Remy Sharp

Many, many personal stories of Christmas, perfect for Christmas time reading even if most carry the same message: family.

I like to read a feel-good-christmas-theme book around this time and having just watched Last Christmas the movie it appeared that this book was released in relation and in aid of raising money for Crisis.

There's many very short, almost blog post in length, stories from different people ranging from well known from movies to doctors to support workers - all of which are lovely and the perfect dose of reality for Christmas.

In fact, the book has helped me put some of my own feelings towards Christmas into perspective and helped me to rethink it a little bit.

The stories do have an aspect of repetitiveness but I think that's to be expected as really the best thing about Christmas is supposed to be being surrounded by family (be it of blood or of mind).

There was also the pleasant surprise to find stories from beyond white English speaking countries and how Christmas (an ultimately Christian affair) comes into their lives. It's something I was never taught at school and (shamefully) I've never considered much before reading this book.

Yes, definitely a good Christmas lead up read to refill what Christmas means to me.

After I got used to the technical aspect of the writing, a really engrossing story.

The book is written in a way that quite often ends right in the middle of a train of thought. Reading on a kindle it was hard to work out if it was intentional or if there was a problem with the Kindle edition! After a while I got used to it, and learnt to just to either let go of the sentiment or ignore it.

The story uses time jumping a lot but thankfully the book is written in a way that it was easy to know when we had jumped back or forwards through time.

The story is set in a dystopian alternative reality, which frankly isn't far from our reality now and it's easy to see how our society could get there. Which makes the entire story even more scary.

The story primarily follows Theo Miller a person who has lived in the world as it becomes worse and just gone along with it because “that's just the way the world works”.

He weighs crime for indemnity, of course rape has a power indemnity than sexual harassment (because... Men made the rules

Far more brutal than I expected.

I'd known that Call of the Wild (and White Fang) were firm favourites of friends, and I knew they were books held in high regard - and I kind of assumed it was good for dog lovers.

I had originally thought of reading this aloud to my daughter (absolutely a dog lover) but I'm glad I didn't.

This story quickly gets to Buck being beaten, and beaten and then beaten some more. I guess the story is about finding strength when pushed to your limits, but I'm no English scholar so I could have totally missed the point!

Buck is certainly heroic (or perhaps stoic) in the face of insurmountable hardship, and perhaps this is representative of the times that London lived in?

What amazed me was, apparently, the Kindle version of the book is 45 pages - and it took me a week to read - either my page numbers are wrong or I stumbled through this book!!!

I totally failed to guess the killer!

Poirot was staple TV viewing when I was a teenage so the image of the character is burned well into my consciousness (thank you David Suchet) - so reading an Agatha Christie book tends to come with very easy imagination and even accents for characters.

The story is well built, told in a way that makes me think I should have been able to deduce the killer myself (and something I've always wondered about murder mystery stories) and does a good job of flipping my expectations on its head!

Solid stuff.

Took a while to warm to the characters, but worth it in the end.

The story follows an exceptionally grumpy old lady, very much a stereotypical old person who doesn't trust anyone and exists almost just for themselves.

We also meet her grandson who is equally useless in his own ways. These two characters together made it rather difficult to want to keep reading their story, but I'm glad I did persevere.

Although the story is a little cliche, around four fifths the way through the book, it does a pretty good job to win me over to the main characters and I want to see them happy by the end of the story.

Probably a little bit too long, but worth it for the payoff at the end.

Very brief but a good bridging story.

Surprisingly difficult to connect with.

This is still a well written, interesting, continues the Wayfarer universe and prompts some challenging thoughts.

Where I did struggle was connection with the characters. Because they're exclusively alien, and entirely so: 4 arms and a shell, tiny sloth like swinging creatures, laru furball bendy things (though I imagined the creature from Ice Age oddly enough), because they're hard to visualise in my head I found it harder to connect to the characters.

I do also suspect this is a way of putting the reader in a position of a minority, to be unable to recognise oneself amongst the peers, which is what kept flipping back and forth in my head whilst continuing with the tale.

As with other Becky Chambers' books, the story isn't some fantastical explosion of events, but a soft observation of life and interaction of species and races living together - and that's something I'll continue to love about their books.

