Levi

I almost gave this book five stars because of how useful it is, but it just lacks a punchiness and conciseness that could have made it better.

But I'm really glad I read this business book from the 90s with the boring cover. It sounds like the most mundane book, and I kind of assumed that it would only have obvious things in it that I already knew.

So I'm really glad my boss at my last job recommended it to me. I had been sharing with him about how I struggle with constant decision anxiety over what to do next, long lists of things... I'm really ADHD and I make lists on lists on lists and always have way more things to do than I can possibly ever do. Maybe I can do a tenth of it in my lifetime. Maybe.

I also have piles of things all over my house—well, not any more! I HAD piles of things all over my house, because this book convinced me to put everything into one “inbox” and then process it all. And I'm glad I did. I haven't processed the whole inbox yet, but just putting everything in one place has already helped me quite a bit.

I didn't realize how much anxiety it was giving me to have all of these random items, piles of items, baskets of items, whatever, lying in all these different areas all over my house. I feel so much more serene already. But I won't be fully satisfied until I've actually processed the pile. Which I'm planning to do Monday, and honestly, I can't wait to get that freedom of knowing that EVERYTHING in my life that needs to be done is captured in one system.

This book has principles that are really simple, kind of basic and obvious in hindsight. Some of them I had already figured out, some I hadn't, but the real beauty of this book is that when you put all of these building blocks together, you get a system that is airtight, that lets your mind rest and stop having anxiety about everything you need to do and aren't doing. No more vague worrying about whether you have some deadlines coming up, or whether there's something you should have already done and what the consequences might be. No more worrying about forgetting things. No more of any of that.

Because when you implement this system fully, then you know that all of the things you need to do are all written down and are all tracked in your system and that when there are time-dependent tasks, you will get a reminder from yourself that will show up at the appropriate time.

You also have certain habits you do to review different lists regularly so you're always up-to-date on making sure that you are, at any current moment, doing the right thing. And that is so awesome because then you can just get in the flow of DOING, one simple thing at a time, without all the background anxieties related to productivity. You can just get in a zen, unworried state.

Honestly, I'm excited. I can just feel my blood pressure going down as I implement each part of this system and get closer and closer to that airtightness.

That said, yes, many little details in this book are clearly outdated. He wrote this in a time when the world was in a hybrid state between physical paper and digital. Obviously we now live in an age where we have way better digital calendars etc. So yes, lots of little details in here are outdated, and it would be great for this book to have an update, but putting all of that aside...

None of that really mattered to me too much, because he teaches you concepts in such a way that you can implement them in multiple ways. He helps you understand the principles and doesn't get hung up with “do it with this exact tool”...even though it is really precise and detailed, at the same time. I am doing a couple of things differently than he recommends but the point is that I am now implementing a system with that airtight system. My productivity is really going up.

Just a note, this book will not do anything for helping you decide what is actually important, or how to make a good strategy or have good vision...those are all for other books (and if you're interested, I'd recommend Start With Why and What's Your Problem?).

The way he describes it is, I'm not going to talk to you in this book about how to make sure you're sailing in the right direction. But I will help you run a really good, tight ship that you'll be proud of.

So thankful for this.

I loved this. This is the continuation of Three Body Problem, in which (spoilers) we get introduced to alien lifeforms who are hatching a conspiracy to stifle human progress in any research being done into fundamental particles and a few other things so that we can't have a huge scientific leap forward before they arrive to conquer earth in 500 years. The Dark Forest is the story of how humanity prepares to wage that war.

One interesting thing about preparing for something that will take twenty generations to accomplish is the problems of continuity. Thankfully, they have technology to freeze humans and re-awaken them at future times, and this is employed to send “reinforcements to the future” because they anticipate that as the preparations for the war goes on, defeatism will grow stronger and stronger and they will need their most loyal and positive-minded propagandists to be there in the future to assist.

This seems to be a clever way for the author to allow us to follow the same characters throughout the story, but it becomes much more than that...first of all, the future isn't what they expected. They awaken to a veritable utopia: fusion drives have been perfected, energy concerns have gone away, there are huge megacities that are basically paradises...things have been going great and everyone is positive that humanity will win the war. The reinforcements seem to be completely unneeded.

However, one of the reinforcements starts being the target of countless assassination attempts. Hm, seems like the enemy thinks he still IS very important...you see, Luo Ji is one of four Wallfacers. What are Wallfacers? Well, as you know from the first novel, there is a problem. The enemy has these invisible sophons that can spy on all of humanity's movements. Everything we do to prepare is under surveillance. What counter-intelligence can be employed in the face of such an extreme intelligence disadvantage?

