Angela Ambroz

A VERY seductive read - part discourse on what it means to be African-American, part slightly self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing memoir, part just plain good readin'. It's also so difficult to reconcile this with Obama as POTUS - I think I would have reacted differently to all of this if I had found it in the Sociology/Black Studies section of my local bookstore, and I had imagined the author not as First Black President, Leader of the Free World, A New Hope, and Other Epithets, but as a relatively unknown activist and writer. Imagining him as the latter, this book becomes an impressive, charged, powerful autobio. I cried. A lot. But constantly remembering that this is OBAMA, the guy in the Oval Office, made me... I don't know, love it even more? Feel something strange and beautiful in my insides? Because it's not political, except in a deeply philosophical/sociological way, and it's not self-aggrandizing in the way a politician's bio would be. He knows he's smart, that's all.

To some extent, I don't think the presidency was on his horizon when he wrote this - so it's a refreshing, “backstage” look into his mind. And what a mind it is! (And what a speaker/writer he is!) Obama comes across as deeply intelligent, a humanist at heart (his relishing of other people's stories was especially touching), honest about his conflicts (and his misfit years with attendant drug use!), and always striving - a big dreamer, indeed. It's amazing (and reassuring) to think some version of this thoughtful, angry young man is in the White House. There is hope!

Man, that paw is a dick. What the heck, paw!!! Of course “be careful what you wish for” if the magical object bestowing your wishes is an absolute asshole and chooses the worst possible interpretation of what you could mean. Or just picks an orthogonally horrible thing to happen to you while granting your wish.

Anyway, evocatively written - full of horror! Reading this at night, I was like, oooh spooky. Thinking about it in the light of day, I'm more like, wtf that paw was a real asshole. At least, I thought the first wish - £200, please - would turn out to be a bad idea because, I dunno, mo money mo problems. Not because some completely manufactured attendant tragedy would be needed to get that cash.

Somewhere between irreverence and academia, there is this book. Absolutely wonderful. It may seem like a self-indulgent exercise in developing a taxonomy of hip, but it really is an intriguing and eye-opening look at the socio-cultural movement that is hipsterism. A series of essays, a transcribed discussion from a New School debate, and a series of response essays. The best: probably, the identification of hipsters as promoting an infantilized, entitled white-ness, politically nihilist, representing nothing, and circling around an almost neo-conservative fetishism of suburban whiteness from the 80s. The worst: I was horrified (HORRIFIED) to learn that my beloved Slavoj Zizek is apparently a hipster fetish object, and thus loathsome to those who don't want to be seen as hipsters (i.e. everyone). CAN THIS BE TRUE!? I refuse to accept it.

Oh, that was great. This book is vivid, satisfying, rich and textured. And never boring! I was worried. But it's perfect. I think it's like Rashomon or Groundhog Day are perfect films; this is a flawless book.

Set in the 4th century CE, this is a biography of Julian (AKA Julian the Apostate), the (last) Roman Emperor who believed in the Olympian gods and rejected Christianity. I had never heard of him, but now I think - what a hero! What a story! Basically, 4th century CE Roman Empire was a tumultuous time on the brink of disaster. The story is told via three perspectives: Julian himself, as well as two of his former philosophy teachers, Priscus and Libanius. Together, all three recount the life of Julian - through letters, diary entries, marginalia and notes to self. We watch as Julian - enthusiastic, nerdy, idealistic - survives the dangers of an Imperial childhood (royal families tending to murder each other), becomes Emperor, pushes back the German tribes, secures Gauls, tries to get everyone onboard with a Hellenistic revival via loooots of clumsy, gory sacrifices to various Olympian gods, tries to conquer Persia, almost succeeds and, well, dies. It's not a spoiler. It's 1,600+ years ago!

What surprised me about this book - and made it so lovable - is that it BROUGHT HISTORY TO TACTILE LIFE. The people were real people. They gossiped, farted, got annoyed, forgot things, were clumsy, were ambitious, complained about bugs. The politics felt immediate; the philosophy - especially the clear-eyed (and very critical) portrayal of an early, ambitious, havoc-wreaking Christianity - felt urgent. Gore Vidal makes it supremely easy to connect there to here - AND he makes it supremely easy to see ourselves there. You understand exactly why some people are Christians, some people refuse to be, and so on.

