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3.5-stars from me. Enjoyed the different closed-door mysteries and the twist for each, plus the intriguing mathematical hypothesis and tale that wrapped around the mysteries. The book is like a candy box of murders, differently flavoured and wrapped. It's a clever way to house and thread short stories together. Ultimately, because there were many characters, detectives, suspects, and victims, the reading is from a distance and the ending had less emotional punch. Still an enjoyable and unique read.
3.5 stars. Not so much lessons as in perspectives, I feel. Appreciated the questions he raised about the need for our “fictions”, whether we really have free will (no), and whether we know our own minds (negative) but didn't find them as insightful as his arguments within the first two parts on technology and politics. Much prefer his earlier books.
A big book and one that I wish I finished years earlier. The audiobook made completion possible this time and the writing made it pleasurable. Beautifully written (with the help of a ghostwriter, I believe) and well arranged, the autobiography underscored the title. The journey to an apartheid-free SA was indeed long and arduous, which made the achievement all the more extraordinary. This is also an inspiring tale of belief in principles and in man's capacity to change, and Mr Mandela's unshakeable refusal to succumb to hatred is exemplary.
Ps: The narrator of the audiobook is excellent.
3.5 stars.
Made me laugh in many places, and one line still makes me snicker. What I didn't like were the italics - there were too many of them as if the narrator / author wasn't confident readers could figure out the tone of the sentences from words and context. But this was fun to read and the subject matter of cults and family relationships (lightly) balanced the rom-com.
This completes the Three-Body Problem Trilogy, and takes us centuries into the future.
My impressions are on the entire series.
It's been termed “hard sci-fi” for a reason - there is a lot of science, arguments about science, and projections on scientific development within the huge span of this book.
The premise: An alien civilisation is looking for a new habitat and Earth is it. Humans have 450 years to prepare for the invasion and in that time, the aliens - Trisolarans - have sent invisible “sophons” to halt progress in fundamental physics and to also spy on human activities. Of course, this supposes that we (humans) are not alone in the universe. Indeed, not only are we not alone, but also in danger of being discovered by other alien civilisations, not just the Trisolarans.
The span of the story is breathtaking - four hundred and fifty years. Also, the challenge inherent in postulating how human civilisation will respond to such a threat to their existence. Will the world governments put aside differences and work together or will human society fracture into different groups seeking different solutions to the problem?
The author tackles all this, and more, and that in itself makes the book worth reading. I also enjoyed the arguments surrounding technology and should humans pursue a technological development that can guarantee its safety in the future but that can also annihilate it if it falls into the wrong hands at present?
Then there are the debates on whether human civilisation is worth saving at all, given the damage we have wrought on Earth, and would it be fair if a small segment of society, ie the ones who can afford to build the sophisticated ships with ecological systems on board, survives but the majority dies?
These, plus the premise, was what kept me ploughing through the pages, because, to be frank, the characters and the writing would not have sustained my interest.
There are so many characters in each volume of the trilogy that I rather gave up keeping track of them all except for the few who remained central to the tale. The characters felt a bit flat for me, especially the “Western” characters who populated Books 2 and 3 — some of them seemed like caricatures, and there were only a handful who came to life in a more meaningful way, most of them in Books and 3. Book 2 also came across as sexist in its depiction of women, with the main character, Luo Ji, going on and on about his version of the ideal woman - suffice to say, she would fit right in with all the traditional Asian stereotypes about the feminine ideal. This is repeated, though less obviously, in other parts of the trilogy, so much so that I felt it was the author's view and not his characters.
Fortunately, the story kept me reading. The tech is fascinating and among those I found most interesting included hibernation, the information windows, lightspeed spacecraft, anti-matter weapons, slowing down the speed of light, and the unfolding or falling in of dimensions.