Well, there is one place that the sophons can't peek: the inner recesses of the mind. So the UN comes up with a scheme by which to grant massive amounts of funds to four Wallfacers, individuals who will never be questioned, and can carry out massive schemes, and are expected to try to deceive everyone as to what their true plan is. They are to keep their true schemes hidden in only the recesses of their minds, and they are expected—nay, encouraged—to actively deceive everyone as to what they are actually doing.

This creates some very interesting psychological interactions and social problems they have in their lives, which is explored in a very savory way.

In particular though, our main character Luo Ji is different from the other three in a couple ways. First, he is a sociologist. Second, he has zero aspirations in life. He doesn't want to be a Wallfacer, and yet he is one. He only wants to live a happy life, not get entangled in grand affairs. He squanders his rights as a Wallfacer. It's a very interesting path that the novel goes down for a while, and it's interesting to see how it gets resolved. I could see some people being frustrated at the novel taking its time for a while with Luo Ji doing a lot of “nothing,” things that aren't advancing the main plot, but for some reason I really enjoyed it. It was like an experiment in: if you had all the money and power in the world and wanted to just pursue happiness, what would you do? What would happen? Would it really work?

After that brief interlude, there is a character who interrupts Luo Ji's stasis and forces him to change. It's very sneakily done; I enjoyed it. Finally he gets on board. He starts much latter than the other three Wallfacers, and asks for much less funds. Many of his actions are mysterious even to the reader (they were to me at least). It's neat to see how they later start to make more sense. The other three Wallfacers, by the way, each have their own subplots that get explored, and they too have sneaky things they do. Some of them. But for all of them, their plans come to naught.

I won't give away how the novel ends, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed every single part of this from beginning through middle and through to the end, and I can't wait to read the next one. Liu Cixin has such a way of blending massive amounts of well-thought-out futuristic ideas from physics, sociology, and so many fields into one comprehensive whole, that it's just staggering. And he manages to also make a really compelling novel with plenty of mystery and memorable characters...I can't put this stuff down.

I've read several books over the years about sexuality, mostly about unhealthy sexuality and how to heal from it. There tends to be two types of such books: those with a Christian bent, also called purity culture books, and those with a therapeutic bent, more based on research and therapy concepts.

In my experience, books in the former camp tend to be misleading and have advice that is a mixture of helpful and patently unhelpful.

Books in the second camp tend to have deep insight but be dense and difficult to read and digest and not necessarily easy to convert to practical takeaways. They tend to be clearly not written from a religious perspective which can be helpful but they also can get really weird in places.

This book, I am happy to say, is an interesting combination of those two camps. It's based on an original research study done on over 3,000 people with unwanted sexual behaviors.

It was conducted by a Christian pastor in Portland who specializes in this kind of work, but he is openly critical of typical purity culture advice for dealing with unwanted sexual behaviors, which he (correctly, in my opinion) asserts does little to address underlying root problems.

This books whole aim is to help you look at the nature of your unwanted sexual behaviors and be able to trace them to your past trauma and your current needs, have compassion for yourself, and then actually do something to search out healing for your underlying problems. This I found to be refreshing.

There's a lot of research data in here showing correlations between different unwanted sexual behaviors and correlated specific types of trauma/neglect when the person was a child. This was useful to me to help make sense of some specific sexual behaviors.

There's a section on getting needs met. He builds on attachment theory. Inevitably, he says, people with unwanted sexual behaviors are doing so because they have needs they suppress and don't get met because of various unhealthy beliefs about themselves. After the need not getting met for some time, it comes out sideways through compulsive sexual behavior.

It also has some interesting challenges calling us to grater sensuality, not less, by learning to appreciate life through all the senses instead of letting it pass us by.

Overall the messages in this book I found to be much more healing, insightful, and helpful than other books on this topic. I feel pretty comfortable endorsing it. I'm super glad he wrote it and I wish more organizations would to the kind of research that he did to help people draw connections between traumas and sexual behaviors—sex is a slippery beast and the causal links are often not intuitive, but the data doesn't lie.

And, this book is also quite in line with what I have come to believe is more what I need in my life: less shaming myself (which is actually part of the problem, as he shows with data that growing up in a strict household is the number 1 thing that leads to developing unwanted sexual behaviors) and more compassion and understanding of myself. This has helped me out tremendously.

What if you were an expert in some field and then got the chance to time travel back in the past to study your favorite subject in ancient times? Say if you were a river biologist dedicated to restoring the rivers of earth in a post apocalyptic setting? And then you got the chance to travel back to ancient Mesopotamia and get river samples while fighting off the local Sumerians?

