Becca

The sequel to Ursula Vernon's Jackalope Wives is nearly as good. It feels a little more pat than it's predecessor and a little more fan-servicey. If nothing else, Grandma Harken is a well-written and nuanced older female character – a demographic largely missing from speculative fiction.

I don't really understand how Neal Stephenson is a bestselling New York Times author. Is there really that large of an audience for a 900+ page book that sandwiches a narrative of Greek philosophy, quantum mechanics and astronomy with a time line at the beginning and an ending of 50 pages of glossary and mathematical problems?

That's not to say I didn't like Anathem, although, having said that, in large part I liked it because I had the time to memorize entries from the glossary (you grow out of needing it around page 400 or so), to look up quantum mechanics, google philosophers and work out a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. This is a book to be read on vacation.

I loved Anathem. It's one of the few books that really begins on a small scale and then gradually scales up to epic scale problems, while entertaining the reader along the way. Similarly, it is one of the few books in which the author tries to posit scientific and philosophic hypotheses while still remaining an entertaining work of fiction and without becoming preachy or (unlike many of Stephenson's other works) an unreadable information dump. His science is entertaining and while it is bettered by outside knowledge, he explains his points in such detail that outside knowledge is not necessary. Stephenson is respectful of quantum mechanics, in contrast to myriad “science” fiction novels that throw around Everett and quantum mechanics as excuses for all manner of convenient magic.

That's not to say that I had no complaints: whole sections of the book drag, particularly because they seem to be rehashing what the reader already has either been told explicitly or intuited and many plans made by characters seem to ultimately go nowhere. More grievous is the closing arc, which has an unfinished feel. After 850 pages of having every action described to the minute detail, the last few pages feel like they're in outline form. Time jumps, plots are dropped, key points are ultimately only intimated and never explained outright. All of these are fine narrative devices but are in stark contrast to the rest of the book and therefore feel unfinished.

I gulped this book down after finishing Too Like The Lightning. It honestly stood up to binge reading. I thought I had Palmer's number this time through – and in some ways I did in that twists were less shocking than they'd been in the first book – but this still managed to be a genuinely thrilling book with a lot to think about.

Here's my final warning: I was the first person in my group to finish Seven Surrenders. Friends don't let friends read Ada Palmer alone. This is the sort of book that you need a buddy to digest with.

Shilts' contemporary account of the advent of what is now HIV/AIDS is truly a classic. Shilts takes an unbiased, journalistic approach to the science surrounding the discovery of the “GRID” complex, the underlying virus, the epidemiology required to figure out how the disease was spread as well as the international politics limiting the closing of the bathhouses, treatment, testing of the blood supply and delaying the correct taxonomy of HIV.

Interspersed with this, Shilts shows the ready a very personal view of the stories of individuals affected by HIV/AIDS and their personal struggles both as patients and as advocates. These interspersed narratives are touching and strong, and completely unfictionalized.

Although it would be easy for these one of the many different components of the narrative to become overwhelmed by the vastness and intricacy of the story that Shilts is telling, he handles each of these components deftly, making the 600 page book a manageable and entertaining read.

Although And the Band Played On is now over 20 years old, it was the first comprehensive account of the advent of HIV/AIDS, it was an instant classic in its time and its contemporary nature lends an honesty to the homophobia, politicking and counter-productive maneuvering on all sides that would likely be glossed over in a modern telling.

My first real rotation after I moved to Philadelphia for residency nearly 7 years ago was the well-baby nursery. Every morning, we'd present about 30 new babies born the previous day, and another 30-40 that were 2-3 days old and the South Philly-native attending would nod along. Every once in awhile, something about a baby would strike her as unusual and she'd respond to the presentation with “Call Noro.” Eventually, it was my turn to get the instruction: “Call Noro.” I looked Noro up in our paging system only to find that there was no Dr. Noro. This still didn't strike me as unusual, since the nursery was in the adult hospital and we (the residents and the paging system) were part of the pediatric hospital, I figured Noro must be a pediatrician on staff for the adult hospital to cover just the nursery. So I found one of my co-residents who had gone to med school at our program and asked her how to call Noro. She gave me a strange look, pulled up the pager system and typed “Neurology” into the service field. “Oh,” I said, “I didn't realize that Dr. Noro is a neurologist.” She laughed and said, “No, not Dr. Noro, neuro.” As a midwesterner, neuro, to me shares a first sound with “nerve.” Similarly, I don't pronounce water “wooder”, and I find the word hoagie to sound vaguely dirty, rather than a generic word for sandwich. It was a hard first year.

