Becca
Hmm. Less satisfying than the first book. Also, the objectification of women is definitely not abating - possibly amplifying, in fact. The other problems from Rivers of London also seem recurrent – for example the two mostly separate plot lines.
Part of the problem might be that I simply don't care about music, so the long passages about jazz made my eyes glaze over. Also, I read it back-to-back with Rivers of London, which may have exacerbated my frustration about the repeated problematic portions. 2 1/2 stars and I'm going to take a break before continuing on.
Man, this book is controversial, perhaps because of the subject matter? Although it's kind of shocking to me to read the reviews, since I came of age in a time where no one really believed in multiple personality disorder the way that it was portrayed in the Sybil case. When we learned about it as an example of the fallibility of memory it seemed intuitively true to me that while we all have different facets of identity, no one is truly multiple people. Additionally, Nathan has clearly researched the heck out of this topic – nearly every sentence she writes directly cites the personal written records of one of the protagonists.
But why is multiple personality disorder something that speaks to so many people? I think it's because of the way that feeling fragmented into multiple parts of self is such a core part of the human experience, while the myth of the continuity of a single self still dominates the human narrative. For instance, rushing from work, I summarized my day to my husband and we both noticed at the same time that in clinic, I am calm and collected in a crisis, while only minutes later, in a different context: late to daycare, I easily become anxious and struggle to quickly make a plan. I think the story of Sybil speaks to that.
And I think the story behind the story of Sybil speaks to so much else: the way in which psychologic manifestations and the perception of self is contagious; the way in which uncertainty about gender roles can subconsciously be subverted into ways to get women back out of the work place (first post-WWII with MPD, a very neat analogy for the way women were torn between the work place and home, but also, as it hit epidemic levels, a way to get women back out of the workforce; and later, during the recession of the 80's with the satanic panic vilifying daycare); the way in which things that we take for granted, like a scientific approach to medicine and professional ethics, had to evolve and belong to a place and a time.
And honestly, that's really what this story is about: that things that seem “normal” and perpetual to us belong to a place and a time. Nathan makes the point that MPD, a disease of middle class white women during the 50's-70's belongs in the back of the DSM with the other “exotic” disorders that only occur in cultural contexts. So does the psychiatry of Dr. Wilbur's age – giving the patient excessive amounts of barbiturates, amphetamines and other psychoactive drugs, then hypnotizing them – clearly barbaric to our eyes. But Nathan treats her very sympathetically, making it clear that Dr. Wilbur pioneered a field, enjoyed all of the professional accolades of the time and did scholarly work. The point is not character assassination, but rather to cause us to question what modern precepts only exist within our cultural context. I found it very interesting reading.
This is the month that the internet becomes book form and then I read it? Except, in contrast to the other book-form internets that I've read this month, Soonish isn't based on a blog, but rather the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Which is one of those things that makes me feel a little less lonely: there are a nonzero number of people out there who, like me, eagerly wake up in the morning to read the newest math/D&D/physics/astronomy joke-based comic strip. I'm not alone in the universe.
Soonish is actually primarily by the wife of the SMBC guy, Dr. Weinersmith, who is a PhD in parasitology and her scholarly publication list certainly dwarfs her lay publications. In my opinion, the scholarly bent showed: it's easy to go off of the scifi deep end here, but Dr. Weinersmith both explained things clearly, but also evidently spent a lot of time interviewing the top scholars in the field and making sure she was accurately depicting the current state of each field as well as the promises that it might contain. Ultimately, because the book focuses on multiple future technologies in a fairly rapid fire way it was light reading, but I don't think overly simplified.
I always have pause to see my own field depicted in the lay literature: here in the form of CRISPR, synthetic DNA and precision medicine, but I found it mostly well done, with a couple of metaphors that didn't quite work out. If that's the barometer for the overall scientific rigor of the book, I would say it's in about the 95th percentile of pop science writing.
And the illustrations certainly helped! As a reader of SMBC, I found the comics absolutely consistent with the tone of the webcomic – funny and a little dry.
