Matthew Groves

Science communication of this level of physics is an odd niche. This isn't a textbook, which a college class would work from. And it's not a science popularizing book, like Brian Greene's, which are for laypeople to get a good feel for the topic. Instead it's a pretty slim volume that doesn't try to get into the nitty-gritty too much (not many equations and no practice problems). I think it would be a good read/gift for someone who's an undergrad physics major, since they already have a lot of the pieces this book assumes, but don't have all of them.

Pretty standard coming-of-age stuff here, a quick and mostly enjoyable read. Deeper than your typical teen lit, getting into real questions of suffering and struggling to find your life's purpose.

Pros:
pretty funny
engages with religion thoughtfully in unexpected ways
the characters all feel like real people with their own quirks and issues
having grown up on a boarding school campus myself, the “campus vibe” felt really spot-on

Cons:
has the “let's include drugs/sex to feel edgy” vibe common in teen lit
She kind of falls into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope

Pros: fun, fast, engaging. A good scope: there's lots of sci-fi that's just a little in the future, like the Martian, or way far in the future, like Star Wars / Trek, but this is in between, and that's a neat time to focus on. It gets it right that if we meet alien life of some sort, it's very likely to be so foreign to us that we can't even conceive of what it is (Arrival or Annihilation, not little green men).

Cons: Not the deepest character development out there, but that's not what it's trying to be

Brilliant and fun, keeps you guessing throughout but doesn't feel gimmicky. My favorite mystery

Speaker for the Dead is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a long time. It's very relevant to today's world in its consideration of who gets to qualify as a human, and it stands out for thoughtful inclusion of both scientific and religious ideas.

I just want to clarify up front: while this is technically a sequel to Ender's Game, it's pretty different. Ender's Game was fun and clever, but only “profound” in a few places. It fit the mold for YA fiction pretty well, even if it was a terrific book. But even the author himself says that the book was mostly an expansion of a single concept in a short story he wrote (what would military tactics look like in zero gravity?), and was intended as a prelude to a second book with a heftier story. That absolutely rings true for me.

Speaker for the Dead is not young adult sci fi. It's a thoroughly adult book that grapples with, just to name a few: genocide and its legacy, murder, challenges of cross-cultural communication, adultery, celibacy, religious devotion, evolution, and special relativity. There's a lot happening here, and does occasionally come across as overwhelming or at least a bit weird. There's a sympathetic portrayal of AI like the 2013 movie Her. There's a complex morality, where few of the characters fit into a clear good or evil role, like Princess Mononoke. There's the confusion of coming face-to-face with an entirely alien culture, like The Sparrow by Mary Russell. And there's the realistic trouble of having time-shifting affect your relationships, like The Forever War. There's the inclusion of genuinely religious people without caricaturing them as either fools or saints. And there's a pretty compelling mystery at the heart of the plot. But all of those references are high praise from me, and it all comes together really well.

I once heard a great definition of fascism as a “hierarchy of personhood.” I thought that was spot-on, in how certain people/political movements try to say that certain individuals don't deserve to be treated in the same way since they aren't “fully human.” I'm not certain how authentic this is, but Card pulls some Norse terminology for the four different levels of how we view outsiders: humans from our place, humans from another place, non-humans that are still people, or non-humans that aren't people. When humanity comes across an alien species, the arguments center on whether they ought to be treated as equals or not. It would do all of us some good to ponder how we as individuals and societies treat people of different races/religions/nationalities/immigrant statuses/etc.

On science, he's really done some good research. One of the most far-fetched items in the whole book is how relativity messes with time, but unfortunately that's the one that's actual modern physics. He employs just a few tropes of the genre (instantaneous communication across planets), but it's smartly framed as something that people don't even understand since we pulled it from alien technology. When biologists and anthropologists interact with the foreign species, all of their approaches and disagreements felt very realistic to me. There's a lot happening here, and Card has clearly read a lot about how science functions.

