Bragan reads more books in 2018, Pt. 3

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Bragan reads more books in 2018, Pt. 3

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1bragan
Jul 3, 2018, 2:59 am

OK, here we are in the second half of 2018, which means it's time for another thread for another quarter of reading.

My threads for previous quarters can be found here and here, and I don't know that I have much more to say about them, so I will just carry on with what I'm reading now. Namely:

61. Final Girls by Riley Sager



Quincy Carpenter was the sole survivor when her group of college friends were viciously slaughtered while vacationing in a cabin in the woods. She and two other women who survived similar situations straight out of horror movies have been dubbed "Final Girls" by the press, after a term used by horror movie fans. Quincy, who doesn't even remember most of what happened that night, just wants to put the past behind her, and believes she's doing fine... until she receives news that one of the other Final Girls has committed suicide and the third shows up on her doorstep unannounced.

I'm of two minds about this novel. On on hand, the plot is interesting, it's a quick read that moves along pretty nicely, and it kept me feeling curious to learn the truth about what did actually happen to Quincy.

On the other hand... I don't know. I think I've started to have a little bit of a problem with thrillers that are very clearly working towards some kind of big, twisty revelation (or revelations, since there are often more than one of them). I spend so much time thinking about what the twist is going to be, and what the author's doing to try to mislead me about what the twist is going to be, that it starts to distract me from enjoying the story as it's actually unfolding. And that was something of an issue for me with this one.

Also, as we fairly quickly come to realize, the main character is kind of a messed-up person. There are good reasons for that, of course. But to me it felt like we never quite got far enough into her head for her messed-upedness to feel interesting and believable and easy to empathize with, so that instead she just seemed like... well, like mildly unpleasant fictional company.

I don't want to sound too down on it, though. I strongly suspect that people who really like this kind of twisty thriller will like this particular instance of it. I think that I may just have some unresolved issues with the genre, myself, even if I do like it in theory.

Rating: I'm not at all sure what the fairest rating is here, but I'm going to go with 3.5/5.

2bragan
Editado: Jul 5, 2018, 2:22 am

62. All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak



This SF novel from 1965 centers on one Bradshaw Carter, a down-on-his-luck small-town guy who finds himself in the middle of a series of strange events, including an impassable barrier around the town, calls for him on telephones that should not actually function as telephones, and a wealthy businessman giving him fifteen hundred dollars because mysterious voices told him to. All of which turns out to be courtesy of intelligent extra-dimensional alien flowers who either want to invade the Earth or to be humanity's friends. It's not at all clear which.

It's all pleasantly ridiculous, and although it's not played as humor, there's a sort of charmingly droll feeling to it all. And I was genuinely interested by the question of whether the alien flowers were friend or foe. It's a question that gets resolved at the end in an odd and rather abrupt fashion, admittedly, but I found enjoyable, anyway.

Simak was a very prolific writer, and his stuff ranged from the really good to the entirely forgettable. I feel like this is one that ought to be remembered more than it maybe is, because it's still fun.

Rating: 4/5

3bragan
Jul 6, 2018, 3:32 am

63. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin DiAngelo



I was very interested to read this book, because I have noticed, and sometimes been very frustrated by, how weirdly difficult it is to talk to other white people about anything at all related to issues of racism and racial injustice. There's a kind of defensiveness that crops up more often than not and just derails any meaningful discourse on the matter. I've figured it's mostly due to the way white people seem to hear the word "racist" as a flat-out personal insult (something it certainly took me a while to more-or-less get past, myself). "Racism," to your average well-meaning white person, is a term associated with evil, hateful people in white sheets burning down black churches, so aiming that word anywhere near someone is taken as equivalent to telling them they're an unbelievably awful person. Except that that's, well, kinda dumb. Because racism is clearly also something much subtler and more pervasive than that. It's about the weight of history shaping the present; about inequality that's baked into large-scale social structures; about the way all human beings, of every race and every kind of moral character, are influenced, however unconsciously, by the attitudes of the society they grow up in; and how none of us, by sheer virtue of being human, can help harboring some kind of prejudices (that is to say, pre-judgements) about the people around us. And you can be a lovely, well-meaning person, and still be shaped by that and caught up in the vast cultural machinery of it. Hell, you can't not be.

Robin DiAngelo, who leads discussions about diversity and racial issues for corporate groups and has seen a lot of defensiveness and anger and dismissiveness from her fellow white people when asked to discuss and examine issues of racism, talks about this problem of white people feeling like they're being morally attacked as bad people when people of color try to point out problems they face or things that they find upsetting, as well as various other ways in which white people have trouble handling discussions about racism and how the behavior that comes from that shuts down useful dialog and reinforces the status quo. She also offers careful advice on how to do the difficult work of examining our own feelings and attitudes, taking control of our reactions, and doing a better job of not being part of the problem.

There are moments here and there where I might quibble with an example she uses or how she expresses something, or wish she had delved just a little deeper into certain subjects. (Like the psychology that drives these reactions. Or the details of what it means to say that race is a social construct and why that's a true statement for a perfectly reasonable definition of the word "race," since that's something I've definitely seen become a sticking point for people.)

Overall, though, it is a good discussion of a very difficult topic, one that's clear and straightforward and useful in its explication of things that sit squarely in the middle of a major psychological blind spot but really ought to be looked at head-on.

Of course, the concern with this sort of book is always that the people who are probably most in need of it may be the least likely to read it. Although in this case that doesn't mean people who are nakedly and avowedly racist, but rather white people who think that they're completely beyond this sort of problem. Which surely none of us is, because, again, we're all the products of out society, and our society is seriously messed-up about race, and that does things to everybody's brains. In any case, I do hope it has an audience, because it's a very useful contribution to the cultural conversation about race and racism. If only because it might help us to start properly having the conversation at all.

Rating: 4/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

4bragan
Jul 6, 2018, 3:53 am

64. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher



This is an epistolary novel consisting mostly of letters of recommendation written by an English professor who's really tired of writing letters of recommendation. Some of them are recommendations for people he desperately wants to succeed, others for people he actually has an extremely low opinion of. He slips in complaints about the English department's lack of funding and the way the building it's located in has become a dangerous construction site. He's passive-aggressive and snarky. He overshares. He offers us glimpses into his life, including his good and bad sides, and into the world of academics and aspiring novelists and English majors attempting to enter the workforce (the poor bastards).

It's a interesting book, in that for the most part it's a very quick, light, funny read -- I laughed out loud a little more than once -- but there's also an undercurrent of sadness that sneaks up on you slowly in a rather poignant sort of way. All of which works better, I think, than you'd really expect it to.

Rating: 4/5

5avaland
Jul 6, 2018, 10:05 am

>3 bragan: Oh, an excellent review, Betty...well said. I often wondered why someone did not write such a book before this. Did you feel you learned things from this book or do you feel it was aimed at a somewhat different audience?

6bragan
Jul 6, 2018, 1:48 pm

>5 avaland: Thanks. It was a little hard to review just because it is such an incredibly touchy subject. But it really is a book that should have existed long before now, because it spells out some things that really need to be explicitly acknowledged and thought about.