My favourite is still the first book, I'm not sure anything is going to top that for many years, but this is still a solid entry into the Wayfarer world.

All throughout reading this book, I found myself smiling.

This book was published in 1938 and tells the tale of Miss Pettigrew, a failing governess who's life thus far has been quiet, polite and “ladylike”, but, as the title gives away, this day, she lives.

I've never before read a book that I've non-stop smiled whilst reading.

I found myself falling quickly in love with Miss Pettigrew and wanting her to have all the kindness she deserved.

Interesting mix of ideas.

I'd read the Three Body Problem trilogy so I know that Cixin Liu's style was massive ideas of the cosmic scale and showing me how small we really are - and these short stories continue the theme.

What I didn't anticipate in these short stories was the total mix of stories (though that's entirely on me).

I didn't personally find any one story punching above the rest. I did, oddly, enjoy the story of the poet challenging the energy being and thusly breaking reality on a galactic scale.

Overall, well written, cosmic ideas, but not quite my kind of mind bending.

I'll never tire of how board the Murderbot is!

I've read every one of the Murderbot diaries and have always enjoyed the fresh take on a bot that's painted in world where people distrust them by default, and yet the Murderbot would rather avoid eye contact, shy away and watch their streaming TV series on their own.

As the books have evolved, it's fun that Murderbot knows that I'm reading their diary and often breaks the “fourth wall” to speak to us, or share how they'd much rather be doing something else.

In a way, Murderbot reminds me of many geek developers who'd rather stay indoors, hide from the sun, complain about other humans and generally prefer their own company.

Oh wow. Where do I begin with my review? I'm always amazed at how current a book written in 1931 can be so current and readable nearly a century later in 2018.

The Brave New World is set in a future some centuries away where happiness is society's key. Religion, art, science and truth have been sacrificed to archive global sustainable happiness.

People are engineered from embryo though constant tweaking at the fertilisation process and growth, then though as children conditioned using Pavlovian techniques: you read a book, you get zapped - aged 18 months. Aged 6 the children engage in “erotic play”. Sleep hypnosis with rhymes that the individuals will live inside society with. Each individual is predestined for a class in society: alphas, betas, down to the “epsilon semi-morons” - button pushers.

All seemingly pretty grotesque, but much later in the book, the benefits of this new world are argued, and it's a fairly convincing argument. Everything is for the sake of happiness.

Ignorance is bliss. The less truth there is to be sought, the more content you are with your reality. And thus, a stable, sustainable, healthy society.

—

It seems as through there's three protagonist with increasing complexity to break the orthodox rules of the New World.

Lenina allows herself to romanticise being with one person, and feeling love, but this is surface-deep and she's still very much a slave to her conditioning and unable to see beyond these walls.

Bernard Marx, an Alpha plus who appears visibly as a Delta, with nasty rumours that alcohol had been slipped into his fertilisation process. He is able to think and speak outside of his orthodox conditioning but when it comes to acting, he falls short, and in fact proves himself more of a coward (or in fact probably as most would act: though inaction).

John (the) Savage is different. He has a mother. He's learnt of God, learned to read and reads Shakespeare. He was born an outcast in The Old World (The Savage Reserve), and brought into the New World when Bernard and Lenina stumble upon him and his mother (originally from the new world but became injured and lost in the reservation some 20 years prior).

John is the only one who questions and tries to change the new world that he now lives, and, obviously fails. The new world is centuries in the making.

John is relatable because he comes from our time. And this is why he's a man out of time.

There's nothing he can do to change society in an impactful way, and even if he did, it would be at the sacrifice of happiness of others.

It's almost an inevitability that he goes mad. That he doesn't survive this brave new world. He can't. He can't escape it, and so, in the end, like any good Shakespeare tragedy, he tries and fails to extract himself from society, as it's impossible, in a rage of madness, goes on to kill the woman he loves, and then himself.

An amazing, and maddening tale. Wow.

Wow this book was a slow read given that it was only 198 pages. It took me 4 weeks, which, isn't a huge amount of time, but the first 80% of the book felt like an age that just wouldn't end.

I was originally going to rate this book 1 star but it changed toward the end (the last 20% as I'll explain).