The story does not have a happy ending. Earth dies. In fact, the entire Solar System is annihilated. The nature of the attack is itself intriguing and involves the Solar System being sucked into a two-dimensional plane, thereby losing light, life, and energy. The humans that survive are those who escaped the Solar System and find other habitable planets.
This book does not make for light nor entertaining reading. It does raise important questions about our existence in this universe, the rate of technological progress, the futures we are building and the legacies we want to leave behind.
A 3.5 star read for me but maybe because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to fully enjoy what is an extremely well-written, tightly-woven murder mystery with sprightly sleuths and nice (there's no other word for it) police detectives.
I appreciated the bits about the challenges and fears of growing old, and had more than a few good laughs while reading. It was the case itself, including its resolution, that didn't intrigue me as much as I expected, clever as it was. Also, when one character is far too smart and resourceful, it saps the thrill of the chase.
Having said that, I'm still picking up the second book in this series, just to follow Elizabeth & Co on their sleuthing adventures.
Would highly recommend this if you're in the mood for an entertaining and enjoyable very English murder mystery with four smart and sassy older amateur detectives.
This was a tough novel to get through, not because it was badly written (quite the contrary) but because the subject matter made me put the book down every few pages for an emotional breather.
The story itself is based on a true story of two fathers - Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli - who each lost a young daughter due to violence. They each become members of Combatants for Peace, seeking to find common ground through shared tragedy which - they hope - will lead to greater compassion and eventually, perhaps, to that elusive peace.
In form, the novel stands apart. It is not in any chronological order, nor is it in any sort of logical order. Passages of story are interspersed with factual snippets and anecdotes that sometimes are only tangentially connected to the main novel. There are even photos to illustrate parts of the novel. Rami's and Bassam's story also go back and forth in time. Oddly though, you can make sense of the tale, and (mostly) appreciate the excerpts on birds, mathematics, riot-control gas, Mitterrand's last meal, among others.
The writing is beautiful. Even when McCann is describing birds, you just want to settle in to the prose. His narration of the personal tragedies of Rami and Bassam and how they each come to terms with it is deliberate, almost in slow motion when he goes in and out of their anguish. Violence is not white-washed and neither are the injustices.
It is a heavy read - there isn't much levity in the story nor the prose - but the writing is graceful. An article said that the author broke up the passages into 1,001 paragraphs echoing 1,001 Nights (NY Times). I didn't count them and there is nothing said in the author's acknowledgements; the form of the novel did help in breaking up the tragic reality of the story.
The book though, I feel, is about hope, a reminder that as long as there are people like Bassam and Rami who can advocate for peace despite their suffering, there may still be a chance for an end to violence.
#booknotes #apeirogon #colummccann #reads2021 #novel #bookstagram #thereadinglife
4.2 / 5
A murder mystery is truly masterful when it is still able to surprise you with a plot twist after revealing at the beginning the name of the murderer and how the crime happened.
Such is The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino.
A murder takes place in the first couple of chapters, and we know exactly who, how, what, and where. What we don't know are the details of the cover-up so when the body is discovered, we follow the clues through police detective Kusanagi and police consultant and physicist Dr. Manabu Yukawa (the Inspector Galileo of the series). We are also, alternately, following the murderer and accomplice, single Mom Yasuko and her daughter, Misato, who are guided to cover up their crime by their neighbour, Tetsuya Ishigami, a talented mathematician.
The brilliance of the book is in getting readers to root for the perpetrators of the crime, hoping that the wit and strategy of Ishigami would best that of the equally sharp Dr Yukawa (coincidentally, they were university mates). At the same time, we are eager for the trail of clues to be connected and made sense of by the detectives so that we, too, can be in the know.
The narrative is spare, but the dramatic tension and emotional stakes are ratcheted up each chapter, as Yasuko and her daughter anxiously follow Ishigami's instructions to evade police detection.