This Late Classical period - so perilously close to the Dark Ages - feels tragic. Julian and his philosopher bros know they're at the end of “their” history - the history that matters to them. Christianity is quickly destroying the old world. Their future is dark. I was watching this Khan Academy video about the early Renaissance, and - just seeing the timeline of Classical Period -> Dark Ages -> Renaissance -> Modernism was a SHOCK. The Dark Ages last a THOUSAND YEARS. The Renaissance was a blip. Then it's immediately the Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, industrialization, and then the horrors of the 20th century. Like: I'm surprised both by how much separates me from Julian, and by how little. The richness of the story is made EXTRA BUTTERY RICH by the knowledge that I, as a modern reader sitting in 2018, have about What Happened Next.

In other words, it was a heaping slice of perfectly slaying historical fiction. HIGHLY recommend. This is the current contender of Best Read of 2018 for me.

Just what it says on the tin. Just like the movie. Consumerism is bad. Join a fight club to get in touch with your primal self. Short, punchy (pun intended), kinetic writing. As it should be.

Hehehe. What is the moral of this? We always talk about “Goldilocks” this and Goldilocks that. As in, the right fit. But like... she breaks into the house of dangerous animals and messes up their shit and then has the gall, and the ice-cold disposition, to TAKE A NAP? I love it. Damn, girl.

Chess has eaten my brain, and the brains of my family, this month, and so it wasn't really a choice to read this. I simply had to.

And, generally, this was a fun, romantic cultural history of chess. It was - like many non-fiction “object memoirs” - a bit hagiographic. Like, I think the author overstated chess's influence over, you know, CIVILIZATION. But, at the same time, I think the author PERFECTLY captured the inner world of chess - what happens in our brains, how it's been used and abused in different cultural contexts. I do wonder how much a total non-chess person would enjoy this. Chess is already super romanticized in our culture (Queen's Gambit blah blah), and the author is definitely deeply in love with the game and that romance, but I mostly enjoyed this as someone who's just started playing obsessively. I felt SEEN by his descriptions of what happens to you when you play, and how some people play (oh god the blunders THE BLUNDERS), and so on.

I think my favorite parts of the book were the ancient chess history - especially the Islamic era stuff, its travel along the Silk Road to Europe, the way the pieces evolved in these cultural contexts (from elephants to knights, from ministers to queens), the way the queen piece was probably based on Holy Roman Empress Adelaide. I also loved learning about the history of chess theory: the romantic era, the strategic era, the hypermodern era, and the new dynamism?

The author also touched on some interesting cognitive aspects of chess as a perfect petri dish for studying cognition. I was very curious to learn more about chess's close relationship with mental illness - the author mentions that there's a theory that it literally drives you crazy, and I KINDA GET THAT. I also really resonated with the quote by one Medieval chess hater about how chess gives you no rest, but just torments your soul. So true, goodness. Look how miserable both the loser AND the winner of the recent World Chess Championships are!

What I did think was missing was: (1) there was zero mention of chess's very weird gender history - that is, it has long been an exclusively male “sport”, and is still extremely skewed. I would have loved some probing of why this has been the case, some discussion of the Polgar sisters, for example. And, (2), there was also no deep investigation of modern scholastic chess - except for a very happy final chapter about NYC's push for chess in public schools. From what I understand, current scholastic chess world is a bit of a shark tank - hyper-competitive and unhappy? That's the vibe I've gotten, but I'd love to learn more. Maybe this book was published before the current scholastic chess boom, so fair enough.

Anyway, if you ever have the (mis)fortune of getting sucked into this game, this is a great overview of its cultural history.

Meh. A gimmicky premise - one guy dies a bunch of times in different ways, at different ages, because mystical wavey hands. I'm sympathetic to the premise (hey, I like gimmicks! and pop mysticism, in small doses). And his deaths, which turned into close calls in each fresh chapter, certainly informed (and charged) the story.

