Wants to read Fox
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Rated Beyond the Fringe: An Arcana Imperii Collection 10/10
Rated The Mothers 8/10
A terrific, sad book, told simply and well. The Mothers of the title are the older women of a Black church in Southern California, who appear only occasionally in person and narrate the book with a collective, weirdly omniscient voice. The title also, though, refers to the absent mothers who haunt the book’s main characters - Nadia, who lost her mother to a suicide, and Aubrey, who fled her home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. It’s a very compassionate story to its characters and a quick, propulsive read.
Rated Children of Time 9/10
Bit disappointed by the end, but I would die for those spiders
Edited 30d ago
Wants to read Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices
Wants to read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Rated Jane, Unlimited 6/10
Fun and a little slapdash - a young woman’s visit to a weird house is the setup to five increasingly outlandish potential stories, each of which builds on the previous ones. All together it’s clever but doesn’t quite amount to a novel.
Wants to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Rated We're Going to Need More Wine 8/10
A really interesting personal story. It hits all of the beats of the celebrity show biz autobio - here’s my childhood, here’s how I got into the business, here’s my romantic misfires and my current family life, here’s the namedrops and anecdotes of the challenges of fame, here’s me and my personality and idiosyncrasies, all in a chummy breezy tone. But through all of this Union is unusually frank about it all and very intentionally delivering a sharp analysis of race and of being a Black woman in an industry - and a world, really - that often devalues Black women. She’s much more interested here in using her platform to talk about serious stuff than ingratiating herself.
Rated A Closed and Common Orbit 8/10
High-quality sci-fi; laid-back about narrative but deep on characters and settings. You don't have to have read [b:The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet|22733729|The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)|Becky Chambers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1405532474l/22733729._SY75_.jpg|42270825] for this book to land, though it's good for an understanding of the world and if you think you'll like this you'll like that one too. There are two interlocking plots that don't really intersect until later; in general the transitions are well-handled. The story concerns the relationships between sentient beings and artificial intelligence - one viewpoint character is actually an AI trying to adjust to living among people. As in the first book in the series, not a lot happens but the universe Chambers describes is fun, well-thought-out, and complex, with lots of basically decent people trying to do their best.
Rated Circe 10/10
Wow, what a knockout. A brilliant, engaging and beautifully-written riff on classic stories of Greek mythology, as narrated by the immortal witch Circe, one of the key figures in the Odyssey. Like [a:Emily Wilson|478455|Emily Wilson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1523444389p2/478455.jpg]'s Odyssey, this book looks at the sex, violence, and social norms of these stories from a new perspective, surfacing all kinds of emotional and sociological insight from within the tropes. Particularly good in this book is the sense of the world of the Greek gods and heroes as both epic in scale and like a small town, ruled by grievance, whim, and pettiness - and the way that mortals given access to godlike powers almost instantly abuse it. There are so many great questions raised about the stories we tell and what we value and choose to emphasize and how the norms of power shape our stories and vice versa. I could go on and on about this book. Highly highly recommended.
Rated Today Will Be Different 8/10
A fast-reading, absorbing and bright family drama. If you liked [b:Where'd You Go, Bernadette|13526165|Where'd You Go, Bernadette|Maria Semple|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1338822317l/13526165._SY75_.jpg|17626728], you'll probably like this - it's not quite as inventive, but it's more consistent, I think.
Rated Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past 6/10
A good overview of the state of the art of archaeology today, looking at the practice and the issues that surround it, especially (as noted in the title) the new avenues being opened by satellite imagery. The author is passionate about the subject and asks great questions - her values and enthusiasm are obvious and admirable. I found myself wishing the book itself was a little more engaging, though - it falls a little short of what I was hoping for as writing. Still, if you think you’re interested in archaeology, this is a bright and interesting read.
Wants to read This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor
Wants to read On Immunity: An Inoculation
Rated On the Road with Hillary: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Journey from Arkansas to the U.S. Senate 6/10
A fun, anecdotal memoir from one of HRC's advance staff, giving a nice mix of the nuts and bolts of political travel, delightful stories of misadventures and an overview of the 1992-2000 period in politics and history. Utterly hagiographic, but doesn't suffer for it.
Rated The Power 10/10
Really compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking. I'd heard a lot about this book and knew the basic gist but wasn't quite prepared for this to have the ominous, almost Biblical force it has. It really leans into the dark, unpleasant aspects of its argument, so it's *a lot*, but of course the point is to be confrontational; this isn't so much dystopian sci-fi as a mirrored reflection of a dystopic state of affairs that already exists. Grimly engaging as you watch the stories unfold and root for a better outcome even as you know from the beginning that you're not going to get it. Cleverly executed and well worth reading. I tore through this in three days but one might prefer to get it in smaller doses -it's heavy.<br/><br/>Weirdly enough, the book this reminds me of the most is [b:World War Z|8908|World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War|Max Brooks|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1528312647s/8908.jpg|817], which is a lot lighter but similarly takes a global view of an emergent phenomenon. It also made me think about the movie "Sorry to Bother You," which similarly uses a speculative and uncanny story to talk about power and social relations.
Finished reading The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order