altlovesbooks

I'll just go ahead and say up front that I didn't think this book was as strong as the others. I didn't feel all that connected with any of the humans our SecUnit was protecting this time around, because the story doesn't really set any of that up in the same way as the other two. We just kind of...end up with them along for the ride when Murderbot was there for other reasons entirely. The framework story also felt not as strong, and a bit fragmented and confusing in places.

I do like the slow transition the author is building from how Murderbot was in the first book (standoffish, aloof, more than a little terrified, wanting nothing to do with any human for any reason) to how it is now (mildly aggrieved, reluctantly protective, a bit curious). There's definitely a lot of character development packed into these small stories.

I read the first book in this series earlier this year and really liked it, in the face of unfavorable reviews. I liked the sci-fi detective noir setting, and felt like people went into it expecting something different than what they got. It had flaws, but I really enjoyed the stream of consciousness writing style associated with our detective's thought processes, as well as the cyberpunk-esque setting he was in.

This book felt just a bit less entertaining, if only because it feels less a detective noir and more a cyberpunk thriller, which is fine I suppose, but not what I enjoyed from the first one. That's not to say this was a bad book -- I did give it four stars after all -- just that my reasons for liking the first one and this second one are different.

We're eight years off of the first book, and our still-unnamed protagonist is raising his kid after being relieved from duty while his wife retains her job on the police force. (story spoilers here) Unfortunately, Ascalon is back and still wants to get one over on her mom Akira Kimura and show how much better she is at everything, so her neural implant burrows into his kid's eye socket while she's swimming and takes her over. What follows is a lot of our protagonist thinking he's finally breaking the hold Akira and Ascalon have over him, but really he's following the path they meticulously lay out for him to the letter. Our protagonist does a lot of thinking in this one about whether he has free will, or whether he's just a puppet for either of them--or both.

There's lots of action in this one. Almost wall-to-wall action, actually. We go to space, we go underwater, we go to the old United States where people live without IEs and technology, giving the author plenty of time to flesh out this dystopian-esque cyberpunk world he's created. But you don't get much time to catch your breath or enjoy the scenery, because our protagonist is never in any of these places for very long before the next story beat yanks him away. The pace really is pretty frenetic, so if fast paced thrillers are your thing you'll probably enjoy this second book better than the first.

I thought it was just a little bit too fast for my taste, but I still did greatly enjoy the book (and that ending!). I'll be moving onto book three in 2025 sometime.

I read Shaun Bythell's The Diary of a Bookseller last year, and found a lot to identify with, being that I work with books as well (as a lender in a library, not a seller). I found his irreverent humor at the crazy situations he ended up in personally identifiable, in that I also have to keep a straight face and a smile whilst fielding personally (or listening to my staff field) questions of all stripes from patrons. One can be ready and willing to help in any manner while also internally wondering how we got to this point, I think.

I found more of that irreverent humor here in this book as well, which follows Oliver as an apprentice bookseller at Sotheran's in London from his first steps into the store, through his career there, and his evolution out the other side at his realization that at some point he was no longer an apprentice. Throughout his time at Sotheran's, he tells us (with some exaggeration rooted in truth) about the bookish atmosphere that at any moment might turn on its inhabitants and cave in on itself, the people who come through their doors looking to buy or looking to look or looking to sing a song or looking to....smell, I guess, the myriad ways people try and get booksellers to buy their moldy books found in a basement/shed/attic somewhere, and many other amusing topics besides. I think my favorite topic was the recurrence of the cryptids throughout the book, leaving me with more questions than answers (as I'm sure the author thinks the same thing).

All in all a fun, short book to keep me just barely on track of my Goodreads goal for the year. I really do love reading these books about people in the book trade.

I'm starting to really like these ship-in-a-bottle mysteries that Turton pops out. I really enjoyed The Devil and the Dark Water (aside from some thematic quibbles near the end of the book), and this was (kind of) more of the same, just with an island instead of a ship. Island-in-a-bottle just doesn't sound as good though.

We have a small colony of people, marooned on an island and unable to leave due to a mysterious fog that's swept the world and killed everyone else on it. This island was the last refuge for scientists, who constructed a barrier that managed to keep the fog at bay and the people safe, but the lab that housed most of their technology and kept most of the people asleep in suspended animation had to be sealed up. Time passed. Survivors rebuilt their society as best they could. The three surviving scientists, enhanced to live long lives, shepherd their small colony of 122 villagers through their lives and their little society coexists together in a fragile balance of just enough villagers for just enough food. There's enough little oddities told about this village to keep you reading and make you wonder at what's actually beneath this little idyllic existence -- and then one of the scientists, beloved and revered, turns up dead. Suddenly there's a clock ticking where the murder must be solved before everyone is killed.