And I'd say the intended audience is any white person who doesn't actually like the idea of racism, and perhaps anybody else who wants to understand what goes on in white people's minds when these topics come up and why. (Although, needless to say, not everybody is going to be equally receptive to it.) Some of it was definitely explicating things I'd already figured out and changed my own thinking on significantly, but it was still helpful to have it laid out the way DiAngelo does it. And she's very careful to point out, repeatedly, that thinking "Oh, I already know this stuff. I'm all enlightened and I don't need to worry about it anymore" is something of a trap, and everyone our society identifies as white should be thinking consciously about our own responses when race matters come up and how those responses might affect others. I think she also provides some useful advice on how to do that.

7valkyrdeath
Jul 8, 2018, 5:55 pm

>2 bragan: I keep meaning to read something by Simak but never get to him. I'm hoping to finally get there at some point this year, but I'll have to see if I make it.

>4 bragan: I remember Dear Committee Members having more depth to it than I'd ever expected, but mostly I just remember it being very funny. I couldn't even imagine how someone could write a coherent novel out of a series of recommendation letters before I read it.

8bragan
Jul 9, 2018, 2:07 am

>7 valkyrdeath: Simak is worth reading, I think. Well, not all his stuff, but certainly some of it is. I always had quite a fondness for Way Station, especially.

And I was skeptical about how Dear Committee Members could pull that off when I started, but she really did manage it. And the main character's crusty, snarky voice is weirdly delightful.

9bragan
Jul 10, 2018, 3:43 am

65. Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang



Weylyn Grey was born in a freak snowstorm and orphaned in another. He spent most of his childhood living with wolves. The weather appears to respond to his emotions, plants grow unnaturally fast around him, and he has a rapport with animals of all kinds. He's a weird, funny, lonely guy.

Stories about people with special, mystical powers aren't anything new, but there's something about this one, maybe the way it's written in the voices of the people whose lives he wanders in and out of, that makes it feel fairly fresh. Certainly Weylyn's an interesting character, and the way we see him in different moments in his life through others' eyes makes him feel a little more mysterious and intriguing. He's also quite likeable, and the novel is, too, with a sense of magical possibilities and a sweet low-key love story.

It's not perfect; it's a debut novel and I think that does show. There's a slightly off turn of phrase here and there, a (non-magical) plot point or two that that's not quite convincing. There's also an annoying moment where it goes very briefly into "science is awful because it ruins wonder, and it's a virtue to believe in magic without proof!" territory, something I take strong exception to. Fortunately, that doesn't remotely dominate the story, though and mostly it's just a very pleasant read.

Rating: Flaws notwithstanding, I'm going to give this a 4/5.

10bragan
Jul 13, 2018, 6:19 am

66. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 edited by Deborah Blum



Yes, this collection is from 2014. Given the state of my TBR shelves, I should probably stop pretending to myself that eventually I will read these fast enough to actually catch up to the current year. Fortunately, though, this isn't the kind of science writing that's already becoming dated by the time it appears on the page.

As is usual for the volumes in this series, I didn't like all the articles and essays equally -- I really don't know what Barbara Kingsolver's rather purple piece about knitting is even doing in here -- but it is generally a good, solid collection.

Unlike the previous installments I've read, though, it's a surprisingly downbeat one. A lot of the pieces here are basically proclamations (or at least warnings) of doom, mostly doom that's humanity's own fault: Global warming may spell the end of civilization as we know it, or at least of lots of coastal areas where people love to live. We're probably all going to start dying of once-treatable infections again thanks to drug-resistant bacteria caused largely by misuse of antibiotics. Measles is making a comeback because misguided people refuse to vaccinate their children. Our citrus crops may be doomed thanks to a disease that could be dealt with by genetically engineering the fruit to be less susceptible, if only the public didn't didn't have ill-informed, panicky ideas about genetic modification that make it a PR nightmare. Species are going extinct, also thanks to us. Except for fire ants. Fire ants are currently swarming the southern United States and may well soon adapt to swarm through the rest of the country. Oh, and just in case all of that wasn't enough, the Earth could just possibly shift out of its orbit, causing all life on the planet to die. Well, hey, at least that one wouldn't be our fault.

Even the articles that aren't contemplating ongoing or possible future disasters are mostly pretty downbeat, featuring such cheery subjects as the ability of animals to feel grief, finding out your mom cheated on your dad via home DNA testing, and leprosy. Not that these aren't all interesting subjects (and, in the case of a lot of the doomy ones, extremely important subjects), but it did leave me kind of wondering whether there weren't any happy science stories in 2014.

Rating: 4/5

11janemarieprice
Jul 13, 2018, 2:08 pm

>10 bragan: Ugh, sounds like a bad one to catch up on this year.

12valkyrdeath
Jul 13, 2018, 5:32 pm

>10 bragan: Maybe the knitting thing was the only piece of writing they could find to include that year that wasn't incredibly depressing? I've often thought these books sound interesting, but I'm not sure I could cope with this one right now with those topics. And I can never read anything about the anti-vaccination and anti-GM nonsense without getting angry.

13bragan
Jul 13, 2018, 5:58 pm

>10 bragan: Yeah. Yeah, maybe it would have been easier to take if I'd actually read it in 2014.

>12 valkyrdeath: I suspect the editors just liked Kingsolver's prose a lot better than I apparently do. (And it's a little disheartening to discover that I think her writing is terribly over-wrought, since I do have one of her novels still sitting unread on my shelves. So in a way, even that one was depressing for me!)

I've read so much about this kind of nonsense that I'm afraid Ive almost become desensitized to it, but the thing about the oranges really got to me, anyway. It's all just so stupidly unnecessary.

14bragan
Jul 14, 2018, 6:42 pm

67. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell



This 1960 novel of a girl who is left all alone on a smallish island when the rest of her people relocate elsewhere was, I think, already considered something of a classic when I first read it as a kid in the 1970s. I think I actually read it several times, but I remembered very little about it -- just enough for me to feel a sense of deja vu on re-reading it now.

And I was surprised by how well it held up. Adult me wasn't quite as enthralled with the story as I think young me was, reading what was probably the first such survival tale I ever encountered, and I did find myself wishing, just a little, for a longer, more fleshed-out and detailed telling. But I can absolutely see why kid me found it compelling, and I still liked it and even, in the end, found it unexpectedly moving. Also, how glad am I that, in reviewing a book from 1960 about a girl from an indigenous society, I don't have to add comments like, "Well, you do have to keep in mind that it's a product of its time"? Very. Very glad.

What I'm really wondering now, though, is how I ever managed to forget the fact that this was based on a true story, albeit one about which very few details are known. That really does add an extra layer of poignancy to the experience of reading it, I think. You can't help but wonder about the lost story of the poor woman (probably not a girl as young as the one in the novel) who actually lived this life, or one like it.

Rating: 4/5

15japaul22
Jul 14, 2018, 7:16 pm

>14 bragan: I’m also fuzzy in remembering details but I do remember that I loved that book as a child.

16bragan
Jul 14, 2018, 9:53 pm

>15 japaul22: It's really nice when the books you loved as a kid hold up reasonably well.

