Bragan Keeps Turning Pages in 2022, Part 2

A new thread for a new quarter of the year! Same old turning of pages on (hopefully) lots of new books. I remain, of course, the same old Betty who continues to read all kinds of varied and occasionally strange things.

My bookish story of 2022 thus far:

January
1. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
2. Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight edited by Julie Swarstad and Christopher Cokinos
3. We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry
4. Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein
5. Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams
6. Oddball: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection by Sarah Andersen
7. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
8. Who Is the Doctor by Graeme Burk & Robert Smith?

February
9. Nyxia by Scott Reintgen
10. The Orville Season 2.5: Launch Day by David A. Goodman, David Cabeza, and Michael Atiyeh
11. The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman
12. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
13. The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
14. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
15. This Is How You Die edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki
16. Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Skottie Young

March
17. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
18. Meet Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse
19. In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
20. The Apollo Missions: In the Astronauts' Own Words by Rod Pyle
21. Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
22. Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen
23. Scratchman by Tom Baker, with James Goss
24. Trinity: a Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm
25. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
26. Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Onward!

27. Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System by M. Chris Fabricant



Fabricant is a lawyer working on the Innocence Project, which strives to free wrongly convicted prisoners. Here, he discusses the contribution of bad forensic "science" to some of those convictions, including cases he has personally worked on. Although there are a truly depressing number of unscientific techniques permitted as evidence in court, he focuses primarily on the matching of bite marks on victims with the teeth of suspects -- a topic which I was interested to read about, as I'd vaguely heard something about it recently, but hadn't gotten the full story.

The full story, apparently, is that this technique basically consists of dentists looking at marks on the victim's skin (including not just clearly identifiable bite marks, but also various dents and bruises not even identified as bites during autopsy), comparing them with casts of the suspect's teeth, and saying, "Yeah, looks the same to me." There was no actual scientific verification that this method was accurate, however -- quite the contrary, in fact -- and little or no attempt to address the inevitable bias inherent in knowing that the teeth you're trying to match are those of someone police or the prosecution already believe to be guilty. And yet, expert witnesses would testify that this "scientific evidence" left essentially no room for doubt, something that more than once meant the difference between an innocent and a guilty verdict. People were sentenced to death based on this testimony. And here I didn't think I needed any more reasons to lose faith in humanity.

This book definitely isn't perfect. It's an eensy bit disorganized, and I do kind of wish Fabricant had spent a little more time getting into the science and carefully spelling out all the exact reasons why this stuff is unscientific. It was clear enough to me (although I would have appreciated a few more specific details), but I happen to have a background in science and a pretty strong grounding in the skeptical evaluation of pseudoscientific claims. Not all readers are going to have that kind of advantage, and I don't think such readers should, for instance, have had to wait until a hundred pages in for a very brief discussion of the scientific principle of blinding and why its lack is a big problem here. But despite that criticism, I still found this enlightening, infuriating, important, and worthwhile.

Rating: 4/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

Checking out your new thread. To think, could bias effect an analysis. Surely not.

>3 dchaikin: I know, who could ever have possibly imagined or anticipated that? Sheesh.

28. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol 7: I've Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You by Ryan North, Erika Henderson & Rico Renzi



Volume seven of the collected adventures of Squirrel Girl, the Marvel Universe's only squirrel-themed superhero. Most of this one is a single story featuring dinosaurs, robots, and robot dinosaurs. (Well, OK, one robot dinosaur, but come on, one is really all you need.) As usually, it's silly, good-hearted fun, with bonus computer science jokes.

This one also features a "zine" drawn and written by various guest contributors (including, somehow, Garfield's Jim Davis) featuring comics supposedly created by Squirrel Girl and various other Marvel characters. This was entertaining, in its own weird way, but I have to admit, I think Squirrel Girl is the only superhero I really care about at this point.

Rating: 4/5

>2 bragan: Yikes. I like to think that people trained in science are more scrupulous about evidence than most, but there sure are lots of counterexamples.

>6 dukedom_enough: There really, really are. Although it honestly doesn't seem to me like many of the people involved here really were trained in science. They were trained in dentistry, and then trained in psuedoscience.

29. The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O'Brian



Book 11 in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series sees some surprising revelations, changes, and reversals of fortune. There's not much sea-going action here, and what there is isn't incredibly satisfying. And the spy stuff is somehow never quite as interesting to me as it feels like it should be, even with the treason-in-high-places plot we've got going on at this point in the series. But the parts of the story involving the characters' personal lives and problems are extremely engaging. Both Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin have moments here that make me feel immense affection for them... and also moments where I'd kind of like to knock some sense into them. Especially Jack Aubrey. How can a man that unbelievably competent at sea be such a gullible screw-up on land? But, of course, that's all part of what makes him such an interesting and oddly lovable character. There's also a moment towards the end that genuinely got me a little choked up, and a very interesting setup for going forward into the next volume.

Rating: Gotta give this one a 4/5 just for the character stuff.

30. The World of The Orville by Jeff Bond



A companion to the TV show The Orville (or at least to its first season), featuring lots of pretty pictures of various characters, sets, ships, alien planets, and pieces of technology. There's not huge amounts of text, but what there is features some interesting bits of behind-the-scenes information -- for instance, I hadn't realized the ship was in fact a 3D-printed model rather than CGI -- as well as some little bits of commentary on the concepts behind the show and its various elements. Worth a look if you're a fan of the series.