I really mostly enjoyed this book! There's enough strange things going on that's hinted at or glossed over by the POV characters as being something that just is to keep me wondering what actually was going on here. In fact, if the whole book was told with this as the framework, I'd probably be looking at a 5-star review here. My hangup is when things turn into murder investigation mode, because everything starts feeling a bit disconnected and frantic. The "detective" (in quotes, because she's not actually a detective with training) seems like she bounces from random location to random location in rapid succession with no real idea what she's doing. (ending spoilers here) Despite this, she manages to stumble on enough of the clues to lead her to a conclusion that was far-fetched at best. I certainly had a hard time following her train of thought, despite already arriving at the 'these people aren't people' conclusion before we got there. It feels like a book that begs for a re-read to really understand the ending.

Still, really interesting thoughts here, spun in a way that kept me reading to see how things wound up. I can't say I necessarily agree with the motive and the ending, but the journey was fun enough for me.

This book follows Lin Chong, a once-arms instructor for the Emperor, who gets branded a criminal based solely on the untrue word of a government official. She falls in with a group of bandits who have a code of justice to protect those less fortunate, and though they do many good deeds, they're all still criminals, traitors, and cutthroats, so Lin Chong struggles daily with reconciling her old life with her new one. This book also (in the middle stretch, at least) follows Lin Chong's friend li Junyi, who gets voluntold by the Empire to work on harnessing a weapon--manufactured Gods' Teeth. Chapters are dedicated to her viewpoint as she works through creating a small team to meet the demands, researching and testing the weapon, and finding out her best friend is working for the other side.

I very badly wanted to like this book, especially since it starts out really strong in my opinion, but the middle chunk of the book felt too oddly paced, and focused too much on Ii Junyi. The ending was strong, but I mentally struggled to keep my attention in the middle stretch of the book. I also feel like the cast of characters was entirely too large, and while Lu Da's character was necessary to be Lin Chong's other half (so to speak), I personally didn't really care for her personality.

The writing was really strong though, I just had a hard time with the actual story being told.

Like a gritty post-apocalyptic jaunt through a lawless West, but your main character is a Buddhist monk who avoids hurting/killing people, when people want to kill him. Will is a courier for a potential cure for a plague that ravaged the world, but the man trying to stop him is actually the least of his worries. The remains of society, the lawlessness, the unchecked wilderness is doing a pretty good job of it on its own. Will reflects on this a lot during his journey, and his additional traveling companions, a cat named Cass, a raven named Peau, provide him with additional food for thought and perspectives throughout.

I appreciated the extensive inclusion of Buddhism/Buddhist principles throughout the book, as this is more meant to be an introspective journey than it is a gritty wall-to-wall dystopian adventure. I really felt a part of the world the author was crafting here, and I think I enjoyed the quiet moments of the journey and his interactions/troubleshooting along the way, more than the scenes involving actual action. I like how the author handles Cass and Peau's "talking", equal parts magical realism and plain understanding of animal vocalizations. I like the story told here as well, with the backstory of the Mayhems sprinkled in alongside the journey to get the cure to California.

I'm not quite as in love with how the book ends up though, which prevented me from giving it the 5 stars I was riding on the rest of the book. (ending spoilers here)I'm not sure I love the idea of Eva not being dead, or the way she was woken up. I know I praised the inclusion of the elements of Buddhism above, but her being conveniently able to keep herself asleep for 14 years using some hard-to-achieve Buddhist principle while not really being a practicing Buddhist herself seemed a bit hard to swallow.

But the rest of the book? Fantastic. Enjoyed every minute of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"Today the sun has set on airships and ... it is feared that it has set forever."

Buddy Levy's arctic expedition books continue to not disappoint. I've read both Labyrinth of Ice and Empire of Ice and Stone, and rated both of those an enthusiastic 5 stars. This one, with its inclusion of the history of airship travel and the arctic, was no different, to no surprise of mine. There's just something incredibly compelling about these explorers who endure so much in the name of planting a flag.

This book's three parts tell the reader about a different airship attempt in each part. We first are introduced to Walter Wellman and the Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition, whose struggles to get airborne set the stage for what comes after. The second part brings in Roald Amundsen (a familiar name for anyone who's read about polar expeditions in the past) and his journey on the Norge, where both him and Umberto Nobile become rivals and enemies at the conclusion. Finally, part three involves the Italia, Nobile's attempt to cross the north pole, funded by Italy and Mussolini, that ends rather poorly. It turns out quite a lot can go wrong with giant bags of gas in a cold environment.

