Kareila's Bookshelf

Previously.

As I mentioned before, this book came out in May, and it took me this long to get through it, at a rate of about two chapters every three days. This installment was even more of a slog than the previous one; the plot had very little momentum until it was about 85% done, at which point I was finally able to finish it in one sitting. I do think the payoff was worth the investment, though.

No release date for book nine yet.

It took me a while to work my way through Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue, simply because it was so dense with anecdotes. I alternated between the hardcover and the audiobook, which both had their advantages - the printed pages included images, obviously, but the audio included occasional source recordings and such. I also found an Easter egg in the audiobook that offered to provide a download of even more anecdotes that didn't make it into the final edit.

Presumably in order to keep an already long book from being even longer, the author chose to focus exclusively (and exhaustively) on Apple's products and business decisions. Unfortunately, many of the chapters describe the development of a single product, sometimes coalescing many years of history and referencing later events that haven't been properly addressed yet, which can distract from the flow of the narrative. I personally would have preferred a stricter chronology, even if it made the book more difficult to organize.

I also felt like an opportunity was missed to provide insight into why Apple suddenly transformed into such a massive success once Steve Jobs returned, instead of merely detailing events. With this in mind, I also read Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain, which relates the same facts around Steve's initial ouster and eventual comeback, but leaves Apple behind for a time to follow Steve through his NeXT days. Although more limited in scope than Pogue's book, I ultimately found it to be a more compelling and enlightening story.

These stories are designed to be read in no particular order, but this one clearly takes place earlier than all the others. Chih is a newly-minted cleric here - awkward, unsure of themselves, and frequently saying the wrong thing, even with Always Brilliant there to guide them. We learn that they were given up by their family as a toddler, and their earliest memory is of being carried to the monastery of the Singing Hills.

In this tale, Chih is stuck working for a time in a busy restaurant because their money was stolen, and they have to wait for replacement funds from the monastery to arrive before they can continue their journey. In the meantime, they witness escalating tensions between the locals and a stream of refugees from some sort of disaster further down the river. There are meditations on the nature of home and what it means to belong somewhere, as well as who gets to decide what will be remembered.

Although it's a beginning, it also feels like it could be an ending. But Goodreads has a placeholder for an eighth book to come, so it would seem that the author isn't ready to leave this world just yet.

This is a story that seems to be taking place simultaneously with the events of Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, but located on an extremely remote outpost of Radchaai space. The way that the story is constructed is a throwback to classic novels that tell the tale of an entire community, rather than focusing on one viewpoint person or even a small handful of protagonists. I saw one person on Bluesky describe it as if Eliot's Middlemarch and Camus' The Plague had a baby in space, and that seems remarkably accurate.

Content warnings would be along the same lines as Translation State, but not as viscerally disturbing. ( Read more... )

Again I was slow to finish this installment of Murderbot, but this time it was because the first chapter mentioned some minor characters from Rogue Protocol that I had mostly forgotten, so I went back to reread that one. And then Exit Strategy. And then Fugitive Telemetry. Ahem.

Anyway, this was more of the good stuff, probably my second-favorite just behind Network Effect. Could also have been accurately titled "SecUnit and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Space Station" because it's less grave peril and more death by a thousand you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me indignities.

Content warnings: character death, trauma

If you need to know going in who dies: ( Spoilers... )

As established previously, Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on a spaceship whose occupants are repeatedly reincarnated over the centuries of their voyage. Measures have been taken to prevent the passengers from producing more children, and each reborn passenger wakes up as a young adult with their most recent backup of memories restored.

Which is why no one knows what to do when an infant is left on the doorstep of Dorothy's nephew and his husband. Nobody has even had to think about how to nurture a child in three hundred years.

This must be why you brought a new baby gifts, I realized. You wrapped them in blankets because you wished you could wrap them in knowledge; you showered them with clothes and soft things because you couldn't shower them with the learned experience of your years and decades. It's why people liked handmade things for infants, even when those makes had faults.

These are breezy and frivolous, but fun. I hope there will be more.

I connected with this graphic novel about a mental health journey in a way that I tried to but never did with Allie Brosh's work. Stevenson (who has undergone a gender transition since publishing this in 2020) is maybe more relatable to me personally, as a gifted and driven overachiever who pushes to the brink of burnout and beyond. That being said, it probably does help when reading this to already be familiar with the author's other works, especially Nimona (which I have only read in audiobook format - I should fix that).

This is an angsty but ultimately sweet story about a transgender man's quarter-life crisis. He returns to his midwestern hometown after 10 years in order to help his mother move, and finds himself torn between staying there and reconnecting with his best friend from high school, versus returning to his queer found family in NYC. Feeling stuck, he visits the indie bookstore where he worked as a teenager and finds himself face to face with his younger self. Can he change his past?

This was a fun, escapist story about two teens with unusual abilities. Genevieve is a scientist whose history of being constantly overlooked has resulted in her being able to literally turn invisible. Ash is a boy with a difficult past who can travel in time. When they cross paths at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair, an explosion seems to unravel time around them, and they find themselves thrown backwards into 1893. They have no idea how to return to their own time, or if their future even still exists. Thematically, the story reminded me of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, but written for young adults.

I looked up the author online, and she appears to have written two other books set in the same universe, although the three stories don't seem to be intertwined in any way. A Starlet’s Secret to a Sensational Afterlife is about Genevieve's twin sister Henny, and their older sister Ruby is the subject of Murder for the Modern Girl.

This 2005 book is technically a reread, but I was surprised to recently learn that it had received sequels in 2012 and 2015. The first time I read it was before I started keeping this journal, and I feel that it deserves a review.

This a juvenile fantasy book, but it's not really about a princess. It's about a girl who lives in a remote mining town in the mountains. The faraway king hears a prophecy that the prince will marry a girl from that town, so an academy is established to educate every girl of marriageable age who lives there, ensuring that whomever the prince eventually chooses to be his bride will be suitable for the role.

To complicate things further, it is gradually revealed that all of the miners can commune telepathically through shared memory, an ability that they call quarry-speech. The heroine, Miri, uses this ability along with her wits and courage to ensure the success of the academy's students and the safety of the town.

What I particularly appreciate about this story, in addition to the subtle feminism, is that there are very few villains despite the tension and character conflicts. Everyone is trying to do their best, and no one is beyond redemption.