Rating: 4/5

31. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans



A collection of six short stories and one novella of about 100 pages, all of which deal, in some fashion or other, with the complicated and often enraging experiences of being Black and/or female in America.

Several of the short stories do a particular kind of literary-fiction thing that doesn't always work for me, where they feel like they have just enough of something that feels sort of plot-shaped to be unsatisfying when they don't resolve in a plotty way, after all. But Evans' writing is so clear and sharp and insightful that it swept any such dissatisfaction quite effectively aside. That was true for the titular novella, too, which for a while I thought might have the opposite problem -- too much focus on a slowly developing plot whose basic premise I had some trouble buying, perhaps -- but which certainly won me over by the end, having turned out to have a great deal to say and an impactful way of saying it. And then there's the story "Why Won't Women Just Say What they Want," which could be described as a sort of parable about the #metoo movement and male 'apologies,' which was just unreservedly brilliant in a way that hit me like a ton of bricks.

Rating: Taken as a whole, I'm giving the collection an impressed 4.5/5, but I'd give "Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want" an easy five stars just by itself.

32. Dead on Deadline by Lara Bricker



This murder mystery, set in a small historic town in New Hampshire, has a reasonably intriguing setup. Local newspaper reporter Piper Greene is covering the town's Independence Festival parade when a body dressed in a British soldier's red coat suddenly descends from the town hall, dangling from a noose, and falls at her feet, where it proves to be her own horrible (and very dead) boss. Unfortunately, everything that follows is just... dull. Dull and full of unconvincing details, and featuring a protagonist who I found mildly unpleasant, but not remotely enough so to make her interesting.

Rating: 2/5

33. A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 by Elise Engler



For several years, Elise Engler has had an ongoing project where every day she draws a small bit of artwork inspired by that morning's top news headlines. As you can imagine, this was an... interesting exercise... in 2020. Although, actually, this volume covers, as she puts it, "the period from January 20, 2020, when COVID-19 made its first appearance in my drawings, to January 21, 2021, the day after President Joe Biden's inauguration."

I thought this sounded like a really interesting project, but having read through it now, I genuinely am not sure what I think about it. The first few pictures already kind of had me questioning whether this was as worthwhile an exercise as I'd anticipated, because it seemed set to mostly be an endless parade of politicians' faces. Once the coronavirus got going in earnest, though, and Engler was drawing representations of what was going on literally all around her in NYC, the pictures took on a frantic, energetic, almost surreal tone for a bit that was interesting to see, and certainly quite effective.

Did it remain that effective for the whole year? Maybe, maybe not. It's honestly hard for me to tell. I thought I was ready for a day-by-day retrospective on 2020, but I think maybe I'm still not quite capable of processing it, perhaps because, somehow, it still doesn't quite feel like that year is over. So part of me thinks this would have worked better if I'd waited and come to it a few years later. And yet, I don't know that this is going to turn out to be the right work to capture the experience of that year for posterity, either. Too many of the headlines really only make sense when you're able to remember the events personally and in context.

In the end, it was certainly an interesting idea, and I'm not sorry I read it, even if it did kind of depress me. But it also doesn't feel quite like it did whatever I was hoping it would do for me. I'm not at all sure precisely what that is, though. Help to give me some new, loftier perspective on the events of 2020 that would result in it all making more sense for me? If so, well, that may really have been entirely too much to ask of anyone.

Rating: I'm giving this a 3.5/5, because I feel like I have to give it something, but I think that rating is even less meaningful than usual.

>10 bragan: This is an interesting one. I have started and put it down a couple of times, because of that literary-fiction almost plot but not really thing. Something that has to strike a certian mood. Sounds like though that once it stirkes this will land quite well.

>10 bragan: This sounds really intriguing. Have added it to my wishlist, but who knows when I will get back to serious reading.

>13 stretch:, >14 FlorenceArt:: It is worth getting to, I think.

Wow, there has been a lot going on here. I actually started catching up in the previous thread. I actually had to get pen and paper to make some notes of what to add to my wish list.
I was especially intrigued by the book on 1816, the year without summer. I will have to do some research on that later on.
The Word is Murder sounds like something that I would enjoy a lot.
Thanks for all the interesting reviews!

>16 OscarWilde87: Always happy to add to others' wishlists! Other people certainly add enough to mine. :)

34. The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth



A lesbian coming-of-age story set in Montana in the early 90s. Cameron Post first kisses a girl the day before her parents die suddenly in a car crash, after which she's left in the custody of her deeply religious aunt, who becomes desperate to help "fix" her after her complicated relationship with another teenage girl becomes public.

It's well-written in quiet, gentle, and yet effective way, and does an excellent job of capturing the feeling of what it's like to be an adolescent. And there's an incredible, almost tragic poignancy to the way in which so many of the people in Cameron's life are genuinely loving and well-meaning, even as the "help" they try to give her is anything but.

I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the ending and the questions it leaves unanswered about what happens next, but I am nevertheless a little surprised by just how much I liked this one, given that novels about teenagers can be kind of hit-or-miss for me.

Rating: 4/5

>10 bragan: Your comments intrigue, must look into that book. You always have an interesting list of books read....

>10 bragan: I really liked that collection. She's just consistently good throughout it, which I find is not always (even often) the case with short stories, and she's very smart about her plots and setups.

>12 bragan: I liked this one more than you did, exactly for the reasons you had reservations. For me it was a good overview of that year that reaffirmed all my doubts and memory-questioning—Was it really like that? and Oh that's right, this preceded that thing that fell all apart. Etc. And I liked the thought of her daily practice and how therapeutic it was to turn all this terrible news into a graphic form. I'm going to admit to being a bit biased because I ended up interviewing her for Bloom and she invited me for a studio visit to see the works on paper (and have coffee and cookies), but I was a fan of the book before I met Elise.