So that's basically this book. Who says what how and what does it mean to them, displayed as a series of heat maps. It was fun to pick up my childhood town, Madison, WI, as largely an isolated bubble on most of the maps, reflecting the imported nature of most of the people there. It was sometimes hilarious to read about what things are called elsewhere. This was a webpage awhile ago and I had played with it then, but Katz has fleshed it out for the book. The result is both entertaining casual browsing and decently aesthetically appealing for a coffee table.

So...this is someone's book. Obviously. But it's not mine. I had not-so-high hopes going in, because I'm not usually one for super hyped anyway, but it seemed perfect for an airplane and the bookstore clerk said he reads a lot of scifi and this kept him guessing and was like nothing he's ever read. Let me count my issues:1. It's derivative. So, so, so derivative. If you've ever read a speculative fiction book based on quantum mechanics, you have read this book. I anticipated every twist. His abductor? himself from a different multiverse OF COURSE!, the surprise ending? there are more than two of him from the many multiverses. 2. It does quantum mechanics shallowly and I care. I read this interweaved with [b:The End of Mr. Y 93436 The End of Mr. Y Scarlett Thomas https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389137862s/93436.jpg 1535663], which does such a more nuanced job. 3. I can't turn off my feminism (sometimes I wish I could.) And the female characters had no agency. And/or were MacGuffins. And also, I read this mid-[a:Alison Bechdel 21982 Alison Bechdel https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1245100306p2/21982.jpg] marathon, and wow does it fail the Bechdel test.4. The family v. success dichotomy is overwrought, unfair and honestly a problematic cultural narrative.What is the second star even for? It was readable enough that I didn't ragequit and I wasn't really hate-reading it. The story was kind of vaguely entertaining.

I'll give Sanderson this: his ideas of “hard fantasy”, meaning magic has to have rules and limitations and be entirely consistent works for some very nice world building. But I've just never been big on epic fantasy. I think my feelings on the whole trilogy were summer up by Sanderson's introduction in which he reported that he was so proud of the epic story he was able to tell in “only” three 700+ page books that would have taken someone else 10. And I just thought of all of the amazing stories I've read that have been single novels or 300-500 page book trilogies and had richer worlds, characters and settings. Sanderson needs to edit. He needs to realize that not every single perspective needs air time and tighter stories are better stories. Also, a world in which every city ruled by a non-noble degenerates into a Communist Russia stereotype and “all religions have a martyr figure and a good/bad duality” was a little much. I'm not big on the Christian manifest destiny, and I couldn't ignore it.

Much of this is pedestrian YA, but the part that really struck me was the reality TV aspect. Collins excels in this area - exploring what it is like for her characters to be in life or death situations, but have to focus on how the TV audience will react and how that affects the situation. The concept is novel and really has room for exploring private vs. public self. I'm definitely going to finish off the series

Let no one say that Neil Gaiman is not the king of urban fantasy. Certainly, Anansi Boys does nothing to bring his title under dispute; however, as a fan of American Gods, I found myself missing the darker, grittier tone of the latter. Anansi Boys is excellent, but will not meet the expectations of readers looking for American Gods redux.

Journeying through three worlds, McGuire showcases her strength as a world-builder. Worlds that could seem silly or frivolous, like Confection, are still both part of a greater theme, and also thoughtfully depicted with internal consistency, backstory and a lush sense of place.

The characters continue to be flat, and the murder mystery of the first novel continues to diminish in importance with nonsensical resurrections, but this time I knew what I was in for, and just relaxed and had fun with it.

Every year, I hit a book that I really struggle to review and as a result, my reviews taper off. It's still early, but I'm pretty sure that All the Birds in the Sky is that book for 2017. To quote a friend, it's just really less than the sum of its parts, and that makes it really hard to discuss.

The first part was truly brilliant: a boy builds a two second time machine (only forwards, not backwards, of course) and a girl discovers that she can talk to birds and together they fight crime commiserate about being stuck in the wrong genre. In this part, the magical elements are so small, and brought into contrast with larger than life reality – super strict parents, super out-of-touch teachers, a guidance counselor/assassin – and together it's just really a special conversation about what it is that we're discussing when we write and read and reread coming of age teen magician books. I loved that they weren't like each other, but they clung to each other because neither of them was like anyone else. In a lot of key ways, it reminded me of my own relationship with my own best friend.