This was my first introduction to Higashino's work and likely will not be my last. I was racing through the pages, and though the ending with its surprise revelation was not one I was hoping for, the murder mystery was satisfactorily wrapped up and explained. The last time a murder mystery struck me as particularly inventive in plot and presentation was Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Highly recommended, especially if you are looking for a fast, clever, and well-spun mystery read.
I first read Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie last year and like thousands of other readers, fell in love with his writing and depiction of inter-cultural, inter-generational relationships. The themes of history, identity, culture, and family feature in this collection, albeit in more futuristic settings.
A lot of the stories deal with earth's inevitable demise as a habitable place for humans. The first, Ghost Days, tells of mutant human children on a distant planet, while a series of inter-connected tales starting withThe Gods Will Not Be Chained deal with the possibility of eternal (digital life) when human minds (and personalities) can be uploaded. Other favourites are The Reborn which deals with memory (and murder) in a world inhabited by aliens and humans, Byzantine Empathy which gives an interesting twist to human compassion, and the short and poignant father-and-estranged-daughter story that is The Message.
There are some fantasy shorts included, including the titular tale, The Hidden Girl, which is a meld of fantasy and sci-fi in feudalistic China. There is even an excerpt from Ken Liu's Dandelion Dynasty series. These tales, though, were not the standout pieces for me. I found his stories of humans and technology far more interesting.
This is an enthralling collection of (mostly) sci-fi short stories told within the context of human relationships, history, and identity.
As with other Ishiguro works I've read, the narrative of Klara and the Sun floats me along, like a gentle river. The point of view character is Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF), a humanoid designed to befriend humans and have their best interests at heart.
From the storefront from which she observes human goings on outside the window and arrives at a conclusion that will shape her decision in the later part of the story, to a home in the countryside, after she is selected and purchased by Josie, a sickly child of about fourteen, for company, Klara's point of view is an interesting one.
Visually she discerns the world through geometric shapes, angles, light and shadow. At times, her vision divides into squares with each segment a piece of out-of-place jigsaw, the result like an abstract art work. Despite this, Klara is unusually perceptive, even compared to newer AF models, with a deep curiosity about, and compassion for humans.
Can almost humans make life better for humans? This is an intriguing concept, and the premise begs deeper exploration of humans and machines, AI and its applications, and what constitutes human-ness. Because the story is told by Klara, we are at a point removed from the drama, and the human interactions - especially the scene of Klara's friends at her home - take on a slightly surreal quality.
In the time and age of the story, parents are expected to have their children “lifted” or genetically enhanced but there are side effects. One can deduce that the children are the first generation to be able to benefit - or die - from the process of genetic enhancements. Josie's childhood sweetheart and neighbour, Rick, is unlifted and life for him presents different prospects with fewer opportunities. In the second half of the novel, there is another reveal, when Klara is taken to the city and discovers what Josie's mother has in mind for her, should Josie not become better.
The story reveals information in slow drips. The narrative is leisurely, and though the eddies become more turbulent in the second half of the novel, the pace remains sedate. I had no trouble with this. The slow pace enabled absorption of the world Klara inhabited, a world where creators (humans) questioned the value and virtues of their own creations.
Having read Never Let Me Go, which was sad and deeply disturbing, I found Klara and the Sun to be a more hopeful rendition of the same theme, albeit still a melancholic one. If there is a criticism, it is that there is no central question to be answered, or explored. In NLMG, the rights of clones comes into sharp focus but in this one, there are instead a multitude of smaller questions. The question of what makes us human is explored, but I am reluctant to settle for Klara's touching but simplistic conclusion.
Klara and the Sun is a moving narrative of humans and machines, the latter of which can be programmed to have our best interests at heart even while we humans with our complicated intelligence and tangled emotions often act against our own.
This book had me from page one, and didn't let go until the end.