>19 avaland: Hey, what is life for, if not for reading interesting books. :) Hope you like that one as much as I did, if you do pick it up.

>20 lisapeet: I thought all Danielle Evans' setups in that collection were interesting, even if some of her plots where less plotty than part of me wanted or expected. But, boy her writing is indeed consistently good, in a smooth, clean, clear, thoughtful way I really appreciated.

And I can totally see how Engler's news-illustrating exercise could be a useful way for her to get some kind of handle on things, and for some readers to feel like they're doing the same. I think maybe I just wasn't quite ready to reaffirm any of my experiences of 2020 yet. I do totally respect the concept of it, in any case, and being able to meet her and see some of her illos in person sounds really cool, regardless of whatever mixed things the book made me feel.

35. Tiassa by Steven Brust



Tiassa is book 13 in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, which is set in the fascinating world of Dragaera, and centers on a wisecracking assassin and crime boss (or, depending on where you are in the series, former assassin and crime boss). At least, it usually centers on him. This is an odd one, though. It's told in a series of different sections set at different times, each featuring different characters and a different style, with only the first section and a brief epilogue being in Vlad's usual first-person POV. Most of the rest of it he's barely in at all, even if he is important to the plot. All these story pieces are connected, but in a weird, disjointed sort of way that left me with a lot of unanswered questions at the end. And, I have to say, I had extremely mixed feelings about the overly detailed, overly literal narrative voice that a good third of the novel is written in. There's a lot of droll humor to it, but it's also genuinely annoying. I'm not positive, because I haven't read them yet, but I have the vague sense that this same voice is used in Brust's Khaavren novels, which are set in the same universe and with which this one is a crossover of sorts. And if that's true, it might well answer the question I've been musing on of whether I should give those a read when I'm finally done with Vlad, because while it's a gimmick that's funny enough to work for twenty pages or so, a hundred pages' worth of it is way too much.

Rating: 3.5/5

>22 bragan: Never heard of this author or series, but it definitely sounds like something I should check out. I downloaded the excerpt of Jhereg to my reader.

>23 FlorenceArt: It's often a series I find myself feeling like I should enjoy somewhat more than I actually do, but if you're into light-ish fantasy -- it does get a bit darker sometimes, but it's mostly meant to be fun -- it's definitely worth a look. I do sometimes find the plots a bit too slight or a bit too hard to follow, and not all of Brust's narrative experiments work all that well, but Vlad's wise-ass voice is entertaining, and the worldbuilding is terrific, and those two things do always keep me coming back.

I hope you find it to your taste!

36. A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life by Lauren Marks



Lauren Marks was twenty-seven years old when, in the middle of a karaoke performance, an aneurysm burst in her brain. She was lucky to survive, but the damage left her with aphasia: a great difficulty not only in producing coherent speech, but in perceiving just how badly affected her speech was. It also left her unable to read, gave her difficulties in following the speech of others, and even silenced her own inner voice. It also affected her memory. She wasn't exactly afflicted with amnesia, but she found it difficult to bring to mind or emotionally connect with personal memories. Over time, thanks to brain plasticity and speech therapy, much of her facility with words came back, but what she refers to as "the rupture" was clearly not only a physical rupture in her brain, but a discontinuity between the person she used to be and the person she had become.

In this memoir, Marks writes thoughtfully about her experiences after "the rupture," including her time with very little language in her brain, her relationships with the people in her life as she made her recovery, and her musings on language and memory as informed by both her own experiences and what she has learned since about scientific thinking on the subjects. It's all very interesting, and I particularly appreciated how careful she is to acknowledge the fallibility of her own memory while narrating events, and to stress that her experiences of aphasia aren't universal and that the sense those experiences have given her of how language works in the brain isn't definitive. I can't help contrasting that careful, humble, refreshingly open approach with the way Jill Bolte Taylor seemed to want to present her own experiences with neural damage as providing some kind of definitive mystical revelation in My Stroke of Insight, which I have to admit made me a little uncomfortable.

I will also say that Marks' writing is perfectly clear, readable, and fluent. Whether that's a testament to the progress she's made in her recovery, the strategies she uses to compensate for her difficulties, or some excellent editing, I don't know, but I'd suspect it's probably a combination of all three.

Rating: 4/5

37. Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke



A short novel written entirely in the format of corporate Slack chats. Gerald, it seems, has somehow found his consciousness uploaded into the Slack app, and is stuck there. Not that his co-workers believe any of his messages pleading for help. There's initially some concern about all the work-from-home time he's taking, but since Gerald is now more productive than ever, his boss doesn't mind at all.

This isn't quite as bitingly satirical as I sort of expected it to be -- satirical, yes, biting, not so much. It does feature some familiar but nevertheless well-rendered commentary about social media, though. And it is very, very funny. I laughed out loud while reading it multiple times. Like, big, real belly laughs. I can't quite remember the last time a novel did that for me. Hell, it even made me laugh while I was sitting in a dentist's chair waiting for the novocaine to kick in, and that is a true literary accomplishment.

If I have one criticism, it's that I feel like the ending could have done with a little more oomph, somehow. But even so, I found this just delightful, in its own weird, wonderful, utterly absurd way.