I love how original this premise feels. It's truly post-post-apocalyptic, where humanity is emerging from “the hells” and rebuilding the ecology of Earth, one dome at a time. There's a lot about how to restore river habitats. And how to restore the earth in general.

We talk about terraforming Mars or the Moon a lot, but I think the most likely terraforming project in the future will be to restore Earth after humanity has fully ravaged it. This is the first book I've read to really explore what that future might look like. It's far future and they have super advanced (but conceivable) tech and they are doing huge projects of epic scales. It's really cool.

But then there's a monkey-wrench thrown in: one of the big corporations has invented time travel, and that screws with everything because all the banks' funding dries up for ecological work.

The protagonist is a project manager. Never has project management and looking at data been so cool as in this book. As she bicycles over stunning vistas (with her six tentacled legs btw, lots of bio modding in this book), she has streams of data overlaid on mountain ranges for her inspection.

I love seeing the cultural differences between characters from different generations. It provides a different angle on relational dynamics.

I love the scenes where they are sampling a super diverse amount of things from the ancient Mesopotamian river biome while the locals try to kill them for being the foreign scary gods that they appear to be.

Speaking of which, I love that this book has a great job of always balancing things so it constantly feels like you're learning things about the world of the book and science, but there's also always something going on plot wise that keeps things moving. Really great job at that. Whether it's fleeing for their lives, working through relational dynamics, or getting into personal crises because of Minh messing with her endocrine system too much (which is a very interesting commentary on something I think it makes a lot of sense will be problematic in the future), there's always something going on.

There's also some ethics of colonialism stuff in here but again not just people sitting around pontificating; the conversations are a result of actions happening in the plot. This book is one of those awesome gems that makes it fun to learn and think and grow.

And it's short, too. 200 pages. Really a marvel how much is fit into that space and it doesn't even feel cramped or anything.

Although, I should mention one important miss. The ending. It literally feels like the last few pages are missing. We're left in the lurch with a bunch of loose ends and unanswered questions. I wonder even if this book was meant to be longer and was one story split into two. But no sequel has been forthcoming. So I have to warn you about that. I'm more forgiving than most about structural issues like this, but I think a lot of people will be pissed about the lack of a very satisfying ending.

Just for fun, if you've read the book and want a more satisfying end. The ending that I choose to believe happens after the end of the book is...

Minh finds ways to use camera drones or others to take down Fabian. Or if she's locked out, maybe he forgot to lock out Kiki or Hamit. They capsize the floating gurneys, killing Fabian and Susa in the process. Then, the king is really happy that they removed his nemesis Susa from the picture. He helps them build ships and go on the journey of a lifetime across the whole globe to get back to the island in the Pacific, where they escape back to the present.

They show the world what a monster Fabian and TERD (lol) are, the whole thing gets exposed in government investigations that reveal that time travel doesn't work the way TERN says it does, the gov steps in and discovers ethical violations galore that amount to crimes against humanity. Time travel as a byproduct becomes open source technology and regulated by a government agency, which has its own problems, but at least it's better than letting TERD do whatever the hell it wants.

Oh yeah and Minh informally adopts Kiki as the daughter she never had. The end.

Thesis: if sugar is killing you and you've tried a bunch of ways to stop but you can't, it's because you have an addiction; let's treat it that way.

The writer speaks from lots of personal experience with himself as well as working with others. He addresses sugar addiction as being mostly a psychological problem, only partially a knowledge problem.

He gets into the food plan of exactly what to eat and not eat in one chapter, but it's mostly about things like getting you through the detox, getting support, how the sugar problems really point to deeper issues you need to address, etc.

I like how easy this is to read in bite-sized parts, short and sweet you know...really really sweet.

All in all, I do recommend it. It's a short read at 100 pages and you can get a free copy by signing up at the SugarAddiction website for their newsletter. Pretty dang good book considering it was free and it has helped me out tangibly on my process of getting free from sugar.

sell your cleverness and
buy bewilderment
cleverness is skepticism
bewilderment is vision

As soon as I read this first poem in this book, I immediately memorized it and mulled over it the next couple of days. I was hooked. There are many others that have had similar profound impact on me, and with so few words.

As I read these I got the idea that this was the perfect book to read intermittently, just one or so per day. That gave me the idea to do an experiment and post short poems as reading status updates here on GR and see what happened. There wasn't any spectacular response, but I like the thought that maybe, just maybe, somebody was able to pause their frenetic day and have a peaceful moment of engaging in the divine because of one of those updates.

