Becca

[b:I Do Not Come to You by Chance 6265288 I Do Not Come to You by Chance Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1236695900s/6265288.jpg 6448541] is fascinating from the stand point of the setting. As a novice on Nigerian culture & history, I found Nwaubani's loving and honest depiction fascinating. Kingsley's struggle as the opara of his family, who is therefore obligated to provide for his younger siblings and ailing mother, but who doesn't have the “long-leg” to get a job using his degree is both manifestly Nigerian and understandable to anyone who has loved academia. Nwaubani takes care to paint the “419 scams” as both necessary and repulsive, successfully depicting a morally ambiguous area.However, the book falls flat of the mark when it comes to pacing. The plot, such as it is, goes little further than the back of the book and somehow stretches across 400 pages. Character development is fleeting (the only development I noticed was when Kingsley finally realized that he had been either doing what his father said or what Cash Daddy said his whole life, which he realized almost word-for-word as I have typed and then did not reflect on that or change his behavior at all.) The setting alone was not enough to hold my interest; a huge part of the appeal of the book for me was hoping to see change & when I realized none was forthcoming, I finished the last 100 pages at a run mostly to get it finished.

I read this in tandem with [b:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements 7247854 The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements Sam Kean http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1276468318s/7247854.jpg 8246153]. What a great combination. The adjective that comes to mind when I think of this is cozy. It reminded me of my own childhood, filled with fingerprinting kits, lust for chemistry sets and Sherlock Holmes books. Flavia is a spunky heroine, who is posed between the confidence that children have as a consequence of not yet knowing enough to feel insecure and the equally inaccurate easy dismissal of children by adults. This tension is expertly woven by Bradley, especially in the ideas of reference that Flavia has - her serious concerns that the adults around her consider her the prime suspect in the central murder (an idea both laughable to an adult, and familiar to anyone who was ever a preteen.)Yes, at times, the mystery is a bit weak and predictable, but a well written child protaganist in a book for adults is much more unusual than a good mystery.

A gorgeous and moving piece centered on what truly makes one oneself and how much of personality is bound up in our relationships with others. Every twist of the ending was telegraphed from the beginning, but despite that (or perhaps because of it) each piece is still extremely poignant. If this book has a draw back it is that Niffenegger still has a somewhat heavy hand with the English language. Long passages in Portuguese are written in full and then occasionally translated below (a gimmick which smacks of arrogance), thoughts are typed haphazardly in italics and some sentences simply fall flat.
Overall, an extraordinary second novel.

An extremely engaging read about the defenses that we have to protect us when dealing with others. It is ultimately about each person's condition – the bits of them that keep them from being completely fulfilled and the fundamental weaknesses that define personalities.

Simultaneous to the extremely moving emotional story is an extremely well-researched scientific one. In my career I have met several girls & women with Turner's syndrome & every bit of Gwen's story rang true. Similarly, I have met several scientists and doctors & the personalities of Billy and Frank and the details of their professional lives down to the minutia was done sincerely. Each character is well-rounded, likeable, flawed and ultimately believable, which is the true strength of the novel.

This was a nice follow-up to the Hunger Games. As a bridge between Hunger Games and Mockingjay, it begins to explore the price of victory and the various costs of publicity. The supporting characters introduced also help add nuance to those main themes. I read this back-to-back with Mockingjay, which says a lot about the easy readability, but Mockingjay sticks out better in my mind, so the majority of my review will be there.

The Magicians is frequently billed as Harry Potter meets Narnia. What is left out is the heavy helping that Grossman borrows from a series of unfortunate events, which is, truly, unfortunate. The Magicians is really quite clever, when Grossman forgets to make all of his characters (and as a result, his reader) maximally miserable.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about why I didn't enjoy this book. I like urban fantasy. I like gritty literature. I loved the way the Grossman treated being a magician in a mundane world as something that would mess you up and remove your chances of having a normal life or normal interactions. I loved how academic and technical magic was. And, when Grossman concentrated on his own plot and his own ideas, the results were amazing.

To me, the problem arose in the set of totally unsympathetic disaffected 20-somethings that comprise that main cast. Although we're supposed to believe that they are the most brilliant youths in America, it seems to be a law of physics in Grossman's universe that whenever a character is confronted with two choices, they will chose the worse one. Perhaps it helps that his characters drink copious amounts of alcohol roughly every other page. As the reader, it becomes tedious to anticipate how Grossman will turn the latest plot arc into misery all around. Additionally, Grossman seems to intentionally write unrelated, usually pointless plot arcs that remain without conclusion at the end. Perhaps this is to loan the reader the despair the characters feel at living in a world where nothing means everything. If so, it worked – I spent most of my time reading this book despairing.