17bragan
Jul 14, 2018, 10:52 pm

68. Big Mushy Happy Lump by Sara Andersen



This is the second collection of "Sarah's Scribbles" comics: simple, delightful little cartoons about dealing with everyday life, including such topics as social anxiety, female friendships, inconveniently timed periods, making future you hate present you, dressing for cold weather, and learning to love cats.

I just love these. Even though they are from the point of view of someone significantly younger and a bit girlier than I am, I still find them utterly, hilariously relatable.

Rating: 4.5/5.

18OscarWilde87
Jul 19, 2018, 4:48 am

I have just noticed that I have been away from here for ages and went through large parts of your previous thread and this one. Took me quite a while but it was time well spent. Thanks for all those reviews!

19bragan
Jul 19, 2018, 6:15 pm

>18 OscarWilde87: Thank you for the kind words! And glad to be of service. :)

20bragan
Editado: Jul 21, 2018, 1:11 pm

69. The Book of Athyra by Steven Brust



This contains books six and seven (by publication date) of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, about an assassin (or, at this point, ex-assassin) and his reptilian sidekick, set in a fantasy world with some really well-done world-building. Honestly, I think I like the world-building better than I like the stories themselves. Not that those aren't fine, but they're usually not super memorable. And I really like the world-building. For a fantasy realm, it feels extremely real to me.

Anyway, the two individual novels included here are:

Athyra: The plot to this one is very slight. But it is interesting in that it's the first book in this series that's narrated from a POV other than Vlad's, in this case a young peasant who gets caught up in Vlad's doings. Which gives us a somewhat interesting view of Vlad from the outside, while making for a rather different tone and voice with much less of the irreverent wisecracking we usually get. So it's a bit more subdued, and, in the end, more of a downer than I was expecting.

Orca: If the plot to Athyra is slight, this one's almost too complicated. It starts with Vlad attempting to help out an old woman who's about to lose her land, in exchange for her helping him with something else, and grows into an investigation of a complicated plot involving banking and murder. Come to think of it, this one's maybe a little depressing, too, just for how reminiscent it is of problems with real-world banking systems. It is an interesting story, though, and one that also features a couple of surprising revelations.

Rating: 4/5

21valkyrdeath
Jul 21, 2018, 2:27 pm

>20 bragan: I've been considering starting this series, along with the Vorkosigan Saga since reading about them in Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great. But then I wasn't sure how closely her taste in books would align to mine, especially after seeing that she hates Discworld, so I'm glad to see your reviews on them too as I have a bit more faith in those! They certainly sound like something I'd enjoy.

22bragan
Jul 21, 2018, 4:10 pm

>21 valkyrdeath: I agree strongly with Jo Walton on some things and very much not so on others. I don't think I'm quite as hugely enamored of this particular series as she is -- I don't think it's remotely on the level of Discworld (and how can anybody hate Discworld?!) -- but I do think the character is fun, the world is impressively well-realized and interesting, and the plots range from okay to pretty good. Which adds up to being an enjoyable series for me, although not necessarily one I think everyone needs to run out and read right now.

On the other hand, I do think you should run out and read the Miles Vorkosigan books right now, because they are terrific.

23lisapeet
Jul 21, 2018, 6:56 pm

>22 bragan: So for someone who's never read any of the Discworld books, where's a good place to start?

24bragan
Editado: Jul 21, 2018, 9:29 pm

>23 lisapeet: Ah, the perpetual question! Although I've known at least one person for whom it was successful, I actually don't recommend starting with the first of them (The Colour of Magic), as it's really not representative of what Pratchett is capable of, and he hadn't really gotten a feel for what he was doing with the series yet.

I'd recommend one of two things. One: You can just skip the first, say, three novels in the series, jump in with the fourth one, Mort (which I think feels like a full-fledged Discworld book and works quite well as a starting point), and then just keep going in publication order.

The other possibility is to pick one of the sub-series and just read all of those in order. There are a number of these, consisting of books that focus primarily on particular characters or topics. There's one about rural witches, one about the adventures of a hapless wizard, one about urban policemen (aka the Ankh-Morpork City Watch), one about the anthropomorphic personification of Death, and one about the invention of various technologies. You can start off with whichever of those most appeals to you. The books in each sub-series should probably be read in order, but each sub-series can be read more or less independently of the others. (There are some standalones, too, but I don't know that I'd recommend starting with those, although I know some people have enjoyed Small Gods as an introduction to Pratchett.)

If you're going the second route, I find this chart to be very handy, although it's out of date and is missing the last few books to be published. (But note that if you decide to start with the Rincewind ones, you should skip The Light Fantastic, too. It's basically just the second part of The Colour of Magic.)

And, boy do I envy you, still having the entire Discworld reading experience ahead of you!

25valkyrdeath
Jul 22, 2018, 5:37 pm

>22 bragan: I hadn't really heard of the Vlad books before reading about it in the Walton book, but I've heard lots of good things about the Vorkosigan series. I've got the first one of those ready to start in the next day or two! And I really can't understand how anyone could actually hate the Discworld, especially someone who says they'd liked Pratchett's non-Discworld books.

26bragan
Editado: Jul 22, 2018, 6:49 pm

>25 valkyrdeath: Truly, there is no accounting for some people.

Are you figuring on reading the Vorkosigan books in publication order, or chronological? I went with publication order for the Taltos ones, but (at least up until I got caught up), chronological for the Vorkosigans.

27lisapeet
Jul 22, 2018, 7:16 pm

>24 bragan: Cool, thanks for the good rundown! I appreciate it particularly because I'm not a huge sf/fantasy reader so this will let me choose wisely... because I think life is short and I should read at least one or two Pratchetts.

28bragan
Jul 22, 2018, 8:15 pm

>27 lisapeet: If you're not much of a fantasy fan, I'd say for sure skip the first couple, as they're basically rather thin parodies of various kinds of fantasy, and maybe also don't start with the Rincewind (that's the the wizard) books.

If you like detective novels or police procedurals at all, the City Watch books, starting with Guards! Guards!, may be an ideal place to begin, as they play around a lot with the conventions of crime novels (although you don't have to be into those at all to enjoy them). Actually, if you're only planning to maybe read one or two, Guards! Guards! is a great one to include.

On the other hand, if you like things like Shakespeare, fairy tales, and the Phantom of the Opera, maybe go with the Witches books -- I recommend starting them with Wyrd Sisters -- as there's some fun riffing on such things in those (although not necessarily all at the same time!). And then you'd get to meet Granny Weatherwax, who is one of Pratchett's best characters. Actually, if you like really great female characters in general, the Witches books are excellent for that.

I myself am really, really partial to the Death books, which start with Mort, so if I absolutely had to suggest just two to dip your toe in with, I might go with that and Guards! Guards! But I try not to push Mort on people too hard, as I am aware of my own biases about it. :)

(Yes, apparently this is a subject I can talk about all day. I'll stop now, I promise!)

29valkyrdeath
Jul 23, 2018, 7:06 pm

>26 bragan: I've made a start of Shards of Honor. I'm going by the Omnibus order as listed on this page: http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-vorkosigan-saga-reading-order.html It seems to be mostly chronological and seemed as good a way as any!