BUT! A big but (and I cannot lie): the Ultimate Purpose of this story was... uggghhh. Such self-indulgent, platitudinous pappery. It was like the Paulo Coelho of comix. Like, awful pop spirituality. Also: coffee + cigarettes + writer's block ( + white dude) = uggghhhh, self-indulgence to the max. In fact, the dudery - the sheer, ingrained, unchallenging, totally mundane and boring patriarchalness of it all - didn't really grate me until Chapter 8, when Protagonist's wife and child hang around the house, and their lives, waiting for him to return from a business trip (non-spoiler: he dies). So much of this chapter was just insidiously sexist, I couldn't help losing what little good feeling I had for this comix: the worshipful attitudes to their pater familias/protector, even just the fact that Son's career day at school meant inviting... DAD to work. (‘Cuz moms don't work, of course. Or certainly don't have CAREERS.) Blech. Blech, double blech. Spare me, authors.

The best part of the story, perhaps, was that it takes place in Brazil, and that's a pretty charming setting (thankfully at least somewhere outside the US/UK!). But I'm, honestly, surprised by the big praise this comix is getting. If you want a Dudely Dude meditating on his life from various points in it, with attendant meditations on Life and the Cosmos, Asterios Polyp is far more imaginative, insightful, and inventive.

Catty and tactile and rich; I found myself, by the end of the book, annoyed by the author and laughing a LOT at the way she described things. A kind of meandering, Epicurean lifestory, it's definitely inspiring on things like cooking and, generally, the Good Life (in the Aristotleian... or, again, Epicurean sense). Gabrielle Hamilton's life has been strange, or maybe she just has a great way of writing about it. I hate to compare this with a MAN's labors (given that I picked this up and put this on my fem shelf), but it does share with Anthony Bourdain that same gutter glamour and heightened sense of taste. They say painters can see colors differently; more vividly, I guess? With greater granularity? These cooks make me think they taste food differently; their palettes are finer. Either way, it was loads of fun to dive into Gabrielle's life. I was deeply pleased with the Italian excursions and her understanding that - YES - Italy has a seductive grip, especially on those of us who seek (or think to seek) the Good Life. And - YES - Italy can then disappoint, when you find all the larvae in the flour and all that. And - YES - Mark Bittman, Prophet of Cooking at Home, makes a cameo, but he really pales in comparison to Hamilton's lively, loud personality. Now I need to cook at home. And - ok, fine, yes - visit Prune.

A long, funny, fascinating and intimate selection of “the nice one”'s personal diaries. Hidden beneath these rather quotidian observations on restaurant meals, meetings with producers, trips up to the family, and occasional writing sessions with Terry Jones or the rest of the Pythons, is the remarkableness of Michael Palin himself. Remarkable because he seems to have been mind-bogglingly prolific: these diaries, already at 600+ pages, are only 20% of the total diaries he kept for himself. In one section (perhaps 1977 or so?), he decides to write a novel. It takes him two months. He writes scripts, hosts Saturday Night Live, becomes a Board Member of the Shepperton Studios, and does this all with ample time to spare. In fact, you start thinking Palin led a really relaxed, charmed life in the 1970s - until you look at the amazing output.

As a diarist, he was also remarkably observant: tending more towards lush physical descriptions of the places he visits, the food he eats, the people he meets. It's very light on any discussion on feelings or emotions or speculations: Palin seems to be very firmly on the ground with both feet, and he seems to trouble himself mostly with what is actually happening (not what he wants or thinks or whatever). This makes him a unique diarist as well. (Of course, all the inner monologues about feelings may have just been left out of publication.)

Of especial interest are also the context of 1970s Britain (the IRA terrorism was especially fascinating, and horrifying - I had no idea Lord Mountbatten's death was so grisly), the low-level famousness of London glitterati (Derek Jacobi! oh, I love him), Palin's homeowner-ness in Camden (the Resident's Association meetings! ha), and the occasional insights into the other Pythons. I already knew that John Cleese was “the angry one”, Graham Chapman suffered from alcoholism, and so on. But it was amazing how, well, real that all was.