It's 1954 in America, and 22-year-old Vietnam War vet Atticus Turner is driving through Indiana to get to his father's home in Chicago. His car has a flat and with no working spare in the boot, he trudges to the nearest car repair shop to buy a tyre. But the men there wouldn't serve him because he's black, and there's nothing he can do about it. He waits for hours by the side of the road, keeping low, reading a Ray Bradbury (he's a fan), before a service from fifty miles away comes to fix his tyre. When he drives to Chicago the next day, he gets pulled over and his belongings ransacked by a police trooper who doesn't believe he really has books in the trunk of his car.
So opens Lovecraft Country and from the first scene onwards, it is like a train picking up speed, the landscape a segregated but normal America, then the land allows us glimpses of creatures from the dark, and the atmosphere suddenly crackles with magic.
The stories don't have a single central character but the protagonists of each chapter are members of Atticus Turner's family, who, because of their heritage, gets drawn into a power struggle that is as old as time, involving ancient forces beyond normal comprehension. The stories are inter-connected and lead to one satisfying finale.
The novel is fashioned on Lovecraft tales, but without the purple prose (or that's how I recall Lovecraft tales, at any rate) and cleverly interwoven into the fabric of 1950s reality for black Americans, racism very much at the fore and centre, affecting where they lived (and where they could live), where they schooled, how they shopped, and how they travelled (Atticus's Uncle George publishes ‘The Safe Negro Travel Guide' which lets black travellers know which motels, restaurants, and cafes would serve them). The story's villains are constructed of bigotry as well as the supernatural.
It is this brilliant mash-up of ancient and unknown terrors with the familiar horrors of racism that makes this novel a thoroughly exciting, memorable, and entertaining read.
Hag-Seed is Margaret Atwood's take on The Tempest, part of Random House's retelling of Shakespeare's plays.
The lead character, Felix Philips (aka the multi-faceted vengeful Prospero of the play), is an avant-garde theatre director of the Makeshiweg Festival, who finds himself cruelly booted out of job by his ambitious underling, on the eve of what would be the grand debut of his version of The Tempest. Without a job and and a family, the middle-aged Felix hides away in a derelict cottage, where he plots revenge and mourns his dead daughter, Miranda.
His chance for vengeance comes after a dozen or so years when he gets a job directing inmates of a prison. His revenge takes shape in the form of a staging of The Tempest that he puts on for the benefit of the man who ousted him, now a government bigwig.
While all this is going on, he keeps seeing his dead daughter and talks to her as if she was still alive. These scenes are touching and poignant, though at some point even Felix himself realises he could be losing his mind with grief.
The narrative is often humorous, but always with compassion and sympathy for the characters. The structure is inventive, containing as it does a plot that follows the play, and a play contained within the plot that enables the author and readers to explore Shakespeare's work. Any fan of Shakespeare would be doubly delighted.
Hag-Seed was unexpectedly entertaining, emphasising as it does the unexpected dark turns that real life can take, and how one can learn - perhaps - to let go of pain and emerge with some light still inside.
A British spy, Nat aka Nathaniel aka Anatoly, returns home to retire, only to find himself placed in charge of The Haven, a derelict sub-station managing a handful of Britain's double-agents and their handlers. Outside of work, he strikes up an unlikely acquaintance in the form and shape of a young, gangly Englishman, Ed Shannon, who challenges him to a game of badminton.
Over their post-game drinks, Ed - who believes Nat to be a harmless retired attache - lets loose with his verbal volleys against Brexit, Trump, and the British leaders who divorced the nation from Europe. It is the politics of post-Brexit Britain and pro-Russia Trump America that give rise to the events that unfold.
It is Nat who we follow for the entirety of the book. He's smart, polished, and over-confident, and makes for a compelling narrator. His family, wife Prue and daughter Steffi, also play a role, Prue playing a much larger role than the long-suffering spouses of spies in other novels. The only other female character of substance is Florence, Nat's young co-worker, also an idealist like Ed.