The moment I fell in love with The Toast as my internet home started with the words “Hey Ladies.”
The moment that I had second thoughts about going into pediatrics also started with “Hey Ladies!” In fact, in my previous life as a computer scientist, no one would ever have referred to a professional group as “ladies,” for gender reasons alone. But, as a senior medical student, all of my peers considering pediatrics were women, as was the altogether too cheery chief resident standing in front of us, gathering our professional attention with her false-friendly greeting: “hey, ladies!”
And, yeah, honestly, I love being a pediatrician, but my professional life is one where gender performance is scrupulously policed, and semi-social professional interactions are full of gender declarations, passive aggressive behavior and subtle status cues. So the way that Markowitz and Moss really capture a way in which women of a certain demographic interact with each other, and the nuance captured in a signature really spoke to me. (Normal conversations I have with my husband include lines like: “We can't hang out with her after she was so mean.” Him: “When was she mean?” Me: “In that e-mail you just read? Did you not see her punctuation marks??”) And no, it's not me and it's not my day-to-day life, but it completely captures where my professional and social life intersect. Perhaps because I am mostly an outsider, cleverly camouflaged to make my way onto these e-mail threads, I find seeing them exposed, dissected and ultimately lampooned hilarious.
But? I thought the blog entries were funnier. I think the pacing was better spread out over months (I binge read the book in two one hour sittings over two days) and that limiting the e-mails to one year lost some of the nuance that, for instance the Jen/Brad relationship took on in the blogs.
Yeah, I don't know. I've been struggling with what to say about this one because I've had such mixed feelings. Usually, I start with what I liked about a book, but I simply think that the problematic aspects of Kushiel's Dart are so problematic that they have to be discussed up front before the book can be analyzed in any depth.When this book was recommended to me it was just as an “epic fantasy that makes epic fantasies interesting again” so any trepidation I had coming in was that it was over 900 pages long, with a map inside the front cover followed by a list of characters with High Fantasy names longer than my arm – in short, the sort of fantasy that I haven't read in a decade. So to be confronted with the core plot of the One True Masochist was jarring. Good heavens people, don't fail to warn people about the BDSM. I see why it could happen – the back two-thirds are a completely different book – but there's 300 pages of a tonally very different book first. And the tone. So, I mean, I try to be a “your kink is not my kink and that's OK” sort of person. And, as one of my friends commented, it is kind of fascinating to get inside someone else's psychosexual identity, but it's not my kink, which made it, honestly, kind of boring. But also, beyond the kink, one has to deal with the really problematic pieces: bond slavery, grooming of children, children slaves, a relationship between a teenage bond slave cum foster child and his owner/guardian, classically conditioning children into masochism – I mean really problematic stuff that has all of its extreme implications glossed over in the book. And I'm really concerned about the glorification of submission and masochism in women and the way in which this is broadcast for public consumption, both in the book but also in the fantasy subcultures. It's not super consensual for bystanders and I think it sets up a gendered culture that can be borderline abusive to young women trying to fit in. I think it's not actually OK to not think about the real world implications of the culture that you're starting (I was really disturbed to see the fan tattoos on the author's website.)Finally, you're allowed to do an alternative history of Europe. Alt histories are fun and amazing. You're allowed to do such a transparent alt history that Scandinavia is actually named a Norse word, and Rome is named after a Roman empire. You're also allowed in fantasy to have highly stereotyped races; we side-eye it these days, but dwarves and elves and goblins are all still kosher. What you're not allowed to do is have a very transparent alt history AND stereotype races. Not OK to say that only alt-history Western Europeans and specifically the French are super blessed/pretty people and alt-history Scandinavians are all ugly and alt-history Romani are super stereotypical fortune tellers and alt-history Jews believe in Jesus. So why did I read a thousand pages of this? Because it actually is a gorgeous Epic fantasy. I found the initial setup of a religion that is to Christianity the way that Christianity is to Judaism fascinating. I really thought that the setting was a well-developed world with some unique implications (although the more I dwell on it, the more I think the mores of Terre d'Ange fit whatever Carey was into at the moment rather than being consistent.) But mostly, after