As a rite, the office of “Speaker for the Dead” is very compelling to me. Instead of traditional funerals, the Speaker will learn all about a person's life and lay it out in public for all to see. It's pretty harsh in some ways, but also shows how honesty is crucial to proper grief and healing.


In that vein, I'd like to say that the handling of religion in this is some of the best I've come across in any kind of fiction. Card is a Mormon, and it shows that he's a religious person. Along with Dune, it's been a great summer for me of religion in sci fi. There's a scene at the end of chapter 17 that's one of the best fictional descriptions of a religious service I've ever read. And there's a parable discussed that was wildly impactful on me. It's attested to a saint in the book's world, and I have great respect for Card that he was able to write something that felt plausibly saint-like. It's a play on the woman caught in adultery in John 8. I've copied the entire thing here:

–“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.
The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. ‘Is there any man here,' he says to them, ‘who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, ‘We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, ‘Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, ‘Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

–Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, ‘Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,' they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.' As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,' he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.' So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

–The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

–San Angelo, Letters to an Incipient Heretic”




SPOILERs for Ender's Game in this paragraph:
One thing I really appreciated is how Ender has aged. After unwittingly killing an entire species, the weight of that moment has transformed him in a thoughtful way. In the first book he was wicked smart and clever, but Speaker for the Dead portrays him as wise, which is a much more difficult trait to write. It seems really hard to age up a protagonist in a way that feels authentic to their earlier self but also realistic to possible growth (I think of the Harry Potter prequels/sequels, as well as the Golden Compass sequel, among others), especially coming from such a traumatic childhood. This is terrific. You can feel his sadness, and the growth and determination it brought him. The transition from Xenocide to Speaker for the Dead felt excellent to me.

Unexpected, hilarious, and alternately dark and heartwarming. Unlike anything I've ever read. Sedaris continues to show the worst bits of human nature (animal nature?) hiding inside us all, but in a winsome way. Not for everyone, but I'd give it a shot (especially in the excellent audiobook)

An accessible way to meet two great minds in Church history at once!

As a scientist and a Christian, the Thomistic approach to nature and humanity's ability to learn about nature using our senses and Reason has had tremendous value for me. Whenever I have some kind of metaphysical question, I look to Thomas and his Dominican brothers for guidance, especially on the relationship between science and faith. I don't quite know enough philosophy to properly understand the tensions between Plato and Aristotle that come up in the book from time to time, but Chesterton makes it all very accessible without feeling like he's “dumbing it down” too much. And the handful of stories we do have about his background and youth add a significant amount of color to the picture, like the radicalness of his refusing his family's expectations to become a friar, and his resolute, life-long humility. As now, the messenger IS the message. Chesterton also takes a few swings at “contemporary” philosophers (written in the 1930s), which feels very prescient to our own age of relativism and nihilism.

St. Francis of Assisi makes a few appearances, and I loved learning about how different the two men were (a wild, mystical missionary and a mild, intellectual professor) in pursuing the same goal (a renewal of orthodox Christianity). As CS Lewis says, all the tyrants are monotonously alike, and all the saints are gloriously different.

After taking a class on Aquinas in seminary, I had the feeling that I'd just read all of the answers in the back of the Universe's textbook. A few details aside, that impression has only deepened with time, and I've tried to adopt his entire framework of virtues, the goodness of creation, and ends/”telos.” We aren't used to thinking this way in today's world, but Aquinas has given me an intellectual stability in my faith and I'm very glad I took the time to explore his life and mind.

Incredible skill/talent on writing different voices for each of the viewpoint characters; as vivid, real, and raw as anything I've read in a long time; tremendous interaction with Biblical imagery and imagination; a window into a very dark chapter of European colonial relations with the Congo. Highly recommended.

Shares effectively all the strengths and relative weaknesses of the first book; if you liked The Final Empire, you'll like The Well of Ascension.