Wow. I usually hate hard sci-fi. But this was captivating – Butler taps into ideas about what makes us humans, at a core, biological level. As a parent, the concept of what we desire for our offspring - the desire for sameness in our offspring competing with a desire for the greatness beyond what one could desire for oneself was very compelling.

It's hard to fairly review The Year of the Flood – [b:Oryx and Crake 46756 Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1) Margaret Atwood https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327896599s/46756.jpg 3143431] is a masterpiece, which will be celebrated as a timeless classic in the genre. The Year of the Flood is...not. It's not bad, but it's a far cry from Oryx and Crake. The beginning of the book, for me, was the best – I liked how Atwood fleshed out the religion of God's Gardeners, and especially liked that she primarily narrated from the point of view of Toby, who herself was cynical towards the religion. I thought it leant interesting insight into the idea of deeds-based religion versus faith-based religion, using a fictional religion to showcase the concepts. The religion itself was interesting: an attempt to merge high-level evolution and science, environmentalism and Judeo-Christian thought. I thought overall Atwood balanced the components well, and made the religion both compelling and flawed, which I appreciated.I like the main characters as well, Atwood is at her best creating nuanced female characters, and Toby is one of my favorite protagonists. Atwood relaly allows her characters to grow and evolve over the course of the novel, in a way that is very unusual and very enjoyable to read.The second half of the book, where it starts to overlap with the events in Oryx and Crake is rockier on several dimensions. First and most problematic is that Atwood makes the choice to recount overlapping events, but to do so summarily and tersely. This disrupts the flow of the novel and makes it read, in places, almost like Cliff Notes for its predecessor. The second problem is that there are multiple coincidences that end up tying together the protagonists from Year of the Flood with Oryx, Crake and Jimmy. These are far too frequent to be credible. I'm not sure if Atwood is making a narrative point by mashing the characters together in multiple ways, or if it's lazy writing. It's rare for me to find Atwood lazy, so I suspect the former, but if she's making a point, I didn't get it.Finally, I think there's an uncomfortable line here between futuristic dystopia that plays on modern themes and conspiracy-mongering. I found Oryx and Crake to be firmly in the former camp, commenting on modern issues such as corporation rights and the growing class divide through the lens of dystopian fiction, while the Year of the Flood seems to be uncomfortable close to the latter, suggesting that no one should take pharmaceuticals because of Big Pharma or trust the government in any way. And while I agree with the first set of themes, the extension in Year of the Flood is one that happens by many people in real life today and I think it's counterproductive, so reading this thinly fictionalized account was uncomfortable.

The first couple of chapters were mild-blowingly good. I thought Harris' explanations of foods that are taboo or vaunted and how those roles are not only logical, but dictated by the socioenvironmental setting in which they originate fascinating. He treats cultural norms as almost the results of Darwinian processes, which is a fascinating and really revolutionary approach. I was awed both by his treatment of rules that are second nature to me, like Jewish dietary laws, as well as those that were quite foreign. Harris was a breath of fresh air to the “anthropology” I was exposed to in undergrad that tried to impress upon us that there is no way to understand other cultures and that trying to do so is cultural appropriation in and of itself.

However, the second half of the book fell flat. Perhaps it's because, as a Jew, I don't share Harris' fascination with Jesus (so much Jesus. Three chapters of Jesus. It was SO tedious) or because Harris' treatise on New England witches has really become conventional wisdom. Either way, I finished this book mostly through a sice of obligation.

Like a modern Sholem Aleichem, carrying on in the rich tradition of Yiddish novels that are deeply engrained in Jewish diaspora life without necessarily a religious point of view. Similarly to classic Yiddish novels, this one also has a strong Labor-rights and immigrant rights focus. I just found this book downright fun without much else to say about it. I really enjoyed Little Ash and the angel, although I didn't love the sideplot about the angel becoming more mortal, and I also wish that some of the restrictions and supernatural elements about the angel would have been protected throughout the novel, instead of it learning to speak all languages. I felt a little funny at the inversion of Aramaic being the one language angels don't know to it being the only language the angel spoke, but this also seems accurate, in that no one else speaks Aramaic anymore. But, anyway, overall the world needs more Yiddish literature revival, even if it's in English (but I would pay a lot of money to have a copy of this translated into Yiddish.)

A fascinating book. More rich and memorable than a lifetime of history textbooks. Exquisitely researched down to the last details.

Two things keep Dreamers of the Day from joining Russell's other books among my absolute favorites –
1) Agnes Shanklin often seems a mere vessel to convey historical facts and opinions on colonization decisions. The main character is more properly T.E. Lawrence. By necessity, historical fiction contains true historical figures, and Russell has clearly done her homework, never misattributing opinions. Nevertheless, Lawrence and other historical figures (Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill and others) in starring roles makes the book feel less like a novel and more like a fictionalized historical text.

2) The ending was superfluous, silly and totally detracted from the tone of the book.