As usual, each part is well researched and well written, with footnotes included, as well as an extensive bibilography at the end. I evidently really need to read Amundsen's biography The Last Viking, because his inclusion (history spoilers(?) here) and conclusion was a huge surprise for me. I wasn't a huge fan of Nobile as a historical figure, but I sort of felt bad for the guy on his return.

Just a fun, informative, tense book all around. The only reason it took me so long to make it through this one is because life happened and I didn't get much time to read until now. I binged the last 50% in two days, it was that good.

This was delightful from beginning to end. I know there's lots of comments here about slow starts, but I appreciate that the author was able to cram in so much of Ester's backstory and motivation into so few pages without me losing interest and without it feeling exposition-y. We learn a lot about rocs, about the kingdom, about the main players, about the rookery, and about Ester herself in the beginning, and I think all of that is needed to appreciate the payoff in the second half.

I would definitely read a full-size story about Ester and Zahra, but I also think this was exactly as many pages as it needed to be to tell her story. I think my only complaint (and it's very minor) was the inclusion of (story spoilers here) Nasmin and the prince and the brief love triangle drama we had. It didn't really bring much to the story, and aside from Nasmin's roc being the catalyst of Darius' maiming later on, Nasmin herself and the prince as well was pretty much out of the story after that. It didn't fit in well with the rest of the book.

Still, a really great story. I picked it up to try and get my Goodreads goal back on track, and wasn't expecting it to be this great.

Boring. Meticulously researched with lots of detail about Egyptian culture and mythology I didn't know, but never makes up for the fact that not a lot actually happens. I'm also only loosely calling this historical fiction, because as I looked up later, there's no proof Neferura did a lot of what happens in this book.

Neferura is the daughter of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, with a half-brother, Thutmose, whom she shares control of the people with. I'm only half grasping this part of the story, but Neferura controls half of their region, while Thutmose controls the other half, and Thutmose was not content to hold onto just his half. What unfolds in the book is a (one-sided) power struggle, with Neferura trying to navigate family power struggles while coming out the other side not dead.

I'll start out by saying this book felt very YA in its writing style. Dialogue is very he said/she said, and while there are some adult situations involved (notably SA), they're only loosely touched on before retreating back into the day-in-the-life-of-a-power-struggle format of the book. Character development was basically nonexistent, and some of the characters started blending together for me near the end. Everything just felt a bit watered down and bland, like what you'd find in a book meant for a younger audience.

I also thought the ending was abrupt and unsatisfying. Ending spoilers here: Neferura is getting ready to have her child, she fades to black, and then we're in the epilogue where evidently she was secreted away by the wise woman and her death faked, but we never actually experience any of that. It just felt really unfulfilling after the buildup of the rest of the book.

Just not my cup of tea. I was bored through most of the second half, but was too committed to put it down.

Poaching is terrible, full stop. It’s one of those things you know (or, should know) instinctively is bad, but apparently we still need books and novellas like these to keep on telling people it’s bad, because it’s still happening. Humans keep being humans.

Mammoths have been brought back, but have forgotten how to be mammoths. There’s no other mammoths to teach them how to mammoth, and so their efforts up to this point have ended in failure. Now they’ve taken the mind/thoughts/personality of a human, the late Dr. Damira, expert in elephants, and implanted it into the mind of a mammoth. The idea is that she, with her inborn knowledge of elephants, will be able to guide mammoths accordingly, being similar animals and all. Instead of this intriguing premise, we follow along as a band of poachers targeting mammoths for their incredibly valuable ivory and the inevitable conflict between them and the mammoths.

I thought this was a really good story with flaws. I far and away loved Damira’s viewpoint the best, and would have appreciated a much longer book that took its time with a lot of the ideas and technologies introduced. As a novella you have to go into it expecting that a lot of what’s discussed and posed won’t be answered by the author in a satisfying way, leaving the reader to mull over the words themselves. I do like this aspect, but part of me also wonders if the book would have had more impact if given the space to expand a bit more. The poachers viewpoint was okay, but ultimately not compelling to me, despite the author’s attempts at characterizing and humanizing at least one of them. They’re still poachers at the end of the day, after all.

I also listened to the audiobook of this, and while the person doing Damira’s voice was fantastic, her male counterpart doing the poachers was kind of bad. Flat delivery of lines, delivered in a very low tone of voice that had me cranking my volume up for his portions every time. It doesn’t impact my rating of the actual book at all, but I’m noting it here in case anyone else is looking at the audiobook.