I had expected an intelligent but slow tale of espionage, but the events in this book develop with satisfying rapidity. They call into question to the meaning of loyalty, patriotism, and idealism. The different threads come neatly together and if there were parts that raised questions, it's to do with the narrator's inability to deal with emotional pain points as well as the hopeful, but abrupt, ending, which left me wanting for a couple more pages of narrative.
This was a solid read from beginning to end, allowing readers a glimpse into the world of modern espionage. Le Carre's genius in this book is the inter-weaving of big issues with individual actions, and the resultant - dangerous - dominos that fall.
Given the views espoused in this book and from what I have read of le Carre's own political views, I would imagine the author must have been relieved by the results of the recent US elections, even though the consequences of Brexit still remain for his country to sort out.
More a 3.5 than a 4.
I expected to fall in love with this novel, the same way I did with On Beauty. But the love affair did not happen and I found myself, unfortunately, racing through the pages not because I was entranced but because I wanted to get to the end, quickly.
The core issues are that of identity and belonging - do these come with family, nationality, religion, culture, or cause? Along with these, the novel explores migration, nationalism, genetic engineering, extremism, elitism, love, activism, and a smattering of other subjects. The narrative is super-smart; you're definitely in the company of high and frank intelligence, one with plenty of wit and humour, layered faintly with condescension.
The characters are richly drawn out - there's Archibald Jones, the middle-aged white guy; his unlikely best friend Samad Iqbal, the Bangladeshi who uproots from his home country to have a better life in England; Clara Bowden, Archie's young, Jamaican wife; Alsana Begum, Samad's wife; their children Magid, Millat, and Irie; and the Chalfens, just to name a few. Their dialogue sparkles. The author takes great delight in poking fun at her characters, in whose emotions, lives, and minds we delve quite deeply but without - at least on my part - the effect of caring about them.
One critic praised the novel as being a “riot” and that is an apt word. The author throws out many threads of plots, characters, arguments, and histories, and we get this amazing weave of colour and texture. It's just that it's hard to discern the pattern in the tapestry.
This is a smart and funny novel but though my mind was stimulated and the funny bone tickled, the heartstrings remained quite untouched.
This may not be the most cheerful book with which to start a new year, but with repeated reminders of death, thanks to the pandemic, it seemed a fitting read.
In war-torn Syria, Bolbol's father dies, after making a final wish to be buried in the family plot near Aleppo. It is only a two-hour drive away but war has made such long journeys treacherous and possibly fatal. Bolbol recruits his brother Hussein and sister Fatima to grant his father's dying wish, and the three of them transport the body of their father in a rusting van to his hometown.
The journey is fraught with danger, from soldiers and militia, falling bombs, and festering family hurts and painful memories.
In less than 200 pages and often with black humour, the author (who lives in Damascus despite the war) paints a vivid portrait of the ravages of war - not just of the lives it takes but also the life that it leaches out from the living, and of the complicated and often treacherous terrain of family relationships.
A five-star read, for its emotional punch and dark humour.
A 3.5-star. The premise is intriguing: people who are murdered get to come back to life again, hence dispatchers are employed by the state to kill those who are dying from.accidents to enable them to live again. Within this setting, John Scalzi has created a plausible missing persons (and possible homicide) case involving a billionaires wife and a missing dispatcher. Interested enough to follow through on the sequels within the series.
This is a collection of short stories by the renowned Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan. The stories are translated from Bahasa Indonesia, and were published in assorted journals.
While the tales were written across a few years, what is a common thread is disgust, distrust, and outright revolt against the government of the day. In the first story, “Graffiti in the Toilet”, these emotions are expressed via graffiti in the toilet (the author describes bodily functions in excruciating detail in this story so be forewarned) while in others they are expressed via characters or - as in “Rotten Stench” - via a breathless, pages-long sentence describing the putrid smell of dead bodies, the result of government action.
Another recurring thread is women, and their oppressed status - whether they are underaged girls promised to lecherous old men (Dimples), former Dangdut girls (My Lipstick is Red, Darling) or someone's “Aunt” (Auntie).