I'm not sure this book will be of great interest to people who don't already know Palin and his work. I was a huge Python fan in school, and gobbled up much of the Python spin-offs too: Terry Gilliam's films (Time Bandits, Jabberwocky). The Palin/Jones team always wrote my favorite material. Sure, the Cleese/Chapman stuff sometimes had me LOLing very hard, but the Palin/Jones stuff filled me more often with delight.

Looking forward to tackling the next tome - on the 1980s - though I may give myself a bit of a breather first.

I should probably review this again in about 12-18 months, when I'll have actual experience and will be able to confidently exclaim “NO THIS BOOK IS FULL OF LIES AND FALSE PROMISE”.

But for now, I am here for this evidence-based, pretty-rigorous-seeming promise. The book covers a few major themes: pregnancy, your relationship post-kid(s), smart kids, happy kids, moral kids, and ASLEEP KIDS. Medina is a neurologist particularly interested in baby brains? I forget what his exact background is. But anyway, he's an academic (at the Univ of Washington?) and seems well-versed in statistical stuff and interpreting research results. My only “correlation is not causation!!!” exclamation was when he strongly endorsed breastfeeding as a means of pumping babies full of IQ points. (Which came on the tail end of a section describing why the IQ test is, in and of itself, kind of a garbage measure.)

Anyway, Medina's basic TLDR seems to be: have empathy (for yourself, for your partner, for your kid, and teach your kid to have it too) and spend time (with faces and talking, not with screens or useless Baby Capitalism gear). I enjoyed his tone (which was casual, a little jokey, and sciencey instead of mystical (other baby books I've looked at get waaaay mystical way fast)). I was reassured that he cited studies I've long admired, like the Grant Study (this 2009 Atlantic article describes it and, okay, made me cry) or Carol Dweck's research. I felt vindicated that the CIO (“cry it out”) method of getting your kid to sleep had some research behind it, but I also appreciated that he was like “or just go super Dr. Sears and cuddle them forever, that's fine too, whatever”. I was a little huffy about the “smart baby” section, because I feel like an ambitious emphasis on “intelligence” is sorta a recipe for a Nietszchean abyss of sadness and pride (there are more important things in life?) and because I'm sorta horrified by people who parent academic achievement starting at age 2. Then again, what do I know. I work in a “knowledge industry” and have benefited greatly from parents who emphasized schooling as the One True Way. So we'll see. Anyway, TLDR for baking a smart baby was (a) eat fish when you're preg (between IQ-lowering mercury and IQ-raising DHA, the DHA wins), (b) do face time with yo baby, (c) talk a lot (no problem for me ho ho), (d) don't bother with Mozart, (e) imaginative play! HALLO MONTESSORI Italians winning.

The book is v readable and organized in a very friendly way, which I also appreciated.

Recommended? Maybe? Talk to me in 2 years.

An at-times muddled, at-times searing take on the 2008 US election, and what it meant for the ladies.

I picked this up on a party acquaintance's (?) recommendation, since I was seeking books through which I could dispense some of my #ImWithHer energy/zeal. Basically, I wanted a Hillary bio. This isn't a Hillary bio, so much as a broad overview of what the 2008 political stage looked like: Hillary, Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Gloria Steinem, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow.

In a way, this book is effective at positioning that moment in history - both my personal history (and why I thought the things I thought), and American history. It had never occurred to me how things like the rise of feminist blogs (Jezebel, Feministing, and shout out to the late, great Tiger Beatdown) with their snark and pithiness and angry, hilarious eviscerations were part of big cultural movements. I just thought... I had somehow stumbled upon them organically, as in a jungle? But, no, as with my crafting craze of 2005, my LiveJournal fanfic days of the early 00s, and my interest in data science, it's all just vogue stuff.

Suffice to say: this book gives a macro clarity to all the feminist stuff that came up in the late 2000s. It's relevant now because, of course, Hillary is running again (and oh God do I need to stop checking the polls), and we also have big powerhouse political women like Elizabeth Warren thundering down from the Senate. The book's good at framing things, but it meanders a bit - and it's written, basically, like a book-length Salon/Slate/Atlantic article: so, snarky and pithy and not terribly concerned with structuring a cohesive narrative over multiple chapters. But - meh, I learned a bunch of things, it clarified some stuff, I give it a B.