This particular book is one of a series of similar books which you can find at Barnes and Noble, each one small, hardback, beautifully decorated inside and out with a particular art style that I would describe as a minimalistic version of stained glass windows or mosaics. The series includes Love Poems of Rumi, Friendship Poems of Rumi, and this one: Spiritual Poems of Rumi.

I went into this book knowing virtually nothing about Rumi or his poetry. Rumi was an Islamic mystic who was part of a particular group known as the whirling dervishes: men who, in a trance, would spin for long periods of time as a sort of mindfulness or meditation. Rumi was known for delivering his poetry to his disciples while whirling, and as you read a poem you can picture how each short line is just long enough for him to utter between breaths while facing the students before quickly rotating away.

don't look at yourself
how ugly or beautiful you are
look at your love (inside) instead
look at the one you love

Most of his poems are like the ones above: profound and tightly packed, no punctuation, no capitalization, always has a twist, often has a question, although it's not always explicit. For me this kind of poetry is great. If a poem is ambiguously written for me to read my own meaning into it, then I like it to be really short, something I can go over and over and really think about the whole thing as one body. These are perfect.

like an ant
in a wheat harvest
we are happy
when carrying a burden
greater than ourselves

He has a way of saying something that seems on face value to be ridiculous, but if you take the time to think about it and ask yourself “in what sense could it be that this is true?” you find great meaning in it. I may or may not arrive at the same exact interpretation that Rumi had in mind, but this kind of reflection is incredibly valuable because it causes me to contemplate the true nature of the spiritual world, the essence of life, and the search for meaning. The fact that these poems caused me to do that multiple times means this is a great work of art. I consider these great jumping off points for meditation.

Did I have the same experience with all of these poems? No. Some of them fell flat for me. Most notably, poems about “love” but which I read as being more about infatuation, losing yourself in another. He seems to deify his lover. This I can't get into.

I was also confused by poems about drunkenness. I found out from my friend Werner that referring to drunkenness is a motif in Muslim literature that is not meant to be taken literally; it refers to the intoxication of spiritual experiences. I'll have to re-read those poems to see if they resonate more now that I know that.

Despite the poems that were misses for me, it was easy enough to just go on to the next poem until I found one that did resonate. And so I would just skim until I found the next deep poem and then camp out and have my next revelatory experience.

If there was ever a book that put me in the mindset of “it's not about the destination but the journey,” then it's this one. Less concerned with “getting it right,” whatever that's supposed to mean, and instead with getting to the business of really living as a true human being.

I will leave you with two more poems:

if you abandon for a little while
your ego and greed
tear down your shield
rise with a quest
to unite with the divine
what do you think will happen

get up and do some good
for someone now
the universe will surely
safekeep your act
everyone has left his
belongings and is gone
you too
except
for what good
you have done

Sasha is on vacation. She just finished her junior year of high school and is on holiday at a beach city with her mom. But her blissful experience is marred when she realizes that an older man in sunglasses is stalking her, day after day. She thinks, naturally, that he must be a stalker. But she is unable to prove his wrongdoing. Finally after much frustration with the problem, she asks him what he wants. He tells her that she needs to get up at 4am and swim out to touch this buoy and swim back every morning. She does so, and when she completes the ritual, she coughs up a mysterious gold coin with a symbol on it that seems, inexplicably, to exist in three dimensions.

And so the story begins which changes her life, pulling her into a magical world which will irrevocably end up changing her, both mentally and physically, by the end of the story.

This gripped me because it was so original and distinct. You have these students in Ukraine being forced to go to this mysterious university on threat of death to their loved ones. They are inducted into bizarre lessons, being forced to read books full of gibberish and memorize passages of the stuff which seems to shift in front of their eyes.

And then as Sasha grows in comprehension you have increasingly frequent passages where she talks about the experience but it is largely incomprehensible. You do slowly start to understand more and more about these weird dimensions they gain access to, but you still fall way short of being able to truly understand all they are talking about, but that is a large part of the point: how do you describe five dimensional concepts to three dimensional beings?

Sasha is an exceptional student of this magic. She continually exceeds the bounds that her teachers try to impose on her, sometimes accidentally. But ultimately she becomes more overtly rebellious by the end of the story; this is about an anomalous person breaking a system of control, or at least majorly challenging it.

But the journey is harrowing. There's shocking bodily transformations as this continues into even stranger territory, and yet it stays grounded in many realistic details as well. Magical realism or urban fantasy? Neither. It's its own thing, a true original.

