Becca

Becky Chambers' mom is an astrobiologist (yes, I'm jealous, too) and they worked together to imagine how spacefaring might work in this world. I love super-realistic space stories and there are so few of them, without ansibles and hyperspace drives. To Be Taught leans in to the boundaries of the speed of light. There is no going home, there is no instantaneous communication with earth, light years away. There is the claustrophobic feeling of being with the only humans who come from the same era as you, of being years away from hearing a response to your question. How do people cope with that? How does a society build up an astronaut plan and a culture to accept that? These are the fascinating questions of space travel and Chambers doesn't flinch from them.

So I had this carefully calibrated to-read list, and then the world ended, and I didn't feel like reading anymore. But in my head, I just kept repeating: “everything changes in a season”, so I figured if I could read anyone, I could read Jemisin.

I had thought that Jemisin was the epic fantasy writer of my generation. I was wrong: I'm pretty sure N.K. Jemisin is THE speculative fiction writer, in general, of my generation. This is an urban fantasy that redefines what it means to be urban fantasy. This is a book about the fantasy of cities. It's a love poem to cities. (a much needed ode, when currently living in a city seems like a death sentence, weaving around masked figures on the sidewalk.). I've never been a fan of New York, but through Jemisin's eyes, I found myself loving it. (Jemisin notes herself: there are NYC people and there are London people; I'm a London person). Even before the fantastic elements, Jemisin's NYC is alive.

And Jemisin's NYC is alive, in one of the most inventive modern fantasies I've read. Full of relatable, human characters, who also manage to slip to just the other side of inhuman. There is a villain who is relatable, understandable and also completely evil. It's the best modern take on Lovecraft: acknowledging and incorporating his racism

This is a beautiful, quiet meditation on what the purpose of life is and finding one's best self. I liked the idea of a tea monk, I liked the idea of a book focused on a character's journey to find the purpose of their life and how to spend their time and I really liked the idea of a post-apocalyptic world that functions by letting the wild lands stay wild.

But exactly what a tea monk does is relatively unstructured, as is Sibling Dex's story in general. And while I found the conclusion beautiful, I also found it a little unconvincing since the philosophical denouement was dependent on the setting that Chambers developed, so ultimately it didn't really speak to the reader about: what is the purpose of me and my individuality and my life and my time?

The best speculative fiction exists in dialogue with the world as it is and I think Chambers slipped a little in that goal.

The Lost Boys is a triumph in setting. The most frequent complaint I found about this book before reading it myself was how long it takes to get to the plot (the plot, per se, occurs on page 374 and runs for about 15 pages before the book ends.) People who say such things are missing Card's point. The Lost Boys is not about plot – it is about how the most mundane things can conspire to drive us down – how teachers can be too cynical to love children, how churchgoers can be so self-absorbed that they wrap God around themselves and how businesses can be so obsessed with the bottom line that they are torturing their employees. It is about how witty Step and kind DeAnne get disillusioned and how hard they have to work to pull themselves back up. And ultimately, Lost Boys is Card's testament to Mormonism – how faith in the unseen can be the most important thing of all.

I work with people with intellectual disability pretty much all day every day. By doing so, I've learned that there's a the range of people and personalities among those with ID is no smaller than that in the typical population. However, in the public conscious and most media, people with ID are children, or the object of Important Lessons, or benevolent figureheads. So I found Rachel Simon's memoir about the time she spent with her sister Beth, an adult with ID, a beautiful and nuanced story. Beth is passionate about buses, bull-headed, hates racism, is man-crazy and matter-of-fact. And Rachel pulls no punches, being completely transparent with the reader about Beth's peaks and valleys and about Rachel's own flaws in her ability to deal with Beth patiently. I really appreciated Rachel's honesty about her worries, frustrations and impatience with Rachel – I think it's important to share our dark times.

The book is organized into 12 months, each of which has a chapter about Beth and the bus, a chapter about Rachel's introspections and a chapter about their past. The middle of these was by far the weakest, and felt kind of shoehorned in. Examples include one and a half pages about person-first language. A personal revelation that she should make more friends and becomes the Giver of Wisdom to the bus drivers, over two pages. Beth is really the life of the book. But I think this was overall a touchingly sincere book about a rarely discussed topic.

I found the story of Hedy Lamarr, which I didn't really know prior to this novel, completely fascinating. Not just a film starlet, Hedy was an Austrian Jew, married to a fascist warlord prior to escaping to the US where she invited frequency hopping. It's a story of transformation from resignation and despair to claiming agency. But I think I would have rather read an actual biography than a fictionalized pseudo-biography. I don't really enjoy real-person fictionalizations and I found Benedict's dialogue quite twee.

a fun graphic depiction of the Escapist. It adheres closely to Kavalier & Clay canon. Nothing breathtaking that wasn't done in Kavalier and Clay proper, but a joy to see the story laid out as a real comic.

