Emma Goto

This is one of those sci-fi books that I would put on a "must read" list. It attempts to answer the question - why does life exist on Earth, and seemingly nowhere else? And the place it ends up at definitely makes it worthy winning the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award.

The main character is Leigh, a Dutch scientist who obsessively dives into her scientific research as an excuse to avoid facing the difficult relationship she has with her mother and their family history.

It's set a little bit in the future - there have been advancements made in space technology, but the timeskip also shows Earth worse off - pollution has worsened, seas are rising and wildfires raging from the affects of climate change.

One of the reviews I saw mentioned alien contact, and although the book does have a slow build up towards this, it's not really the key part of the story. The writing is also excellent, with a lot of the focus on the characters rather than being a "hard sci-fi" kind of book.

I picked this one up as the most recent winner of the Nebula award. It’s a fantasy novel, where a boy has his shadow severed from his body by his mother, and then he grows up to move to a city where there are inexplicably glowing doors all over the place that don’t lead anywhere.

The book itself was easy to read, and some of the characters felt easy to connect with, but overall the plot felt quite vague at times. From reading the reviews afterwards it seems the wow factor comes from the themes it covers - religious fanaticism, totalitarianism and so on but I think it was a bit lost on me and I would have liked something more tangible.

So this won Goodreads scifi award for 2024. I was a bit iffy at first, since Goodreads is the kind of place where ACOTAR wins awards, and so I wasn't sure if this book just won the scifi award on a technicality because although it has time travel it didn't sound very scifi-y. But I was pleasantly surprised!

The story centres around people who were destined to die in their original timeline, but instead brought out before this happens to live in 21st century London. The secretive Ministry that brings them out obviously doesn't have altruism in mind when they do this, though. As they struggle to adjust, the Ministry also comes under fire from enemy spies. And there's a (good) romance side plot too.

There's a lot happening in this book, and I almost feel like it could have been simplified a bit by removing a side plot or two. Also time travel is always a confusing topic to write about with changing timelines and the like. But overall a really great read.

The book's plot summary hooked me - the pair meet via a Reddit "Am I The Asshole" thread, and it turns out to they are both similarly cursed with having their exes immediately found "the one" right after their breakup.

As well as the romance itself, there's a side plot surrounding some mental health issues and unresolved drama with their family.

I think what makes a good romance for me is the buildup and the "pining" stage but it's mostly skips that and instead the main complication is the character's childhood trauma and issues with forming relationships with other people which is kinda meh to read about (sorry).

This book is written by two computer scientists in the AI field. The seeds of this book started before the likes of ChatGPT took off, and so I found the first portion of the book quite enjoyable as the book covers some of the pitfalls of the AI technology that came before LLMs like machine-learning and predictive AI. e.g. the concept of "data leakage" - how a tool can be trained on a set of data, and work very well against just that set - but fall apart when you try and more broadly apply it.

Also details a funny (well, not really) story about how attempts at using predictive AI in a hospital to triage patients went wrong - the AI model found that patients with asthma were less likely to experience complications with pneumonia and so suggested that those patients should not be prioritised in the triaging process. When actually the reason the asthmatic patients generally didn't experience complications is because they were prioritised to begin with.

Also other examples around how AI tends to just reinforce the biases that we humans already have so it's quite a dangerous technology in that sense - an easy example in today's world is that if you prompt an AI for a picture of a doctor and nurse it will tend to stereotype and provide a male doctor and female nurse.

There was also a bit of an interesting detour into a section on how scary the effects of social media can be. e.g. how Facebook hires for its moderation team in a central location, rather than having moderators per-country. And without cultural context, moderators cannot accurately detect/remove hate speech especially when dealing with local slang, etc. And so Facebook has possibly inadvertently contributed to spreading violences in certain countries via its lack of moderation. I suppose this ties back to AI because it was a section on how we probably _can't_ use AI for moderation since it would be very difficult for AI to pick up on these cues.