the first super problematic one third, the entire premise was dropped and it became an actual epic story about someone who went from being kind of self-absorbed and shallow to deeply invested in the survival of a country and a lifestyle. I found Phedre's (and Joscelin's) personal development really intriguing and I thought that they were depicted well as sympathetic characters who still had a lot of room for growth over the course of the story, which is really unusual. The political intrigue was decently well-done, and I found the setting both big enough that the intrigue was convoluted, but small enough that I could follow what was happening. When the book was good, it reminded me of the [b:The Goblin Emperor 17910048 The Goblin Emperor Katherine Addison https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1373039517s/17910048.jpg 24241248]Ultimately what kept me in it was that I really liked Joscelin's character arc. It's really rare that a fantasy novel lets a character break a vow. Usually the fantasy convention is that vows are inviolate, it's one of the most fantastical elements of fantasy. And in traditional fantasy, characters that break vows are either irredeemable or their core story is a quest for redemption. On the other hand, Joscelin simply realized that the vows he took as a teen were naive. An exploration of how to be true to oneself and be a moral person while also loosening up on a black-and-white world view is something rare in fantasy and rare in literature in general, and that's a pity.
I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one – Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me.
The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book was actually quite good. I usually am terrified of books invoking evolutionary concepts because it's just so poorly done in most popular literature, but Pollan has a very good grasp on genetics; often he first offers an anthropomorphized or simplified hypothesis about why a trait such as sweetness evolved and then goes deeper to explore how that would actually be a competitive advantage for a plant carrying a specific gene.
I thought it was extremely interesting that most of the plants in the book were plants that don't “breed true” (i.e. have a sexual reproductive pattern resulting in genetically diverse offspring), such as apples and tulips, and how the extreme diversity that results within a single species of plant turns out to be a strong advantage. Pollen argues that this is particularly true as an artificial advantage because it makes plants adapt more quickly to human demands for cultivation. Interesting, but not completely convincing.
Anyway, I found the individual stories of each plant also interesting, in particular the story of the apple, how it was first used almost entirely for alcohol on the American frontier and the Johnny Appleseed story and the story of the tulip and the Dutch tulip mania. I was less convinced by the exploration of marijuana, which had a strong focus on why humans would evolve an endogenous cannabinoid pathway that I found overly speculative. Potatoes, the Irish potato famine and genetically-modified organisms was done in a less speculative manner and I thought Pollan explored the differences between the artificial selection already introduced in the book with GMOs in a very even-handed manner.
I am an unapologetic (Daniel) Mallory Ortberg fangirl. I've followed his work since the Toast, was overcome with glee when he took over Dear Prudence and basically think he can do no wrong. I also love faerie tales and hate short stories, so that's pretty much the context for where I'm coming from.Ortberg is a master of language and it shines here. His wit is subtle, but biting, and each story quickly comes into focus with a clear tone and setting, in a way that many short stories authors struggle with. In a lot of ways, the book reminded me of Kelly Link's work – designed as an intellectual puzzle that left you feeling something, without necessarily understanding why or what was literally happening in the story. Which is a super cool effect. But sometimes, a girl just wants to get what's happening, so by the end of the book the impact of that had kind of worn off.My favorite stories was the first, a really atmospheric retelling of The Little Mermaid, perhaps because many of the conceits that Ortberg used throughout the book were new and shiny still then. I loved the way Ortberg played with my expectations of “mermaid” by introducing radial symmetry, and the administrative humor of the Rules of the Fae. The siren/selkie tale later on used a lot of the same tricks, but just felt less cool. The two Frog & Toad-based stories stood out. Both because I don't consider Frog & Toad a faerie tale, but also they both had the same tone of passive aggressive/gaslighting horror. (Which was kind of also present in the Merry Spinster – where Beauty basically just bullied everyone by “never thinking of herself”) And yes, that is my personal bogeyman, but at the same time, I kind of wanted to be like “who hurt you?”Daniel Mallory Orbterg came out as a transman and changed his name coincident to the publishing of this book.