The stories provoke discomfort, with a few being slyly humorous (Caronang) or absurd (Making An Elephant Happy, The Stone's Story). In any collection, you will have favourites. The Stone's Story - told from the POV of a stone - is one of my favourites, as are Kitchen Curse, Aunties, and Easing into a Long Sleep.
This is not a book to read for enjoyable escape; rather, the stories tell - simply and wryly - of the brutality and ugliness of real life.
The premise: What do you do when you are a suburban housewife and mom of two, living in a traditional suburban enclave in Charleston in the 80s, and you suspect one of your new neighbours is a vampire? This is the predicament Patricia Campbell, wife of the respected Dr Campbell, faces when a series of strange events, disappearances, and deaths, lead her to conclude the seemingly improbable, and make decisions that lead to wildly unthinkable outcomes.
The battle is never straightforward and the odds are stacked against her, even though she's white, middle-class, and what today we would consider “privileged”. But Patricia is a woman and a housewife, pitted against a suave (male) villain who becomes a rich source of investment for her husband and his friends. Her solace comes from her book club friends but even that is not a guarantee.
This modern vampire tale delivered more than just fun thrills. The housewives in the story do not hold equal power in their marriages, and Patricia's own marriage is a reflection of the inequality. Being a housewife and a mother is regarded as a second-class occupation and the husbands in the story seem to be lightyears away from male enlightenment. If the author intended to increase the ire of his female readers, then he certainly succeeded.
This was also the ‘80s and ‘90s which meant no mobile phones, very little internet, and crazy real estate deals. How the poorer, less white people featured in the story are treated highlights social inequities, but this is not a book about revolutionary change. The changes that do take place within Patricia, her group of friends, and the community they live in are incremental but menacing, and the series of events, many of them unfortunate, some of them gruesome, and a few of them truly gory, makes her re-assess her life and relationships.
Substitute vampire with drug dealer or corrupt official propped by their public facade, community support and popularity, and with levers of power at their disposal, and the premise can be transplanted to the real world, albeit with less fangs and blood.
A hugely entertaining read, providing some unexpected twists to a familiar genre.
This is a love story with a sci-fi twist.
In this world, two opposing forces, Garden and Agency, move forward and backward in time (upthread and downthread) to affect events to ensure the survivability of their peoples. Red (Agency) and Blue (Garden) are rivals who at first taunt and compete with each other, then - through secret letters and notes they leave one another - fall in love. They never meet - both wear different faces and take on different identities at each mission - at least not in flesh, but get to know each other intimately through words. We follow their clandestine relationship, as they attempt desperately to evade the detection of their oppressive leaders, and of the mysterious Seeker.
The writing is lush and poetic, even as it narrates death and violence (which, as human history will attest - and both of them do traverse history, mentioning along the way Khan and Caesar, among others - is full of blood and cruelty), destruction and desolation. It gives us a tantalising glimpse of what can be done and undone should we have the power to travel through time.
But this novella by American writer Max Gladstone and Canadian author and poet Amal el-Mohtar is not about human history. It is about love's power and how it spans space and time, and overcomes all odds to survive.
#booknotes #reads2020 #scifireads #thisishowyoulosethetimewar
It's been awhile since I was so enthralled by a novel, and a fantasy novel at that. It seemed like such a daunting read at first but the story weaved its spell after the first few pages. Slow-paced? Not when every sentence is such a delight to read. Complex characters, an intriguing magical system, period atmosphere, and a plot that unspools into darkness.
A 3.5 stars.
What happens when stranded teens and young adults are cut off from the world (and social media)? This account of how the young employees of an amusement park “Fantasticland” degenerate into murderous tribes is told from the viewpoints of the survivors. At turns horrific and annoying (some of the voices truly, truly grated), the story reminds us that young people may all be capable of violence, once the edifice of civilisation crumbles away.