Rating: 4.5/5

38. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers



This fourth book in Becky Chambers' loosely connected Wayfarers series is set in a sort of interstellar truck stop, where some kind of orbital disaster traps several aliens of various kinds together for a few days.

You know, I remember reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book in the series, and commenting that I was something like a hundred pages in before it suddenly occurred to me that basically nothing had happened in it, and that I didn't remotely care because I was really enjoying hanging out with all of the characters, and learning about all the different aliens species in this universe and their cultures and interactions with each other, and so on.

Well, this one is also largely about hanging out with characters and learning about alien cultures while not much actually happens, but this time I definitely noticed. Everything was mildly interesting, and all the characters were mildly likeable, but it wasn't exciting me or keeping my attention in anything like the same way. I also couldn't escape the very strong sense that the entire thing was basically an exercise in the author carefully modelling How to Behave Well Towards Others and Respect Their Personal and Cultural Diversities for the benefit of her readers. As moral lessons go, this is one I'm in favor of, and it's done pleasantly enough and not in a way that's terribly clunky or preachy, but, nevertheless, I sometimes felt like I was experiencing some sort of science-fictional Mr. Roger's Neighborhood gently attempting to teach me good behavior by example. But, with the greatest of respect and love for the late Fred Rogers... I really do feel a bit too old for that.

Rating: 3.5/5

>27 bragan: Unfortunately, valuable moral lessons rarely make great literature. I read the first two books and liked the characters OK, but they do feel a bit like children’s books.

>27 bragan: While my review wasn't too effusive I was gushing like a fangirl on the inside about this book :-). I can absolutely see what you mean about the "lesson" but I think I was clearly ready to read a sweet book about people treating each other nicely.

>28 FlorenceArt: Not that there's anything wrong with children's books, which I will often happily read, but it's possible there may be a limit to how much I want adult books to feel like kids' books in that particular way.

>29 rhian_of_oz: I totally understand wanting that! Maybe in a different mood I would have been happier with it, too. Or maybe lately I've become so cynical and pessimistic that people treating each other relentlessly nicely for 300 pages, or whatever it was, feels entirely too unbelievable to me.

39. Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall



As the subtitle indicates, this book covers some fairly broad scientific topics, including some discussion about the history of science and the importance of scientific thinking. A lot of it, however, is more specifically about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. It was written in 2011, though, so the discussions here about attempts to find the Higgs Boson (which did happen pretty much as predicted) and the possibility that LHC data could overturn or amend the currently reigning Standard Model of particle physics (which so far hasn't happened) are inevitably somewhat dated now.

Honestly, this book feels kind of all over the place. Sometimes it outlines things on what's intended to be a layman's level, although I think having a little bit of physics knowledge going in does help. In other places, it gets very technical, and, in my experience, going in with a little bit of physics knowledge helps very little in understanding concepts like the Higgs field. At least, it's certainly never helped me. I think no matter how clearly anyone tries to explain some of these things, it's just really not possible to entirely understand it without knowing the right kind of mathematics. I can't say that this is the best stab I've seen anyone take at it, either, or that Randall's prose is especially lucid. She's not bad or anything, but definitely not someone I'm going to hold up as a paragon of good, clear science writing.

She does have a few insightful things to say, and anyone who's especially interested in the specifics of how the LHC works is likely to find her detailed descriptions of its technology and operation useful. But, overall, this volume is kind of dense and unfocused and often not particularly good at getting the author's points across. I feel like there are much better books on these topics out there.

Rating: 3/5

40. The Verifiers by Jane Pek



Claudia Lin has just gotten a job at a company that does detective work, of a sort, for people who want to check on whether their online dating matches actually are who they say they are. But when an especially unusual client turns up dead, supposedly of suicide, and also not to have been exactly who she claimed to be, Claudia takes it on herself to channel the detectives from the mystery novels she loves and investigate, while also dealing with her own (lack of) love life and her extremely difficult family.

I found much of this one enjoyable. The writing is breezy and fun. Claudia's a likeable character, and her family feel very real. And the online dating angle to things is fairly interesting and seems to be ready to deal with important themes involving privacy and the role that corporations play even in the most intimate parts of our lives. Where it goes with those themes doesn't turn out to be terribly satisfying, though, and in the end neither does the plot. The solution to the mystery turns out to be about half obvious from the beginning and half ridiculously implausible, and the ending, which seems to maybe be trying to leave things open for a sequel, mostly just fizzles out.

Rating: I found enough of this entertaining enough to give it a 3.5/5, but I'm still annoyed that it doesn't stick the landing well enough to be the 4-star read it initially seemed like it was going to be.

Betty, the current "Avid Reader" question is about SF, would love to have you post on it (I don't want the heavy-hitters to miss it....)

>33 avaland: Am I a heavy-hitter? LOL. I don't feel much like one these days, I must say. I've been having so much trouble keeping up with anything but my own thread of late that I keep not even getting around to even reading the questions until everyone else seems to be about done with them. But I will make a point of looking at it soon! Thanks for the heads-up.

41. Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett



This is book two in Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy. I liked the first book, Foundryside, but found it maybe a little bit uneven in how much it held my attention. This one, though, I found engaging all the way through. I think it helps that we've got the scary ancient godlike entities in play here right from the get-go, without needing any of the setup the first book started with. And Bennett does do a good line in scary ancient godlike entities. Particularly interesting here are said entities' motivations, which are understandable and perhaps even faintly sympathetic, while still being completely monstrous. Also still fascinating and very, very cool is the imaginative magical/technological system, which blends logic and mysticism in a way that works remarkably well.