I liked the decision to skip over both of them coming into their own and go right to them as independent young adults. I thought it was brave to leave out any details of the Special Secret School for Witches. The tone of the next part lost some of the contrast of small magic/big life/quirky offshoots that are funny but not overpowering, but it was still riding on the strength of the beginning. Some of the ideas introduced were really clever (like the guy who turns into nature once he leaves his bookshop) and others fell a little flat for me (like the way witches were totally obsessed with not becoming too arrogant), but overall, I really liked the central tension between saving the world and saving humanity and found that compelling.

Then, holy non-sequitur, Batman! We enter a massive time jump, to stop one month in to have 1.5 pages of Patricia and Lawrence having sex, their social falling out and Lawrence's girlfriend both having been erased during the time jump. But no sooner do we turn the page, then there's another several months of time jump. If you have to stop your time jump in the middle to show your readers coitus, you're doing something wrong. But I probably should have just walked away, because after this, I felt that the characterization completely fell apart and a lot of the storytelling hinged on deus ex machinae and false dilemmas.

So, strong start, I'd like to see Anders' next work, but I probably won't reread this; at least not all of the way through.

I consider myself a pretty sizable Batman fan. I've seen all of the movies...well, all of the good ones, anyway; I consider myself above Batman vs. Superman. But I'm not much of a comic geek. I find comic books nearly impenetrable with the layers upon layers of necessary backstory. Which is why a history of the lives and times of the batman and how they fit among the surrounding cultural milieu was pretty interesting to me. I found bits overly pedantic, or a little unmoored from the greater history, and there were times that I wished Weldon would offer more speculation as to why, for instance, there's been a huge resurgence of super-hero culture, but overall, I appreciated this serious and thorough take on one of the biggest cultural icons of American history.

I think I wish Vance had set out to write a true memoir. Hillbilly Elegy is at its best in those autobiographical moments – you really feel for teenage Vance, his poor sister/surrogate-mother and his matriarch figure of a grandmother. Many memoirs increase their narrative power by adding analysis, but in Vance's case, I think the result is less than the sum of its parts. When he switches to political or socioeconomic commentary he takes an extremely preachy tone, which I think is not necessarily warranted by the narrative.

Although I would consider this book a four-star work (all for the memoir portions), three sentences really detracted for me. It's highly unusual for me to have such a visceral reaction to a single sentence, much less more than once in a book, but here we are:

1. In the very beginning (and then repeatedly throughout), Vance talks about how “Hillbillies” are culturally distinct from African Americans as a way of justifying their poverty behavior, but not that of African Americans...and then thoroughly fails to prove that. Through years of serving the poor urban African American population as a physician, I found everything Vance talked about as unique to Appalachian whites to resonate about the subset of poor, urban African Americans well. I think the two populations are extremely similar in their Protestant ethics, historic participation in the labor portion of the workforce and disenchantment with the American Dream. I don't know why this bothers me so much, except that it really smacks of White exceptionalism – even when we're poor, we're special!

2. Vance talks about how patriotic he is and then says essentially that no one on the “Acela corridor” would ever understand that feeling. First of all, the generalization that the Acela corridor is all wealthy, white liberals needs to stop – I meet plenty of disadvantaged people right here in my Acela-ified city. But secondly, OK, I'm white, I'm Jewish, I've never been working class in my life, I went to a hippy liberal arts college and I'm a doctor, so I'm the epitome of the Acela corridor and I think I've figured out patriotism just fine, thanks.

3. He talks about the loss of American heros. True, the days of astronauts and politicians being the heros instead of teenybopper singers and actors are over (assuming the past was ever truly like that.) but then he brings up Obama. To me, Obama is the American hero of our generation – a brilliant, charismatic, young president, who pulled the economy out of a death spiral, brought healthcare to millions, brought about the legalization of gay marriage, doubled the number of female supreme court justices in the history of the country and did it all while keeping his nose incredibly clean. To Vance, Obama is an “alien.” Not because he's black, Vance hastens, but because he's well-spoken and highly educated. Yes, this is the complaint of someone who less than 50 pages prior said that what the Appalachians need is an American politician hero. But, apparently not a well-spoken, highly-educated (black) one. If you think there's racism between those lines, well, I'm with you.