Holden Caulfield, as read by myself a near 40 year old man, is a bit of a whingebag, if put subtly. He's self centred and believes the world owes him something - god knows what though. The 1950s language doesn't really pose much of a problem (as I read it), and I appreciate that lives were very different to that of 70 years later in ~2018. Not being a teenager myself, I'm not pissed off at everyone for existing so I had trouble connecting to a large part of the story that Holden shares with me during the book.

The book is also fairly heavy with 1950s sexism, and it isn't uncommon to come across lines like “the trouble with girls is...”. It's hard to read and I can imagine how it perpetuates the image of men being above women for the following decades. Either it's reflecting how men thought at the time, or it re-enforces how they were supposed to think.

Also, the trouble with Holden was that his (teenage) exaggeration made it hard to tell what was real and what was imagined and what was him simply trying to be older to his peers. Sometimes I was just confused as to what was real and what wasn't. But then he'd share his feelings about his family, sister and deceased brother Allie...

When Holden did talk about his family, it seems like you're able to see the real Holden under all the complexities of being a teenager. Then finally, around the 85% mark, Holden shares with his younger (adored) sister, that if he could be anything he would be:

“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start going over the cliff–I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.”

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that wants to live humbly for one.”

I loved the concept behind this story, but sadly the delivered story fell fairly flat for me.

Firemen: those who burnt books. The story does go into why this profession even exists and it's even more intriguing.

But I really struggled with the book. It's a little over 100 pages and I felt like I was slogging the book after the first 1/4 of the story. I think the writing style also distracted me from the story too. I felt line nearly every sentence was laiden with a turn of phrase or clever simile - but the book is thick with this and it became very noticeable to the point of distraction.

The pace really threw me off too, it starts building up characters and before I know it, Montag is murdering his fire chief, battling murderous robot dogs, planting fake evidence against another fireman (and from what I could tell, a character we hadn't met) and then wondering off in the woods to meet the people who keep books in their heads.

It felt like there was a great story of a dystopia where happiness is swallowed up in a pill, potentially like Brave New World, but Fahrenheit 451, for me, falls way short of achieving that.

A shame. I really wanted to enjoy this story more.

Lovely but I found the language almost too distracting.

Only right at the end of the book did I consider that maybe I really wasn't the right audience for the story - as it seemed to smack of “millennium type problems”. Using air quotes in my description because I'm fairly sure this is a patronising statement I'm making!

The Dex character feels discontent with their achievements and is struggling to find fulfilling meaning. Their work has meaning to others but they're left feeling empty. Obviously it's an impossible measure as life trondles forward and achievements change with time.

For me it was only really when Dex meets the Robot (whose name I've already forgotten) when the book became more engaging. It was like the Dex character could be challenged and some real depth was offered (for better or worse for Dex's personality).

But what I did struggle with was the language and the odd shoehorning of gender pronouns. Dex is neither “he” or “she”, so Chamber's settles with using the “they” pronoun. This led to my own confusion regularly thinking the lines I was reading was referring to Dex and another character that was in the scene.

The sore-thumb moment is when Dex asks, interestingly, what pronoun the Robot uses, and the Robot responds with “it” and it refers to itself as an object. Dex replies with (something like) they are the same, and their pronoun is “they”. This seemed like a potentially interesting exchange between the Robot and Dex about the subject of how one refers to oneself and how they identify, but it doesn't happen. It just has that exchange, and then the story returns to what they were doing and carries on. It felt jarring and like Chamber's wanted to discuss this topic, but instead shoe horned it in.

I do also suspect that my trouble with the language is a me-thing and probably with practice it won't cause me as much (or any) confusion, but for now, and this book, it definitely affected how I enjoyed the story.

Loved it. As always. Heart wrenching too.

Uh! I love this character! This is the 2nd book in the murderbot books and the main character, who I realise now doesn't have a name (nor gender as it's a bot) is so fun to read.

The murderbot is so dry and grumpy and so different from previous characters I've read in sci-fi.

The first book definitely works as a stand alone, and although there's a self contained story in this second book, it definitely carries through a decent number of references to the earlier story that I'd not recommend reading this on it's own.