Strange Creations, by Donna Kossy, self-proclaimed expert of Kookology purports itself as a tome dedicated to the strangest ideas about human origin – something I was so down for. I was drawn in by promises of aquatic ape theory (delivered) and expected that to set the tone of the book (not-delivered.) Instead, Kossy spends the majority of the book discussing racial overtones in the ways in which people have thought about the origin of the human species. The chapter entirely on race (focused on polygenesis – the idea that the ethnic groups are literally separately originating species – vs. monogenesis), to me felt interesting and in-bounds. However, the subsequent chapter on eugenics, which isn't really a human origin idea, felt like too much. Also, based on the billed description, I read this mostly on vacation and in the mood for a fun read and eugenics...isn't. And that's before the focus on race in the section on devolution as well.
Even if a book about racial tensions in the history of science and pseudoscience wasn't what I signed up for, it would have been interesting, but Kossy manages to fall into the Uncanny Valley of pop science writing: she is neither comprehensive or systematic like a scientific approach would be (and frequently interjects her own opinions, including her complete disdain for creationists but deep respect for the Heaven's Gate cult, which I found discordant), but she's also not approachable like a more literary approach would be. Instead, she is very detail-oriented about single people or topics in a story that she explores in depth and then abandons related context. It really felt like a no-forest-only-trees writing approach. As a result of the combination of unexpectedly heavy and off-topic material and this strange writing style, I found the book quite dry and a chore to read.
The first and last chapter were by far and away the best – the first focusing on the ancient astronaut theory and the last aquatic ape, Heaven's Gate and other weirdness. Bizarre and breezy, that's what I signed up for.
Despite my super mixed feelings on [b:Wonder 11387515 Wonder R.J. Palacio https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1309285027s/11387515.jpg 16319487], Auggie really stuck with me, so when I saw that these novellas were available from the library, I decided to get some closure on Auggie's story. The Julian Chapter immediately took me back to my strongly positive feelings about Wonder: the way in which RJ Palacio captures the nuance of bullies. Not of bullying, but of bullies as people. The way that a ten year old can seriously think “Aw, shucks, but I didn't mean anything by it” as a defense to even terrible actions, which seems unfathomable to most adults. I liked the way that fear informed a lot of Julian's actions, and I liked how his parents were well-intentioned but contributory.As the narrative of the books shifts away from Auggie and the events in Wonder, they lose a sense of having a center of gravity and become very light and fluffy: The Shingaling is a cute little story about Charlotte learning how to make friends across the social divides, which does really capture a tween girl social dynamic, but is more shallow. And then finally, Pluto is basically a plutoid: the shape is a little irregular with story parts sticking out – Christopher used to be Auggie's best friend and there are lumps of flashbacks that don't add much, to the small little nugget of story about Christopher's band friends.
Let's start with the good: I thought that Wonder was an amazing and nuanced view of the social intricacies from late elementary school to early high school. By introducing multiple perspectives, RJ Palacio has written one of the most insightful pieces about how people inadvertently become bullies, alienate their friends or switch social groups. It rang very true, and more informed than a lot of the non-fiction references about bullying.
I also liked having a book about someone with a craniofacial anomaly. Too often disability characters in YA are completely sanitized: “normal person in a wheelchair!” style. Auggie was a great and honest portrayal of a kid with Treacher Collins. I know many kids like Auggie in real life, and I think this is the first book that they get about them. I liked that she pulled no punches in describing his surgeries, and his difficulty eating and articulating and also no punches in giving him a personality that went beyond his disability with his love for Star Wars, sense of humor and insight into people's ways of thinking.
