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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Caliban's War
Finished
What a surprise.
I enjoyed the last one ok, but between the chaotic space zombie stuff and the prominent Men Writing [Fridged] Women stuff, I was really kind of perplexed about how much praise this series gets.
Starting this one, there’s a whole bunch of “full lips” and “coffee skin” going on, and one particularly egregious “ass” of a child “on the verge of womanhood”—ew—but as the book gets going, most of that stuff goes away, and what’s left is more than just a really fun and smart sci-fi adventure where even the space battles—for me, almost a guaranteed tune-out—were interesting, tense, and engaging. Two prominent perspective female characters—Bobbie and Avasarala—are well-rounded and compelling characters who feel like far more than “male writer tries to prove he can write badass women,” even though both are pretty badass. Naomi is so far still mostly “almond-eyed”-love-interest-on-a-pedestal, but I hear that eventually changes too.
At least once in this book, I said to myself “oh, I see where this is going,” and the author immediately called it out and subverted the trope, in a way that was refreshing and believable and not just overly-meta; a few more times I think a similar thing happened less explicitly. The plotting is intelligent and engaging, and the political intrigue of Avasarala’s arc is surprisingly fun.
In the end, the book is not without its flaws, but it’s much better than the first, and I’m really excited to pick up the next now.
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The Summer I Ate the Rich
Finished
This was disappointing but maybe that’s on me—it simply wasn’t the book I expected it to be. I was about 80% of the way in when I realized it just wasn’t heading where I expected it to, and it was a lot tamer than the title had me thinking it would be. I think there are some really smart ideas in here, but I think maybe it’s just … more aimed at young adults than I realized? The romance subplot seemed to undermine some of the righteous anger that the protagonist carried, and
I’m left feeling like I missed something when it came to the “eat the rich” thing here. The one moment when someone found a tooth seemed to imply there was more to her cooking than she let on, but … did I just miss it? I’m just very confused after it all about what actual “eating the rich” happened. She got a summer internship, snagged a rich boyfriend, and … influenced people with her cooking, I guess, -
Emperor of Ruin
Finished
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Where the Drowned Girls Go
Finished
This is such a good series. This one gets pretty dark though, for what is I think ostensibly a children’s series; I don’t just mean the kind of spooky or gothy themes of some of the other Doors, which are common in this series, but the Whitethorn Institute is cruel and abusive in a very different way. The Institute’s storyline doesn’t resolve though; I’m hoping future books at least move that along? Which I don’t think is a guarantee in the way this series works.
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The Bridge Kingdom
Finished
Pretty corny. Jensen has become a much better writer since this. I was actually getting into it, though, when it ended before the third act. By which I mean this followed a pretty standard plot arc and just after the major “twist” (hardly a twist as it’s been coming, but a twist in terms of how it changes the relationships etc) that should set off the standard third act, the novel ends. What a pain. I don’t want to reward that by reading the sequel, but I know I probably will.
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All the Missing Girls
Finished
This book is a mess. It’s got a kind of interesting sort-of mystery at the heart of it, told in a way too-clever manner of going backwards in time from an arbitrary point that is both hard to follow and completely incoherent once it all resolves—as you’d expect, the resolution of the mystery is near the end of the book, which puts it near the start of the timeline; so how did she spend the rest of the book not knowing? The resolution is also silly. What she treats as inevitable is anything but.
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Those Beyond the Wall
Finished
I loved the first book. This one didn’t grab me as much; I think the pacing was a bit off and a lot of reveals and flashbacks made some of the twists and turns hard to follow or keep track of what’s happening now, where do we stand, who knows what. Felt more grim than the first book, which still had plenty of grimness to my recollection. And then the final act gave strong Mad Max Fury Road vibes which, to be fair, really only helped my enjoyment because it gave me a strong image in my mind’s eye.
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The Cuckoo
Finished
I really enjoyed this one. The series was fun, but I think this had some of the best, most evocative scenes in the series. The pacing to the end of the book was a little strange, a little anticlimactic, but oddly, I found I kind of appreciated that – not a tidy bow on a series that didn’t have a clearly desirable outcome.
I’m painfully aware of how fantasy is used – often unintentionally – as a vessel for smuggling right-wing and racist ideologies; and a series that centered on two explicitly western European, mostly Anglo, societies trying to genocide each other, with strong Nordic influence and themes deeply intwined with toxic masculinity, is certainly not immune to those criticisms. But in the end, I think it could have been much worse in that regard. Bellamus was a fascinating and sympathetic antagonist, and while men definitely outnumbered women in the story, at least a few women have strength and agency, and the men were generally layered and human. Not a perfect book in that regard, for sure, but far from an outlier in the subgenre.
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Love, Mom
Finished
This was such a perplexing read for me: the central idea is really fun for a thriller, but the execution is awful. I had the twist figured out long, long before it came. People use awkwardly sanitized language. So many uses of “freaking,” and her dad, drunk and bitter, says her mom was “shagging” someone else—this book all takes place in the US, in the present day. But this book has murder, SA, drug use, sex (references, not acts), so it’s not like the language is sanitized to make it PG.
The premise is a bit silly as many thrillers are, but the way it unfolds is even more cartoonish. The pacing gets weird, there’s essentially no climax, and then much of the mystery is just resolved in epilogues.
The way the author treats EJ, I was certain he’d turn out to be bad – my theory was that he was the child given up for adoption – but no, it’s just an excessively cheesy love story side plot. And dad going to prison for life? Did I hear that right? Nah. Silly. A fun story, somewhat disorientingly written.
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A Conspiracy of Truths
Finished
A delightful read. The whimsical storytelling style, in the voice of the protagonist—very much in the vein of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams—could easily be something that took me out of the book, because a voice like that is hard to make natural; but it was very well executed. The constrained first-person perspective had me wishing, at times, to get out and see the world a bit more; but I enjoyed it all the same.
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Things Don't Break on Their Own
Finished
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The Second Rebel
Finished
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Forever and a Day A James Bond Novel
Finished
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You Must Be New Here
Finished
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The Red Winter
Finished