I kept wondering if I'd cut Vance more slack if I didn't know that he was a Republican, but the fact of the matter is that overall, I felt like he didn't read between his own lines. He talks about his understanding of learned helplessness, but then is dumbfounded when his neighbors won't commit to jobs. He talks about how he believes culture drags down everyone in it, but then says that he thinks the best that can happen is placing a thumb on the scale for disadvantaged kids, rather than the evidence-based practices, like housing-first that's been shown to intervene on culture.

It's not all bad – some of Vance's comments are both critical and point out a recurrent problem I see in my own larger community: especially an unawareness of need-based aid for college by those who actually need it and the way that community college and other less prestigious institutions often cost more, rather than less for the working class and come with less of the unwritten benefits. Overall, I found Vance bracingly honest and reflective about his own experience growing up in the working class, but I wish he would think about generalizing his experience beyond the Appalachians.

So, I love microhistories. There's just something SO satisfying about learning a lot about the world by ostensibly learning about something small and contained. And Salt is basically the ur-microhistory – one of the first and most famous books in the genre.

By my typical standards of microhistory, Salt is a win: every conversation I had while reading it eventually came around to me saying something like “so did you know that one of the major advantages of the North in the civil war is that they had more salt mines?” and (since I read it while in Austria) “did you know that they used to open salt mines to the general public as adventure rides?” And I did learn a lot about (broader) history through the infinity stories of “this area used to belong to tribe, but nation came and took it over because it had a good access to sea salt” but overall, I found the book boring. Not that the topic was boring, but, well Kurlansky's writing style was not ideal for me...he simply doesn't have any form of linking information. He'll state a sentence but not link it to related concepts in the chapter, or provide any sort of information about why that particular fact is interesting. If background information is needed for context he doesn't provide it. My own textbook writing is filled with linking phrases like “therefore, it follows that...” or “in light of this, it's particularly interesting that...” to keep the reader grounded in how things relate to each other. Also, each chapter contains recipes for no clear reason. Often the recipes use quantities that aren't defined anywhere and Kurlansky won't tell us what he intends the recipe to be an example of?

Kurlansky also perseverates on some topics: like salted fish. I think there were three chapters on salted fish, and yes, this is a microhistory, but there's really a limit of how much I want to know about salted fish.

But the content was excellent and I'm glad I read it. Just, next time, hopefully with any degree of structure

Wow. NK Jemisin is a force. Every bit as good as the Fifth Season, Jemisin has basically turned the genre on its head to produce something truly original, but with all of the nostalgic resonance deserving of an epic fantasy trilogy.

Keeping a brisk pace in this second book, with tons of plot reveals and twists Nassun taken in by Schaffa! and character development (including a deepening of the relationship between Alabaster and Essun, which may be my favorite relationship in a modern book.) The characters are rich, nuanced, broken (so broken) and really relatable. There's an intimacy to the story, which mostly takes place within the confines of Castrima in this middle book, despite having world-altering consequences.

I think one of the places where Obelisk Gate really shines is exploring the metaphysics of orogeny and depicting how it's much broader than Essun (and we!) have been given to believe from the Fulcrum. I was also really drawn in by Schaffa's story and the deepening of our understanding of Guardians in general.

After the tightly woven Lie Tree, I found this book even more painful than I would have otherwise – Missing, Presumed is basically the opposite: loose ends are left everywhere, including subplots, dropped characters and thematic references.

Look, Missing, Presumed is a perfectly workable beach mystery (although honestly, I think there are better pulp mysteries; I found every twist pretty telegraphed.) But it's clear Steiner's aiming to be the next Tana French with thematic elements woven into the mystery and the life of the investigators paralleling the investigation. However, I found the thematic elements lacked a coherent arc; it's clear that Steiner wants to explore the idea of families of choice (one detective “adopts” an elderly woman with Parkinson's, while another adopts a tween) and independence versus loneliness, but I just didn't find that there were much said other than the repetition of these elements.

But where things really fell flat for me was the lack of coherent narrative. The two major suspects are basically completely coincidentally connected to the case. Tony Wright? Investigated because they are investigating “all criminals in the area with similar MOs” (even though he's the only one ever mentioned) and he has an alibi that feels very pat. I was so confused by the detective's insistence that he was involved that I searched the ebook for his name not once, but twice to try to figure out what he was missing. Similarly, the person who got connected with the case because he was a dead body who turned up in a different area of town at a different time? Meanwhile, an extremely suspicious character that had a physical fling with Edith the night she disappeared is never mentioned or interviewed again. It was clear Steiner started with an ending and worked backwards to introduce her key characters without the theory of mind of how readers would perceive this.