But, I didn't love it. Perhaps because I've spent a lot of time with kids with craniofacial anomalies, it didn't have the same newness to me as to a lot of other readers. Or because, as a professional geneticist, I got really distracted by the fact that he has biallelic TCOF1 mutations, or that he has both a new, previously unknown recessive form of Treacher Collins and OAV spectrum. (I'm not sure in what universe someone would make a diagnosis of OAVS, a clinical diagnosis, in a kid with molecularly confirmed TCS, who doesn't have any facial asymmetry, but.) Or that they didn't use the words “Treacher Collins” in the whole book? I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: authors who want a geneticist consultant, I'm for hire! Pay me in books.
But honestly, I had two other huge concerns: the first is Auggie winning the community service award at the end. I found this super frustrating and shallow compared to the more nuanced take in the rest of the book. Auggie didn't do any community service just by existing. The “point” of people with disabilities is not to be a fable for children without disabilities to learn from. He's an actual human being who should actually do some community service to get a community service award. That dehumanization really undermined a huge portion of the book for me, and made me feel hesitant to recommend it to children with disabilities.
My other concern is unfair for a book review, but stick with me: they chose a child without a craniofacial anomaly to portray Auggie in the movie? In a world that has thousands of actual children with craniofacial anomalies, who will never ever have a chance to play a protagonist in basically any other movie, and they took a typical kid and put him in disability drag? Overall, that choice, combined with the ending of the book made me really concerned that RJ Palacio doesn't really believe that atypical children are human beings with their own personhood and reason for being, rather than a tool for her to write moralistic novels.
I feel a little unsure about Borderline. There's a pretty standard urban fantasy plot, centered around an unapologetically, no-holds-barred borderline personality disordered protagonist. And I felt towards it the way that years of being in the medical profession has drilled me to react to borderline personality disorder: man, it's kind of fascinating, but best observed at arm's length. The portrayal of borderline personality disorder is eerily accurate, but also extremely sympathetic. The book has received much accolades on its portrayal of BPD, and I think a lot of that is deserved: this is clearly the best portrayal of BPD in the literature, one of the few protagonists I know of with BPD and its take is quite nuanced. However, at some point, I also felt like Millie got too much of a narrative pass for her behavior and it was pretty clear to me from the writing that the author herself had BPD (indeed, she does.) The way that this is clearest to me is that there's a sense when you're around someone with BPD that their behavior and actions are amped up to a hundred to the point that no one around them has any space, and the book completely treats Millie that way – all of the other characters are flat and under detailed. Even the plot grinds to a halt to serve Millie's internal churning. Perhaps that's part of the realistic portrayal, but it's kind of off-putting as a reader. What redeems the book for me is Baker's portrayal of Millie's inner self, her suffering and her (meager) attempts at getting better.
Overall, I found this book a fascinating insider's view on borderline personality disorder, but kind of flawed as a novel.
There's not much to say about Hidden Figures that hasn't already been said, but I still found the story of how African American female mathematicians left behind their families and hometowns to seek their fortune doing calculations on bomber planes to win WWII, in a time that there was still segregated lunch tables and African American women could expect to make a pittance. It's amazing to read about the women, who despite these circumstances, forcibly integrated grade schools to earn their PhDs and persevered for years to be recognized as engineers and included on literary papers. I liked that Shetterly chose to focus on a few key characters as a way of humanizing the story, although I agree that the character development was pretty weak, and especially the side characters tended to blend together.
As a side note, I DNF'ed the young adult version and, having read the real thing, I completely stand behind that choice. What were they thinking? Young adults are not more attracted to drier books stripped of characters.
It's possible I got old between the other Twelve Houses books and this. I remember the Twelve Houses as charming old-school fantasy novels with great character growth and setting development. Fortune and Fate feels like a fanfic of that: Wen is a character who has been totally present all along, don't you remember she was Justin's BFF? And the Queen loves her so much she won't replace her even though she went missing? So, since she's totally a central character we know and love, here's her story, with ample name-dropping of the (actual) main characters and a side plot about the actual main characters that's completely unrelated. So, yeah, as a Gillengaria novel this fails – and there are more loose threads than I could handle on that end: “there's so much more crime in the Southern lands than there has been, let's investigate.” That ended up being completely dropped. “What if people aren't still loyal to the queen?” Oh well, everyone loves Cammon, so should be fine.