I picked this up after Prof. Eric Rabkin (from the Fantasy and Science Fiction Coursera course) read an excerpt on the protagonist's experiences with mind-bending “daoist engineering”. Overall, I'm glad I did - even if much in this book left me wanting more.

Basically, an impressionistic overview of a near future Earth (and Mars), now dominated by the People's Republic of China. I'm all about future histories that chart a post-white socio-political hegemony (indeed, I write much the same thing - only I assume both India and China will be the competing superpowers, rather than just China). I like having my own prejudices jarred when, for example, the USA is treated as a developing country, with “brain drain” flowing from the US to China. Just the fact that that jarred me bespeaks much, I think, about my implicit worldview and current geopolitics/economics. I also enjoyed, as Prof. Rabkin did, Zhang's exciting and interesting dips into daoist engineering - that was one of the few times the book hinted at more mind-bending SF potential: what will our creativity and our spirituality look like when we can augment our thoughts with an almost infinite Internet?

That said, this book fell short for me. It was a plotless, meandering look at this (admittedly very cool) future world, but - since it had no story to sink your teeth into - I often felt frustrated. (Especially when chapters strayed to characters I had little interest in, such as the flyers.) It was basically like Love Actually in terms of its “six degrees of separation”/”people doing stuff” look at humanity. And it was a bit like Michael Chabon in its exploration of sexuality and sexual politics. Though I found that the story's “the love that dare not speak its name” theme of homophobia and hidden love was a bit outdated. At least, it strained my credulity: 200 years from now, and people are still shocked to hear that someone's gay?! Oh, come on. I can understand (and appreciate) the meta of having a LGBT protagonist in something published from the 1990s, but I would have preferred if Zhang's sexuality was seen as supremely normal, instead of something that's a liability, something to hide. I mean, for the love of God, 1990s Riker regularly macks on aliens of indeterminate gender! Maybe that just goes to show that, once again, the Law of Star Trek is proved: whatever SF idea you've had, Star Trek has already done it - and probably better than you did.

Solid, but not mind-blowing. B.

Taking a tip from the illustrious Chris Blattman, my model on being a globe trotting development worker, I decided to read this book in preparation for an upcoming work trip to Bangladesh.

I'm glad I did - reading (even fictionalized) historical accounts about a country is probably a fun, insightful way to learn about it, as long as you keep in mind the potential biases. In this author's case, I suppose there are two: first, she was born several years after the Bangladesh Liberation War (this story centers around the 9-month 1971 conflict between what was then East and West Pakistan), and so I suspect there may be some romanticizing nostalgia going on (the same way I might romanticize the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall). And secondly, every (West) Pakistani character in this book is pretty uniformly awful - from the shrill Karachi relatives to the evil Pakistani military forces. The book's obviously pro-Bangladesh, which is fine and well and all that, though I think its pride (and nationalism) sometimes spills over into implicitly anti-Pakistan jingoism too. Which is less appealing.

Onto the good bits! One very, very good bit is that the protagonist is a middle-aged lady, a mother of two headstrong, charismatic college kids. The middle-aged-lady-as-focus is very rare indeed throughout film/TV/books, and so it's always refreshing to hear this voice, see through these eyes. Rehana Haque, the heroine, is also nicely quirky: from her easy-going spirituality to her girlish rebellious streak. At times it strains credulity, or feels a bit thin, such as Rehana swinging from anxiety to pride re: her son's guerrilla exploits. But overall, the voice is consistent and compelling.

The overall writing style is also compelling, and it feels very, very familiar. At least, I feel like I would have written this in the exact same way - which meant that, while the familiarity was warm and fuzzy, it also left me wishing for something more, in the same way I find my own writing limited and even formulaic. The author is no Salman Rushdie, blowing your hair back with a BIG BRAIN strutting its stuff. Nor is she even a R.K. Narayan, captivating you with humanistic simplicity. Instead, it was good, never great - and satisfying, but never overly stimulating.