Since the books are only around 160 pages, I'm moving right on to the next installment and looking forward to it already.

As usual from the MurderBot series: excellent, fresh and entertaining.

I felt like the story dug deeper into MurderBot's character, anxiety and it's attempt to understand it's feelings.

Definitely feels like this third book is pulling together an overarching story that will be concluded in book four - which I can't wait to read!

Wow. I loved this book. I'm not entirely sure how I found it - I suspect Amazon randomly recommended it to me, and it was definitely a random purchase - but so glad I did.

I'd just finished reading Snow Crash which has a small character which is an enhanced dog (called a Rat), and a few years back I'd read We3 which has animals who escape a tyranny of human kind...so I think I was expecting something like that. I was wrong!

The book opens from the point of view of Rex, a “bioform” dog - part machine, part dog, part human DNA. The first few pages read as a little trite “I am Rex. I am Good Dog” etc - but this quickly falls away as I realised the darkness of what was being described from Rex's point of view.

Then each chapter is told from different individuals point of view, including Hart - the engineer/carer for the bioforms, Honey - a bioform Bear and many other characters.

The story is split over 5 parts that, I can assume, is covering several years. It starts in a war torn country, but once this part is over, the story goes on to raise the question of the bioform's rights, and whether a human-made thing can be human if it can feel for itself. By human, we mean the condition rather than the species.

The story is a mix of the future of AI and augmented lifeforms, fear of different, corporations and their relationship with slavery - and through it, somehow, the protagonist is a dog that I can actually relate to as he even evolves through the book (the author does a brilliant job of evolving Rex's language and vocabulary as Rex is exposed to more of the world and the story moves on).

Other thoughts that this book brought up for me:

- If humankind make a thing and a thing can think for itself, should it have rights? What does that process look like - and how long does it take?
- Can and should humankind survive in it's current state. Is an augmented human less or more human?
- A fully autonomous intelligence is effectively immortal, so it can also outlive generations of humankind until the generations come to accept it?

If you're interested in how technology can evolve in our future with AI, singularities, and the like, then I'd definitely recommend this book.

I loved this story, really great stuff!

A zoomed out view of the universe that Chambers' has created mostly from the human species point of view.

After reading Becky Chambers' first book I've been absolutely in love with the universe that they created.

What draws me in so much is the beautiful characters that Chambers' creates and lets us share a slice of their life.

This story starts with an event that's mentioned very much in passing in the first book about a collosal tragedy that results in the loss of one of the starships carrying the human species. That first chapter in itself is mind boggling, and the sheer tasks of collecting the bodies in space to offer the families a respectful funeral.

The story then jumps some amount of time forward (which initially I didn't realise) and we're introduced to more (I think) characters. There is also a tiny bit of connection to the first book (but sadly we don't get to revisit the original characters that I was so fond of).

For me the I struggled to keep track of the characters for around the first third of the book. I've found that Chambers' characters are drawn so vividly that this had not been a problem, but for this book I really struggled to distinguish the human characters (and I wasn't even sure if I had met them from the earlier section of the book).

Thankfully, eventually, the characters did settle out for me and I was able to tell them apart properly so I could understand who's story I was following.

As usual, the stories have a great deal of love and heart behind them and make me wish for a world like this.

It's a lovely book and story. Not my favourite of the series, but the bar was set so spectacularly high with the first it's almost impossible - that's to say that this is still a pretty darn good book on its own two feet.

I read the first installment of the Murderbot a few months back (as an Amazon single), but after reading it, I decided I was going to pony up the £8 for the following 3 books - although probably the most I've spent on a single book, let alone 3 books - absolutely totally worth it. I loved this series.

The series follows Murderbot, a rouge security unit, mostly good at killing but who would rather just watch TV and be left alone. The first book reads easily as a stand alone, and I'd say the second book does too.

The third and fourth pull together all the previous adventures into an overarching story that we see Murderbot learning about itself and struggling with the the concepts of emotions and desires.

In fact, the Murderbot ends with that huge question of: what do you want.

There's so many things I enjoyed about this series: it's a sci-fi that doesn't really require you to understand all the ins and outs of the political systems that exist in the world. I've read a few sci-fi books that really struggle to make the world believable because there's often so much to take in - the Murderbot diaries does this in a way that reads easily and lightly.