I read that it's basically impossible to read the Taltos books in chronological order since he's written books that are set both before and after previous ones, so I think I'll be going in publication order for that when I get to it.

30bragan
Jul 23, 2018, 9:13 pm

>29 valkyrdeath: Yeah, I've heard that about the Vlad books, too, plus the omnibuses I've been reading for that series are in publication order, so that seemed good enough to me.

31lisapeet
Jul 23, 2018, 9:38 pm

>28 bragan: Well, I don't dislike fantasy, but I don't read much and it has to be really good. Actually same goes for police procedurals and fairy tales, which may explain why I haven't just picked up any of the Discworld books. This is a good guide, though... I may start with the Witches. Actually it all sounds really tempting, because I do like mixing up my genres when I think to. Thanks!

32bragan
Jul 23, 2018, 10:36 pm

>31 lisapeet: Pratchett mixes up genre quite wonderfully!

33bragan
Jul 27, 2018, 11:13 pm

70. The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman



This is a collection of miscellaneous non-fiction bits and pieces by Neil Gaiman from the late 90s through about 2016, when the book was published. And when I say "miscellaneous," I mean it. There are speeches given at various venues, a lot of introductions to other people's novels (or short story collections or comics), even things he wrote for the liner notes of albums. It should feel interesting -- because Gaiman is always interesting -- but kind of disjointed and slight. After all, lots of these pieces are very short, most of them are out of their proper context, and, because they were never meant to appear all together like this, there is inevitably a little bit of repetition, as Gaiman tells the same anecdote or makes the same point in more than one place.

And yet I found myself strangely engrossed, interested in everything Gaiman had to say, even when he was introducing works I'd never read by people I'd never heard of. 500 pages of this, and, I swear, I never got tired of it. I think that's in large part because it's not as disjointed as you'd expect, since almost all of these pieces involve variations on the same broad subject matter: stories, storytelling, and storytellers of all kinds. And, boy, is this a topic Gaiman can talk about intelligently, compellingly, and eloquently. I could listen to him going on all day. Or, apparently, for the five days or so it took me to read the book.

Rating: 4.5/5

34bragan
Jul 27, 2018, 11:15 pm

71. Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen



This is the third collection of comics from web cartoonist Sarah Andersen, dealing with such subjects as anxiety, cats, music, the internet, and loving the autumn. And it's just as terrific as the first two. Sarah Andersen has this uncanny ability to feel like she's just tapped directly into some experience in my brain and brought it to life in the most charming, delightful, hilarious, all-too-real way with just a few short words and simple drawings. Additionally, in this one she also includes some supportive, wise, and entertainingly presented words of advice for young artists in the age of the internet.

As always, my only complaint is that it's a small book, and it left me still wanting more.

Rating: 4.5/5

35bragan
Editado: Jul 29, 2018, 5:07 pm

72. Find Me by Laura Van den Berg



Joy was abandoned as an infant. As a 19-year-old, she works the graveyard shift at an all-night grocery store, until the United States is swept up in a plague whose most terrifying symptom is memory loss. She appears to be immune, and is taken to a place she knows only as "the Hospital," where she discovers something about her mother and begins to dream of finding her again.

And none of that actually remotely describes this book. Or rather, it describes the book I thought I was reading at the beginning, but there is something odd, something off-kilter about it all that just grows stronger and stronger as the novel goes on, until about halfway through it starts to feel more like a collection of symbols than a story. Now, I have no problem with the surreal and the symbolic, and it's all well-written and kind of interesting, but the longer it went on, the less it felt like the book I wanted it to be, or was hoping in the beginning that it would be, and the less satisfying I found it. And in the end, I'm not even remotely sure just what all those symbols are supposed to add up to.

Rating: This is extremely hard to rate, as I can't say I liked it, but it's not a bad book. It is, rather, a book by someone with obvious talent who is trying to do something artistic that just didn't quite work for me. And I'm not even sure how much of that is the novel itself, and how much is it just being the wrong book at the wrong time for me. But in the end, whatever the reason, I'm dissatisfied enough that I can't bring myself to give it more than a 3/5.

36valkyrdeath
Jul 29, 2018, 5:21 pm

>33 bragan: I've been curious about that one and wasn't sure what his non-fiction would be like. Sounds like I'd enjoy it. I imagine it would be interesting to read his thoughts on other books especially.

>34 bragan: Now to wait impatiently for the next one!

37bragan
Jul 29, 2018, 8:06 pm

>36 valkyrdeath: Some of this thoughts really were fascinating, and I'm honestly not sure if I was more interested by his comments on works I was familiar with or ones I wasn't. He was responsible for me adding at least a couple of new things to my wishlist, too.

And I know! I need more Sarah Andersen! Mooooore! Well, I guess I can read her online, but that's an even more frustratingly small dose.

38bragan
Ago 4, 2018, 9:17 pm

73. The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian



This is book six in Patrick O'Brian's series of sea stories featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his best buddy/ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. And it's definitely one of my favorite of the series so far.

It starts out with some fun character moments and appealing bits of humor that I really enjoyed. Admittedly, nothing will ever be quite as entertaining as the sloth in H.M.S. Surprise, but the wombats in this one are pretty fun, too.

Soon enough, however, we get some dramatic reversals of fortune, followed by the first sea battle in any of these books that I actually had no trouble following at all. I don't know if O'Brian started writing them any differently, or if I'm just getting better at understanding them, or what. But I actually found this one genuinely exciting, and had lots of appropriate emotional reactions at appropriate moments. (Well, appropriate from one point of view, anyway. They're fighting the Americans, having by this point reached the War of 1812, and as an American myself, I sometimes found myself with the strange feeling that I was rooting for the wrong side.)

Things do get considerably slower after that, with Jack sidelined and Stephen dealing with spy stuff that drags on a little in places, but there are some good moments of action, as well as some good character stuff for Stephen, who is always most interesting when he's suffering, poor thing.

I've been making my way through this series very, very slowly, but if they continue to be this enjoyable, I really must make a point of prioritizing them a little more.

Rating: 4/5

39bragan
Ago 7, 2018, 10:54 pm

74. Neutrino Hunters by Ray Jayawardhana



Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles with the notable property of being extremely unlikely to interact with other forms of matter. Indeed, trillions of them are passing through your body right now and having absolutely no effect on you at all.

But with sufficient ingenuity (and huge quantities of dry-cleaning fluid), it can be possible to detect these elusive particles in the rare instances when they do have an effect. So we know that they do exist. And their existence is important in a surprising number of ways. Learning about neutrinos tells us interesting things about how physics works, about what happens in the centers of stars, and even about the universe on a cosmic scale. Without them, we wouldn't even be here.