A valuable, worthwhile read, regardless.

So, of the mixed bag that is the mythology retelling genre, I think this was actually a pretty decent read.

I didn't know much about Atalanta going into this, aside from her golden apple experience, but from a cursory glance after finishing this book, it does a good job of retelling her experiences up to the infamous golden apple run. She's strong, she's fast, she's a crack shot with a bow, and she's out to prove that she has what it takes to hang with the men in Grecian legend. We start with her upbringing under Athena in the woods with the other nymphs, we then progress onto her stint aboard the Argo chasing the Golden Fleece with the rest, and then end the book with her trying to find her place as an ex-Argonaut.

The problem I have with this book is that the beginning and the ending are kind of weak points of the book. I think we spend overlong in the woods with her growing up under Athena, and then the last part of the book is her being all feminist-but-not-really about what to do now, and the dithering kind of grated on my nerves. Even the middle part, the quest for the Golden Fleece itself, was kind of boring, because we experience it as a ride-along character. Jason and the other Argonauts actually do everything, she experiences the quest watching what they do and talking about it. I also have a minor quibble about how Jason was portrayed in the book, but I get that the author was going for a feminist take on the whole thing, and so had to portray him as being more inept than I feel like he was.

But the writing was phenomenal, and there's definitely something here if you're still into the Greek mythology retelling genre after all this time.

"Lucky for us they don’t know we are that stupid."

Oooooof this was a rough book to read.

This one takes place between movies 5 (Empire Strikes Back) and 6 (Return of the Jedi), and covers Luke, Leia, & co. on a mission to retrieve Han who is at this point in the story frozen in carbonite but not yet turned over to Jabba. Prince Xizor features heavily in the story in this one, and was one of the reasons my husband said I should read it. Xizor and Vadar are butting heads behind the scenes, and in an attempt to out-alpha each other, Vadar is trying to capture Luke alive while Xizor is trying to kill him first.

The writing is clunky in this one, especially during action scenes where the author starts ending his lines in em dashes rather than punctuation, switching to another POV within the same fight, ending that line with an em dash, switching again, and on and on until the author finally lets the sentence (scene?) end. It made things a bit hard to follow and seemed unnecessary. The author also had a tendency to have multiple points of view in each chapter, some only a paragraph or two long, which was kinda grating. Finally, the whole Xizor/Leia section was a whole lot of ick.

Not my favorite of the OG legacy books.

"Run as far away as you’d like, the wall had told me. I will always be there."

Our dear Unnamed Protagonist has a bit of an identity issue. He met a girl when he was 17, had a brief, unrequited love, and then she vanished. During their time together, they played a game imagining a walled city together. This stuck with our Unnamed Protagonist long after she vanished, until circumstances bring him to the very city the two of them dreamed up when they were kids. Lo and behold, the 16 year old girl is there, acting as the Unnamed Protagonist’s assistant in dream reading. Things get along swimmingly (if a bit same-y, day after day after day after day after….), until the Unnamed Protagonist helps his own shadow leave the city, never to return. Suddenly we’re back in Japan, in Fukushima, with our Unnamed Protagonist acting as a librarian in a very remote town. Where did the walled city go? What does the dead-but-not old head librarian know about the walled city and how to get back? Who is the kid with the Yellow Submarine sweatshirt? All these questions and (so many) more are yours to explore by the end.

I won't get into my deeper thoughts on what I thought this book meant, because that's more for the reader to find. I will say I liked the themes here of (thematic spoilers here) duality, the perception of reality, and moving on from unrequited love, amongst other things.

Right off the bat I feel like this had some pacing issues in the middle. I enjoyed the young love setup in the beginning, and enjoyed the satisfying payoff as things start accelerating past the midpoint of the book, but the day-after-day sameness of the library in Fukushima felt a little thin. The detail is certainly there though, so if you love Murakami depicting everyday life (I do), you’ll get that itch scratched here. In true Murakami fashion, don’t go into this looking for definitive answers from the author, because the real answers are the ones you find (or, make up convincingly) along the way. I appreciated being able to revisit the town from Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t feel like a rehash exactly, just another story layered over the same town. And finally, while there’s no sex in this book (Murakami bingo card holders with ‘weird sex’ as a square, I’m sorry), we do get some of that patent ogling of underage girls and dated-feeling thoughts about middle aged women here. If you can’t overlook those things and enjoy the story told here, I’d give the book a pass.

Just a pleasant read from one of my favorite authors.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This had all the markings of a book I'd really enjoy, but the end product came off kind of aggressively bland. I can't even really point to why, just that by the end I was actually kind of bored with the whole thing.