I think my biggest struggle with this book was that it was two (or maybe three) books in one. Both books were books that I think I could have loved, but the whole was way, way less than the sum of its parts. The two stories kept getting tangled up in each other – tripping up the tension and stealing the narrative thread.

The first story is, of course, the Murder at Road Hill House. This insanely gruesome real life murder is, as billed, like something out of a mystery novel: Locked Victorian house, bizarre forensic findings, no apparent motive, Victorian family with closets packed full of a skeleton for everyone.

The second story, which is what I was really hoping for, is an analysis on the rise of the “detective.” I have a weakness for the Super Smart Detective, who figures out terrible crimes using only his powers of deduction. I'm particularly fond of the Victorian instantiation of the same. I loved Sherlock Holmes before Holmes was cool (again). So I was super into this idea. And Summerscale does explore it, using Mr. Whicher as an exemplary case, who at one point was one of the foremost authorities of Scotland Yard. And this part is fascinating. There's lots of cool linguistics exploring the development of the vocabulary of the modern detective. Unfortunately, it's pretty sparse.

So if both parts are sparse, what makes up the majority of the book? Summerscale is addicted to the details, which sounds like a good thing, but becomes tedious quickly. Did you want to know literally every known address for Mr. Whicher over the course of his entire life? Literally every single contemporary piece of literature that even vaguely references a detective and how it might be influenced by Mr. Whicher? Every job the governess had before and after the murder? The book covered every action of every family member for the rest of their lives to an absurd extreme – fifty years after the principal events, we're reading about fights that the deceased's brother, now a middle-aged ornery scientist, is having with his scientific colleagues about the categorization of Australian fish (which yes, is another book I'd read, but does not belong in this one!)

I really enjoyed Deborah Blum's [b:The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York 7054123 The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York Deborah Blum https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442933592l/7054123.SY75.jpg 7305202] about poison in the Jazz Age, and this prequel, so-to-speak, of the turn of the century push for food purity was fascinating. Many popular non-fiction books read like an afterthought of stitched together essays masquerading as a book, but Blum's journalism background really shines. The narrative flows nicely from one section to the next, painting a complete picture of an America held captive to corporate interests and party politics on one side and activists, suffragettes, socialists and scientists on the other. This may feel a little on the nose for modern politics, but Blum never lets a parallel slip out, instead sticking strictly to history. She does so largely by focusing on the story of Dr. Wiley, the titular “one chemist,” who forms the also titular, “poison squad” – a randomized controlled trial to determine the effects of preservatives on food.Perhaps my biggest complaints about the books are the flip side of its virtues. With a singular narrative focus, Blum loses the opportunities to draw parallels and also address how the FDA and food regulation has evolved since FDR. Wiley's campaign against preservatives like saccharin and benzoate is addressed with complete credulity analogously to his campaigns against formaldehyde and copper salts in food. Blum never even mentions that both are FDA-approved now (a tangent: as a professional biochemical geneticist, I use benzoate all the time as a nitrogen scavenger because it binds to the amino acid glycine to form hippuric acid, which is easily excreted in the urine. When I first started interpreting urine organic acid analyses, I turned to my mentor confused – why do so many samples have hippurate in them? I assumed that some hippuric acid might be naturally occurring. Instead, my mentor handed me a diet soda bottle, clearly labeled “contained potassium benzoate to preserve flavor.”). She also didn't address the modern “pure food” movement or how that may be different with a more robust FDA who does approve the chemical additives...

I don't always review short stories, but people need to know about this one, which I was lucky to stumble upon a link to in a GR friend's review of something else.

This is one of the best things I read all year. Like goosebumps, mixed with trying to pick out key quotes that kept spiraling from a sentence to a paragraph to a page of amazing prose. This very light fantasy story is about what books mean to us – how they can speak to our emotions and how the right book can guide us through hard times. It is poignant and very funny.

Don't take my word for it – go read: https://apex-magazine.com/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/

Merged review:

I don't always review short stories, but people need to know about this one, which I was lucky to stumble upon a link to in a GR friend's review of something else.

This is one of the best things I read all year. Like goosebumps, mixed with trying to pick out key quotes that kept spiraling from a sentence to a paragraph to a page of amazing prose. This very light fantasy story is about what books mean to us – how they can speak to our emotions and how the right book can guide us through hard times. It is poignant and very funny.