Spoilers for this book and the full trilogy:

Pros:
I didn't really notice this on the first read through, but I respect how he handles major character deaths. He manages to avoid the two bad ends of the spectrum: the “plot armor” trope, where major characters are immune to threats no matter how fatal (a la late Game of Thrones), or the “look at how edgy I am by killing characters” (a la the third Hunger Games book). The death of Kelsier was completely unexpected last book, and Dickson and Clubs felt the same way. You don't see it coming, and it heightens the stakes because it feels like anyone can actually die (a la early Game of Thrones). You feel actually nervous when Marsh tries to kill Sazed, because other main characters weren't spared. For book 3, this is heightened all the way with Vin and Elend. What other series kills it's big hero and big bad villain a third of the way through the plot, then it's two protagonists at the climax? Props to Sanderson for pulling it off.

The premise - what happens after the good guys win - is still intriguing and lives up to its promise. Both of the twists felt clever without falling into deus ex machina territory. The first twist, how Vin's kandra was replaced by another one, was a good use of supplied information: the audience assumed the spy couldn't be him, but we had no real reason to believe that. In fact, there are hints throughout the dialogue that it's him: constantly warning her that she's underestimating the cleverness and skill of kandras, lines about the Contract being ironclad but also surprising, and a bit where Vin is surprised that he doesn't know a detail about her past. That last one was really subtle writing by Sanderson. Vin is currently investigating people by posing details about their past conversations to check their identity, and what does she do when OreSeur doesn't know she grew up on the streets? She assumes that it's because he was excluded from the group, and it causes her to take pity on him. That's really good plot writing.

The second twist, the big one with Ruin at the end, is a great one. It manages to up the ante without feeling like “Mario, your princess is in another castle.” Such a clever technique by Ruin, to flip the cause-effect chain of morals. By setting up the message to be “only the best of us will be able to resist keeping the power,” it's such a clever tweak. Lots of villains have to get protagonists to help them by provoking characters into doing bad things; Ruin gets Vin and Elend to help him by provoking them to do good things. I thought it was great storytelling without being gimmicky.

A few other tidbits I liked: In the world of Twilight and the Hunger Games, I think he deserves a bit of credit for making a non-traditional love triangle that felt authentic to who Vin was.

Knowing the ending of book 3, I really liked the foreshadowing over the prophecies of the Hero of Ages. It's become a bit of a trope to have some character say, “actually, that word isn't gendered in the original language, so it really should be translated as ‘he OR she'” (see Game of Thrones S7E2). I liked that this is twisted to refer to Sazed, the eunuch, who by all accounts has earned it.

Duralumin is a good addition. It tweaks the realm of possibility enough to be exciting to the audience, but always lives within the current rule structure so it doesn't feel gimmicky.

Cons:
I did feel like it was just a little slow in the first half. It's the same length as the first book, but not quite as much happens. I liked watching Elend grow into his role, but all the city politics sapped a little of the relentless motion of the first book's storyline.

His prose is still very much functional over fashionable. He's an outline writer, which is fine, and it's what makes his foreshadowing thoughtful and his plot arcs tidy. But I just think some of his prose is melodramatic and a bit cliche, like this sentence: “He could easily imagine the disaster that would befall the land should the mists persist all day.” Not that big of a critique, in the larger scope of the book, but something that bugged me a bit.

The first time I read these books, I sprinted through the entire trilogy in a week while I was sick in bed overseas. I liked them then, but I'm glad I come by for another round. I'm always more observant on a second read, but I feel like Sanderson's attention to detail and consistent foreshadowing gave me a lot to latch on to as a repeat reader. A few spoiler-free thoughts:

Pros: Final Empire is fun. It's a fun premise, it's fun to read, and it's fun to imagine. The pace is good, even relentless at times, but not overwhelming. The 500 pages feels full, but about the right length for the amount of plot he has crammed into here. The magic system feels consistent but also a little wild, like they haven't figured it all out yet, which is good. The protagonist is easy to cheer for without being a saint, and her identity crises are engaging. The tone is also that of one large heist, closer to Ocean's Eleven than Lord of the Rings, which is a great twist on the genre. On the whole, Mistborn is worth your time if you like fantasy at all. For my money, this is Sanderson's best work.

