Wants to read The Lions of Al-Rassan
book
Rated World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music 8/10
This is fun - breezy and modest, building on Tweedy’s skill as a storyteller and passionate fandom about music. Like a conversation with a friend in a bar when a good one comes on the radio.
Rated A Closed and Common Orbit 10/10
Brilliant plotting. I think I was three quarters of the way through it, maybe farther before the great big penny dropped. Not a surprise coming from Becky Chambers: this is a wonderful space opera about friendship, family and love.
Rated Automatic Noodle 8/10
Very SF SF, and fun. I had a problem keeping the cast of robots in my head (which one is the octopus and how does that work again?) but that might just be because my head is really old.
Rated The Interestings 8/10
the third book I’ve read this year in the “intense friends formed in childhood between sensitive creative people, played out over decades” genre, and a solid example - well done shifts in perspective, decisions and their impacts seen from different angles, conflicts planted early and revealing themselves over time. A very quick read.
Wants to read Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Wants to read X-Men: Days of Future Past
Rated The City We Became 8/10
Inventive and energetic.
Rated The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer 8/10
A good set of short stories, each stylistically different and linked by being set in a mystical dystopian future with a mind-controlling police state called New Dawn.
Rated The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears 8/10
A brief and touching book about a lonely Ethiopian immigrant living in DC. An interesting snapshot of history, both of the Ethiopian political upheaval of the 1970s and 80s and the gentrification of DC in the late 90s.
Rated Interior Chinatown 8/10
A really fascinating book - ostensibly about an aspiring actor named Willis Wu and his Taiwanese immigrant parents, it blurs the line between the roles they perform on tv and the roles they perform in life as it explores, in semi-screenplay form, the roles Asian people have been put into in American popular culture and American life. The “interior” refers to the screenplay-style setup of the story but also the interiority of Willis’ perspective. A quick read and a rewarding one.
Rated The Donut Legion: A Novel 8/10
A very silly, enjoyable beach read. Breezy and clever with a little sex and violence, some twists and turns, and a lot of down-homey similes.
Rated Blood Colony 6/10
A generally enjoyable sci-fi-ish adventure. It's a twist on the vampire concept: the premise is that there's an ancient sect of immortals from Ethiopia, except the world is out for *their* blood. Detailed, plot-heavy, and pretty compelling, if a little corny and pulpy at times; it's the third in a series and I don't know how much that was clunky about it comes of picking up a series partway through and how much is inherent to the writing. The shifts between the characters' perspectives - especially as some of them can telepathically connect to others - are well-handled and subtle; the efforts to make the book grimdark and "topical" are less so. I liked it but don't know that I'm super-inxlined to seek out the rest of the series.
Rated The Sparrow 8/10
wild-ass book - a unique take on the first contact story. Bleak and weirdly compelling
Rated The Daughter of Time 8/10
A curious, talky little mystery in which a convalescing policeman considers the very very cold case of Richard III and his purported murder of his nephews.
Wants to read The Shadow of the Wind
Rated Crooked Kingdom 8/10
I enjoyed [b:Six of Crows|23437156|Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)|Leigh Bardugo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1651710803l/23437156._SY75_.jpg|42077459] a lot, but was annoyed at how abrupt of a cliffhanger it ended on. All is forgiven because this one is even better. Fun, engaging, rich, a quick and compelling read, and aspirationally, the kind of thing I'd like to be able to write. You *do* need to read Six of Crows first, but they're both well worth it.
Rated Anna Karenina 10/10
Correctly regarded as great; it feels very modern despite being a century and a half old. It's only partly about the title character and her affair that upends a social circle of mid-level Russian nobles; more generally it's about *everything* that's upending these people's lives. In this era, Russia is very tentatively confronting modernity. They have photographs, bureaucracies, telegraphs, plumbing, and (notably) railroads, but they're also just barely emerged from agrarian feudalism, and nobody quite knows where they stand now. An emerging professional-managerial class overlaps largely with a fading hereditary noble class, and Anna's infidelity, like the character Levin's freethinking, is just a symptom of this sense of societal flux and displacement. It took me a long time to get through but I quite enjoyed it.
Rated All This Could Be Yours 8/10
A skillful and fast-reading unhappy-family drama, from multiple perspectives.
Wants to read Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Added Crossroads of Twilight Book Ten of 'The Wheel of Time' to Read Books
Edited 44d ago