This installment also ends with some big revelations and major unexpected developments which will undoubtedly lead to still more exciting stuff to come in volume three. I'm looking forward to it.

Rating: 4/5

42. The Second QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson



QI -- for "Quite Interesting" -- is one of those weird, delightful British comedy/quiz shows where the aim is less to win and more just to have a fun and entertaining time. The format of this one is that all the comedians are asked a question which likely has an obvious answer. That answer is usually wrong, or at least not the one that's required -- those are generally much weirder, trickier, more obscure, or even downright unfair.

This book, like The First Book of General Ignorance before it, is a collection of such questions with their answers (and, as on the show, sometimes vaguely related tangents, as well). An example: Where is the largest known lake? No, geography buffs, it's not the Caspian Sea! We never said it had to be on Earth, did we? Or that it had to be filled with water. And it turns out there's a really big methane lake on Titan.

This stuff, admittedly, is nowhere near as hilarious and entertaining in book form as it is on TV, but as trivia books go, these are definitely high-quality, full of interesting little tidbits, and very readable. I also found myself admiring the structure of this one. Every question somehow manages to feel at least vaguely related to the one before, and yet they end up covering a very wide range of subject matter. One moment you're reading about Roman history, and before you know it, you've somehow seamlessly slid onto the topic of organ transplants.

Rating: 4/5

>34 bragan: If it helps, I try to post one quest somewhere about a week into a month, followed by the 2nd about ten days to two weeks later, and finally a "list" usually bridges the end of one month and the beginning of the next.

>37 avaland: It doesn't really help, unless I change my reading-posts-on-LT habits. Which I probably should, honestly.

43. Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon



Dan Chaon's new novel is set in a near-future America where things are falling apart -- even more than they already are, that is -- and violence seems to be casual and commonplace. Our protagonist, Will, a guy with a weird and difficult past, travels around running errands for an organization he's in debt to, from disturbing deliveries to bloody assassinations. Despite this, he doesn't like to think of himself as a bad guy, and damned if he doesn't almost get you to believe it. Then one day Will is contacted by someone who claims to have a mysterious personal connection to him, and things get really complicated.

Not that "complicated" begins to describe it. The plot of this one is just... bizarre. Bizarre, and ridiculous. And despite the fact that everything does kind of get explained, it somehow still feels, by the end, as if nothing's really been explained at all. Honestly, the whole thing feels like the stuff of some sort of psychotic delusion (and it's probably not insignificant that Will does, in fact, seem to have a history of psychosis).

It seems like it shouldn't, but Chaon does somehow make the whole thing work, overall. His main character is just such a great combination of strange and scary and sad and funny and charming that it's impossible not to enjoy taking a ride inside his head. Combined with Chaon's breezy writing style and the way he gives us intriguing, darkly comic little glimpses of this messed-up future world and Will's equally messed-up past, it makes the whole novel a lot more fun than it seems like it ought to be.

Rating: 4/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

>39 bragan: I'm in the middle of this one right now and you've summed up the main character well. (I've just finished the chapter with Wade the orangutan.)

>40 RidgewayGirl: I think he's a chimp, isn't he? Well... Sort of, maybe, I guess? I don't even know. At that point, it was getting very, very weird, and I was just sort of going with it. :)

But it's nice to know I'm definitely not the only one who feels that way about the main character!

44. At Childhood's End by Sophie Aldred, with Steve Cole & Mike Tucker



I was very, very excited when I got to the end of the most recent Doctor Who installment and saw Sophie Aldred in the preview of the next episode. Her character, Ace, was always one of my favorite companions, and she was definitely on my top ten list of characters from the classic series I'd most want to see again.

It also reminded me that I'd had this book sitting on my TBR for a little while, and I decided now was definitely the time to get to it, so I could see Sophie Aldred's own vision of a future for Ace before meeting whatever version is about to appear on our screens.

And it is a good version! I'm really pleased with the way the Ace depicted here -- or Dorothy, rather, as she's gone back to using her real name -- feels both believable as a 50-year-old woman who's done a lot of growing and maturing and making her own way in the world, and as someone who used to be the fiesty teenager we saw on our TVs in the 1980s. If the show's official reintroduction of her feels anything at all like this, I will be very pleased, indeed.

My feelings about the plot of this are a bit more mixed, though. Parts of it are fairly clever, and overall it feels very much like a Doctor Who story. But one or two elements do feel a bit silly (even for Doctor Who), or difficult to suspect my disbelief for (yes, even for Doctor Who). And while it was mostly fun, I can't say it always held my attention quite as well as I might have liked.

Rating: It's hard to know quite how to rate this, given aforementioned mixed feelings, but I think I'm going to be generous and give it a 4/5. After all, it did get the most important thing right!

>42 bragan: Ace is coming back??? I knew about Donna, but not about Ace. I've only seen a few of her episodes, having come to Classic Who by way of New Who (and not having been around yet in the 80s), but I really enjoyed what little I've seen of her. Looking forward to that!

>43 Julie_in_the_Library: Yes, both Ace and Tegan (who you may or may not have met yet, if you've only seen a bit of Classic Who -- she was a companion of the 5th Doctor earlier in the 80s) are going to make an appearance in the next episode/special, whenever it actually airs. Sometime this fall, apparently.

It's ridiculous just how excited I got over this. :)

>44 bragan: I have seen one with Tegan, actually. I'm looking forward to the special!