Don't take my word for it – go read: https://apex-magazine.com/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/

I read speculative fiction in the undying hope that something will come along and surprise and make me find a new perspective on the world. It doesn't happen often, but it's electric every time. Rosewater is that book - I loved everything about this new take on alien encounters, psychics and oppressive governments. It's clear that Dr. Thompson has a firm grounding in science (he's a psychiatrist), with decently well-thought out explanations for how alien physiology works and impacts human cognition in this world. The sociology of the aliens and their motivations are...alien – distinct from other first encounter books I've read, and I enjoyed the futuristic Nigerian setting. If I had a complaint (and I always do), I would say many of the sex scenes are gratuitous and a little uncomfortable, but that was a minor annoyance. I liked the time-skipping back and forth as each time jump revealed a little bit more of the global setting and Kaaro's backstory and motivations (the perspective shifting is also something I've encountered from a number of Nigerian writers

Ok, so this just isn't how books work. McGuire leads us up to the climactic battle and then...the next chapter opens the next day as they recouped from their wounds. Not just once but again and again throughout the book. I know this is a Thing she's doing on purpose, perhaps focusing on the interstitial days that actually make up a life? But it's jarring and distracting and I never did like Lundy that much anyway. The setting, as always, is fascinating and creative but I just could not get into this.

The Theranos story is so fascinating. Carreyrou paces the book evenly, slowly building his case. I borrowed this from a clinical chemist who plays (per him) a bit role in the story, appearing in a couple sentences within the book. When I returned his copy, the two of us sat in his office just marveling at how things progressed so far. Within my own little clinical chemistry domain, CLIA looms like a Greek god – all-powerful and all-knowing. Should we accidentally make a typo in our data, CLIA will send bolts of lightning to destroy us. The idea that a lab somehow became CLIA-certified with such significant variance in their data even before the straight-out fraud is almost unbelievable.

In addition, this seems like any doctor in their right mind would know what to make of Theranos. My best friend who works with silicon valley startups asked me about it several years ago, when I was still in residency, and I told her that the problem with capillary draws was hemolysis (blood cells splitting) and that you could never get some accurate results do that - and that's baked in to the blood draw, before you even get to the machinery. Any doctor worth their salt knows this.

So this is an almost fantastical story about how someone by force of personality alone paraded out technology that everyone knew was impossible, and somehow, without ever really inventing anything became a billionaire running laboratory testing in clinical labs on patients. It's pretty serious and scary stuff.

While reading it, I couldn't help but be amazed by the number of smart, well-educated people who were at least temporarily a party to this, often bullied by fancy lawyers and nondisclosure agreements. I think there's a lot here about how much the assumptions of civil society are really what keep us in check more so than institutions like CLIA or CAP. Once someone starts operating in bad faith, it's pretty scary how far they can get. On the other hand, Theranos was pretty much brought down by Carreyrou assisted by a pair of early-twenty-somethings who felt they had to speak out. So I think there's also a lot here about the importance of protecting whistle-blowers and the media.

Miller writes at times extremely movingly about the impact that reading has especially on the juvenile mind. I particularly liked her exploration of the differences between reading as a child and reading as an adult and the way in which children inhabit a fantasy world of a novel with a passion and without any degree of removal or eye towards literary criticism.

Her description of her relationship with religion and how it impacted her to realize that Narnia was about religion (and more to the point that it was rife with symbolism and additional meanings) and overall her maturation in her reading style was poignant.

Also interesting was the exploration of the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien - Miller really uses the men as foils to each other to explore their distinct religiosities and views on their manifest to write. In addition, she talks about the different approaches to writing and the relative importance of different components of a story's structure. It made clear to me that the reason I've always liked Lewis and never liked Tolkien is that Lewis is committed to a narrative, whereas Tolkien was truly a setting simulationist.

On the other hand, once she had dispensed with her central thesis, the remainder of the book really lagged and seemed to be the same key points in repetition.

I simply lacked sympathy for most of these medical students. Medical school is hard; it is demanding and it requires compassion and a love of science. One of the writers complained how her classmates were shallow for enjoying their science classes and how they didn't care that she didn't have time for poetry, which she claimed was the underlying discipline that drove her to medicine. Whatever made her think that being a doctor and being a poet were the same job is beyond me.

Some of the stories were touching – a lesbian mother and an older student with sickle cell syndrome both had stories that called to me. But others simply were naive, self-centered and at the end of the day, whiners. The stories were prosaic, although it was clear the authors thought they were insightful and the writing was amateur.

Some great ideas but much stronger for professional gatherings – I don't feel like every personal gathering needs a deep, disputable purpose. For all that Parker disdains the term, sometimes people DO just want to hang out.