There are very dark undertones to everything. Her teachers claim they are trying to “help” the students. If you perform well enough then none of your loved ones need die. It's disturbing.

The Eastern European setting fits that theme pretty well. But I'm also happy to report that there is a happy (with caveats) ending to the book, with an uplifting message at the end. That makes a great deal of difference to me and increases the odds that I'll re read it in the future.

The book pulls you along with a series of mysteries and does a great job of answering a lot of your questions. The university life plays large but everything feels just a little different, which could either be due to the setting being Ukraine or could be due to the strange magical nature of what the university is doing to their minds.

Ultimately the “why” matters less to me than just the fact that it has a distinct feeling that adds to its originality.

The type of magic (or science; it's ambiguous in this case) is also very intriguing and original. It's really hard to explain if you haven't read it but, suffice it to say that reading this book is quite the unique experience. You can only understand by reading it. Writing a review for this is hard!

There's a diverse cast of characters, rather unique personalities. Sasha's relationships with others factors largely.

The book often has the feeling of a story about a young person being sucked into a cult of sorts. Only the cult is a weird magical school. Sasha's advisor and teachers break her (and everyone else) down, demanding the impossible, constantly pushing them to breaking and then continuing to push. The body count wasn't as high (by the time I got to the end) as I thought it was going to be, but it is a quite dark time.

When Sasha finally starts to pull through and get a handle on things it's very satisfying in some ways to see her succeed, but it's also a mixed feelings thing because she is losing her humanity...not necessarily in ways that are completely bad...but it's scary. And it is what the situation demands of her to survive and protect her family.

She's an admirable heroine. And yet she does become a little bit of a worse human being before she gets better at the end when she ultimately rejects some of the moral beliefs of the institution and makes a change to the world in a big way...trying to be vague on purpose but there's a very meaningful moment at the end of the book.

All in all a rather rewarding read, and no less interesting for finding out that the authors are a married couple who grew up in Ukraine and Russia and then moved to the US.

I would really like to see a sequel. During this book, they allude to there being this institute that they are preparing the students for. What is that institute like? How do people use this magic in the outside world? And how does Sasha's big change to the world play out?

More please.

Susanna Clarke is one of my favorite authors of all time. She has written two books. Both are undeniable masterpieces, and I do not use that word lightly: stunningly original, full of beautiful language and concepts, striking characters, striking concepts, and just extremely well-crafted, the kind of books you don't ever want to put down until they are done. Her more recent work is a short novel, Piranesi. 16 years before, she wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a much longer work.

The setting is Enlightenment England (think Jane Austen), but an alternate-history version of England, wherein magic played a major part in its history. That history is rich and layered with different epochs and periods of decreasing virility up until the present day of when our story unfolds, in a day in which magic has now been dead for hundreds of years.

Our story begins with observing a couple of gentlemen, Honeyfoot and Segundus, join a society of Yorkshire magicians, only to discover that all these supposed “magicians” do is talk about and read about magic—not one of them has every done a lick of it, not even once! When the naive Honeyfoot asks why the emperor has no clothes, he inadvertently triggers a landslide of vitriol and outrage, all masked under all sorts of pretenses that we all know are just plain rubbish concealing the fact that these men are not magicians at all.

This scene is executed very comedically and sets the tone for the novel. For indeed, a lot of what makes this novel so good is the portrayals of Victorian nobility and their silliness, just as if you were reading Dostoevsky or Jane Austen. It can be quite funny.

Only, you also have all this magic. One could simply describe this book as “magical Jane Austen” and not be far off from the truth.

The book primarily follows the rise of Mr. Norrell for a while, and then later Jonathan Strange, who become the two great magicians of a new age of magic. Norrell first comes on the scene, showing up all the York magicians by showing up and doing the first bit of real, documented magic that has been seen in England for a long time. (He set a bet with them that required that, upon him doing the magic, they would all have to recuse themselves as magicians).

Norrell sets out with the goal of re-establishing English magic and making it respectable again, but because he's such a pedantic, bookish stickler of a little man, he struggles to gain traction. He really isn't your typical hero at all; indeed he's very unheroic, cowardly, and sometimes spiteful, although utterly remorseful and conciliatory the next moment, like a child. He is more to be pitied and chuckled at than anything.

And yet, for the first part of the book, he is a compelling main character to follow because you see him triumph over such crippling inner problems. You really root for him and rejoice with him as he makes progress. But it's later in the book that the negative side of his character becomes more at play, and in contrast we become more drawn to Jonathan Strange, who becomes the protagonist for the rest of the book.