Cons: Maybe it's just because I finished reading Stephen King's excellent “On Writing” last week, but I noticed that I don't love Sanderson's prose. Sometimes it's a little melodramatic or hackneyed (especially bits of dialogue, but maybe that's intentional). But it's always, always in the past tense. I feel like this takes me out of some of the scenes, since it leads to boring and repetitive sentence structure. This is the worst for fight scenes; he has all this great worldbuilding, these interesting characters you care about, and all of the fights go like: “Kelsier jumped on the crowd. Then Kelsier pushed off of a soldier. Kelsier smiled, and then swung his knife at another soldier.” It's not that big of a thing, but it is frustrating since all of the other pieces are there.

I think this might be because Sanderson is an outline writer. The great advantages of this are consistent foreshadowing and a sense of finality at the end, like he's wrapped up all the loose ends he wants to. Anyone who likes George RR Marten or Pat Rothfuss will also appreciate that it keeps his publication rate MUCH higher than the industry average. But it does also make him seem like an encylopedist sometimes: “I have plot point A and plot point B that need to be connected, let me write the scene to tied them together.” His transitional scenes and lines are so FUNCTIONAL, they sometimes feel like means to an end instead of something interesting in their own right.


SPOILERS FOR WHOLE TRILOGY

On the sentence structure in fight scenes, don't get me wrong: that closing duel when Kelsier kills the Inquisitor is still awesome, top to bottom.

On foreshadowing: The development/teasing of the kandra was done well, as was Kelsier's actual plan, and Vin's relationship with Ruin. (Also, how did I not notice the Ruin / Reen name similarity? Both the voices in her head have similar names, kind of a fun observation.

Pros: I read somewhere that Sanderson said the entire premise of Mistborn is “what happens after the good guys win?” I think that still really holds up, looking forward. Beating the Big Bad Guy is usually the climax, but I like that it's only a third of the way in. You can see the humanization of the Lord Ruler coming, when the thieving group has to actually govern an empire. I don't think there's ever really any true pity developed for him, considering his brutal cruelty and subjugation of a people, but I like that the main characters are forced to see the world from his height and recognize what a challenging thing it is.

Also, I thought the twist about Rashek really being the Lord Ruler was a good one. It's hard to have the plucky protagonist defeat the Big Bad Guy without it feeling gimmicky and unrealistic. If they were really so big and bad, then one book's worth of training shouldn't let our nobody hero beat them. (For all its other flaws, I thought the Eragon series actually handled this well).

Cons: Eh, after reading Nora Jemisin's Fifth Season trilogy, every other fantasy story about a subjugated people group just doesn't ring quite as true to me. That's not especially a knock against Sanderson - he depicts the brutality and killings enough to get the message across - but it doesn't quite have the same bite.

Pros: Beautiful. The inner thoughts of a wise, kind old preacher as he ponders the important things in life and appreciates the relationships and nature that he loved. I liked how she captured his honest doubt and anxieties about dying before his son grows up. The writing is clear and simple, almost stark, like Cormac McCarthy. Reminds me a bit of Will Campbell's memoir “Brother to a Dragonfly” since it's a thoughtful, measured reflection on life and religion. It also made me think of the more recent “Between the World and Me,” since it's written for the life benefit of a son from his father.

Cons: a little slow, and it's very hard to read quickly.

Creative, thought-provoking, stark, and a great example of why sci-fi/fantasy/“speculative fiction” needs more diverse voices. Essentially an extended look at the thought, “if you'd be happy to go back in American history and live there, you're probably a white man.” Did feel like it had more premise than plot, although I know the disjointed nature of it was intentional. Butler is great, I'm excited to read more

When I really think about it, it's pretty impressive to finish a series well and in a timely manner. I think The Expanse might be the first big series to manage both since Harry Potter. Lots of series finish on time but poorly (Hunger Games, Game of Thrones TV), or take forever but finish well (???), or are stuck in limbo and could easily never finish (Game of Thrones, Name of the Wind, Locke Lamorra). I think JK Rowling deserves a lot of credit for publishing regularly and ending the series well, and so does Corey.