I already knew most of the science Jayawardhana covers here, since I was a physics major in college. Although he does talk about some interesting things that can be done with neutrinos, such as studying the interior of the Earth, which were new to me and rather fascinating. Anyway, since I already knew a lot of this stuff, I'm probably not the best person to judge whether he's talking about it in a way that makes sense to the layperson. But, while I have one or two small quibbles about how he puts certain things, it seems to me that he generally does a good job of being scientifically accurate without being overwhelmingly technical. And he breaks up the physics with little human-interest details about the scientists involved in making the discoveries he's describing. I've often seen popular science books taking this approach, and it frequently seems awkward or forced, or as if the author is trying to turn science into some kind of dramatic soap opera. But Jayawardhana manages to do it in a way that feels very smooth and natural and interesting.

So for me, at least, it was a very readable book, and I certainly feel a new sense of appreciation for neutrinos and the people who hunt them. I'm also impressed, after looking back at the history of our understanding of neutrinos, with the realization that less than a hundred years ago not only did we have no idea what a neutrino was, but the only particles we did know about were the proton and the electron. It's a bit dazzling to look back and realize just how far we've come in our understanding of the underlying nature of reality in such a very short amount of time.

Rating: 4/5

40FlorenceArt
Ago 8, 2018, 5:51 am

That sounds interesting! I have only a very vague and general interest in physics but once every decade or so I set out to understand relatively or quantum physics. Of course I completely fail to do so, but it still makes for interesting reading. I might try this book.

41bragan
Ago 8, 2018, 1:56 pm

>40 FlorenceArt: You could certainly do worse for a popular-level book on physics stuff. Even though the focus of this one is pretty narrow, it covers a number of interesting things.

42bragan
Editado: Ago 10, 2018, 8:38 pm

75. The Gunslinger by Stephen King



I've read a lot of Stephen King, but for some reason it's taken me a long, long time to get to his Dark Tower series, even though it's one of his best-known works.

And after reading this first book in the series... Well, I'm not sure yet if it's going to be worth the wait or not. This is a weird little book, in ways both good and bad. There is something rather compelling in its central image of the hard-bitten gunslinger doggedly pursuing the mysterious man in black across a seemingly endless desert. And the strange, dreamlike setting -- a combination of Wild West past and brutal post-apocalyptic future with various odd, fantastic touches that are never entirely explained -- is an interesting one.

But I can't help feeling that King's reach exceeds his grasp a bit here. In the first section in particular -- which apparently was written very, very early in King's career -- he seems to be trying hard to write highly evocative prose and often just not quite hitting the target. Sometimes what he ends up with instead are turns of phrase that don't seem to mean much of anything at all, literal or metaphorical. I do think the writing improves significantly later in the book (and the final line, which sets things up for the sequels to come, is probably as effective as anything King's ever written). But it's still a bit uneven, and, unfortunately, this is the kind of book that really requires a state of willing immersion to work properly, and once that immersion is broken by prose that fails to do what it's trying to do, it's really difficult to get back into it.

Still. There is something here, I think. King might not have quite put his finger on whatever it is yet, but he's got several more books after this to get it pinned down, and I am genuinely interested to see where he goes with it.

Rating: I'm going to call this 3.5/5, although the half-star might be more for what it promises than what it delivers.

43OscarWilde87
Ago 11, 2018, 5:56 am

>39 bragan: Great review of an interesting book!

>42 bragan: I cannot remember any particulars of the writing quality of the novel and I probably have not paid too much attention to it at the time either, but I do agree with what you say on the setting and the plot. It somehow makes you want to continue reading. Having read the rest of the series, I can say that I definitely found it well worth reading. I hope you are not too discouraged by the prose and will continue reading the series.

44bragan
Ago 11, 2018, 2:03 pm

>43 OscarWilde87: I am definitely going to continue on with the series, hopefully in the relatively near future. I already have the next three books. And I think King has gotten better as a writer since his very early days, so I'm hopeful that the writing quality in later volumes does a better job of doing the concept justice.

Admittedly, if I'd read this in the 1980s like everybody else, I might have been less critical about it, as I've gotten pickier about prose quality since then!

45valkyrdeath
Ago 11, 2018, 5:09 pm

>39 bragan: It's been a while since I've read a physics book and it sounds like this might be a good one. I know about some of the things you mentioned but I'm sure a full book on the subject is going to go into things I haven't read about before. Either way, it's good to refresh the memory on these things.

>42 bragan: I'll be interested in watching your opinions on this series. It was over a decade ago when I started the series, and I raced through the first three books and loved them. (The second and third books are very different to that rather odd first book.) Then I started the fourth book, and a flashback scene started which I found to be really dull. I discovered it wasn't just a chapter or two as I thought but actually went on for more than 500 pages, and I put it down with the intention of taking a break from it, and then just never went back to it. It was a long time ago and my opinions on things might have changed now, so I keep thinking I'll restart the series but never getting round to it. I think I'll wait to see what you think of the later books before making my decision on whether it's worth going back to now!

46bragan
Ago 12, 2018, 1:01 am

>45 valkyrdeath: It does go into some reasonably interesting territory, including the various impressive ways people have gone about trying to detect neutrinos.

And I'll be interested to see what I think of the rest of the Dark Tower series, too. I do have some rather mixed feelings about Stephen King in general. What he does best, he does really, really well, but, boy, do I want to hack some of his books down to size with a machete. Whatever I may or may not have thought about The Gunslinger, it was at least pleasantly short.

47ELiz_M
Ago 12, 2018, 8:26 am

>42 bragan: The Drawing of the Three was my favorite of the series, but >45 valkyrdeath: most of my friends thought Wizard and Glass was the best. I hope you read the series to the end -- I'd be interested in your reaction to the resolution.

48auntmarge64
Ago 12, 2018, 1:48 pm

Just catching up. Your review of Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance made me go out and borrow it, so now it's awaiting me on the Kindle.

49bragan
Ago 12, 2018, 2:49 pm

>47 ELiz_M: Nice to hear The Drawing of the Three was your favorite, since it's up next. I'm thinking I'll read it next month while I'm traveling to visit my mother. Reading Stephen King on plane flights is something of a tradition. :)

>48 auntmarge64: I hope you enjoy it! Even if it's not a flawless book, it really just did find it so... likable.

50bragan
Ago 16, 2018, 8:16 pm

76. No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal



This is a novel about Indian immigrants in Cleveland Ohio, including empty-nester Ranjana who copes with her lackluster arranged marriage by writing vampire romance novels; the repressed and lonely Harit, who responds to the death of his beloved sister by pretending to be her for his withdrawn and unresponsive mother; and (to a lesser extent) Ranjana's son Prashant, away at college and nursing a huge crush on a fellow student.

The writing is good, and the characters are vivid and compelling in their struggles to find their own identities: cultural, sexual, and personal. It's not perfect, admittedly. It gets a little slower, I think, once Ranjana and Harit actually meet, and arguably there are moments where the characters feel just a little too much like mouthpieces for the author's own thoughts about subjects like writing or self-actualization. You could also argue that the ending, although warm and pleasant, is a little too pat. But overall, I really enjoyed it. Some days, what I want out of a book is the opportunity to go and live someone else's life for a while, perhaps a life very different from mine, and this one fit that mood very well. I'm also quite impressed by Satyal's handling of some of the secondary characters, as he takes people who might seem to be shallow and off-putting from the outside, or even to be dull non-entities, and offers us little glimpses into their interiors that show us that they're three-dimensional, complicated, sympathetic human beings after all.

