Ryan
A fairly interesting social history of some of the giants of the Canadian snack food industry (Old Dutch, Hawkins, Ganong, and the like). A little on the dry/academic side, but interesting to see the impact of those companies on the communities that they inhabited, and the relationship that people develop between food and childhood memories.
This was a really mixed bag. It takes the old and familiar - a ragtag band of adventurers questing for a mcguffin - and infuses it with a more modern understanding of how politics and gender relate to war (given Khan's academic background in political science this is quite understandable). For the most part, though, the story dragged slowly and took some time to find its feet. Once it found itself, though, it became a lot more enjoyable, but it was a lot of work to get to that point.
This was a fun, creepy, frenetic novella that mashes up the obsessive power of music and Lovecraftian horror. If you're the kind of person that notices the difference between the radio edit and the album version, or has a favourite bootlegged version of a song, the characters here will seem familiar.
The plot of the novella moves really quickly, which at times stretches credulity a little, but that's kind of necessary for the structure of the story, so it's forgivable. Overall you're left with a fantastic EP of a story.
The beginning of the end (one I'm not quite ready for yet). We begin with the crew of the Roci scattered across the universe, with the Laconians tightening their grasp across the systems. From there you can kind of tell where the story's going to go, but the experience of going there is what matters, and it's one that's incredibly emotional and exciting.
Poker and poker stories bring me joy. Which made this a bad fit for me - Whitehead is incapable of feeling joy, and as such his writing about poker is as interesting as reading a page of tournament results, with the added bonus of the kind of hipster detachment that tries to make you feel like less because you had the audacity to feel something.
This is a wonderful souvenir of The Mercer Report, and is a must-own for people that were invested in the show. The book is 80% transcripts of Rick's rants on the show, with enough behind-the-scenes stories mixed in to give it some added value.
If you weren't a watcher of the show, but have any interest in Canadian politics, it's probably still of interest? Rick's rants always got to the heart of the political issues, big and small, affecting Canadians, and reading them in reverse chronological order is like stepping back into recent history. Social media has made following politics into a bit of a goldfish bowl, where people forget what things were like even a few years ago, and it's nice to have a document of what they used to be.
This was sold to me as “Eurovision in space”, but really it's more like “Eurovision in space by way of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Hedwig and the Angry Inch for a soundtrack”, which is infinitely better. Valente takes a fairly standard sci-fi premise (aliens considering the destruction of Earth), fills it with an intergalactic singing competition, characters that are endearingly over-the-top, and aliens that are completely bizarre and beyond the imagination of most.
I thoroughly enjoyed this!
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays”
This was a fun novella that helped flesh out the culture of Innistrad really well, as well as introducing some interesting new characters in Tacenda and Davriel. Hopefully they weren't created just for this story, and will continue as part of the larger Innistrad mythology.
I can't imagine anyone being really interested in this is they aren't already invested in the lore of Magic: the Gathering, but if you are it's a great read.
This was an incredible, heartfelt alternate history story that took two separate historical events - the Radium Girls of the early 20th century, and the elephant that was sentences to the electric chair - and winds them together in a way that makes complete sense and is at the same time completely fantastic.
I want more of this story. There's this entire other world that Bolander is only able to hint at here, and I'm completely fascinated by it.
This was a fantastic extension and expansion of the world that Chakraborty created in City of Brass. We learn a lot more about the Daeva world, as Nahri attempts to adjust to the position she was placed in at the end of the first book. It feels like this volume has a much tighter grip on her as a focal character, and it makes it a stronger narrative because of it; through her eyes, we can see not only the wonder of the fantastical world she exists in, but also the frustration over the rules that it tries to impose on her.
This was a great continuation of the series started with Son of a Trickster. Robinson does a great job of presenting a protagonist who faces relatable challenges that would be difficult for any young person to cope with - Jared has to deal with issues about identity and belonging, escaping cycles of violence and dysfunction, and trying to stay connected to his heritage while building a life for himself.
The fact that he's the son of a trickster spirit, and is living in a house filled with otherworldly beings, is an extra layer put on top of all that, but one that doesn't define Jared's experience, and the story is stronger for it.
The new setting and supporting cast are all interesting and enjoyable, and add a lot of depth to the book.