I thought it ended in just about the only way it could have, and each character's arcs made sense. The end is the right amount of sad, the right amount of sympathetic to villains, and the right amount of messy. I appreciated that the series wasn't too “tied up with a bow” tidy. Lots of small but fairly important things never got followed up on (Alex's first wife, Naomi's son), because that's how life goes. At the same time, we often saw minor characters become major characters in later books, and this is a great addition. It's fun to see them again, and it makes you reevaluate their past decisions in light of what you now know about their motives, which works really well. Captain Singh was one of my favorite characters, so seeing Tanaka's viewpoint adds a lot of depth to his interactions with her. This approach still gives character development, just via an ensemble. It keeps things fresh in such a long series.

The whole series is about two questions:

1. what do we do when we come across an alien thing?
2. if the aliens are dead, what could have happened to them?

This overall makes it a great extended meditation on the Fermi Paradox, and I'm very glad I took the deep dive.

Station Eleven is my favorite book, so I was excited to read this new one from Emily St. John Mandel. When I heard that this book had a split timeline and multiple protagonists, I was especially optimistic since I believe she does that very well. Sea of Tranquility does that almost as well and is a tidy, quick, slightly surreal read.

It's pretty in the way that you would expect from her, and it's fun to see authors try things that are very different. This is one of the first books I've read that was written entirely in a Covid world, which shows up a lot. I've always thought I had one of the more surreal experiences of the early days of Covid since I read Station Eleven over Christmas of 2019 and it freaked me out to see its exact plotline start happening. But I'm sure it was much more surreal and terrifying for Emily Mandel since it likely felt like she wrote the pandemic into existence in some way... One of the characters here is an author who goes through a similar experience and I'm sure lots of those anecdotes came from her real-world experience with that. I also recently read Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, which has a somewhat similar premise of multiple protagonists and timelines, and had a similar takeaway: it makes perfect sense that books written during the pandemic will be more surreal and confused about time and perspective. I wonder how future decades will look at the fiction from this era and what themes will stand out. (This book was more cohesive than Cloud Cuckoo Land, which felt like 3 separate novellas stitched together).

I thought the time travel aspects were clever and served the plot instead of being a distraction. She also follows the best logical approach of how time travel works and pulls things together into a pretty satisfying, slick ending that makes the pieces click together.

Not her best work, but still worth a read.

There's a lot to like about Gallant, especially if you enjoyed her Darker Shade of Magic trilogy. Similar strengths include:
Imperfect but like-able and cheer-for-able protagonists
Tremendous shaping of the atmosphere of her world; the setting feels like a character itself
Really good scope. Gallant doesn't try to be about the whole world/universe in a way that makes the problem feel more abstract than serious (cough cough Marvel). Even though the villain has larger aspirations, the focus is on digging in deeply to one house and its rhythms. This pays off a lot by getting to know the few characters really well and in a few different layers, and the layers we learn about the house pay off in the plot in a non-gimmicky way. Also, in the age of everything being part of a cinematic universe, it was wonderfully refreshing to find an author who had a good idea, told a story about it in a reasonable number of pages, and let it be. It's self-contained because that's all it needs to be

It feels more like a fairy tale than anything, but I really like the tone. You'd think it's bleak and gothic/horror on paper, but it actually feels quite warm and sentimental in unexpected ways, especially the very end. Touching and sweet


Cons: the main character has a million questions, and the biggest ones never really get answered. Maybe that's by design to keep the reader guessing at the mystery of it all (and to make it more of a fairy tale than a hard fantasy, which is fine), but I have the same basic “so, what the heck is going on?” questions as Olivia did and I'd like to overhear someone give her the rundown

There's a lot to like in Cloud Cuckoo Land: the prose is just as pretty as you would expect from the author of “All the Light We Cannot See.” The characters are varied, charming, a bit morally gray at times, but easy to cheer for. The frame story is an ancient Greek fable that's hilarious and touching, and his love for storytelling and the power of books is tangible everywhere. And I learned a whole lot about the world of the Byzantine empire's final days before Constantinople fell to the Turks, which was a fascinating corner of world history I'd never come across before. In addition to that world, there's also a Korean War veteran from Idaho and a teenage boy living near him who becomes an environmental terrorist, plus a girl in a spaceship far in the future. Each of these settings is thoughtful and comes alive in Doerr's hands.