Rating: 4/5

51auntmarge64
Ago 19, 2018, 7:35 pm

Thanks to your review I just read Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance by Ruth Emmie Lang, and it was delightful! I'm so glad I saw your thread that day.

52bragan
Editado: Ago 19, 2018, 10:36 pm

>51 auntmarge64: Yay! I'm glad you enjoyed it, too.

53bragan
Editado: Ago 20, 2018, 6:22 pm

77. The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin



On January 12, 1888, a snowstorm from hell swept across America's Great Plains. Temperatures rapidly dropped to levels that sound more fitting for Antarctica, and blowing snow crystals reduced the visibility to zero, making it nearly impossible to find one's way to shelter. Hundreds of people died. A distressing number of them were children, since the storm hit while schools were in session, and many of the kids, with or without their teachers, ventured out into the storm in an attempt to get home from school, or at least to reach someplace better stocked with firewood.

I have to say, my primary reactions to this history of what was to be called "The Schoolchildren's Blizzard" seems to consist largely of "This is interesting, but..."

The account of the storm itself actually takes up less of the book than one might expect. First, it's preceded by some background on the settlement of the American prairies and the history of various immigrant families who were caught in the blizzard, including the motivations that drove them to leave their former homes and the hardships they faced on the journey and afterward. This is interesting, but it bounces back and forth between the tales of the various families so much that I found it a little difficult to keep track of everyone.

Then it goes on to explain in great detail how the storm formed, what the state of weather forecasting was at the time, whose job it was to predict this sort of thing, and why there wasn't more warning. This is interesting, but contains perhaps more information about the internal politics of 19th century weather forecasting than I ever actually wanted to know.

The chapters that do cover the events of the storm are rather gripping, with harrowing accounts of what people experienced and some very detailed and vivid descriptions of exactly what happens to the human body as it succumbs to hypothermia. This is interesting -- very much so -- but, well, it turns out that reading about children freezing to death is just really not a good time. (I know, who would have thought?)

All of this has, however, left me with one very useful realization: I never, ever, ever want to live someplace like South Dakota. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but now I'm really sure. It's not even so much due to hearing about the horrors of the blizzard, as about how the just-slightly-below-freezing temperatures that preceded it kept being described as "warm," or even "balmy." If you ask me, anywhere that's considered warm is just not fit for human habitation.

Rating: 3.5/5

54baswood
Ago 20, 2018, 11:54 am

>53 bragan: Very funny, but I have to agree "warm" is not hot enough for me.

55bragan
Ago 20, 2018, 6:21 pm

>54 baswood: On the other hand, living in the desert as I do, I will admit that often find myself laughing at people who complain about the "heat" at what seem to me to be perfectly reasonable temperatures. :)

56dchaikin
Ago 20, 2018, 10:50 pm

>53 bragan: a surprisingly popular book on LT, but from your review sounds like a small story with a lot of padding.

Jayawardhana‘s book sounds fun. Wondering about those neutrinos passing through and if I could sense them somehow. : )

57bragan
Ago 20, 2018, 10:53 pm

>56 dchaikin: It did feel a bit padded to me, although that may be unfair. I mean, I certainly did get the impression the author was interested in all that stuff about weather-forecasting politics.

And you cannot sense the neutrinos passing through you. They are very, very hard to sense. You need something along the lines of a giant underground cave filled with cleaning fluid and some extremely sensitive detection equipment. :)

58bragan
Editado: Ago 25, 2018, 2:13 pm

78. Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich



A few years ago, I bought a ridiculous number of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books at a library sale. (It was one of those big-bag-of-books-for-five-bucks deals, and I went a little nuts.) This one, finally, is the last of them. Not the last one to be published, by any means, but the last one I owned. And I am glad to finished with them. Honestly, the only reason I kept reading through this series this long was out of some sort of stubborn completism. Well, that, and the fact that if I needed something to read when my brain was completely fried after a week of night shifts, they were incredibly undemanding and easy. But by this point, mostly just the stubborn completism. They started out as good, dumb fun, gradually became less fun and more dumb, and finally degraded all the way down to boring. After eighteen-plus of these novels, it's hard to blame Evanovich for running out of ways to make the formula these novels inevitably follow interesting or entertaining, and, I think, equally hard to blame me for being tired of the formula itself. Either way, I'm done with them now.

Having finally finished with them, I was hoping for some feeling of accomplishment or relief, or maybe even of going out on an interesting note (even if it might have been interesting in a bad way). But there's not really much of any of that. This book was on my TBR shelves, and now it's going onto my read shelves, and whatever happened in-between those two things was entirely forgettable. Not especially good, not notably bad, just forgettable.

Rating: 2/5

59bragan
Ago 25, 2018, 3:32 pm

79. Edge of the Known Bus Line by James R. Gapinski



A bitter, damaged woman boards a city bus even though its sign says "Out of Service," and instead of taking her to her job, it instead takes her to Out of Service: a brutal shithole of a place that's somehow cut off from the rest of the world. A place where people fight over the small items new arrivals carry in their pockets, cult factions war over the question of which city the bus that finally rescues them will take them to, cannibalism is a casual way of life, and absolutely everything is covered in dirt.

I wasn't sure I really liked this novella at all, at first, but I will admit that it grew on me, in its own often-disgusting way. I do think the idea of "Out of Service" as an actual place is clever. So are the cults. And the writing style, which I initially thought was a little too distanced, a little too simple, worked better for me as the story went along.

In the end, though, I'm not sure quite what it all adds up to. It feels like an interesting sort of exercise, like a short, mildly disturbing dream, but perhaps not a whole lot more than that.

Rating: 3.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

60bragan
Editado: Ago 31, 2018, 1:01 am

80. Just Kids by Patti Smith



Patti Smith's acclaimed memoir about her long, complicated, strange, and deeply intimate relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

I have to say, there is absolutely no reason for me to think this was a book I was going to like. I have only the vaguest familiarity with Patti Smith's music, and I know Mapplethorpe's work only by reputation. I have absolutely no interest in the NYC arts scene of the 60s and 70s, and the bohemian lifestyle she depicts here has less than zero appeal for me. But I'd heard so many good things about this book that I figured I ought to check it out anyway, and I'm not sorry I did.

The writing is fairly compelling. There's a poetic sensibility to it that might almost be bit overdone, but which ultimately avoids feeling too pretentious by virtue of the fact that there's also a deep sense of sincerity and genuine emotion to it. It's impossible not to respect that, and hard not to be affected by it. When she talked about the days before and after Mapplethorpe's death, I honestly got kind of choked up. And whatever I do or don't relate to, this is an interesting glimpse into a particular time and place and culture, and into the lives of some complex, passionate people.

Rating: 4/5

61bragan
Editado: Sep 2, 2018, 7:57 pm

81. Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez



Earl and Duke, a redneck vampire and werewolf duo, pull into a diner on a dusty desert road and find themselves in the middle of strange doings involving zombies, ghosts, and apocalypse-craving elder gods.