It took me a long while to finish this book. I felt it start to drag on a bit and I lost my interest as it approached the present-day and covered LLMs like ChatGPT. I think this is a combination of how fast the industry is moving at the moment - if a book is published in 2024, it can very quickly start to go out of date. And I might be wrong, but possibly also more care was put into the first section of the book since the authors had quite a while to write it, before they suddenly rushed to finish it to capitalise on this recent AI boom.

Loosely based on a true story, about Black women and girls in 1970s America who were given birth control without being properly informed of the risks and side effects, and/or being sterilised without actually realising it.

The story follows Civil, a nurse who helps two of these girls, and ends up becoming almost like a member of their family - which is quite emotionally conflicting for both her and the family as she see-saws between her role as nurse and pseudo-mother figure.

Overall it’s quite an unsettling book.

A book about a summer romance with a movie star, which jumps between that summer and 30 years later when the woman, now a mother, narrates the story to her grown daughters. The romance is a bit more towards nostalgia and melancholy than romcom.

I don't know what it is about the book, like it's just straight fiction but it really gripped me? I think also the jumps between the two time periods lets the mother to reflect on her naivety at the time and also to see the story from her daughters' perspectives.

About a white writer stealing a story from Chinese American author and passing it off as her own, while making her penname be racially ambiguous hence the title “yellowface”.

The main character doesn't think of herself as a racist but is very obviously one (a lot of little microaggressions throughout the whole book like being surprised when an Asian character speaks good English). So you start off by obviously hating her, but the way it's done feels quite heavy handed. And as she gets sucked more into her lie towards the end you can't help but feel some sympathy for her but at the same time you don't want her to succeed so it feels pretty conflicting.

The ending also acts more as a set up for a second novel but I can't help but wish it was resolved a bit more satisfyingly.

The main character, Elena, who is now in her 60s, recounts a childhood spent growing up with her best friend Lina in Italy. The pair are both from poor(er) families, but do well in school. They end up leading diverging lives as their individual circumstances change. The story and characters are vividly written and I read the entire book in one sitting.

There's a 1 chapter setup for the book in present time, before a 50 year jump back in time for the rest of the book. The story ends on an abrupt cliffhanger. At first I thought this was some sort of literary technique to make you go and reread the first chapter to piece together what happens, but no this is actually just the setup for the next book (lol).

I mean I miiiight go read the second, and I am sort of curious about the HBO series although unfortunately I'm not sure where to view it in my country!

A story that follows a three different people and eras. First we have Lily, a girl born in America to Chinese immigrant parents. As someone who can’t even speak Mandarin, she struggles with feeling like an American yet not being perceived as one by the people around her.

The story then jumps forward to Lily’s son, Noah, who looks identical to his white Dad. He identifies as half-Chinese, but everyone only sees him as an American, and he struggles with this gap in his identity.

The third character is Lily’s mother, May, who takes us on a time-skip back to 1950s China. May’s struggles are more real and immediate as she lives through the harsh poverty caused by the Cultural Revolution.

There’s a secondary plot around genetic engineering, and developing the ability for certain genes to be more dominant when giving birth, as well as this weird magical ability the characters have to (occasionally) slow down time - although they don't really use it much at all. I think that magical side-plot should either have been expanded upon more, or cut out altogether, because I didn’t feel like it added much to the story.

As a fellow half-Asian I related the most to Noah’s story. We have Lily who so desperately wants to fit in and feel included as an American by her peers, and yet Noah, who has the comfort of already being accepted, instead wants to be recognized for his differences. Is your identify something that you decide for yourself, or is partially influenced or constructed by the people around you?

DNF at 50%

I gave this a good crack but it felt too dense with all the characters and plot, and hard to keep up with / actually enjoy reading.

Abandoned at 35%. Went through from Warren's childhood through to his life in the early 1970s. This is a huge 800+ page book and unfortunately I'm not that interested in finance or Warren Buffet to want to read all of it.