So, ultimately, two stars mean it was readable without being actively painful, but I basically only finished it because I happened to be on vacation and it was on my computer from the library.

Although we share an alma mater, Alison Bechdel is sufficiently older than me that when I first heard of her, she was already a realtively famous sensation, with a popular webcomic, which was soon to be followed by an eponymous test that would be cited in every feminist movie review for the rest of time. So, thinking about her as an unassuming child, forced into girly clothing was a little odd.

Usually, memoir (especially graphic memoir) is form over substance, as no one's real life is actually very interesting, but Bechdel's childhood may be an exception to that rule. Her early years are dominated by a gothic house, kept to exacting detail; a mortuary that seems to resurface in the narrative at particularly apropos moments and a relationship with her father that is largely dominated by F. Scott Fitzgerald allusions.

Bechdel drops hints along the way that she is not the most reliable of narrators, and I found that although Fun Home is ostensibly about her dad, it's mostly about how Alison Bechdel cast him as a foil in her own life, and then uses that to reinterpret her own.

Every year, I get super behind on reviewing books because I read something that I just can't capture in words. Too Like The Lightning was that book this year. Not that I don't have things to say about it: I went a month where it was the only thing I could talk about. But I don't have anything intelligent to say in under 20,000 characters.

I might stick to what Jon told me to convince me to read it: Too Like The Lightning is the first book in a long time to truly thrill me. It's a view of the future told by someone who really gets that the future is the future – as far from us in mores and habits as the Victorians on the other side – not just Now but with flying cars. Palmer really feels out how things will change, and then layers on top of her fascinating setting, compelling, flawed and unreliable characters. And then, like an Escher drawing of stairs twists, and twists, and twists all somehow staying in the same place.

It is NOT for everyone. I wish I had been warned about just how over the line the content gets sometimes, but (except for one chapter at the beginning of the sequel) it's almost all purposeful to get the reader to question what our boundaries and morals are and why and what's a product of our moment in time.

My pre-read notes say “Apparently, it's all a surprise, but the author of the Girl with All the Gifts wrote a book NPR describes as ‘[a] supernatural fantasy [that] reads like a marriage between Stephen King and Charles De Lint, with a touch of Orange Is The New Black...'” And, yeah, that's basically it, with a few quibbles: I would describe this as Orange Is The New Black, with a touch of De Lint and Stephen King, rather than the other way around; and I think this book is really hurting itself with the “it's all a surprise” shtick.

Let's start with the un-spoiler-y parts: this is a good book. This is an important book. Those who turn their noses up at speculative fiction don't understand that at its finest it takes a simple question of “what-if” and uses that to deeply explore humanity, our existence and modern living in ways that “literary fiction” cannot. And that's what Carey did with this book: he took the biggest issues of the ‘10's – for-profit prisons, the opiate crisis, human trafficking – and added a tiny “what-if” to cast a new and thought-provoking light on them. And, I guess this is where I'll spoiler tag, although I encourage you to keep reading, because as previously mentioned, I think trying to guess the “mystery” impedes the reading of Fellside.

The what-if is this: what if the protagonist can see a ghost. That's it, not that there are ghosts, or lots of people can see ghosts. One little trait of one main character that really shifts the entire narrative. Through the ghost, who Jess originally thinks is her victim, but who turns out to be Nasreen, a former inmate, Carey gets the chance to say a lot about what it means to be a criminal and what it means to be a hero. One of the core themes of the book is exploring the myth of a "lost-cause" and how by fighting for this ghost, Jess becomes a champion and, in turn, inspires other characters who have given up on themselves. Carey also has a lot to say here about how our current incarceration system inevitably causes recidivism by presenting impossible dilemmas of continued criminality versus victimhood. What I liked the least about Fellside was the ridiculous commitment to mystery. It was abundantly clear to me from the beginning that the ghost wasn't Alex, but was Nasreen and to have the narration pretending otherwise was distracting. In addition, I felt like letting the reader in on that secret would help give insight into Jess' state of mind and the lies that we tell ourselves to try to heal ourselves.