Cons:

There are still so many different things happening that, while it's never exactly hard to keep track of, it's still a bit disorienting/disjointed. (Although the two young girls did bleed together in my mind a bit since I felt like they had similar personalities and a similar dilemma.) You end up having 5 main characters spread across 3.5 timelines, plus the framing story of the Greek myth. That's a LOT of balls in the air at once. Although the themes of the framing story generally hold them together, and there's lots of overlapping symbolism, at the end of the day I felt like they were loosely connected novellas instead of a cohesive story. Some books are able to make that multifaceted of a plot fit together as tightly and thoughtfully as a jigsaw puzzle (Station Eleven in particular comes to mind).

(As a final aside on the ‘plus' side, this book has a good amount of similarities in its goals to “The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern, but this one's much, much better. So if you were ever thinking of reading Starless Sea, read this one instead)

Pros: very pretty writing style; great to see literature interact well with multiple types of science; the tie-in with Flowers for Algernon is great; captures a sense of enchantment with creation that many scientists feel; made me think a lot about how hard parenting is; identifies some of the best questions to be asked about the anthropocene (what's the right balance of caring about the world's systemic problems vs living your daily life in contentment? How can you be honest about what the species is doing to planet earth and its future without being a nihilist? etc)

Cons: some (but not all) of the political commentary feels out of left field and heavy-handed; small stretches of the story shone, but the broader narrative didn't really come together (actually, I had a similar problem with a few other pretty books written during the pandemic like Sea of Tranquility by Emily Mandel and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr; maybe it's more a product of the era than the author)

I'm only a moderate fan of John Green's fiction, so I was delighted to find how much I like his nonfiction essays. The book is a collection of short studies on a particular topic of our human-centered planet, ranging from the best of what humanity has to offer, to the mundane and bad.

Green trained to be a pastor, and you can tell: he has an earnest love for so many of the wonders of our world, and some of his feel like sermons. He has a delicate balance between seeing all of the bad things that have come with humanity's rise on planet earth and critiquing them, while still being present to and in love with the world. It reminds me of the old Discovery Channel commercial, “Boom de yada,” about the great things on planet earth. But he never makes it feel like a silver lining, and never shies away from exploring the terrible things we are losing in our new world, from extinctions to social connections. He's at times hilarious, vulnerable, heartbreaking, and full of hope. Highly recommended. Many of these are available on the podcast of the same name, if you want to try them out.

Pros: earnest, humble, the world is still neat, fun blend of genres (murder mystery, redemption journey, bit of a horror / ghost story at times). Really refreshing to meet a pastor who's a likable real character, flawed but good hearted and trying to do the right thing.

Cons: all these weird names are terrible to keep up with, and genuinely hurt my understanding of the plot. I can hang with the best of them on varied casts (Game of Thrones, etc), but this is too much

I had an absolute blast reading this book. If you have any interest in sci-fi, science, outer space, alien life, or humanity's precarious place in the stars, I think you'll find a lot to like here.

I don't want to say too much since part of the plot is discovering things alongside the character as his memories return, but the same scrappy, warmhearted, optimistic “we'll science a way out of this problem” from The Martian is on full display here, and is a joy from start to finish. Highly recommended.

I got this book as a gift, and it checks a lot of boxes for me: it's about two boys exiled to the countryside during China's cultural revolution who come across some Western literature that changes their lives. It was a little clunky, but had a lot to like.