Movie was better. Yes, I'm a philistine.

Glorious surfy goodness. While I was always sad when she shifted the story from the big wave surfers back to the boring ol' scientists, I did enjoy the Lloyd's chapter. Who knew insurance could be so interesting! But, ultimately, this was a surf adventure - and it was lovely. Casey found a million ways to describe, essentially, the same scene - big burly handsome man rides giant wave, is amazing! - but I still appreciated it every time.

OH MY GOD, I ACTUALLY FINISHED IT.

(Semi-audio.) People are depressed. Gross things happen. Gothic homes. Drunk guy murders cat, just BECUZ. The end.

Warning to all the good people of the internet: do not listen to the cat story while eating dinner, it will really ruin your appetite.

I was troubled by this book. At first, presented as a quasi-fictional account of the terrible 2008 Fritzl crimes in Austria, it sucks you in with its quite gimmicky premise: our little narrator is Jack, a 5-year-old imprisoned with his mother in a small shed somewhere in America by a villainous rapist named only “Old Nick”. Jack was born in Room, and he expects to die in Room. Everything beyond Room - “Outside” - is “in the TV”, that is, unreal. But Jack's mother (initially presented as nearly endlessly inventive and resourceful) hatches a TV-movie-esque plan to get them out of Room.

The escape, which comes midway through the book, divides the book into a before/after tale. The “before” is stronger: grim, believable, horrifying. Experiencing Room, even through Jack's relatively naive and optimistic eyes, is pretty awful. Experiencing the Outside through Jack's eyes, instead, gets sidelined into a Rainman-type social satire that was completely unneeded. This is where the author began to shine through the text more and more: the characters began to feel like caricatures, the dialogue heavy-handed, obvious and preachy. It started to feel like Jack and his Ma were being set up as quasi-spiritual figures, emerging like Mary and Jesus through a life of suffering into a kind of holy quality. Dude, they lived in a shack for five years. How is living in a shack ennobling? I started to get a bit pissed off. Indeed, I gobbled this book up - as I gobbled up other unreliable narrator confessionals (this one resembling “Flowers for Algernon”, to some degree) - but it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Especially when I read the details of the Fritzl case; again, dude, they lived in a bunker. It's horrible. And I almost feel it's unethical to leverage the sensationalist horror of their experience to make points about Plato's cave (seriously?!).

3.5/4

Too much nature, not enough science.

A touching, clever, and beautiful graphic novel about two (or maybe four) young people trying to Be Good. In a way, it's kinda like Nick Hornby's How To Be Good. There's an anxiousness and a moral striving in the well-meaning characters, an inauthenticity. There's a wonderful, very funny bit where the titular Koko tries to volunteer at an old people's home.

I loved how this was told: Jen Wang exposits NOTHING, or only deftly. The art is also - mwah - effortless and delightful. It reminded me of Fiona Staples's art in Saga; the kind of drawing you really envy.

Readable and informative, this is a great crash course into the plight of post-industrial urbanization, and why it's increasingly looking like our planet will be a planet of slums.

A very bird's eye view, I had never really considered what would be driving urbanization rates: I just thought that people move to the city thinking they'll earn more money (which, on average, would probably be true). But Davis makes a compelling case that the 1980s neoliberal agenda - privatize all the things! via the World Bank/IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs - led to a collapse of the agricultural sector, the dismantling of many social welfare states, and the sudden explosion of massive, difficult-to-manage megacities.

Some interesting notes: the McMansion-ification of the nouveau riche in developing countries (noooo), the enormous poop problem, the similarities and differences between historical slums in London and Naples with present-day slums in the developing world.

Overall, this was both dispiriting and energizing. Davis is a very old school Leftist, with lots of Emma Goldman-style rage and lather and “A pox on you!!!” adjective-overload. Which I appreciate; economics can always use a little spirit and fire.