The first book was a delightful fantasy take on urbanism and politics. Now it's all a little too real and a little too raw and reading about it just hurts.

A biting satire of modern literature.
I was a little worried that a novel satirizing modern literature might be a little on the meta side, but How I Became a Famous Novelist is down to earth and veers to keep a wide berth from being self-referential.
The fictional novels clearly give nod to real world counterparts and their titles and descriptions are the funniest part of the book.

For once, reading about a complete self-absorbed, under-productive scumbag is entertaining, rather than tedious. Likely, the insight into his own odious nature helps make the protagonist less tooth-grating.

I was concerned about two possible outcomes when I first read the cover flap to How to Buy a Love of Reading: the first that the book would be overwrought with literary devices, self-referential and self-deferential – obsessed with its own cleverness, the second that as a “young adult” book, the writing would be so simplistic, so easy to read, that it would not be worth my time.

Gibson walks a narrow line without ever venturing into either extreme in this novel, which is filled with a rich and moving narrative, well-depicted and sympathetic characters and metafictional devices, theme, tone and point-of-view. It is not only the sort of book that one can read many times to find out what it is “really about” (and certainly, because it is the sort of book that makes one hark back to their own exposure to the concept of literature as more than narrative, I was tempted midway through to sit down and write a 5 paragraph essay about the Dark Journey and Coming of Age imagery.) but also the sort of book wherein “stuff happens” and the reader cares about what will happen.

The writing is elegant, readable, funny and terribly, terribly sad. It is easy to identify with parts of each of the (many) characters, while despising others. Ultimately, it is a book about narrative, as each of the main characters has a different struggle with living their own narrative – Hunter who lives his life according to his own internal narration, Carley, who rewrites her life in Aftermemory, Bree who is so self-conscious and defensive that she invents literary devices in her life and Justin, who does not live at all, rather inventing the story of his life to be printed in the papers.

After I read [b:Sharp Objects 66559 Sharp Objects Gillian Flynn https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1423241485s/66559.jpg 3801], I wrote off Gillian Flynn. It's not that I didn't like Sharp Objects, but it was so unbelievably disturbing that I didn't feel like more. But then I came down with the Flu, and Dark Places was one click away on my computer, for free from the library, while everything else was in that horrible far away land known as Up Stairs, so...The good news is that Dark Places is nowhere near as disturbing as Sharp Objects. The bad news? Well, terribly disturbing is what Gillian Flynn does best. In the absence of horribly disturbing, her work is pretty pedestrian. I worry that it may say bad things about me/society/violence on TV/etc. that I find a book about a mass murder of two children and their mother not that disturbing, but the fact of the matter is that it reads like any other murder mystery. It takes more than gore to make disturbing and Dark Places doesn't have anything else. It's a decent murder mystery, but really, nothing special.Which is a shame: some of the themes really seem like unique things to feature in a novel, especially a genre novel. However, Flynn really tells-not-shows both of her favorite themes: children taking small actions with large consequences (which in an especially heavy handed sequence, one of the characters offers a soliloquy about after expositing that he had accidentally set a forest fire by playing with a lighter and making an analogy to the main character's testimony in a murder trial as a child); and satanic panic. Satanic panic is such a great topic for a book – moral panics are fascinating, and satanic panic is clearly the best moral panic – it's recent enough to be memorable to most readers, distant enough that almost no one believes in it anymore and bizarre enough that it's mind-boggling that anyone ever took it seriously. However, Flynn deals with it much as I did: she has characters literally parrot words like “Satanic panic” and discuss the ways in which people fall prone to moral panics, instead of ever showing any characters emotionally struggling with the issues, or coming to terms with the idea that they fell prey to a panic or anything like that. So the exploration of these great, deep themes is really shallow. Finally, the characters in Dark Places are extremely sympathetic (with only one or two exceptions) – mostly people dealt a really hard blow by life and trying their best to keep going anyway. Honestly, I prefer these sympathetic but damaged characters over the extremely unsympathetic characters that star in her other books, but I felt like they weren't flawed enough. For instance, Libby Day, who regals us with stories of how blackened her soul is and how she's too lazy to even get out of bed? She says these things but at every turn in the narrative, she bends over backwards to give people the benefit of the doubt, help others, and challenge her own weaknesses. So, yeah. I would have actually preferred her to start out more troubled and Flynn to actually depict the character growth.

