Kareila's Bookshelf

I included a question mark above because I'm not convinced that these are intended to be read in any specific order. I numbered them in publication order, but they seem to have been published according to the reverse of the internal chronology.

The first installment, Red Team Blues, depicted a modern-day man at the end(?) of his career in computers, and this book is his origin story, from childhood to MIT to the early-ish days of the Silicon Valley phenomenon (mid-1980's). Unfortunately for the book, as soon as he arrives in San Francisco, the protagonist becomes the least interesting character in the story, and even the author begins to ignore him for entire chapters at a time.

The other day my mother was telling me a story about one of her older cousins, who recently moved into assisted living. This cousin managed to knock over a lamp in her room, tried and failed to call the staff for help, and eventually ended up calling 911. To help her with a lamp.

And my mom is laughing hysterically, and eventually realizes that I'm not laughing, because all I can do is just say "oh no" over and over.

Reading this book is kind of like that. Some people may find it hilarious. All I could do was cringe.

The author of A Memory Called Empire takes on haunted house tropes with a murder mystery set in a near future where nanobots and artificial intelligences are, if not common, at least things that are understood to exist. Creepy as heck.

First in an upcoming series of cozy spacefaring mystery novellas, similar in theme to The Mimicking of Known Successes but much less academic in character. The setting is a spaceship on a centuries-long voyage, whose crew is repeatedly reincarnated thanks to the ability to store backups of their personalities and memories in Books, which are kept in a Library on the ship. One of the ship's detectives, Dorothy Gentleman, wakes up in another passenger's body when her Book is erased. There is a mystery to be solved, and she soon realizes that the person whose body she unexpectedly took over is the prime suspect. It's a great premise, and the reincarnation aspect is what gives it the "Memory Called Empire meets Miss Marple" blurb that caused me to pick it up.

I found myself beginning to write a story last year, thinking it would take maybe a few weeks, and now a year later it's maybe halfway done? Since it's taken on a life of its own and is turning into more of a novella than a short story, I thought I'd read some books aimed at helping me be a better writer, or at least a more productive one, because I do want to finish the thing sooner rather than later.

One was No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the original founder of NaNoWriMo. (My sense of timing is, as usual, inexplicable: the nonprofit organization that formed around NaNoWriMo announced a few days ago that it is shutting down.) I've never been interested in trying to cram an entire novel's worth of writing into 30 days, but I'm sure there's something to be said for how that strategy forces you to seek out a productive flow state. I did glean a few tips on how to access creative juices on days when it feels like the well has run dry, but much of the advice concerns hitting specific word count targets, which I find off-putting.

The other book, The Happy Writer by Marissa Meyer (author of the Lunar Chronicles, which I had no idea was a NaNoWriMo product), had tips for a more sustainable pursuit of the craft. Like many of the books I've read so far this year, this project started out as a podcast, and both books include words of advice from other successful authors. Part I talks about how to seek ideas and spark creativity, so there's some thematic overlap there. Part II contains good strategies for overcoming distraction and procrastination in any endeavor, not just writing. Part III presented the ideas that really challenged me - references to narrative structure, and how to formulate an outline that helps to achieve that structure. I've always been what the author refers to here as a "Pantser" instead of a "Plotter" (and I do have to say, I much prefer my DM's terms of "Gardener" and "Architect") - someone who figures out what the story is by writing it and seeing what happens, knowing the destination but not the shape of the journey. So actually thinking about narrative structure explicitly instead of intuitively is something that I'm sure I will find helpful... in my second draft.

I didn't read Parts IV-VI because they targeted the business of being a professional writer, instead of someone doing a one-off project on a lark, but overall I would characterize the Meyer book as much informative and helpful than the Baty one, which largely consists of irreverent cheerleading.

This final book of the trilogy neatly wraps up all of the plot threads introduced earlier in the series while also being completely unpredictable from one page to the next. It even circles back, at last, to the court of The Goblin Emperor himself. I'll preserve my character name cheat sheet (up to four dozen lines by now) in the hopes that we haven't seen the last of Celehar and his friends.

Found-family high-stakes space adventures! I really hope the author writes more of these. The protagonists reminded me a lot of my D&D characters, if only they existed in a sci-fi setting.

Anaïs Nin wrote that we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

The conceit of this book is that it reviews the spectrum of human experience, from cave paintings to the internet, but it's really a way for an anxious, thoughtful, middle-aged man to reflect on what he loves (and occasionally loathes) about life. It was largely written after the COVID outbreak and before the vaccine was available, which lends an extra poignancy to many of the entries.

Because the concept of The Anthropocene Reviewed started out as a podcast, I can particularly recommend the audiobook format: it includes a couple of chapters not available in the printed version, including one about the Kaua'i O-O, a now-extinct bird whose haunting and lonely cry was licensed for the recording. However, the paperback and ebook releases also include bonus chapters written after the audiobook and hardcover editions were published.

This was a very interesting book that I nonetheless felt would have been more effective as a podcast. Its main focus is the DART spacecraft, a test mission which changed the trajectory of an asteroid in late 2022. But it also engages in several sidetracks and diversions along the way, including complete spoilers for the 2021 movie "Don’t Look Up”, which I hadn't yet seen. And the author interviews a wide range of scientists and engineers, whose voices could have easily lent themselves to an episodic audio presentation. Still, it is almost certainly the definitive source for understanding the current state of the art with regards to the prospect of saving our planet from an asteroid impact, as opposed to the ridiculous antics featured in popular movies.

There are some interesting ideas here but taken altogether as a story, this did not work for me at all - in fact I almost ragequit multiple times.

That said, I did enjoy another story of his, Elder Race, and plan to read his Children of Time series at some point.