45. If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut



This is a collection of graduation speeches given by Kurt Vonnegut between 1969 and 2004, along with a few other bits and pieces he wrote or delivered as speeches for other occasions. (At least, the expanded third edition that I have includes the extra bits and pieces, anyway.)

And, man. Vonnegut. What the hell can you say about Vonnegut? Even in moments here where I don't entirely agree with him (and I do agree with him about a lot), I still feel like I just want to sort of... roll around in his brain. Which this collection does kind of make me feel like I'm doing. He's weird, sharp, rambly, earthy, insightful, satirical, funny, humane... Basically, all the adjectives. There are occasional moments where I want to pull quotes out of here and just, I dunno, engrave them in foot-high letters on a plaque in Washington D.C. or something. And one particular piece -- "How to Be a Wise Guy or a Wise Girl" -- just left me sitting there afterward going, holy crap for several minutes. That one feels every bit as desperately relevant today as it did when he wrote it in 1981, and genuinely feels like he's put his finger on a major component of whatever the hell is wrong with the world.

I will say that not all of these speeches affected me equally, and as a whole the collection does suffer from being more than a little repetitive. There's enough variety between the speeches to make all of them worth reading, but there are, understandably enough, particular points he clearly liked to make over and over for these occasions, and particular jokes and anecdotes he tended to repeat. Not all of them are his best or most interesting points, either, in my opinion, although the story about his uncle that lends the collection its name is one that is well worth internalizing. Sometimes, when you're experiencing a moment of quiet, simple, contented happiness, it surely is a good thing to notice the fact, and lean back, and say, "Well, if this isn't nice, what is?"

Rating: 4.5/5

46. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 edited by Charles Yu



My decision to go back and read the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies for years I'd previously missed continues to pay off spectacularly. There are maybe two stories in here that didn't 100% work for me, but those are among the shortest in the book, and are interesting even in their failure to completely click with me. Otherwise, the contents range from pretty good to fan-fucking-tastic, making it a terrific reading experience, as a whole.

One could probably spend a lot of time analyzing the interesting trends and patterns and repeated themes to be seen in this particular collection of stories, despite their widely varying perspectives and voices. I'm not necessarily up to doing much of that, myself, but one thing I definitely did notice is the way a surprising number of them draw on ideas from some venerable old subgenres -- especially 1950s monster movies and teen dramas, and classic kids' portal fantasies -- to do things that feel meaningful and relevant in the present day.

Rating: 4.5/5

47. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken



This is a very strange-feeling novel. It spans a period from the 1900s through the 1970s, and you could describe it as a family saga of sorts, but it's not really like any family saga I've ever read. Or like anything else, for that matter.

It starts with a woman in a graveyard. She has a bag containing a bowling ball, a pin, and fifteen pounds of gold. If she has a past before that day, she won't talk about or acknowledge it. Instead, she starts a new life by opening a candlepin bowling alley, an establishment which remains somewhere at the heart of the story for the rest of its pages.

Do we ever find out what her backstory is and how she got to that graveyard and why she had that bag? Nope, not really. We do learn a thing or two about her past, and can maybe guess at some more of it, but it's all sort of... oblique. As are a lot of things about the book, including the writing style, which is also not quite like anything else I've read, in some way I have a weird amount of trouble putting my finger on. It's not hard to read, mind you. And it's good. You can absolutely tell McCracken knows what she's doing and is firmly in control of her prose. But it's hard to feel like you quite know where you are with it.

That's also true of the narrative itself, which was never quite what I was expecting. Characters you think are going to be the focus for a good long time will suddenly die in bizarre circumstances, or leave town for decades, and you'll find yourself sliding into someone else's POV for a while, and then back out of it again, not all at once, but still before you've had time to feel completely at home with it.

Ultimately, though... it works. It was certainly an interesting reading experience, and, in the end, not an unsatisfying one. Somehow. I'm genuinely kind of impressed with McCracken for pulling it off, despite how much of the novel I spent trying to decide whether it was, in fact, working for me or not.

Rating: 4/5

48. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach



The subtitle here is more gimmicky than accurate. Obviously it's not about nature "breaking the law," because that's an inherently ridiculous concept. What it is about is the ways in which humans and animals (or, sometimes, plants) come into conflict with each other, and the ways in which humans respond to those conflicts.

My initial impression of this one is that, while it was readable and interesting enough, certainly, it wasn't nearly as entertaining as many of Mary Roach's earlier books. After a while, I realized that at least part of the problem was that even someone who once made reading about corpses an oddly enjoyable experience, couldn't (and, let's face it, probably shouldn't) do the same for stories about people getting mauled by bears or children being killed by leopards. After the first few chapters, though, she turns to some slightly less somber topics -- monkeys stealing things, seagulls vandalizing the Pope's flowers, weird tactics for scaring birds -- and things get rather more fun, especially Roach's trademark weird, hilarious footnotes. Well, mostly it gets more fun, anyway. The chapter about research into humane forms of pest control, perhaps ironically, is quite distressing.

Rating: I wavered just a little on this, but even when she's writing about things that are genuinely disturbing (as opposed to just kind of gross), Mary Roach is always worth reading.

>48 bragan: I had the same impression as you did about the difference between this book and Roach's previous works. I think another element of that difference is that Roach is at her most humorous when writing about absurdity, especially the absurdities that humans get up to. Generally speaking, the natural world that Roach is describing here just isn't anywhere near as absurd as humankind (perhaps with the exception of the bears who only eat high-quality ice cream and ignore the store brand stuff). Anyway, also like you, I ultimately enjoyed this book, as I have the others.