The action sequences are really well written and fairly easy to follow - another thing I've struggled with in other books.

Even though we know that the Murderbot is a construct, it exists in a time that emotions can be simulated - and therefore felt - by the Murderbot, which, just like any one of us, they don't relish having to process those emotions, and they'd much rather just shun away and hide away escaping with TV.

Finally the characters are refreshing. As a white man myself, I'm too quick to assume the gender and race of the characters I reading about, Martha Wells does a really good job of keeping me in check, reminding me that Murderbot doesn't have a gender, there's people in the universe that don't identify as one gender, and that not everyone is white. I love this, and I appreciate it in the books I read (in the hope that it shifts my mindset).

Loved it.

Another superb Saga volume. The artwork is so incredible, subtle and respectful - as in the writing.

This volume deals with some topics extremely close to my heart (baby loss) and made for some hard reading, but again, this is done in such a respectful way.

Absolutely love it, and will be chomping at the bit to get hold of volume 9!

Beautiful. Inspiring. Amazing. I loved this third installment of Binti's adventure. What an amazing world and collection of characters Nnedi Okorafor has made.

Throughout reading this book, I'd often forget I was reading a sci-fi novel as I was so utterly consumed by Binti's story, travels, adventure and emotional journey.

This entire series is so fresh and so original it's moved my expectations for all other stories.

Loved it.

Interesting, but found I got lost in the timeline of the story quite often.

I really wanted to enjoy Remote Control a lot more than I did. It was well written and initially the character of Fatima, aka Sankofa, aka “adopted daughter of the Angel of Death” was really interesting. I wanted to know more about them.

If I'm honest though, I completely lost track of the timeline, I think half way through the book I jumped around in time and I wasn't sure if the story was being told from the past or the present and it left me a little confused as to where the character was up to.

It was also strange (to me certainly) that Sankofa's family could be killed and they live in their mother's home whilst the mother's body is rotting (maggot detail to boot) - and yet this doesn't phase Sankofa - or at least it didn't come across to me.

Still, as I said, the story was well written and though I couldn't entire emphasis with the character, Sankofa is an interesting character all the same - even if I'm left wanting to know a lot more about them. (and like, what was the deal with the fox??!)

Love it. Witty, humourous, original and fresh.

The title of “Murderbot Diaries” is what caught my curiosity. The story is told directly from the point of view of the murderbot which makes for a utterly new take on the alien-type stories where shit (always) goes bad.

The murderbot itself is an really refreshing take on the future of bots, who through first “person” storytelling, mostly wants to be by itself, avoids talking about it's feelings, dislikes any eye contact and general doesn't really give two hoots about anything except for their TV binge watching.

I really enjoyed this short story, reading it in (about) one sitting on holiday. Now the only downside is that it is a short, I finished it so quickly and I don't get to enjoy more of the murderbot protagonist. I guess I'll be buying the other three books (though for anyone considering this book, this short book stands alone and you don't need to invest in the full series).

Enjoyed this story - it had a lot of warmth.

I have to admit, I was fairly upset to realise that Wayfarers book 2 did not continue with the characters I'd grown to love so much from Wayfarers book 1. I'm still secretly hoping to find the crew from the Wayfarer again in another book.

This story however, picks up right after the closing events from book 1 - but instead follows Pepper and Lovelace back to Pepper's adopted world to find acceptance both within and without.

The story focuses on the two characters and bounces back and forth between the two (and along two different periods of time). I didn't find myself laughing in this book (I did in the first which is what spurred me to immediately read this and the third) but it was a touching story of individuals trying to find their place in the world and the loneliness that comes before.

In a way, I felt like the book was a pair of stories about mother and daughter - and whilst I'm neither, I found lots to relate to. And as with Chambers' first instalment of Wayfarers, I find myself wanting this future for our own humanity.

There's something both charming and utterly beautiful about the universe that Chambers has created for us. It was nice to travel to a new place and follow new characters (even though I still want to hear more about Kizzy and Jenks, and Dr Chef and Sissex - I suspect their on their own journey).

Good stuff. Very sweet. Very warm and loving story.