Overall, I could easily see this book ending up in a high school English class curriculum, exploring the interplay of speculative fiction and contemporary events. (I kind of want to write that five paragraph essay now.)

There's not much to say about Hidden Figures that hasn't already been said, but I still found the story of how African American female mathematicians left behind their families and hometowns to seek their fortune doing calculations on bomber planes to win WWII, in a time that there was still segregated lunch tables and African American women could expect to make a pittance. It's amazing to read about the women, who despite these circumstances, forcibly integrated grade schools to earn their PhDs and persevered for years to be recognized as engineers and included on literary papers. I liked that Shetterly chose to focus on a few key characters as a way of humanizing the story, although I agree that the character development was pretty weak, and especially the side characters tended to blend together.

As a side note, I DNF'ed the young adult version and, having read the real thing, I completely stand behind that choice. What were they thinking? Young adults are not more attracted to drier books stripped of characters.

When I put books on my to-read list, I usually write a few sentence synopsis. For this I had:

“A precocious child protagonist, who may be autistic, his child-minder, his famous novelist mother and somewhere, a plot. It's quirky! And zany! And hopefully not ridiculously twee.”

Pretty much sums it up. It is a little twee – Frank is not really an accurate portrait of an autist, as much as a portrait of an idealized-self-insert sort of child: extra precocious, loved by adults and with preternatural insight – but in a cute way.

I often look for flawed characters that the reader nonetheless comes to really like, and Be Frank With Me really excels at that. All of the characters are substantially flawed but likeable and them coming together as something that resembles a family of choice feels really satisfying.

I was really excited to read this book on why women aren't getting married any more. But I wasn't wowed. I found Traister's treatment of the subject to be very superficial – focusing on what she and her friends were experiencing, with pretty limited deeper analysis. When she did turn to statistics, she employed a lot of motivated reasoning including interpretation of statistics that I didn't believe were significantly different. It was clear sometimes that she had a pet theory that she couldn't let go of, for instance, when she talked about how urbanization made single life easier, brushing off that the woman in her exemplary anecdote had to move out of NYC to Virginia to survive as a single mother. Also, her work really focused on singleness among highly educated, affluent white women. She had a chapter on African American women, but the breezy anecdotal tone of the book really didn't translate well to this. Even more than other chapters it felt like she interviewed one black woman (Nancy Giles) and generalized from there in favor of her hypothesis. Traister herself is married and waited until she was married to have children, and she really resists acknowledging that the postponement of both marriage and children among highly educated, affluent women is a different beast socially, psychologically and from a woman's liberation perspective than the childbirth before (and instead) of marriage among less privileged women. She references [b:Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage 73305 Promises I Can Keep Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage Kathryn Edin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438872307l/73305.SY75.jpg 1500229] a few times, but keeps returning to “my life is great! I have a career and female friends and a husband and kids. Isn't single life amazing for women?!

The underlying story here is fascinating: illuminated manuscripts representing muslim thinking through the ages are strewn about as family heirlooms in Mali surrounding the area of Timbuktu. Initially scattered in the face of French colonialism that resisted evidence that Africans and Muslims were highly intelligent with a pre-existing deep culture, many of the manuscripts were being ravaged by time and the elements. A single man, Abdel Kader Haidara, heir to his father's own massive collection, was recruited to save the manuscripts and house them in a formal library in Timbuktu. As a native, armed with his knowledge of the local culture he manages to ingratiate himself and buy back manuscripts. As a well-spoken, well-read individual he also manages to ingratiate himself with NGO funders to plan and build a climate-controlled building in Timbuktu to house the documents (despite building the first library on a floodplain by accident and having to ask all of his funders to refund him!) Then Al-Qaeda invades Timbuktu and wants to destroy the manuscripts as they are largely Sufi in origin and have a more nuanced approach to Muslim law. Abdel, aided by his family, “Emily” ([a:Stephanie Diakité 5078224 Stephanie Diakité https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], for some reason her real name is obscured but her bibliography is listed, which confused the heck out of me) and crowdfunding to evacuate the manuscripts to safety.This is a great story. Unfortunately, this is also about all you get of the story in over 300 pages of the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which probably would have been better if left as a longform article. It's not all bad: I learned a lot about the major players in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb, Islamic and North African history, and the Tuareg ethnic group, which is something I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to and it was interesting. But the writing style really got to me: a frequent complaint I have of popular nonfiction is it is often multiple longform articles strung together, which requires a strong editor to make it cohere. The Bad-Ass Librarians is the most flawed book in this direction that I've ever read: characters would be introduced and discussed in four or five chapters and then all of a sudden at their sixth mention would get several pages of backstory, much of it redundant to their shorter previous introductions. Acronyms would remain undefined for their first ten mentions then arbitrarily expanded on the 11th. This was particularly unwieldy because I think some parts of the book were originally from unrelated articles and plopped down unedited in the book, which made the whole thing feel very incoherent. Remember the story that I told you was the ostensible premise above? Hammer goes over a third of the book in the middle without mentioning a single person or concept from it, instead giving us the entire backstory of a terrorist who never turns out to be related. My final complaint is that Hammer's self-insertion is really distracting. I love self-insertion in non-fiction (says the girl who's read everything Mary Roach has ever written), but Hammer does it in a way I found intrusive, perhaps because I was frustrated with his diversion from his premise. We hear what he was thinking about while he rode a boat down a river to meet with a source, and what type of iced tea he drank while sitting in a hotel lobby to meet with another source and I did not find it evocative of Northern Africa or introspective I found it completely useless noise.So overall, these is a really weird book: I'm glad I read it because I learned so much about a region and a history that I had little prior knowledge, but I found it extremely frustrating to read.