>50 rocketjk: Yeah, I think that's a good point, too. A few of the human responses had that kind of entertaining absurdity (particularly some of the bird-scaring schemes), but there was less of it than usual. That may be why I found the footnotes the best part of this one. They were generally just short tangents, but there were some wonderfully ridiculous ones.

49. The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain



Mark Twain's classic tale of two identical-looking boys -- the prince and pauper of the title -- who switch clothes for a lark, only to find themselves trapped in each other's roles, with no one able or willing to believe they really are who they say they are.

I first read this when I was about ten, and I hadn't remembered it particularly well. Indeed, I think I had the sense that it was some sort of vaguely ahistorical fairy tale, when it's actually quite firmly grounded in English history -- the prince in question is Edward VI -- complete with historical quotations and footnotes.

I do have the feeling that I enjoyed it well enough as a kid, and I'm pleased to report that's also true on an adult re-read. It's an entertaining enough tale, especially the twists and turns of the true prince's unhappy adventures. There's also humor here, of course, although it mostly feels rather low-key, compared to the sharp, acerbic wit Twain was sometimes capable of.

Not at all low-key, though, are the vivid contrasts between the absurdly lavish pomp of the prince's world and the brutal, unjust squalor of the pauper's. Nor is the obvious equality of spirit between the two boys. As social commentary goes, it's something of a blunt instrument, perhaps, but an effective one, all the same.

Rating: 4/5

>52 bragan: I've not read anything by Mark Twain for a while and I think I have this in my collection of short stories on my e-reader. It seems I should give it a try!

>53 raton-liseur: It’s a novel - maybe that’s why it is missing in a short story collection? :)

>53 raton-liseur:, >54 AnnieMod: Yes, it's a novel, but it's a short one, so I could maybe see it getting bundled in with a collection of short stories. Worth looking to see if it's there!

50. Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko



Sixteen-year-old Sasha is enjoying a pleasant beach holiday with her mother, when she becomes aware that a strange, unsettling man is watching her. The man coerces her in an impossible-seeming fashion into performing certain odd, seemingly meaningless, mildly transgressive actions, with bizarre results. Then he tells her she's been accepted to a college she's never heard of, much less applied to. And she will be attending. Or else. Even once she gets there, though, it's not at all clear exactly what she's studying. But it seems to be doing something worrying to the students...

It's tempting to think of this as a sort of weird, dark mirror of the Harry Potter books. The obvious comparison here is with that other dark school-for-magic story, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and, indeed, there's a blurb from Grossman on the cover. But I have to say, I liked this a lot more than The Magicians. (Or at least the first book. The rest of the trilogy did grow on me.) And the general vibe of the two is very, very different. Whereas The Magicians feels as if it sort of sucks everything magical out of magic, this one feels positively permeated with a deep, profound feeling of something mystical and extraordinary -- despite the fact that the students mostly aren't doing things that we might conventionally think of as magic, and words like "magic" are never used.

Exactly what the students are doing is hard to say. I do think that, if I'd read this in a worse, less patient mood, I might have found myself annoyed and frustrated by how opaque so much of this is, how little is explained, and how much of what we are told or shown is expressed in ways that are abstract or oblique or perhaps even flat-out nonsensical. But I'm very, very glad I did read it in the right mood, one that allowed me to fully appreciate the way in which the authors are approaching something that is literally impossible: giving us a glimpse into the process of learning something so deeply alien that it simply cannot be understood by human beings... and a viewpoint character who must herself become something non-human and incomprehensible if she is going to master it. It's audacious and fascinating and more than a little disturbing, and it worked for me much, much better than I might have expected it could.

I should note that this was translated from Russian, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of some of the translation choices. There were definitely a lot of moments where I felt like the translator must have been struggling to find an English word to express whatever was in the original, and ended up landing on one that felt a little off, or inappropriately obscure or something. In another novel, maybe that would have bothered me more, but in this one perceiving it all through an obvious extra layer of translation maybe just enhances the overall feel of strangeness and provokes some actually appropriate thoughts about the ways in which the words available to us do or don't fully capture meaning. Anyway, despite all that, I found the novel very readable and fully capable of evoking the intended emotional reactions, so I think we can say the translator was doing the really important stuff right.

Rating: 4/5

>56 bragan: Although not a book I would have run across on my own, your review is enticing me to look for it. Sounds interesting.

>57 labfs39: It's not a book I'd run across on my own, either, or even heard of. I got it from my SantaThing Santa (but only just now got around to reading it, because that's just how backed up I am), so thanks to them for bringing it to my attention.

I really don't think it's going to be a book for everyone, or for every mood, but for me it definitely seems like the right book at the right time. I hope that's true for you, too, if you decide to give it a look.

>55 bragan: That's right. I had in mind a novela-type story, but it's a full fleched story. 280 pages on my ebook. I don't think I'll read it soon, but it went up on my electronic to-be-read pile.

>56 bragan: Weird. Probably not a book for me, but I enjoyed reading your review.

>56 bragan: I have this one and its continuation on my Russian pile - which had been very neglected lately. Thanks for reminding me of it :)

>59 raton-liseur: I think it was rather less than 280 pages in my paperback copy, but it did have fairly small print.

>60 AnnieMod: Well, I hadn't realized there was a continuation of that one! It's not listed as a series on LT. I'm guessing maybe it hasn't been translated into English?