There was a war of conquest between the Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic that ended in failure. The Vaalbaran Empire surrendered, but the societal divides between the two still exist. Enitan of the Ominirish Republic is just a scribe and lover of tea, fairly far removed from all the political machinations moving above her, but she gets unwillingly dragged into being a spy, a double agent, and political prisoner when her sibling is abducted by the Vaalbarans.

This book hits the imperialism/colonialism tropes hard, as one might expect from a story in the aftermath of a war of conquest. I struggled to really get into this great world the author built, because once Enitan ends up in Vaalbara, it feels like she entirely forgets her mission to save her sibling for a large chunk of the middle book while she hosts tea ceremonies as a cover for spying for the Ominirish Republic. Every tea ceremony had an incident involving in-world racism, classism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, or some other tangentially related social issue worked in somehow, which made it feel a bit heavy-handed and same-y after a while. I have no problems with social issues being worked into the books I read, but I also hate feeling like I'm being beat over the head with the same message over and over again. I got it the first couple times, I promise.

Even after the plot starts moving again, I felt like it was too little, too late. Enitan, despite being the main character, didn't really have a lot fleshing her out. She makes good tea, she's devoted to her sibling, and she wants respect for her people. That's essentially the extent of her character as shown in the book. Her supporting characters get even less treatment, which is a shame considering I thought Menkhet had the most potential to be a great character.

It's fine as a book, but kind of a letdown from the premise.

After a weak few books, I'm glad to see I'm enjoying this series again. We're back in the Three Pines, we're well-fed off Gabri's food, and the neighbors are (mostly) just as delightful as they used to be. Things do feel a tad...messy, however.

I don't want to get too far into the plot of this book since it is a mystery after all, but I do feel like it's noteworthy to mention that two real life events are referenced in this book, and play a role in the mystery: a graduation honoring the (real life) tragedy of the École Polytechnique massacre, and a giant reproduction of (the real life) The Paston Treasure being found in an walled off attic space in the Three Pines. The mystery revolves around how the painting got there, why this particular painting was given modern touches in its reproduction, and what role two siblings play in both the murder of their mother when they were children and the current events happening in Three Pines.

There's a lot going on in this one. I think that the author should have chosen to focus on either (major plot spoilers here) Fiona and Sam as the killer(s), or John Fleming as the mastermind, but not both. I feel like the siblings are just in the story to serve as misdirections to conceal the true plot, but they don't even really have much of an impact that way either. It just felt unnecessary to have both, and muddied the case even more than it already was. A lot relied on coincidence and timing too, which drove me up a wall. My brain kept feeding me reasons why this whole thing would have fallen apart if Gamache or anyone else at all had done even one thing differently, which took me out of the story a bit.

Still, this kept me reading to the end, as a good story will. I just feel like these books are getting messier and messier.

"The rules don’t fuck around. "

What a hard book to rate.

We have a narrator, a ride-along character, who stumbles upon a mysterious radio program while driving late one night. A mystery man, Buck Hensley, comes on the air with a short radio segment entitled "Rules of the Road", where he delivers a strange ultimatum to our driver. If he sees a single solitary shoe on the side of the road, he has to stop and put a sock inside it. If he doesn't, something bad will happen. Sure enough, not long after hearing this (and after the absurdity of it has lodged itself deep inside our man's brain), he sees a shoe alongside the road. Of course he stops. And what happens after he does so sends our man on a spiraling journey to connect with other people who have experienced this same strange radio broadcast, who know about Buck Hensley, and what their particular Rule of the Road might have been. Some did as instructed. Some didn't.

The bulk of this book is taken up by the stories that our main character compiles into a website, and forms the narrative structure. 12 stories from different people about their encounter with the broadcast are included here, as well as a final story from our main character that explains some things about Buck Hensley, and an epilogue about how things end up. The short stories are a mixed bag, there's lots of author commentary here in some stories about cell phone usage (people being obsessed with their phones), some political viewpoint commentary, and immigration issues. The stories themselves are supposed to be unsettling and creepy, but of all of them I think only three were standouts for me ("What's Your Name", "Landslide", and "Left of the Dial"). The others came off boring or preachy or repetitive. Chapter 13, the Buck Hensley backstory, felt tacked on, and while I appreciated the info to fill in the gaps (including the origins for the "Rules of the Road"), it felt too... I don't know... different from what the rest of the book was supposed to be. I did end up feeling things for (ending/plot spoilers) Buck and Carla as their story was told, and I did like how the author turned each of her road trip superstitions/habits into its own story, I just wish it felt more put-together.