One of the most frustrating thing about Norrell is how he sets out to control magic. First, he buys up all actual books of magic and prevents anyone else in the whole country from getting their hands on them. He locks them all up in his library that he never lets anyone into. Second, he sets out constantly to discredit anyone else who claims to be a magician and make it abundantly clear that he is England's only magician. Despite being able to accomplish this though, he is so insecure and anxious that he can never stop being paranoid of others, and these worries and doubts are preyed upon by others, most notable the two sycophants Drawlight and Lousells that attach themselves to him to “help” him manage his affairs with regards to all interactions with the rest of high society—which admittedly, he does need a great deal of help with, being (at the outset of our story) completely unknown to society, and on top of that, being very socially inept.

In contrast to Norrell, Strange does not start off as such an extremely bookish person. He's a jack of all trades, master at none, wandering aimlessly in life as only the rich can afford to do. But by the end of the book he becomes such a strong character; these could really be called a coming-of-age story for Strange in a sense, only the whole book happens while he is an adult. At the onset he's technically an adult; mentally more of a child.

But by the end he's all grown up, has gone on many adventures, starting with the discovery of magic, being pupiled by Norrell, going away to fight the war in Portugal and use magic to defeat Napoleon, come home to Norrell again, and then finally gets himself out from under the thumb of Norrell, who becomes more and more controlling. After some time, Strange actually starts a whole new magical school of thought in contrast to Norrell; they each have their followings in newspapers and such; Strange publishes a book; Norrell magically makes all of its copies disappear; it's great stuff. Strange also develops a lot of depth when he loses his wife. And as he goes deeper into magical dimensions that Norrell had forbidden him to, he finds out some amazing things and these also transform him in strange ways.

The plot is multi-layered. A big part of Strange's arc has to do with losing his wife to magical bewitchment; he thinks for a long time that she has died when in reality a wicked fairy has spirited her away as revenge against Strange.

This wicked fairy, known only as The Man With the Thistledown Hair, factors very large in the overall plot of the whole book; he is an ancient, deeply narcissistic person (sometimes comedically so) bent on self-aggrandizement, paranoia and revenge. He factors into helping Norrell do one of his earliest most important pieces of magic (important in the sense of establishing his career in the public view) that involved saving a lady's life...little does anyone understand though that in order to save her life, Norrell made a deal with the devil—I mean the man with the Thistledown hair—that means he now has a hold over her soul. This hold looks like an enchantment whereby every night she is transported to some far away place and dances al night till she is a walking zombie, always exhausted.

This enchantment factors large in the main plot, which is hard to talk about without spoiling things, but let us just say that the wicked fairy has designs for killing the king of England and putting in his place one Stephen Black.

Stephen Black is one of my favorite characters in this whole thing. He is a black slave, very well known for his value as a servant. He's one of those highly intelligent and considerate souls, a really good-hearted person, but one who is nevertheless under the yoke of slavery. He bears it with the meekest compliance: what else is he to do?

But the irony is that the Thistledown man takes a real liking to Stephen. So you have perhaps the most spiteful character I have ever read about constantly talking about killing everyone or doing awful torturous things, all for Stephen's “benefit” (or his own), and poor Stephen, the kind of person who would never hurt a fly, is mortified, and constantly trying to figure out how to avert crisis and talk the wicked fairy out of killing people all the time, which is no mean task. It's really a very entertaining dynamic they have.

Arabella, Jonathan Strange's wife, is an important character as well, although she is a nuanced character who it is hard to succinctly describe. And, also, there is a host of many other characters who I won't take the time to enumerate but suffice it to say: this book is full of very strikingly painted characters of all kinds, from rogues to villains to the petty to the noble, people of absolutely every kind, and the book is just so damn funny when describing them. Susanna Clarke is just a master of characterization.

Books feature very heavily. And references to different magicians and their spells. And “English sensibility.” And magic, esp. teleportation through mirrors, scrying through water, and many other things. There is a whole world of magic that Susanna has invented, a Tolkien-esque feat of worldbuilding. The whole history that you get gradually exposed to feels so real and alive and nuanced and detailed. I love it.

A particular historical figure factors very large into the plot as well, and that is the Raven King. Long ago, England has a king who was the most powerful magician of all history. He ruled several kingdoms in Fairy as well as England, and did such a tremendous amount of things it can scarcely be believed. As time goes on, you learn gradually more of his biography, and there is a payoff toward the end of the book.

