
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The Republic of Memory
Finished
The world this book introduces is fascinating – the characters, the Safina, the world it left behind – and that’s why I’m rating this as highly as I am because this isn’t a complete novel. This is part one of a story. There is rising action, I suppose, but I don’t know if it’s a personal issue I have or how many others feel the same, but a novel, especially a genre novel, should generally have a beginning, middle, and end – an arc, which resolves at the end. That doesn’t mean it has to resolve everything, but this book had just finished introducing the stakes when it ended. My feeling is that a novel that is a part of a saga still needs to have its own sub-story, and this one didn’t. I realized when I had half an hour left in the audiobook that unless something really surprising happened, the plot I thought I had been following was not going to come to a climax in this book, and I was right. I’ll probably pick up the next, whenever it comes out, because I do want to know more, but it’s the same wanting-to-know-more as if I’d only finished a chapter.
The “new patois” of the novel’s youth felt extremely stilted in the audiobook narrator’s voice – things like “donde are” being enunciated made it feel much less convincing as a new vernacular, and much more contrived, phony. But I’m willing to grant the benefit of the doubt that it reads better in one’s mind.
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The Blacktongue Thief
Finished
Anglo/european fantasy with a unique flavor. The Irish accent (I think?) of the audiobook narrator definitely helped with that familiar-but-different feel of the story, and some of the magic made me think of something more slavic or Scandinavian. I felt like it dragged a little at times, but I’m curious enough to read the next one. I’m not sure I’m curious enough to read The Daughters’ War, though. I may just skip (?) to the one that picks up where this one left off.
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Murder Bimbo
Finished
This wasn’t quite what I expected it to be – the blurb had me thinking there’d be a bit more … righteousness? But I definitely enjoyed it. It was more thought-provoking than the book I expected to read might have been. I found the ending a bit unsatisfying, because
it undermined – for me – any remaining sense that I was rooting for “the good guy” and any sense of even a compromised happy ending -
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
Finished
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Angel Down
Finished
I was so excited to read this book as it seemed like a great intersection of my main genre interests – an angel falls in the middle of a battlefield? – and more “high-brow” reading – it won the Pulitzer! And honestly I think a rating of 3 is padding it a bit for reasons of the latter.
In the end it felt so much like every other war book we had to read in high school: ugly and dark in all the same ways. And I get that, I don’t think it’s bad that books about war be dark and ugly; they should be! But I don’t really need convincing there. The addition of a fallen angel didn’t really seem to add anything unique—until maybe the climax, but by then it was too late, for me.
On top of all of that, the “one single sentence” gimmick was… eh? It added a kind of breathlessness to the piece that worked fine, but also: just replacing all your periods with “and” barely counts as an achievement. I was kind of hoping for a true, well-worked run-on sentence—one that used all the tricks of the trade to prevent a sentence from ever ending—but it was mostly just regular writing with a whole lot of extra “and”s.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Finished
I’ve really liked the Wayfarers series, but this one didn’t get me. Kind of an interesting premise that didn’t really go anywhere with the short time it had.
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Caller Unknown
Finished
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A World Without Princes
Finished
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Automatic Noodle
Finished
Fun. I think I had the enjoyment, the experience, reading this that some people had reading Legends & Lattes, which I liked less. Feels less like a novella and more like part of a novel, though. I’d like to read more, and I’d like there to have been a bit more of an arc to this one.