On the other hand, Wen's story was sweet, if predictable. There's room in my life for a cozy old-school fantasy about female warriors.
This is a short book about how things become trends. Some of the ideas are really interesting, such as late v. early adopters and who tends to be in which group. But overall, I found the book poorly organized, with a concept being explained very abstractly, alternating with examples without demonstrating how the example fit the concept, rather than really using examples to illustrate the concept.
I also found that the book didn't age well, in part because Vejlgaard was really concrete in some parts. For instance, he names the people who tend to be trendsetters: e.g. artists, gay men, rather than why some groups are trendsetters. But also, I suspect Vejlgaard is himself a late adopter: despite a heavy focus in the book on social networks and media to spread trends, the internet isn't mentioned until the epilogue, on page 200, and even then Vejlgaard says “the speed of media has changed [from newspapers and magazines], but the type of media has not.” Even in 2006, this was abundantly untrue and in 2018, it's laughable to think about discussing trends without invoking social media.
Dahlia Moss is billed as WOW meets Veronica Mars, and honestly, that's pretty apt, sans the hard exterior. I found the fast-paced mystery enjoyable. Wirestone is heavy on the allusions – I can imagine the book is almost illegible to people who aren't part of at least one fandom – but he draws from a pretty diverse pool, so it's not like you have to specifically play MMORPGs to find it enjoyable. Besides the general geekery, I found the mystery well-built, with some nice clues, some nice distractors and overall good pacing. The characters were all pretty shallowly depicted, but each was quirky and fun.
I thought where the story showed some depth was in exploring the ways in which Dahlia had separated herself off from a social life when life didn't turn out how she planned, and how she managed to find her way back to having friends and accepting herself how she was. I think it's a pretty universal story of the mid-20's and this is one of the most honest depictions I've seen.
It's imperfect: some of the allusions felt a little forced and the witty repartee felt a little on the nose, but overall, I found it a completely enjoyable, fast romp (I read nearly the entire thing over the course of a 90 minute flight) and I'll probably read the next books in the series.
I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: “Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?” and “Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like ‘typewriter' and ‘schizophrenia'?” and “The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?”
The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning – the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.
Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with “monomacy” for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book.
Let's get a few things out of the way: Stiletto was a very different book from the Rook. But it was a very, very good book. In fact, I think it might be a better book than Rook (although not quite as enjoyable.) In Stiletto, O'Malley zooms out from the narrow perspective of Myfanwy to a much bigger story about the Checquy, told primarily from the point of view of the Checquy's mortal enemies, now nascent allies, the Grafters. By switching perspective, O'Malley uses the different takes on supernatural and what each considers the proper way of things to really explore cultural dissonance. I thought O'Malley had a lot of interesting things to say about assimilation, alliances and immigration through the lens of these secret, ancient, supernatural organization. As an aside, I felt pretty anxious about how bring the Antagonists into the story would work with that because I was worried that they would be yet another, totally separate secret, ancient, supernatural group that would really unbalance the novel. I was extremely pleased with the direction that he went in. Also, it's very unusual for me to come across a book with a twist that both makes sense and surprises me.
I also continue to be extremely pleased by how deftly O'Malley writes female characters: they are distinct, nuanced, not sexualized and have agency. Yes, they tend to be dismayed to wear extremely expensive clothing, which they subsequently manage to ruin during action sequences, but everyone has their quirks.
Speaking of literary quirks, people who didn't like the Rook won't like Stiletto either. O'Malley loves info-dumping, and uses the merger between the Checquy and the Grafters as an excuse to go off on historical tangents (I'm pretty into his world-building, and found this fun, but it's an odd pacing choice.) He is intent on sharing the backstory of every character in the universe, even if they only survive for two pages. And he paces books like a TV show, with lots of monster-of-the-week encounters (including one that's kind of poorly paced.) But he's a fresh new voice on the speculative fiction scene, writing new, fun, things with well-written characters, well-drawn settings and something new to say with fantasy worlds, so, yeah, I'll read anything he writes.