It's hard to convey just how many really awesome moments there are in this book, how many moments that feel just right, how many amazing novelties that intrigue, or beautiful concepts that all alone are worth the price of admission. There is a great concept in this book that in order to really do magic, one must have a touch of madness to them. I feel like there are analogies of this to many things in life, and it's just a beautiful poetic detail of worldbuilding, again.

There's also some of the most poetic, fitting endings for several of the characters. I love the ending of this book. Very satisfying.

I feel as if I have told you many things “about” the book but still conveyed nothing of how amazing it is to read it. Words really fall short. I will say that although the book is long, my attention never wavered, it really is always very intriguing and fun, a real relief to read something this well-written in comparison to most stuff out there. It's just head and shoulders above the rest, and I can't wait to re-read it again and again throughout the years.

Wow. This book was nothing like I imagined it.

The ancient Greeks had two dominant schools of thought: the stoics and epicureans. Similar to how we have two main political parties in the USA and then constellations of other parties that, as independent as some of them try to be, are mostly seen in light of the two largest parties, that is my impression of what the clout of various Greek schools of thought had: stoicism and Epicureanism were the two main schools, and all the others—skepticism, hedonism, cynicism, etc.—were cast in light of those two.

How do stoicism and Epicureanism differ? They both ostensibly believed in the gods, they both believed in moderation (a quintessentially Greek ideal), and both were concerned with the question of how to live the best (most virtuous) life. But while the stoics believed in denying one's emotions to do that, the epicureans believed in making decisions based on what would provide the most pleasure.

But that doesn't mean what you think it means. First of all, contrary to what you might think, Epicurus didn't advocate for enjoying the finest foods or the most sex or any of that; those were the Hedonists, and he was quite opposed. He actually advocated that if you only ate bread and water for your food, that was the best way to be happy, because then you would always be able to find what you were looking for and be satisfied.

Also, Epicurus defined pleasure in the negative: an absence of pain. Every source of positive pleasure must be weighed against how much pain it will produce later; every decision must be looked at from the long view of how it affects the individual. So getting drunk is seen as having the benefit of increasing pleasure at the time of drinking, but Epicurus would say that that decision would be morally wrong because the physical and/or emotional pain from the fallout would be greater than the pleasure of the drinking. I'm sure some people would disagree with him on that point, and to them he would probably say great: in that case, for you, it is morally imperative that you DO drink.

Yes, that's a weird thing to wrap your head around: Epicurus based his system of ethics, of right and wrong, on what produces the most pleasure-minus-pain, over the long run, for the individual making the decision. This leads to the main “flaw” in his theory that led to it not being more widely adopted by politicians etc, because his philosophy was seen as rather solipsistic. That being said, he was a precursor to the idea of the social contract (the idea of how selfishly motivated people could form a mutually beneficial society based on recognizing that if we all abide by certain rules then it will benefit all of us—I'm butchering it but you get the point) that was later expounded by Thomas Hobbs over a thousand years later.

In fact, Epicurus is striking for how groundbreaking he was. He claimed to be building from scratch, relying on no one that came before him, much like David Hume, who fittingly also ties to Epicurus through the philosophy of empiricism.

Epicurus was a truly original thinker. He was very important in the philosophical field of epistemology (the philosophy of how we know things; vital for the history of science) and can be seen as a forerunner of materialism, humanistic ethics, and empiricism.

When was empiricism invented? There were great empiricist philosophers (starting with David Hume) in the enlightenment period, but in reality, the idea of determining what is true not based on intuitive ideas and reasoning, but rather on keen observation, was not new to them. They were building on Aristotle. And Aristotle, as it turns out, was merely iterating on Epicurus.

Another notable section of this book is fascinating because Epicurus developed most of the Greek thought on atoms (fundamental, indestructible particles), not Democritus, who did little more than come up with the basic idea. Epicurus developed a lot of good thoughts on it, and I wonder how he was able to be so accurate before they had electron microscopes/etc.

But I get ahead of myself. What exactly is this book?

Epicurus wrote over 300 treatises. Unfortunately almost all of them are lost to us, even his most major treatise (On Nature) and The Major Epitome (a condensed summary he wrote of On Nature). What we do have is parts of The Minor Epitome, a couple of letters that outline how his philosophy applies to specific concepts, a collection of quotes, and other peoples writings about him (most notably Laertius). This book is a collection of the best of those sources and had a lengthy introduction and lots of very enlightening end notes to help fill in gaps and understand his philosophy as a whole hand I'm eternally grateful for the scholars who put it together.

Although one thing I wish they would have done differently is reversed the order of the writings. They have laid this book out so that you have pages and pages of Epicurus going on about solar eclipses and atoms before you get to the more interesting and broader ethics.