Margalit Fox is probably my current favorite non-fiction writer. She has an unrivaled ability to both tell a very detailed story and also provide a context that makes it meaningful. In this case, the story is the wrongful imprisonment of the Jewish German immigrant Oscar Slater, and the navigation of his subsequent release by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The context chapters are wide-ranging, for instance: the history of criminology versus true forensic science (the former assumes the type of person a criminal is, then looks for clues to support it, while the latter uses abductive reasoning to come to a conclusion), Victorian sensibility and the life and times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who apparently really hated being called Arthur casually). But the bulk of the context chapters focus on the xenophobia of Victorian Scotland with a particular focus on their anti-semitism and abject hatred of immigrants. Obviously, I found this highly relevant to current events.

I felt like she had a little more zip when writing about linguistics in her two previous books. I also missed the formal alternation of chapters – in Conan Doyle for the Defense there's a poor balance of thematic chapters and plot chapters in some sections. Nonetheless, I learned a lot and really enjoyed the narrative while doing so.

When I get stressed, I read pop-linguistics. This was fun: exploring the “verbal” quirks that happen in internet spaces, primarily social media. I particularly liked McCulloch grouping generations of early adaptors, etc. and how different generations, exposed to the internet in different ways, communicate differently. As an Old Internet Person, I've definitely kept a lot of capitalization and format my communication more for e-mails than texts, which I struggle to explain to people only a few years younger than me. I found this very light – McCulloch is an academic, but definitely not looking to have a completionist approach here – but memorable: I found myself referring to McCulloch's findings for months after.

There is nothing more refreshing than a book that is truly completely new. And this is: Clark imagines a Cairo in which the late industrial revolution was marked by the emergence of djinn and magic. And rather than handle this as a fantastical event, the world simply adapts to this as a newfangled technology: you know, kids run off to the continent to take “alchemical classes” and in my day, high-bred kids just took Latin. And by the way, the steampunk aerial trams are also powered by magic.

Mix this with a strong sense of place: Cairo here is presented as a melting pot of Western Asian, Middle East and African cultures. (Me: Is it Afrofuturism if it's set in Egypt? Jon: Is it about either Cairo or Alexandria being the best in Africa at something? Me: Cairo is the hub of the African dirigible system...so...yes). And then add in some bureaucratic procedural elements in the form of a pair of police officers whose job is to take in magical hijinks. Plus a heaping dose of suffragettes (the Egyptian feminist society in this alternate history gaining a much early right to vote) and the result is completely delightful.

This book is SHORT – most novella's feel short because there isn't enough space to develop an interesting set of characters/plot/setting, but Clark really excels here. Just to illustrate how quickly he sketches the scene for you, three pages in you know that the world has gone through a recent technical revolution, the main character is cynical because hauntings are too mundane and his partner is overly eager. Indeed, this novella feels short because there is so much developed and so many interesting questions like, should tram cars be emancipated? How are djinns similar and different from ethno-specific folklore beings? What rights do non-binary gendered beings have in this world? And while the story comes to a satisfying conclusion, these existential questions are unanswered. I hope Clark continues to write a lot in this setting.

After multiple rounds of abandoning my intended to-read, I decided that the only way to get to COVID was to read like I was a teenager again: back-to-back science fiction and fantasy, preferably in serial form. Good news: in the two decades that have passed, spec fic has gotten super high-brow. Murderbot carried me through all of July. In this, second outing, despite it's best intentions, Murderbot keeps making friends. ART, arguably Murderbot's best friend, is my favorite character. Fresh off of its first human friendships (and unwilling to acknowledge them as such), Murderbot needs another bot to be friends with. And ART is not human, although charmingly a bit arrogant, and definitely more than a bit pedantic, ART is a beautiful foil to the sardonic and asocial Murderbot.

The second book in the series spools out some of the backstory hinted at in the first, but the central focus is exploring what makes a bot itself and not just any generic construct. I loved this: I think it had a lot to say about people, growth and relationships.

When I lived in London, we had an assessment to do any leisure activity that you would not have otherwise done. My class partner and I decided to go through her oddities of London book, which landed us in the Jon Snow pub. Ever since, I've been enamored by Jon Snow. His story is not just one of life-saving epidemiology, but also the triumph of good science (germ theory!) over bad (miasmists) and real science (...still germ theory) over social prejudice. Steven Johnson would also have you believe that this story is about urbanism and the way that population density results in vulnerability (I think. More on that later.) So, pretty much no matter what you're into, this is one of the coolest stories in Western history.