When I was a tween, I had a generalized tonic-clonic seizure. It's bookended by flashbulb memories: one of sitting down to play a video game and the other of waking up and the sinking realization that I had lost at least half an hour of time – that apparently before the seizure, I'd been acting perfectly normally for at least thirty minutes after the last thing I remember. Tweendom is a pretty existential time at the best of times, so I doubt it's very surprising to say that this experience left me obsessed with the idea of personhood and memory: who are we if we can't remember ourself? Is continuity of personhood an illusion? These are the questions that are really at the heart of Wondering Who You Are. Sonya Lea's husband suffers complete retrograde amnesia following a (life-saving) experimental cancer therapy and anoxic brain injury.Some readers complained that it is a completely internally focused narrative of Lea – the wife of the actual patient – and that's kind of the point. The book is really an exploration of who you become when you don't remember yourself and how that affects the people defined by their relationship to you. I found it brave, introspective and thoughtful. Lea doesn't flinch from examining the hardest parts of herself. Unlike in [b:Are You My Mother? 11566956 Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1511409644s/11566956.jpg 16507555], where I found this cringeworthy, Lea's narrative voice is removed enough that it works. She discusses her own alcoholism, her husband's physical abuse of their children, and who these truths change in a world where his former self is lost.If I have a criticism it's that Lea's insight was curiously silent when it came to her privilege, which was on display in spades: they move to California from Seattle on a whim, only to then spend four months in France and another several months “housesitting” in California wine country. Lea spends an entire year doing nothing except exactly what she wants (as a physician parent, I sometimes feel overly indulgent spending an hour doing only things I want to do.) and the throw gads and gads of money on holistic medicine, faith healers and other therapies. Money, time and job obligation problems are usually looming for people with major medical challenges, out of work on disability, so for them to be so strikingly absent was distractingly notable.Which I guess is my last point: Lea is definitely not the sort of person I'd be friends with if I ran into her in real life. I found her flighty and gullible. But you don't have to like someone to learn from and admire them, and this is a fantastic book. Lea is unflinching when discussing the difficulty of being a caretaker and I think she has a lot to say not just on disability, but on relationships and personhood.
I require a very high bar for spec fic books based predominantly on quantum mechanics, but I think Thomas did a very good job here. She clearly learned her stuff, and uses it sparingly and deeply when used. I'm less a philosophical expert, but it seemed to be handled similarly. All of that being said, while many books use quantum mechanics in service to the plot, Thomas seems to be writing more of a Sophie's World style, where the plot exists to advance her thoughts on quantum mechanics and philosophy.
While this seems to have turned a lot of people off, I found her completely forthright about it: this is a book about a main character who is writing her thesis about novels that are thought experiments. This is a novel that is a thought experiment: let's say we could enter thoughts. If that were possible, what would it mean for how thoughts are made? What would that say about what it means to be conscious? Is what we learned from this thought experiment generalizable even in a universe where thoughts aren't a manifest place that can be visited? Those are fun questions to ask and explore.
When she veers away from that core, the book really falls flat (the love story? The random officemate who was into evo bio and got totally dropped, even though I really wanted her to integrate into the main plot line?), but that's OK, because it's not supposed to be a proper novel. My only real complaint is the ending kind of petered out.
I thought Thomas had interesting thoughts about what it means to think, what defines consciousness and whether emergent consciousness is possible. I was intrigued by the thought process of whether defining phenomena mathematically instantiates them or merely defines them and I think she explores this in a particularly deft and nuanced way.
I first saw a DTWOF comic in one of the campus newspapers of my hometown growing up. In the years of DTWOF comic strips that followed, I'd occasionally catch one posted online, or in another newspaper, or a few strips in a collection at someone's house. But the comics are intensely serialized (not making much sense as a standalone), the whole archive was never available online and only 527 comics were ever published in the 21 years of the strip, so it always seemed like I was catching a glimpse of an elusive whole. This collection is near-complete and the storyline finally manages to be cohesive. Don't get me wrong: this still reads like a serial, and threads drop and there are one-off jokes, but it reads a lot better as a collection.
