kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
A little background... )

One word of warning! Some of my reviews contain spoilers. I used cut tags, but if you're clicking the links in the summary table, the cuts will be ignored!



An explanation of table columns in the summaries: Read more... )



I think that's everything! I'm keeping this mostly for my own review, but comments are welcome!
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
I decided to give this book a try because I wanted a change of pace. Several people that I follow were raving about it, and I can see why it's become a phenomenon. It's very compelling, and the protagonists are fun, but the humor is mostly pretty dark and occasionally the things they witness are just plain ghastly - basically what if the Hunger Games were a video game dungeon complete with levels and stats, but it's somehow still real life and there are aliens involved. The series is up to seven books and counting (the author has said it will be ten books "give or take"), so keep that in mind if you decide to start it.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
This was a new twist on the Cinderella story - one of the few times that I've seen one of the stepsisters turned into a sympathetic character (the others being Cinder and the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie). Said stepsister is the protagonist here, and she has good reason to be hateful, but she's really not all bad. I don't know if I enjoyed it enough to continue with future installments in the series, but it wasn't boring.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
The fact that this book is dedicated to "everyone who feels betrayed by J.K. Rowling" signals that its primarily focus is transgender magicians, and that's lovely as far as it goes - messy and prickly, yes, but lovely all the same.

Unfortunately, once the villain of the piece was properly introduced roughly halfway in, I had to skim to the end, because it began to remind me of when I had to stop watching Stranger Things partway through Season 3. It was just too much.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
An author with a word game habit decides to write a book about all types of puzzles, from crosswords to puzzle boxes to jigsaws to Sudoku to ciphers to escape rooms. What he lacks in skill, he makes up for in enthusiasm. He visits Will Shortz and attends a National Puzzler's League convention. He manages to talk his family into representing the United States at the first ever World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Spain. He receives permission from the CIA to see Kryptos up close. He joins Setec Astronomy for the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt (the same one I attended). Each chapter dips briefly into the evolution of each type of puzzle discussed and gives both historical and current examples. It's an entertaining overview, and it ends with its own series of puzzles representing each chapter.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
This is a very well-written, unflinching memoir of the author's early years, starting from birth and ending as the nascent Microsoft company moves its headquarters from Albuquerque to Seattle.

The first half of the book covers his upbringing, and two things are immediately clear. One is that he was on the autism spectrum, which he acknowledges in the book's epilogue ("If I were growing up today...") The other is that he was immensely privileged, both by the choices made and opportunities afforded by his parents, and also in having access as a young teenager to some of the earliest commercially available computers on which to learn how to program.

The second half of the book describes his early business ventures, which started in high school and continued during his time at Harvard. He reveals that he got in big trouble with school administrators for bringing non-students into the computer lab to work on a non-academic project. He also notes that he originally had every intention of returning to finish his senior year and graduate. I hope his mom wasn't too disappointed that he never did.

I was surprised that the book did not mention his recent decision to release the original Altair BASIC interpreter as open source.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
The last of a loose trilogy of unrelated novels that all prominently feature an asshole billionaire receiving his comeuppance, but have little else in common. Unlike Starter Villain and The Kaiju Preservation Society, there is no single protagonist. Instead, we live through a period of confusion and panic as seen through the eyes of multiple (American) viewpoint characters.

Yes, the premise is absurd. But on some level, the premise is irrelevant. It's a story about society and human connection. It's ridiculous and hilarious and poignant and gut-wrenching and uplifting and disappointing and... well, it runs the gamut of life experience, I suppose.

I'm not sure there's a point to all this. Maybe the point is that there isn't a point, and maybe that's okay.

Content notes: physician-assisted suicide, impending apocalypse, mob violence, Christianity
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
For a book that was accurately recommended as "Howl's Moving Castle meets T. Kingfisher" I really expected to like this story more, but none of the characters particularly came to life for me.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
This is escapist contemporary action/adventure fantasy in the same vein as the book that preceded it, The Kaiju Preservation Society, but this one was less quippy and a shade or two darker, so I didn't enjoy it quite as much. I guess I'd still take it over most James Bond films, though.

Content notes: dead mother backstory, ridiculous funeral shenanigans, sudden violence.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
I liked this one more than the other Clark stories I've tried, probably because it's working hard to be funny on top of everything else. Still pretty horrific, though.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
If Space Opera was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then this is Life, the Universe and Everything - erratic, baffling, and easily mistaken for a repurposed Doctor Who script. The spaceship even looks like a casual dining establishment.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
This is the story of Nadya, who lived for years in an underwater world before being "rescued" and brought to Eleanor West's school. We already saw in the third book, Beneath The Sugar Sky, how she left our world behind for good, but this shows us the life that she returned to, and why she was sure enough to have gone there in the first place. I didn't much care for her the first time we met, but I learned to love her here.
kareila: a lady in glasses holding a stack of books (books)
[personal profile] kareila
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.

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