>56 bragan: I was intrigued, so I found the French translation, started reading the extract on my reader, and then bought it. So far I like it, and I’ve been reading so much American (or occasionally British) stuff lately, it’s a really nice change.

>62 FlorenceArt: Glad you're liking it so far! I really did find it fascinating, in its own strange way. And I feel like I probably don't read nearly enough fiction in translation.

>61 bragan: No, it came out in 2021 in Russian and had not been translated yet. Technically that is actually the 4th in the extended series but the 2nd and the 3rd are set in different places and do not share characters with the first (it is one of those weird series) so you can look at it as either a second or the fourth. Not sure if there will be more and how they will relate to any of the others. Or when any will be translated.

>64 AnnieMod: Huh, I had no idea. Well, I will keep an eye out for the rest of them, if they ever do get English editions.

>65 bragan: The one you read was the very first one (in case it was not clear that the fourth was the 2021 one). :) The 2021 one is also the continuation of the one you read. https://www.goodreads.com/series/76603 has the complete series and it seems like the actual second in the series has an expected 2023 English edition.

>66 AnnieMod: Yes, I did figure that out, but thanks for the clarification, regardless. And the extra info! Now I know when to look out for it.

51. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson



I really enjoyed the two previous biographies of Isaacson's that I've read: his Albert Einstein one, which was very relevant to my interests, and the Steve Jobs one, which was fascinating even if its subject was unpleasant as a person. I didn't find this one quite as engaging, but I think that's mostly because this piece of history was of somewhat less interest to me. And being the particular sort of nerd I am, I'd have preferred reading more about the electricity and less about the diplomacy, but I'm fully aware that that's not going to be most people's priority in a Benjamin Franklin bio. I also admit that, as an American, I find myself getting sort of twitchy these days when reading about the origins of my country, because so much of where we've evolved from those origins seems so deeply dysfunctional to me. But, hey, that's hardly Walter Isaacson's fault. It's probably not even very much Benjamin Franklin's fault.

Anyway, all that having been said, this is still a good biography. Well-researched, thorough, and readable, with some interesting analysis from the author (especially at the end), but not too much editorializing, overall. I certainly do feel like I learned quite a bit about Franklin, and got a much better sense of who he actually was as a person, rather than as a myth or a pop culture caricature. Which I do appreciate, especially as someone who grew up within a stone's throw of Philadelphia, where Franklin's name and face seemed to be everywhere.

Anyway. If you're interested in reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin, this is probably exactly the book you want.

Rating: 4/5

52. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 8: My Best Friend's Squirrel by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi



Volume 8 of the collected Unbeatable Squirrel Girl comics! This one features a three-issue story arc that's just wonderfully nuts. (Pun, of course, 100% intended.) There are appearances by a whole bunch of weirdly random Marvel characters (which I'm pleased that I mostly recognized, despite not being much of a Marvel comics reader in general). It also has aliens, and ghost squirrels, and outer space con artists, and holograms, and magic, and Squirrel Girl accidentally punching a demigod in the face. It's weird, and wild, and very entertaining.

There's also a one-shot story after that, in which Squirrel Girl and her BFF Nancy get accelerated in time, which managed to be sort of hilarious but also kind of heart-warming and poignant, all at once.

All in all, this may well be my favorite Squirrel Girl volume so far! Although I was kind of sad, at the end, to read that this would be Erica Henderson's last outing as artist on the series "for the foreseeable future." Her work is so good, I'm finding it hard to imagine Squirrel Girl without her. But I do already have volume 9 on the TBR shelves, so I guess we'll see what I think of the next person to do the job.

Rating: 4/5

Lots of catching up to do here.

>46 bragan: Thank you so much for putting this on my radar. I just read the "How to Be a Wise Guy or a Wise Girl" speech online and it is fantastic!

>52 bragan: Great review! This went right on my wishlist.

>68 bragan: And yet another one for my wishlist. :)

>70 OscarWilde87: Always glad to contribute to other people's reading wishlists! Goodness knows, other people put enough stuff on mine. :)'

And, yeah, isn't that an amazing speech? Although I'm feeling increasingly depressed at how absolutely, painfully on-target it is right now, all these decades later.

53. Highway of Eternity by Clifford D. Simak



This science fiction novel from 1986 features a couple of 20th-century guys with some odd, unexplained abilities who stumble into some other people who come from a million years in the future (although they don't much act like it) and have fled back in time to escape from a world in which aliens have talked most of humanity into becoming incorporeal entities. Then they're all attacked by some kind of monster and end up fleeing to various different times and places.

Simak has written some good stories. This novel, unfortunately, is not among them. There are some scenes or ideas, I guess, that are mildly interesting, but mostly it all just feels like a bunch of random thrown-together stuff that never adds up to very much, despite the attempts of an exposition-laden twist ending to tie everything together and explain it all. On top of which, it's got some of the clunkiest, most painfully stilted "as you know, Bob" dialog I've encountered in recent memory. Oh, and a bad take on the concept of evolution, too. A very common bad take, it must be said, but one I find I've lost my patience for.

Rating: 2/5

And that's it for Q2 of 2022! Join me for the third quarter on my shiny new thread! And, uh, don't ask how many books I bought in the first half of 2022, OK?

>9 bragan: Noting this one. I've just started streaming Season 3 and loving it!

>74 WelshBookworm: Season 3 is amazing!

>52 bragan: This was one of my favorites as a child. I've read it again as an adult, but not for many years. Maybe time for a reread?

>76 WelshBookworm: It's certainly worth at least one re-read as an adult, so it might well be worth a second one.