I don't really know what to make of this one. I really liked Jahren's discussion of botany and chemistry when it was happening. Jahren is hard on people: her students, her co-workers, but also herself and she pulled no punches in describing herself, which led to challenging passages where I was cringing at her condescension towards colleagues and students. I liked how she depicted herself learning and growing, and making her way through bipolar disease. It was truly vulnerable and authentic. Nonetheless, I don't think I'd send one of my students to rotate through her lab – it's clear that she embraces the sort of work-to-death environment that academia is struggling to grow out of.

Speaking of generation gaps, I was surprised to find that Jahren has barely more than a decade on me. From the way she described being a woman in science, I would have guessed more like three decades. Indeed, many of her faculty members were women, and my own experience in overlapping years in the life sciences was that there was very little overt sexism.

I loved reading about her relationship with Bill, her lab manager, but I note his conspicuous absence from the press releases, her lab website and many of her publications. It's hard to read about how she sees him as a partner while he's underpaid and underacknowledged for the work he does. Finding grants to pay people is brutal – I know that personally – but now she's a big deal and he could have fancy titles and a nice profile on the lab website but he's not even mentioned. Perhaps that's how he wants it, but it's weird to write a book about your friendship with an employee and then not use any of your employer privileges to support said employee.

Let's get a few things out of the way: Stiletto was a very different book from the Rook. But it was a very, very good book. In fact, I think it might be a better book than Rook (although not quite as enjoyable.) In Stiletto, O'Malley zooms out from the narrow perspective of Myfanwy to a much bigger story about the Checquy, told primarily from the point of view of the Checquy's mortal enemies, now nascent allies, the Grafters. By switching perspective, O'Malley uses the different takes on supernatural and what each considers the proper way of things to really explore cultural dissonance. I thought O'Malley had a lot of interesting things to say about assimilation, alliances and immigration through the lens of these secret, ancient, supernatural organization. As an aside, I felt pretty anxious about how bring the Antagonists into the story would work with that because I was worried that they would be yet another, totally separate secret, ancient, supernatural group that would really unbalance the novel. I was extremely pleased with the direction that he went in. Also, it's very unusual for me to come across a book with a twist that both makes sense and surprises me.

I also continue to be extremely pleased by how deftly O'Malley writes female characters: they are distinct, nuanced, not sexualized and have agency. Yes, they tend to be dismayed to wear extremely expensive clothing, which they subsequently manage to ruin during action sequences, but everyone has their quirks.

Speaking of literary quirks, people who didn't like the Rook won't like Stiletto either. O'Malley loves info-dumping, and uses the merger between the Checquy and the Grafters as an excuse to go off on historical tangents (I'm pretty into his world-building, and found this fun, but it's an odd pacing choice.) He is intent on sharing the backstory of every character in the universe, even if they only survive for two pages. And he paces books like a TV show, with lots of monster-of-the-week encounters (including one that's kind of poorly paced.) But he's a fresh new voice on the speculative fiction scene, writing new, fun, things with well-written characters, well-drawn settings and something new to say with fantasy worlds, so, yeah, I'll read anything he writes.