Still, I did feel compelled to finish this, and it did make me feel things, so there's something here. It's just a bit hard to get through to the interesting bits.

I think calling this a retelling of Hansel and Gretel is a bit misleading, but not in a bad way. For one, this is more of a continuation of Gretel (Greta) and Hansel (Hans)'s stories, as this book takes place well after being imprisoned by the witch as kids. For another, the author weaves in other Brothers' Grimm stories (most notably Snow White/Rose Red, and some references to Rumpelstiltskin) to tell something that's entirely new and unique and fun. Lumping all this under a simple tag like "retelling" seems reductive and does this a disservice, actually.

Greta has been doing her best to make ends meet for her and her brother Hans by selling gingerbread in their local village, but she's never been considered one of them. Lots of whispers about her being a witch and cursed in some way abound, so she's never really fit in anywhere. And with her brother racking up debt after debt, she has to find a way to keep him safe that doesn't involve her becoming a domestic servant, or worse. She encounters Mathias in the woods, a stranger with a mysterious secret that draws her in more than pushes her away, and it's through this encounter that she starts realizing there's much more to her childhood story than a simple witch.

The telling of this story was beautiful, but I will say it has a bit of a slow start. It took maybe 15-20% before I started getting invested in what was going on, but it ended up being a satisfying wait. There's romance here as well, and while I get a bit impatient at romance scenes in books (just not my thing, not judging), I actually thought Mathias and Greta seem sweet together. I do think the ending came a bit fast and abrupt, but I'm willing to forgive it because the rest of the story was so well done.

Also a trigger warning heads up: Chapter 25 is pretty brutal, if animal cruelty gets to you I'd probably skip it. It's not required to understand the story if you've been paying attention up to that point.

I enjoyed this, but I think the summary does this book a disservice. It's not really about hope, it's more one man's struggle to provide adequate healthcare in a system designed to fight you the entire way. Unless you find bureaucracy hopeful, I guess.

There's not really much to summarize here. Henry Marsh was a neurosurgeon within the NHS, and while I'm not familiar with the name, I gather he was a pretty good one too. This book is him looking back on his career, highlighting some of the more notable cases along the way, while also providing insight and philosophizing about the many rules and regulations set up ostensibly to improve care, but really were just to cut costs and make things more difficult. He does quite a bit of ruminating on the cases that didn't go so well, and it's refreshing to see someone confront and admit their mistakes, especially when they're as impactful as these were. Nobody's perfect.

I guess the only thing that bothered me a little about this book is that it hops around so much, even within chapters. It isn't told sequentially/chronologically, but rather case-by-case, and even within the case he sometimes goes back and forth in time discussing various related points/stories. I didn't mind so much because I enjoyed what he had to say on whatever he was talking about, but someone else who better appreciates a linear story might have problems.

All in all, a very readable, enjoyable book.

"Snowy mountain, why do you not weep? Is your heart too cold?

Snowy mountain, why do you weep? Is your heart too sore?"

This was a really moving tale about a woman who spends thirty years(!!!) in Tibet looking for her husband she had been married to for less than a month after he went missing during his time in the military. Everyone told her he was presumed dead, but she refused to believe them and went to go find him for herself. If that’s not dedication, I’m not sure what is.

I’ve come to realize during the many translated books I’ve read that translations come in two varieties: ones that attempt to capture not just the individual words but also the feeling of the phrases that may not carry over, and ones that take the shortest route between two points and just translate the words without regard for emotional impact. This book falls into the latter category, with everything feeling dry, emotionless, and clinical, which made it a struggle to get through despite its short length. I didn’t get a huge sense about what sort of person Wen was beyond her loyalty to her husband because of the emotionless writing (translating?), which was a bit of a letdown in something billed as a love story.

Which is another thing: there’s very little person-to-person love in this love story. While their marriage is the driving factor for Wen being in Tibet in the first place, it’s actually not brought up all that much. We get a staggering amount of really interesting information about Tibet, but this is more of a travelogue than a quest to be reunited with her husband (ending spoiler alert: they don’t get reunited anyway, and if you're aware of what a Sky Burial is before reading this, you'll probably have guessed that).

Another point I should mention is that while this is billed as a memoir/nonfiction story, the copyright page labels this as historical fiction, which I think is closer to the truth. A lot of fantastical things happens to Wen, and it’s hard for me to believe all of it was true.

A quick read, and one I learned a lot about Tibet from, but kind of a thin/weak story overall.