This was a light and humorous read. I liked the framing device of supervillainy and the dry humor. But I think the pop science nonfiction was distributed unevenly with some chapters have a lot more interesting factoids than others. In particular, the first chapters were the best with lots of new info and the later chapters dragged more

I really enjoyed a lot of the concepts in this book. Angeline Boulley really set out to ground a story in the Native culture that was the most familiar to her – the Ojibwe people specifically of the Sault Ste Marie area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There is a very strong sense of place here. It takes about 50 pages to get into the story and not feel like a history and cultural lesson about the region and people and language, but once that happens the story has a propulsive power. I really liked Daunis as the main character, and her connection to her Ojibwe community and her elders, as well as to science and her white family, while not being able to be enrolled as a tribal member. The interplay between community, family, heritage and individual identity was a major theme and I was very drawn to it.The romance is a little unrealistic and honestly just distracting, and I think relatedly the denouement was a little too conspiracy and high drama for me - I think it would have allowed the rest of the book to shine if there was a little more nuance and realism there. Rather than   a 17-year-old controls a bunch of adults and teens, including his mother who is a judge   I think this really undermines that gritty reality of the majority of the book, that domestic violence and addiction are major problems in indigenous communities and this is a very low priority for law enforcement.

So I immediately went into murderbot withdrawal, and failing having another novel right now, I settled for a short story. This is the only story I'm aware of in the series that is not from Murderbot's perspective

Totally blown away by this second entry in Between Earth and Sky. This may be the only epic fantasy series that I've ver truly loved. I am just so compelled by how Roanhorse does this fascinating, intricately plotted politics while keeping her characters realistic humans whose self-interests, self-doubts and relationships consistently figure into what happens. I love the world building, the nuanced and often challenging characters, and the many factions each with many subdivisions. This is fantasy at its best: creative, brilliant and absorbing.

I think after reading her fiction and her nonfiction, some people are clearly Dara Horn people and I am not those people. Not that anything she wrote was wrong. And she was very clear that her opinion is that Jewish writing doesn't need to have a moral or a narrative thread. But there was no there there. It was just a discussion of the antisemitism in the world and a conclusion that the only choice we have is to keep being Jewish. Most Jews in the world already knew both of those pieces before we even knew the ABC's and most non-Jews, unfortunately, won't read it. The essays didn't necessarily fit. Some of them were, in my opinion, uncharitably picky about just how a Holocaust museum exhibit did or didn't hit Horn's specific personal criteria for what made a thoughtful exhibit, or whether a virtuous gentile was unselfish enough while saving hundreds of Jews and at one point Jewish Shakespeare critics who didn't agree with her ten-year-old son's interpretation of Shylock's monologue. It's too bad it didn't live up to its excellent title.

This is one of those books I couldn't stop telling people about:
So there's these two prisoners of war, and they use slight of hand and cold-reading to convince their Turkish captors that they're psychics and then lean in to the Turk's xenophobia to further convince them that there is secret Armenian treasure

In Icepick surgeon Sam Kean looks for scientists who did bad things in the name of science. In doing so, he mostly tries to avoid the easy ways out: most of the chapters are about sincere scientists, who at least start out meaning well, not cartoon villains. And on the flip side, Kean makes clear that there is no justification for the sorts of harm inflicted by these scientists – he reminds us again and again that this is not how science advances.

Reading it, I was stunned at how many of the tales were tales about scientists who did bad things in the name of MONEY, not science: taking to piracy, slave-trading, even murder with the goal of raising enough money to continue doing science. I complain bitterly about the NIH and the silly hoops for grant-funding, but at least science is funded. So much of historical science was only for people who were already gentry and could self-fund.

So, full disclosure, I am not audiobook people. I am a massive Scalzi fan and I'm pretty fond of Zachary Quinto, so I thought it was worth a try. It's not enough. There are just too many names and too many subplots for me to keep track of just by listening. I'm not sure why audiobooks don't go the direction of podcasts, or even radio plays, and try for more auditory interest? Even Quinto, an expert voice actor, comes off as monotone and some of the voices he uses for different characters are jarring or absurd.

The bones, I think, are decent: Scalzi explores what options the criminal element has to operate with in a world in which murder doesn't work. He brings back his Dispatcher protagonist, his cop sidekick Langdon and the morally grey crime boss from the Dispatcher and that continuity and further story development was nice. Hopefully I'll get a chance to read this at some point when it stops being an audible exclusive.

This is archetypal Connie Willis: light science fiction, adorable rom-com between people you want to root for, department stores, Christmas, historical fiction and miscommunications. Honestly, it reads a little like “we forced an artificial intelligence to read the entire oeuvre of Connie Willis and then it wrote this” – it bears a striking resemblance to parts of Time Out as well as Bellwether. But I'll still read everything Connie Willis writes: it's adorable, funny and wholesome.

By the way, yes, I was annoyed to pay $30 for a 115 page novella, but the book is a gorgeous slip of a thing with embossed inner covers and a color illustration on photo paper, so I'm pretty sure I'll get over it.

A snippet of a story, McGuire gives us back an adventure from book 4, and actually introduces the pivotal character in shaping Lundy. In doing so, she tells us more about the rules of monsters in the world and while the scene is short (and sad) it feels like a fundamental part of the story. I wish she hadn't cut this and the other such scenes from the novella