Perhaps what I found the most interesting from a modern perspective was actually the politics. It was fascinating to realize that the things that the characters said about Bush (HW) and Clinton (Bill) strongly resemble the things that I've said about Bush (W) and Clinton (Hillary) and Trump and Obama, too, for that matter. And indeed, the protest wing of leftwing politics versus the run-for-office-wing versus the tear-your-hair-out-publicly wing have apparently always had the tension that is so apparent now.
So...this is someone's book. Obviously. But it's not mine. I had not-so-high hopes going in, because I'm not usually one for super hyped anyway, but it seemed perfect for an airplane and the bookstore clerk said he reads a lot of scifi and this kept him guessing and was like nothing he's ever read. Let me count my issues:1. It's derivative. So, so, so derivative. If you've ever read a speculative fiction book based on quantum mechanics, you have read this book. I anticipated every twist. His abductor? himself from a different multiverse OF COURSE!, the surprise ending? there are more than two of him from the many multiverses. 2. It does quantum mechanics shallowly and I care. I read this interweaved with [b:The End of Mr. Y 93436 The End of Mr. Y Scarlett Thomas https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389137862s/93436.jpg 1535663], which does such a more nuanced job. 3. I can't turn off my feminism (sometimes I wish I could.) And the female characters had no agency. And/or were MacGuffins. And also, I read this mid-[a:Alison Bechdel 21982 Alison Bechdel https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1245100306p2/21982.jpg] marathon, and wow does it fail the Bechdel test.4. The family v. success dichotomy is overwrought, unfair and honestly a problematic cultural narrative.What is the second star even for? It was readable enough that I didn't ragequit and I wasn't really hate-reading it. The story was kind of vaguely entertaining.
Wow, this book was frustrating. Under the guise of writing about her mother, Alison Bechdel mostly explored A) her own insecurity and B) pyschoanalysis. So much psychoanalysis. Mostly Winnicott. So, I mean, on the one hand, psychoanalysis is a widely debunked borderline pseudo-science. And on the other hand, it seems to have loaned Alison Bechdel a lot of insight. Maybe not so much personal growth in that she's still writing books “about her mother” about psychoanalysis, including transcribed passages of her life that she was explicitly told not to write down by her psychoanalysis (including transcribing that she's not supposed to be writing them down.) But I have a lot of insight into the inner life of Alison Bechdel now?
This memoir is harsh, honestly. Not really so much on Alison Bechdel's mother, who comes off feeling pretty distant for an ostensible focal point, but on Alison herself, who pulls no punches in depicting her insecurity, fear of commitment and transference to psychiatrists. It was pretty uncomfortable reading.
Yeah. So, I feel bad not liking this, because I borrowed it from a friend who really likes it, but I spent most of my time wanting to slowly walk away.
People are mad about the character assassination of Dr. John Watson – and don't get me wrong, me too – but the fatal flaw is the character assassination of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps all the more pernicious because King actually does get Holmes' voice pretty dead-on. But his actions... The very idea that it's OK for any 50-something year old man to carry on flirtatious conversations with a 15 year old is already pretty obnoxious; the idea that a 19 year old referring to her 58 year old “surrogate father” as her “near-lover” in literally the same sentence is egregious. But at the idea of this middle-aged Romeo being Sherlock Holmes causes words to fail me. Yes, I realize that the author herself married a man 30 years her senior when she was in her early 20's and therefore might mistake grooming for romance, but there's no excuse for it to have been published that way.
One star for a semi-decent mystery when I ignored that drivel, but the pacing was poor and there were multiple details lacking (especially the Hebrew: Mary “translates” Armageddon as “Ar Megido” as...I don't know, evidence of her Hebraic superiority. It's “Har Megido.” “Har” means mountain.) But it's not worth nitpicking something that has a glaring flaw. Wikipedia tells me Mary grows up and marries Holmes: I'm out.