This is very much a horror-comedy, something I love when it's done right, but which can be difficult to pull off. I'm not sure this one quite hits the sweet spot between the two genres consistently. Certainly not as well as the same author did in blending pulp SF and noir detective genres in The Automatic Detective, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The humor is sometimes funny and clever, and sometimes just kind of silly. The horror isn't necessarily scary, but it does do a nice job of putting its own stamp on some familiar tropes (although I could have done without the evil sexy teenage sexpot who manipulates people with sex), and there are some very well-done cinematic-feeling descriptions of monsters and supernatural happenings.

Really, it's mostly just trying to be fun, and while it's not perfect, it succeeds reasonably well. Not a must-read for comedy-horror fans, but not a disappointment, either. If there was a sequel -- and the ending, while it's definitely an ending, is certainly left open for one -- I would probably read it.

Rating: Let's call it 3.5/5.

62dchaikin
Sep 3, 2018, 10:29 am

>60 bragan: Glad you read and liked Just Friends. Nice to see it show here.

63bragan
Sep 3, 2018, 3:58 pm

>62 dchaikin: It certainly took me long enough to get to it!

64bragan
Editado: Sep 10, 2018, 9:55 pm

83. Inkspell by Cornelia Funke



This is book two in the Inkheart trilogy.

I really only have one complaint about these books, which is that they're just a smidge too long. Book two clocks in at well over 600 pages, and the pacing is still a little slow, especially for a kids' book. That aside, though, I am definitely enjoying the series. It's got a little magic, a little action, some nasty villains, and a few moments that are surprisingly touching. All of which is nice enough, but it's mostly the premise I find appealing. The conceit is that some people have the ability to read fictional characters out of stories and into the real world, or to read real people into fictional universes. The first book mostly pulled fictional people into our world, but this one takes us into the imaginary land of Inkworld, the setting of the book at the center of the story. I wasn't too sure about that at first, as I thought this fictional world was perhaps more interesting in the little glimpses and secondhand accounts we got in book one. But visiting it directly was interesting, in a meta sort of way, as it illustrated in an entertainingly literal fashion the way in which stories can take on lives of their own and grow out of their creator's control.

Actually, though, I suppose I do have one more complaint, which is that volume one, while it left a few things unresolved, more or less stood on its own, but this one ended in a much more clearly "to be continued..." sort of way, and the abruptness of that startled me a bit. There I was, reading along, wondering how we were going to get to any kind of resolution in the next twenty pages, when I turned one more page, and, bam, it was over! Turns out the rest of it was just acknowledgements and a preview of the next book. Wish I'd been braced a little better for that!

In any case, I am looking forward to the final book in the series, although it may take me a little while to get to it. I'm going to go and read something a little shorter first.

Rating: 4/5

(Also, whoops, I just realized I've been off by one book ever since I accidentally labeled two books as #57 for the year, months ago. So that's why this one is book 83, when the last one purported to be book 81. Not that I'd expect anybody to actually notice that...)

65bragan
Sep 11, 2018, 12:34 am

84. M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work by M.C. Escher



I've been fascinated with and delighted by M.C. Escher's art since I first encountered his famous "Relativity" print as a small child. I love the way he way he plays with perspective, with dimensions, with background and foreground, with visual paradoxes, and recursion, and all kinds of almost mathematical ideas, all while retaining a sense of whimsy.

This particular volume reproduces 76 Escher prints (at least of couple of which, much to my surprise, I don't think I'd seen before), with the author himself providing a short introduction and a paragraph or so of commentary on each piece. These commentaries are often not much more than a simple description of what it is we're looking at, and yet even so I found many of them gave me interesting new insights. After all these years, it's rather wonderful to know I can still see new things in Escher's work.

Rating: 4.5/5

66bragan
Sep 12, 2018, 10:57 pm

85. This Side of Home by Renee Watson



Maya is a senior in high school, and she's having to deal with a lot of changes in her life. Her best friend and twin sister seem to be questioning the plans they'd all made together for their college lives. Her formerly mostly black neighborhood is undergoing gentrification and turning into a place that no longer feels like it belongs to her. And then there's her growing attraction towards the white boy who just moved in across the street.

The writing here definitely has that slightly choppy feel that seems to practically define YA novels these days, and that I've always found very slightly off-putting. And much of the dialog doesn't seem particularly likely to come out of the mouths of real teenagers. But the characters and their situations do feel realistic, and the social issues at the heart of the story are approached in a nuanced and warm-hearted way. Ultimately, it's not just about race or about gentrification, but about having an identity both as an individual and as a member of a community.

I'm not exactly in the target audience for this, being long past my teens (and, as noted above, not entirely thrilled with YA writing styles), but it worked for me, regardless, and I think I would recommend it to actual teenagers.

Rating: 4/5

67valkyrdeath
Sep 13, 2018, 7:41 pm

>65 bragan: I love Escher's works. I think he was the first artist who ever appealed to me, probably initially from a day in school where we were given copies of his Belvedere picture and asked to find all the impossible things. I had an old CD-ROM years ago that had hundreds of his pictures and you could zoom in to view them in more detail, and I feel I need to hunt that down now.

68bragan
Sep 13, 2018, 7:59 pm

>67 valkyrdeath: He was the first artist who ever appealed to me, too, and I still remember my first encounter with him. When I was a little kid, my parents had a set of Childcraft books on various topics, including one on art. I loved those books, but the art one mostly bored me... until I came across Escher's "Relativity" in it. I stared at that for what felt like hours, utterly entranced, and would come back from time to time just to look at it again. I also discovered Dali through that book, but I had no interest in anything else in it at all.

That CD-ROM sounds really cool.

69bragan
Sep 16, 2018, 10:42 pm

86. Company by Max Barry



A novel about the absurdity of corporate life, and the soullessness of companies that treat their workers as expendable, exploitable assets, rather than as human beings. The satirical humor is decent, though never laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, on the whole, it may be more depressing-because-it's-true than it is funny-because it's true.

There is also something of a sense of over-familiarity to it, although an interesting twist a hundred pages or so in makes it feel at least a little less like yet another variant on Office Space, which is good.

Rating: 3.5/5

70bragan
Sep 17, 2018, 1:43 pm

87. A Little Tea Book: All the Essentials from Leaf to Cup by Sebastian Beckwith, with Caroline Paul



This is basically exactly what the title indicates: a little book about tea and the growing, preparation, and drinking thereof. Not an in-depth, comprehensive look at any of those things, but just a little bit about all of them to get you started, perhaps, on a journey from tea-drinker to something like a tea connoisseur. The author himself is definitely a connoisseur. He mentions early on that he travels to exotic locations looking for obscure teas for high-end restaurants, which honestly sounds entirely too fancy-schmancy to me, but the book itself turns out to be very accessible, and while Beckwith might be something of a tea snob, he's a tea snob who puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that, ultimately, a good tea is a tea that tastes good to you, which is nice.

Because this is such a little book, there's not a whole lot here, and it's definitely not the place to go if you want, say, a detailed history of tea-growing. And, while the writing is perfectly fine, it's not the kind of compelling non-fiction that's interesting even if you're not deeply interested in the subject. But it does a reasonably good job of being the kind of introduction it's trying to be, and I definitely learned a few things. Now I finally know what orange pekoe is! Not to mention how to pronounce it.