Well, I liked the premise! Who wouldn't want literal superpowers bestowed on you through a book, right? The problem was that this book suffered some major pacing/development issues that prevented me from thoroughly enjoying myself, and it also requires the attentive reader to entirely turn off the part of the brain responsible for thinking logically about time travel implications. It was these two things that prevented me from rating the book higher, but I do have to say that I did mostly enjoy the story told. There was just a lot of telling.

Cassie works at a bookstore when an elderly regular of hers, Mr. Webber, stops by one snowy evening, exchanges some banter about world travel and The Count of Monte Cristo, and then passes away right there in the shop. In front of him, Cassie finds a mysterious book with an equally mysterious message for her right inside the cover. This was her introduction to The Book of Doors, which lets her travel anywhere (and anywhen) just by opening a door. There's other books out there with other strange and mysterious powers, and just as many people trying to get their hands on them. Cassie finds herself sucked into a power struggle she never knew existed, armed only with a book to keep her and her friends safe.

The cast of characters in this book is rather large, but don't worry, only a very few of them are actually relevant to the plot. There's an equally huge number of different books of different powers out there as well, but again, don't worry, as our heroes really only make use of two or three regularly. The author does a lot of handwaving of these other books (evidently a whole library's worth?), which was a little disappointing. The plot also moves incredibly slow in the beginning while everything's being set up, and then after it falls over the tipping point things start moving incredibly fast, which was a little problematic. It took so long for the plot to start moving, and then when it does, interesting plot points are handwaved away in a "we'll think about this later" off scene sort of way as the author barrels through their plot points to get to the end. After all the time setting things up, I expected a bit more care to be taken with the end.

And then don't get me started on all the time travel shenanigans that aren't adequately explained. DO NOT click this spoiler/read this spoiler if you're at all interested in this book (I'm not joking) (HEAVY ending spoilers here): So ultimately it was Cassie who made the books, right? But we don't actually ever talk about that and what that means or how it happens. She just saw Izzy die (but not actually), freak out, go through a door to nothing, and then.....hangs out there for months, sheds her emotions into books, and then somehow they're distributed out before everything started hundreds of years ago for everyone to fight over. She was the origin of the books, but everytime afterward that Cassie starts to think about it she waves it away as being too large to think about. Girl, you're right, but also the readers want to know wtf that was all about so we need to have a moment together, I think. It just smacked of the author having a cool idea but not really knowing how to adequately/satisfactorily explain it at the end, so we'll just have the main character not talk about it at all okay?

But if you're able to turn your brain off and want an original book superpower-themed thriller, give this one a try.

"The fact that someone was now paying for us to complete our adventure and that the story was starting to be picked up by major newspapers and TV stations showed that we were doing something remarkable, even if it was really just an excuse to go travelling and party on an overextended road trip with our best buddies."

I said this in one of my Goodreads updates while reading this, but this book is like if 90s Ashton Kutcher wrote a factual account of traveling the world. That either does it for you, or it doesn't, there isn't a whole lot of inbetween. I fell on the "doesn't" part of the spectrum, but there were some redeeming qualities about these guys' trip that kept me reading.

The back-of-the-book summary is what's inside - three friends, in an attempt to put off being an adult post-college decide to take a London cab on a worldwide tour to break a Guinness world record and circumnavigate the world. Along the way they meet a host of friendly people, make their way through miles of bureaucracy, become expert roadside mechanics, and just overall have a good time with their buds.

They really do just party their way through the first part of the book, to get it out of the way early. Lots of drinking, partying, and couchsurfing, before waking up, driving all day, and doing it again in another location. I'm not a huge drinker or partyer, so they do come off as being a bit insufferable in the beginning to me.

But you can see a tonal change right around when they start trekking through the Middle East. I feel like we get a bit more introspection out of them about the world they're just now starting to see and about the people around them. There's less about how they're drinking their way to liver failure, and more about the scenery, the journey itself, and how much of a struggle it is to keep their cab running on a day-to-day basis. It's these little nuggets of introspection that were the most interesting to me.

But I mean, at the end of the day they do come off as being insufferable dudes who haven't really grown up yet circumnavigating the world on someone else's dime to put off having to make adult decisions. Which, fair, they're up front about that in multiple places in the book, but it's still a little tedious to read about.

I actually finished this several days ago, but wanted to let it percolate a bit in my brain before deciding on a rating. This was not a bad book by any means (in fact, quite good actually), but it is a complex book with a lot of science-y type stuff thrown at you fairly quickly.