Massive, pulpy, blitzing sci fi. Ultimately nothing too-too new, but still, on the whole, a lot of fun. The first book, Hyperion, is definitely the more original of the two - this is just classic space opera, with a dash of cyberpunk, and a strong (too strong) dash of the author's esoteric interests (in this case: Catholicism, John Keats, Rome in general?).

Overall, I blazed through this and enjoyed it. Yes, there were moments where I tired of the constant cliffhanger/mini-chapter style, but that's pretty standard medium-grade sf writing. I enjoyed the slow unpacking of the Ultimate Premise (which was only kinda meh... thus not meriting Great/Mind-Blowing SF status, but merely Fun SF status), and I thought a lot of the details (the river Tethys, wending its way through many planets via the Stargate-like farcasters) were nice touches. A couple things were unresolved, though I don't see how this series could really continue without just going into generic “freaky aliens! FREAKY ALIENS!” territory. Where would the new conflict be? Who cares? But the series does continue. It smelled a bit like post-Gateway Pohl.

A thing to note. On the one hand, I appreciated Simmons' somewhat feeble attempt to make a post-white, post-Anglo future. We see glimpses of this in his future history, and the rise of “Eastern” religions like “Zen Gnosticism”. But! I was VERY disappointed that Simmons then fell back on a primarily white, Anglo “good guy” resolution. All the leads are white, as far as I can tell. Only CEO Gladstone's aide is described as black, and only one of her military types (Admiral Singh) is coded Sikh. But even poor Singh ends up being totally incompetent and, in the end, cowardly/doubtful. Also, why the constant pushing of the quiet, dignified, handsome, wise, good, etc. Catholics? Paul Dure, for example, is basically Charlton Heston in his moral courage and unquestioned authority. Why do we care about the planet of Pacem?

Other discordant notes along this whole white/Anglo privilege thing:
- The Templars are inscrutable beings described as looking “vaguely Asian”.
- The Catholic thing. Seriously! The Catholic thing!
- Evil robots are Zen Buddhists who speak in inscrutable koans. Sigh...
- When Simmons clicks through all the planets, sketching their reactions to the Big Climax, we get two seriously groan-worthy moments of total prejudice: Qom-Riyadh (described by Hyperion wiki as “notable for its almost totally Islamic population”) undergoing an ayatollah-led revolution that “sets them back two thousand years” and is followed by “the crowds rejoicing”? The Zionist “Hebron” planet taming its deserts, praying for deliverance and then “complaining about the discomfort of deliverance”? These are such stupid stereotypes, and I don't sense any irony in Simmons' use of them. (Even if they were used ironically, I'd find it stupid.) Very lazy, Mr. Simmons.

Also, I did get a bit tired of people being:
- very very tired
- buffeted by winds
- explaining things to each other
- reading/writing poetry (oh my God)
- fighting the Shrike (seriously... dude is made of blades, and yet he is pretty toothless in a fight - Worf Syndrome!)

But I did appreciate Simmons having one character stop to pee after he gets off his magical flying carpet (“Hawking mat”) during a journey of great importance. Nice human touch.

I was wary of reading this book, since it seemed like a massive tome of hard sci-fi (I like my sci-fi soft) requiring lots of brain and willpower to comprehend and finish. Indeed, the book is (1) long, and (2) brimming with science talk. Yet, despite this - or, okay, because of this - I couldn't put it down.

In light of Curiosity's landing, I was jonesing for some relatively realistic Mars colonization stuff - and Red Mars delivered. The book is ambitious in scale and epic in scope, covering something like 50 years, from the very beginnings of Mars colonization (100 gossipy scientists travel, land and briefly live in a Next Generation-style utopia of trailers, experiments and power tools) to its eventual politicization, commodification and industrialization (everyone else shows up and ruins everything, a la 18th century extractive colonies).