Buffett gave the author the go-ahead to be brutally honest and it shows. The early pages don't paint a very flattering picture of him. He comes across like a manchild (if I'm being honest). He's very picky with his food, to the point where when he stays out of town at a friend's mum's place (and this is when he's an adult by the way) she cooks him hamburgers for breakfast (!) His wife was doing an amazing job of basically propping him up and allowing him to do the one thing he was good at. This singular focus on money though meant he wasn't really paying enough attention to his wife and kids.

Although he's super money-oriented he's also very concerned about what other people think of him and possibly some loyalty comes into play too. So he's not a complete dick to other people in his pursuit of money. e.g. he wouldn't fire an entire factory worth of people just to make a couple extra bucks. He also did (maybe grudgingly) let his wife spend some of his money, so he wasn't a completely stingy guy either.

Of course since I only got a third of the way in (and there are 40 more years of his life covered in the book, I'm assuming he did grow as a person and a lot more good points happened further on. e.g. he did force his town's country club to start allowing Jewish members.

I made it through 230/480 pages before I had to give up. Too dense and not very fun to read! All I knew about Wells was that he had written War of the Worlds so it was interesting to learn he was pretty progressive for his time, super influential and wrote a big wide range of stuff.

DNF - the book talks about using your time wisely, and I don't think reading this book is worth it. Very shallow anecdotes and examples. Maybe worth reading if you have a problem saying “no” to things and really need a kick up the butt.

DNF this one. Too many cliches and the plot twist is fairly obvious.

Kinda boring so DNF at 50%.

DNF at 50% - can't put my finger on it but the writing style was just not good. Too confusing, maybe?

DNF @ 50%

Very quirky, hitchhikers guide-esque book about a guy taking over his uncle's company and trying to become a super villain. Not really vibing with it, too quirky for me.

Abandoned 30% in - I think I was about 10 years too late with this book. It was filled with a lot of ways employers could “nudge” their employees, but I was more interested in how I could nudge myself and so the book didn't really grip me.

Thought I'd try pick this up cos I vaguely remember Anne McCraffrey did a bunch of dragon fantasy books and this one's a scifi, but I DNF pretty early on - kinda like slave girl meets alien boy? But very cringe. Was written in the 90s and I feel like it shows.

DNF at 40%. The book goes for a very feminist, anti-men vibe (there are still good male characters though) and centres around some women who come into their powers at middle age. However it felt a bit too cringey for me to enjoy.

Abandoned at 50%. The author is a tad too arrogant for my liking and his constant referring to people as “he” tipped me over the edge. I tried to push through but the content wasn't really hooking me either.

E.g. in a scenario where you're asked to imagine buying a new car - “People will think, Hey, he has a great car”. No they wont!!

Or “the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you've reread him” - what about the women??

He also liked to diss people in certain professions “we humans have the largest cortex, followed by bank executives, dolphins, and our cousins the apes” which I get he's trying to be funny but it's really not.

Another notable “yikes” moment was when he said that attending social events is worth it for the networking and the ideas you'll get, but “if you are autistic, send one of your associates to these events” (I guess people with autism can't network?)

DNF at 30%. This book has won awards and the author sadly recently passed away so I thought I'd finally give it a crack. It's historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell (dude that was around the time of the infamous Henry the Eighth). Unfortunately with the writing style and the lack of background it was really hard to follow. Maybe if you are more familiar with the time period it will be easier..

DNF at 50%. Basically this girl is leading on / getting involved with 3 different men (well, as much as you can get “involved” when you are in the 19th century lol). It's kind of annoying since she doesn't come across as a very good person, and wasn't too fun to read either so I had to give up on it!

Giving this a one star since I gave up 150 pages in.

The author introduces a lot of characters' POVs very quickly and it felt a bit all over the place. The multiple sex scenes were just cringy to read too. The sci-fi concepts itself were cool but once the author started a sex scene with the woman “flipping back into a handstand” I was done.