And Johnson just destroys it. I spent a lot of time thinking about how this went wrong. I read a lot of popular science, and there's some classical ways to mess it up: oversimplifying to the point of boredom, getting too bogged down in the details, getting attached to a pet theme, etc. Johnson does none of those. In fact, if I were to describe the content of the book, it would seem perfect. In addition to the science, Johnson explores how contemporary science and the politics therein reacted to this discovery and opposed it, how the friendship developed between the disparate Snow and Whitehead and how Whitehead's better social skills improved his ability to really test the hypothesis well. Those sorts of themes were key to my enjoyment of Johnson's the Invention of Air, which is one of the best history of science books I've ever read.

First, I thought there was something innately boring about the discussion of Victorian sewage. But I'm the sort of person who loves pedantic details and I have enough medical training that I am unimpressed by extensive discussion of unmentionable topics. I think there was just no organization to what was happening. And as a result, every 25 pages or so, for no clear reason, Johnson would start repeating one of his key themes, not really apropos of anything but because it had been a long enough time since a central thesis that I think he forgot what he'd already said.The other problem was that the backend of the book was a mess. After an extremely in-depth exploration of very specifically the broad street pump outbreak of cholera, Johnson tries to expand to discussing urbanism in general and his thoughts are completely discombobulated. Included within this chapter are: But urbanism is good for the environment even though no one used to believe that, and Johnson and his family certainly will live in a city and he loves cities and this is the global city, but urbanism is bad if there is terrorism and terrorism is relevant because it could be bioterrorism, but vaccines will work against bioterrorism and they won't work against conventional terrorism, so it'll probably be a bomb and also, there's this idea of mutually assured destruction but what if a lone actor gets their hands on a nuclear bomb? With about that degree of organization between thoughts.All of this disorganization happening at the end of a reasonable chapter about how Jon Snow made a physical map to prove his point, which Johnson used as an opening to discuss how critical graphics are in science and then *did not include said map. And yes, it's 2017 and I had a smart phone handy to google it, but come on.

*(This book is shockingly dry, given that its about a water pump.)

This is an interesting, hugo-nominated short story. I found it all a little on-the-nose, and it took reading reviews to get insight into the cultural appropriation association.

The moment I fell in love with The Toast as my internet home started with the words “Hey Ladies.”
The moment that I had second thoughts about going into pediatrics also started with “Hey Ladies!” In fact, in my previous life as a computer scientist, no one would ever have referred to a professional group as “ladies,” for gender reasons alone. But, as a senior medical student, all of my peers considering pediatrics were women, as was the altogether too cheery chief resident standing in front of us, gathering our professional attention with her false-friendly greeting: “hey, ladies!”

And, yeah, honestly, I love being a pediatrician, but my professional life is one where gender performance is scrupulously policed, and semi-social professional interactions are full of gender declarations, passive aggressive behavior and subtle status cues. So the way that Markowitz and Moss really capture a way in which women of a certain demographic interact with each other, and the nuance captured in a signature really spoke to me. (Normal conversations I have with my husband include lines like: “We can't hang out with her after she was so mean.” Him: “When was she mean?” Me: “In that e-mail you just read? Did you not see her punctuation marks??”) And no, it's not me and it's not my day-to-day life, but it completely captures where my professional and social life intersect. Perhaps because I am mostly an outsider, cleverly camouflaged to make my way onto these e-mail threads, I find seeing them exposed, dissected and ultimately lampooned hilarious.

But? I thought the blog entries were funnier. I think the pacing was better spread out over months (I binge read the book in two one hour sittings over two days) and that limiting the e-mails to one year lost some of the nuance that, for instance the Jen/Brad relationship took on in the blogs.

Realistic, gradual and sustained character growth is rare in novels. And yet, Murderbot has clearly grown in this fourth installation, which it reunites with many of the characters from the debut novel. Murderbot starts having and believing in its emotions and starts believing that relationships with people matter. Most of this novella is emotional work and it feels deeply satisfying after the first three books.

In this episode of Murderbot: the delightful foil, Miki, who is a friendly and social bot. Also, perhaps my favorite of the adventurous romps against an entire evil factory. In the second book, I spent some time worrying about whether each book was truly going to be episodic and isolated from the characters of the last. In this book, the glory of the structure became clear. Wells has written these each like a TV episode with a standalone arc and set of characters, but an arching metaplot. (With a reading speed of 100 pages/hour, I also finished these off in only trivially more time than a standard television episode.) This feels like an adorable callout to Murderbot's favorite hobby. As much as Murderbot learns about its world by watching soap opera, we learn about this world (and by extension our own society and the interaction between people and corporations) through Murderbot.