Pros:
A quick, breezy read. It's easy to sympathize with and cheer for the main characters in their ordeal. It's also pretty funny at times, like a scene in the middle where they find themselves to be impromptu dentists. The magic of reading is also handled quite well, like a long scene in the middle where a boy tells the story of the Count of Monte Cristo over many nights. The romance is sweet, if a bit uncomfortable at times, and I thought a plot point towards the end about women's health issues was handled well and provided a real lens into the era.

I also learned a lot more about the Cultural Revolution, which I didn't know very much about besides the scenes in Three-Body Problem. I also thought that, similarly to Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin, this book did a pretty good job of 1) revealing the fundamental absurdity and arbitrariness of draconian, authoritarian governments, and 2) still having a serious enough tone at times to point out the real consequences of such regimes.

Cons:
Aesthetically, I think this is one of those books that loses something in translation. Some of the phrasing is a little clunky, and there's a bit in the middle where the narration style switches abruptly to an interview format, which really confused me. I'm sure it's much more cohesive and prettier in the original language.

“All We Can Save” is the best kind of essay collection, full of short reflections from climate women of all professions and backgrounds, shot through with an emphasis on the the true roots of our climate crisis. Most importantly, it avoids the “doom and gloom” trap that much of the climate/environmental movement has fallen into; the essays focus on positive statements (what we can do, what we value, “all we can save,” visions of a better future) instead of negative ones (we must stop X, we hate Y, etc). Highly, highly recommended for anyone interested in our climate crisis, and likely my #2 climate book recommendation to people beside Laudato Si by Pope Francis.

Favorite essays include:
Beyond Coal - Mary Anne Hitt
Collards are Just as Good as Kale - Heather McTeer Toney
A Green New Deal for All of Us - Rhiana Gunn-Wright
How To Talk About Climate Change - St. Katharine Hayhoe
Truth be Told - Emily Atkin
Wakanda Doesn't Have Suburbs - Kendra Pierre-Louis
Mending the Landscape - Kate Orff
We are Sunrise - Varshini Prakash
Under the Weather - Ash Sanders
Home is Always Worth It - Mary Annaise Heglar
Black Gold - Leah Penniman
A Field Guide for Transformation - Leah Stokes

After a really slow start, Rhythm of War came together really well, did some new things that were refreshing, and makes me feel curious and optimistic for the concluding book #5.

Pros:
For the first three books, it was fairly easy to group people into “the good guys” and “the bad guys.” Some people had rough pasts, or were traitors, but the audience was generally aware of that and characters didn't really transition between groups. In this book, however, you have an unexpected burst of “gray” characters. The new Taravangian, Raboniel, Venli, and even the Honorspren are all a great introduction to the plot, since you're never certain what might happen with their motives and loyalties.

It could have been a little gimmicky, but returning to the same pivotal incident in multiple different flashbacks over the series from different perspectives has been a great development. And as a reader, you now know sooo much more than you did in the series preface, so it all fits together in your mind much better.

I thought the mental health stuff was going to be gimmicky, but I actually thought it felt authentic to the characters and thoughtful. Of course that kind of thing would happen to Shallan and Kaladin, and it's nice to see them “break script” from what has been expected of their characters since book 1. That's also true for Adolin, whose time without a sword was really good for both him and the reader.

Sanderson has always handled information/misinformation really well, sometimes hiding knowledge from the reader, or certain characters, or both (thinking back to Mistborn's great twists). There's a good dose of that here, and the story is stronger for it.


Cons:

SOOOOOOOO long. I get that Sanderson can write quickly, which is great, but I think this book would have been improved significantly if he cut out 80-100 pages before the halfway point. There's a really good plot development around the 50% mark which carries the rest of the story on a quick pace, but it took me weeks to get there.

I'm a sucker for short fiction, and Rash captures the intricacies of small-town life in the South with a winsome humor, without sugar-coating life's travails. The best short collection I've read since Stephen King's “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me.” Terrific.

Beautiful, thoughtful, heartfelt. Does so many different things well without feeling scattered: childhood journals, science, religion, immigration, addiction. As a Christian and a scientist, I was left teary-eyed by some of her descriptions about how nature is charged with wonder. Highly recommended.