The massively moving plot threads don't always pay off - indeed, some things (like the whole narrative with Frank Chalmers, as well as Arkady) felt somewhat anti-climactic, even frustrating, in their non-resolutions - but then again, that's life. And the book seems to be very attuned with what life is. That is, Kim Stanley Robinson offers a vision at once awesome (in the original, “ye majestic cosmos!” sense of the word) and familiar: people are petty and kind of dumb (even the smart ones), economic problems still drive scientific research, and the universe is vast and unforgiving and just really fantastic. I loved the characters: the First Hundred scientists were all uniquely drawn and generally interesting: from the extreme environmentalism of Ann Clayborne to the drama queen charisma of Maya, to the wonderful Nadia. The only one who felt a bit too broad was the ostensibly Classical Hero, John Boone. At least, the chapter inside his head was surprising in its decay and frivolous vanity - or maybe Stanley Robinson was making a point about our golden boy heroes/politicians.

Anyway! I'm now properly hooked, and it's time to move onto Blue Mars and Green Mars. Given how much ground was covered in Red Mars, my expectations are high for the remaining two - I assume we'll end up 500 years in the future, in some drastically altered social and geological landscape.

Yo. Sometimes it feels like reading KSR is like listening to an opera by Philip Glass. That is: richly pleasurable, challenging, kinda boring, repetitive, opaque, humanistic, godless (heh), inspiring, exciting, confusing and smart. SMART! I want to put that in all caps. This man (KSR) is some sort of genius-type person who seems to have a deep (amateur, I guess) passion for geology, engineering and other hard sciences, as well as an equal talent for political science, political history, economics and sociology. It's incredible what that man's brain can hold and convey. I find myself also admiring his writing, especially the way he weaves in personality and mundanity into these crazy characters and their crazy lives.

The Glass-KSR parallel was made doubly cool when, in KSR's other gigantic solar system opus (2312), Philip Glass's Satyagraha was the elevator music. Space elevator music. Because - of course it would be!

Anyway. Green Mars. We pick up 50 years after the eventful events of 2061, which finished off the first book (Red Mars, A+++). 2061 was when an awful third world war consumed Earth and Mars caught fire (figuratively and, in some brain-boggling moments, literally). This cataclysmic craziness has driven most of the surviving First Hundred (the first hundred scientists who were sent to establish a Mars colony) underground (again, figuratively and literally). It has also given up the red planet to corporate interests, who are promptly following their profit motive and raping the hell out of it. This book is about the First Hundred and their as-ever conflicting visions for the future of Mars, now also conflicting with the second- and third-generation colonists who are all super-tall sexy Amazon types with weird social mores. Basically, hippie commune types, raised on tons of milk.

This is a long, dense, challenging read, divided into sections dedicated to various protagonists. It feels a bit like Dr. Zhivago at times, in terms of its scope (and, OK, the presence of Russian characters). It also feels like a geology textbook, or something by John Muir. As in Battlestar Galactica, or other long-form stories, characters' narrative arcs wax and wane in ways that are unexpected but - oh jeez - compelling. Vast, even! EPIC. I speak especially of Sax. Much like my feelings for Colonel Tigh in BSG, I was neutral/uninterested in Sax/Tigh in the beginning, until their story went so completely bonkers insane that I could not look away. And then: oh man is Sax my favorite character. (It used to be Arkady and Nadia in Red Mars.) Oh man is Sax now the BEST. Look what he did to Deimos!! Who does that!?! God, he's so great. Great!

Is this book for everyone? Or every self-described SF/F fan? Probably not. I feel like most people - if they're going to be turned off - are going to be turned off by the ultra-dense technical writing interspersed with slyly radical leftist ideals (“Red” Mars indeed, ho ho). i.e. Some people might find it boring and kinda offensive/eye-rolly, if they're not into anarcho-commune stuff. This is definitely NOT space opera in the usual kind, it is definitely subliminally left-wing (whereas much mainstream SF feels sub right-wing) nor is it mind-bogglingly weird the way some (great) sci-fi can be. Instead, it's one of those “we use SF to put the lens on ourselves”, in that - reading this - you understand things like the Russian revolution a lot better. And colonialism!

Anyway. If this sounds vaguely up your alley (tech porn + history porn + long, dense reading + anarchist undercurrents + a crazy scientist + in space), then OH WOW will you be rewarded. I feel almost that I trivialize it by making jokes in my review. But this really is an astounding epic, a feat that should be lauded for a long long time. I definitely count this in my top 10.