There are also a lot of pictures, of tea, tea accessories, and landscapes where tea is grown. In the advance copy I have, most of these are black-and-white, but there's a note saying they'll all be in color in the finished version, which I think should make it a very colorful and rather pretty little book. It might make a nice gift for a lover of books and tea.

Rating: 3.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

71bragan
Sep 24, 2018, 11:06 am

88. The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King



Book two in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

I complained a bit about the quality of the writing in the first volume. This one is definitely better written. Much more assured, and a much easier and more entertaining read. There are some pretty good moments of action, suspense, or horror, and some interesting bits of worldbuilding as we get to learn various little details about Roland's world by seeing our own world through his eyes.

On the other hand, though, it still feels not so much like a story in itself as like a prelude to some story we're still being promised, and at some point, enough prelude is enough. I'm a little worried that pretty much the entire series might keep feeling like this, but we'll see.

My real problem with it, though, is with one of the main characters, Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker. Who is, in fact, two people, and King clearly knows nothing about multiple personality disorder and hasn't bothered to research it, referring to her condition constantly as "schizophrenia," which is a common mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Also, his attempt to write good and evil versions of a black woman from the 60s... Well, he means well, but I found the results a little cringe-inducing, anyway.

Still, the series is moving in the right kind of direction for me, and I'm at least mildly interested to see where it goes from here.

Rating: 3.5/5

72bragan
Sep 24, 2018, 11:17 am

89. Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard



A Mafia-connected loan shark goes to LA in pursuit of a guy who owes him money and ends up getting drawn into the world of the movie biz, which might not really be that different from the world of organized crime.

This was a fun, quick, breezy read with a nice, low-key sense of humor and a reasonably interesting plot. Basically, a great vacation read.

I did see the movie version of this, by the way, ages and ages ago. I remembered pretty much nothing at all about it, except that I enjoyed it, and that John Travolta was in it. Having read the book, I sill remember nothing about the movie, but I am now amused at the thought that there was a movie version, since the characters in this are basically already writing the story into a movie script as they're living it. Maybe I'll give the movie version another watch and see if acknowledges just how meta it is.

Rating: 4/5

73bragan
Sep 26, 2018, 12:39 pm

90. Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis



Years ago, I read Michael Lewis' book The Big Short, about the subprime mortgage crisis. It didn't fully succeed in helping me wrap my brain around exactly what went on there, but it a least made a good attempt at it. Well, Boomerang is his follow-up to that, in which he looks at the global financial crisis that followed in the wake of that whole debacle, specifically in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and the US state of California.

And, I have to say, I found the financial stuff Lewis is covering in this one easier to understand, but perhaps even harder to fathom. My big takeaway here is that people are nuts, governments are nuts, the things that we do with money are nuts... and the abstract actions we take with this essentially imaginary substance can have deeply serious real-world consequences. Which is perhaps a good thing to be reminded of.

For all that it's depressing -- and it is pretty depressing -- this is also a fairly entertaining read. It's not a dry account of what happened (or was happening in 2011, when this was published), but a personal narrative in which Lewis travels to the places he's contemplating and talks to various interesting people, with lots of his own personal commentary included. There is, perhaps, a lot of room to disagree with him on some things, including his thoughts on what each country's specific situation says about their national character, and it's by no means a comprehensive look at the subject of global finance problems. But overall it's quite eye-opening. I'm just sorry it took me this long to get to it.

Rating: 4/5

74bragan
Sep 29, 2018, 11:26 am

91. The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat



This is a novelization of the Doctor Who episode "The Day of the Doctor" written by Steven Moffat, who, of course, also did the original script. And a wonderful job he's done of it! This version adds in a few new scenes, as well as a lot of character insights, and it takes us fairly deep into an exploration of the Doctor, including the Doctor at the most pivotal moment of his life. It's also got lots of timey-wimeyness (of course!) and cheeky in-jokes and complex layers of meta-ness. Some of that works better than others for me, but overall I enjoyed it greatly, in the way that I enjoy so much of Moffat's work: it may be a bit of a mess, but it's a glorious, entertaining mess. I'll also add that when I first saw this particular episode, I had somewhat mixed feelings about the way it's resolved, but whether it's due more to the passage of time since then or to the way Moffat presents it here, I've found that it now actually works quite well for me.

Definitely recommended for Who fans, or at least for those who liked Moffat's approach to the show. (Which I did. I really, really did.) Heck, I sort of expected this to be a really quick, easy read, much like the Who novelizations of yesteryear, most of which I could read in one short sitting, but it ended up taking me much longer than I expected to finish it, just because I found myself wanting to savor it and to get as much as I could out of every sentence.

Rating: 4.5/5

75bragan
Sep 30, 2018, 8:37 pm

92. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn



This is an extremely unpleasant book. Deliberately unpleasant, I mean. It centers on Camille Preaker, a journalist who is sent back to her home town to report on the recent murder of one young girl and the disappearance of a second. Camille, as it happens, is a deeply fucked-up person -- sorry, but there's really no other way to put that -- from a deeply fucked-up family in a town that seems to encourage fucked-upeness. The whole novel is basically a cavalcade of human awfulness, from the petty to the grotesque. (Seriously, consider this a trigger warning for just about anything you can think of.) And there are almost no characters who are entirely decent or remotely likable.

But that doesn't mean it's a bad book. Well, to be honest, for much of it I was thinking that Flynn just wasn't quite making it work. She has a great eye for realistic details, including the details of how people can be cruel to each other, but her characters, perhaps, feel just a bit too much to be entirely convincing. She did a much better job of pulling off unlikable characters and unpleasant events in Gone Girl, I was thinking, and there is clearly a reason why that was her breakout novel, and not this one.

And yet, somehow, by the end, I found myself feeling quite compelled by it, drawn into the messed-up dynamics of Camille's life and even becoming more sympathetic towards her, as well as experiencing a sort of uncomfortable train-wreck fascination with the whole thing. I am thinking, perhaps, that this is the sort of book one has to really be in the mood for, and that I wasn't when I started it, but it dragged me there by the end, whether I wanted it to or not.

Rating: Somewhat to my surprise, I think I'm giving this one a 4/5. Even though it's not something I'd go around recommending to most people. Or possibly anybody.

76RidgewayGirl
Oct 1, 2018, 12:39 pm

I thought Sharp Objects was excellent. Flynn has a talent for forcing the reader to inhabit the lives of some very messed up people.

77bragan
Oct 1, 2018, 2:48 pm

>76 RidgewayGirl: I think part of me really just didn't want to like Sharp Objects, and Gillian Flynn kind of forced me to despite myself. :)

78baswood
Oct 1, 2018, 5:38 pm

Well I might go for the Day of the Doctor but not for Sharp Objects

79bragan
Oct 1, 2018, 9:53 pm

>78 baswood: The Day of the Doctor is well worth going for.

But I have to say, reading those one right after the other was a bit of emotional whiplash. :)

80bragan
Oct 5, 2018, 8:27 pm

I have now continued this for the last quarter of 2018, here.