It's a tough book to summarize because of the necessary mess that is time travel. Essentially, a device is invented that allows the user to go back into their memories. Originally developed by the creator, Helena, to help Alzheimer's patients, the idea gets snapped up and quietly co-opted by her source of funding into something simultaneously more advanced and more sinister. Being able to literally go back in time to a previous point and re-live a life has predictably messy results on the future, and despite wanting to keep access limited, the word eventually gets out and Helena and her husband/future-husband/ex-husband Barry struggle to undo all the damage done to save the world from itself.

Right off the bat, I'm going to let you know that this is a very science-heavy book involving time travel. While I wasn't confused along the way necessarily, there's definitely parts of the book that you really shouldn't think too closely about or try to understand. Actually the reason I gave it 4 stars and not 5 is because it felt like rather large plot holes were hidden under these science-y parts, where as long as you don't look too closely at the seams everything looks flawless. There's also some rather jarring time skips (understandably) where a reader might be confused if they aren't reading closely, and a definite tonal shift as the book progresses and the late game kicks in and things start feeling more frantic.

But at its core it's a character-driven story about time travel. I loved that we spent time with Helena and Barry across different iterations of their life/lives together, and got to experience the different events that changed them subtly in each one. Additionally, we also get to see the changes in each of them as they experience these lives, with Helena (late book spoilers) getting increasingly disenfranchised with all their attempts at trying to undo the chair's creation. Rather like when you make a copy of a copy, each iteration of herself makes her more fragile than the last. It's a very human reaction/interaction, and I liked that a large part of the late book plot involved it.

Just a really good book, I'm surprised I didn't read it sooner.

Another enjoyable entry in the Murderbot Diaries series! I actually enjoyed the first book just a bit more than this one, but I loved that our Murderbot friend is doing things of his own volition and looking for answers to the big questions he has about his past. It almost feels a bit like a footnote in this book though, as most of the plot centers around Murderbot's interaction with a group of down-on-their-luck workers trying to get their IP back.

There's a lot going on in this book, and while it's all fun to read about, in novella form everything feels like it happens so quick. That's really my only minor hangup about this one, but it's still an entertaining read regardless.

I slogged through this book so you don't have to.

I've had this one on my to-read list since its publication I think, and as luck would have it, one of my regular library patrons had just finished reading it and was dropping it off at our swap shelf. I asked if they liked it, and they hedged a bit and finally committed to a half-hearted "....yeah?" And with that rounding endorsement, I decided to give it a go.

It's a mess. First off, the story is told through letters the main character sends to his niece. Highly, highly detailed letters he manages to pen with exact dialogue, scene movement, and adult topics to his kid (at the time) niece, between highly dangerous/incredibly wild scenes climbing a dangerous mountain. That took me right out of it, as I couldn't suspend belief enough to accept it.

Second, while the actual mountain climbing story starts out intriguing, it's really only for the first third or half or so before things start getting crazy weird and hard to follow. Even now, having just finished the book, I'm not really sure about that ending. There's actually a neat idea in here, if the author could've stuck with it and didn't lay so hard on the monsters on the mountain plot.

Third, and I'm putting this in spoilers, (character/plot spoilers here) the guy's name being a reverse of "i am alien"? Really? My eyes rolled super hard at that one. Why would an alien bother?

Dunno, definitely not my cup of tea. I gave it a star for the intriguing premise and interesting beginning, but it falls hard on its face not far in.

I actually really enjoyed this book. It's very much a noir mystery, in that there's large swaths of the book where we get a lot of introspective thought trips through our protagonist's history, views, and character insights. Normally that sort of unfiltered thought dialogue drives me up a wall, but I thought it worked well for this setting and didn't entirely bog me down in detail.

Our protagonist (whose name we never find out) is an aging police detective, who hears that an old client of his during his head of security days, the scientist-cum-savior-of-the-world Akira Kimura is fearing for her life, so he drops in to see what he can do. And finds her dead.

That's basically it for the plot, as is tradition for a lot of detective noir stories. Where I thought this book shined was in the rich detail of the world. It's a far future Earth where we have underwater sea houses, AI personal assistants, and a whole host of cultural issues associated with climate change and classism. I really loved that we got to know this Earth so well through the eyes and thoughts of our nameless protagonist.

There's also a bit of (thematic/character spoilers here) unreliable narrator aspect to this that I appreciated, where our protagonist maybe isn't as upstanding as we're led to believe. And hanging over the entire book is the was-there-wasn't-there aspect of the Sessho-seki Comet that was a nice touch.

This one gave me brain food, and I like it for that. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if an introspective sci-fi-themed detective noir story gets you interested, give this a shot.