Brown Girl in the Ring is the story of a dystopian, futuristic Toronto that's falling apart from the neglect of the larger authorities around it - in other words, it's very contemporary, only with added elements of Caribbean supernatural folktales added in.
All that is background, though. The story that really matters here is that of a young woman coming into her own, taking the beliefs and responsibilities of her ancestors' culture and making them work for her in a modern, contemporary way. It's a complex and interesting character-based work, and it's hard to describe what makes it work as well as it does.
Over the past few years, I've started a winter tradition - when we have the first real cold snap of winter, I read a Carl Hiassen novel. They're always fun, popcorn-for-dinner style crime novels, and most importantly, they're all set in warm, sunny Florida. I dive into the book and let the descriptions of beaches and everglades keep me warm while the slush piles up around my winter boots.
This one's set in the middle of Florida winter, which counteracts that a bit. But it's not something I can really hold against it.
Razor Girl was a fascinating experience in situational ethics because EVERYONE in the book is running a scam. Some of those scams are legal, and some aren't; some of them could even be argued to be ethical, from a certain point of view. But scam, scam, everywhere's a scam; Hiassen's Florida is a place that's nice to visit from a distance, but you definitely wouldn't want to live there.
I'm sorry, Kushiel's Dart, it's not you, it's me. You're a well-written novel, and I can see why so many people fell absolutely in love with you - but we just didn't click. Your alternate-history Europe setting was interesting, your protagonist was fascinating, but at the same time I felt cold and unmoved by you.
This was an interesting companion piece to Martin's abandoned Song of Ice and Fire series*. It's written from an in-universe perspective, chronicling the history of the earliest Targaryen rulers of Westeros. Written as a history book, it initially feels dry and lifeless, but as you get more engaged with it (and as Martin gets to the more interesting parts of Westerosi history), it becomes sometimes fascinating. On the whole, the Targaryens are a great argument against hereditary monarchy, and it's interesting to see the Westerosi narrator struggle to attempt to justify their failings and present them as beneficial parts of the development of his society.
Due to the scope of the material that Martin's going over, he unfortunately doesn't have space to include all the parts of the history that fans are most interested in - there's no Aegon the Unlikely or Rhaegar Targaryen here, which is a bit of a shame. On the other hand, he does include a comprehensive look at the Dance of Dragons that is epic in scale and rivals anything he's written in this world.
This story was an interesting mix of small-scale and large-scale crime: a man is found dead after falling from the Scarborough bluffs, possibly due to foul play. As investigators Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty investigate him, though, they start to suspect he may be connected to the war crimes of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. Through both of these events Ausma Zehanat Khan explores ideas surrounding justice, loyalty, and the lasting effects of crime on a community. The war crimes Khan writes about are shocking, and for some are hard to read about, but Khan contrasts the events with characters that are deeply humane (if flawed), which makes it easier to read about.
The Unquiet Dead is a very slow-burning novel - in the early sections it feels very slow and cold. If you stick with it, though, it is and incredibly rewarding and haunting piece of literature.
This one felt a little more enjoyable than the first one - del Toro feels more comfortable with writing for the page as opposed to the screen, and it was interesting to see the story of a society slowing sliding into an apocalypse (rather than the usual post- or pre-apocalyptic stories one tends to get).
This was a fantastic story, both as a creepy horror story and as a look at institutionalized racism. LaValle takes the tropes and elements of traditional weird horror and looks at them from the perspective of outsiders. Throughout the novella, he contrasts the corrupt, racist environment of 1920s New York, and the threat of impending doom on the part of the Deep Old Ones. As the injustices pile on, he starts to see less of a distinction between the two.
LaValle is reimagining an old Lovecraft story in this novella, so the endgame of the characters are a bit of a fixed point for him. However, he manages to work in and around that framework in such a way that the end result stands alone as a great example of what a modern horror story is capable of.
This was a surprisingly heartfelt and poignant end to the Murderbot saga.
Murderbot would have hated it.
In all seriousness, though: this was a great end to the series of novellas. Things come full circle, and we see the ways in which autonomy and culture have made Murderbot more “human” than it was at the beginning. Which is thought-provoking about how we define humanity, although Wells writes it in such a way that those themes aren't explicitly brought to the forefront. Good reads all around, though.