Which brings me to the funniest thing about Epicurus! His goal was to provide people with mental peace of mind. That was what he considered the good life. Again when he talks about living a life in pursuit of pleasure, remember that he mostly considered the highest state of “pleasure” to be the absence of all pain. So far so good right? But it gets funny when you look at what he found necessary to do that.

So what are the types of pain we want to be free of, Epicurus? Well, we want to be free of physical pain. So he espoused eating a plain diet of bread and water, instead of pursuing richer fare and then experiencing pain whenever it could not be found. Ok, very interesting. What other types of pain? Well there's the consequences of doing something illegal or hurtful to someone else: going to jail, being fined, having people slander you, etc. Ok.

And finally, there's another type of pain which he found it very important to eliminate: the pain of not believing that the natural world is strictly materialistic and deterministic. Huh? He believed that peoples superstitions about the gods causing weather events or misfortunes etc caused great distress. And so he goes into great detail about trying to prove that lightning is likely not caused by Zeus throwing bolts around, but by natural phenomena. Which is interesting. But what's really interesting is how essential he considered these beliefs to be to having peace of mind. He goes on and on at great length about all kinds of natural science topics (atoms and meteorology esp.) but not because it's interesting...because that would violate one if his beliefs, that one should not indulge in curiosity...so instead he argues that it's “necessary” to prove these things so that we don't lie awake all night worrying about why the recent solar eclipse happened. Lol, my dude.

Regardless of how many people were lying awake worrying about eclipses (which, admittedly, people in ancient times did attach great portent to), he was a bit of a forerunner in the realm of natural sciences. He came up with multiple plausible explanations for different weather phenomena, some of which were stunningly close to the mark—he didn't have the scientific instruments we have today but he was a very keen observer and clear thinker. Where direct evidence was lacking he would look for examples and precedents to back every theory of the natural world because one of his missions was to overturn the idea that the gods caused weather events.

So in summary: this book is nothing like what you think. There is a section of getting into the ethics and advice on how to actually live a happy life. Most of it's about atoms swerving and natural sciences, to “put our minds at ease.” He was as close to atheist as you could stand to be in a time where everyone was supposed to be reverent of the gods. He was supposedly very pious with all the festivals/etc., but in his philosophy he relegates the gods to being basically laws of nature, deterministic, nothing like what we think of as a “god.”

I'm sad that so much of Epicurus's original writings were lost. This detracts from the enjoyment of the work, although obviously that is no fault of the translator. I found the translation to be highly readable. I'm glad I read this, but it's just an incomplete experience. I wish I could have read his main treatises.

Very meaningful book and well-written in many ways. The voice is delightful. And it's interesting how this curse of having no gravity and never taking anything seriously has the side effect of never allowing the light princess to truly laugh either...lots of insights here.

However, it's just too hard to have a book this long where the protagonist is completely unlikeable in every way up until 90% of the way through. I think this could have worked really well as a short(er) story. Also, a nitpick but MacDonald has a way of being overly repetitious and drawn out at times. But he doesn't do it too much.

Intensity has always been something I enjoy. I pursue it. I love it.

So it's been very strange to find myself actually having a hard time with a book because...it's too intense. Major spoilers ahead, by the way—there's no way to avoid them.

This book disturbed me in a way that none of Robin Hobb's books have so far (although they have gotten progressively darker starting with Fool's Fate). There is torture described in more detail than ever before and this time being done by the supposed hero of the story! That scene was sadistic. And there are several other messed up moments revolving around torture and macabre violence.

And more to the point: half of the book is overshadowed with the threat of rape to these two girls. One of them is raped and there's also a scene where a whole bunch of people get raped and then there's dealing with the fallout of that trauma. Point is: there's a whole lot of rape and threat of rape.

On top of that, this book is also really intense because the second half of it is basically a play by play of a parent trying desperately to conduct a manhunt for their abducted child. That hit me hard. That content I have no objection to, it was just...emotionally hard for me personally. A year and a half ago I was conducting a manhunt for my father. It was a terrible, sinking feeling that culminated in discovering that he was, in fact, dead. I don't have to explain much more than that.

Another thing about this book is that the first half is agonizingly slow, and slow during a period of time where you know that the hero's daughter has been kidnapped but he doesn't. And so he's just going about normal life and there's just a whole lot of freakin NOTHING going on for way too long when you know all along what has happened and that he needs to spring into action. It's too prolonged.

There were absolutely great things about this boo, too. Of course we have familiar characters that we have come to love being developed upon. In particular, Lant, a young man, becomes much more interesting and likable by the end. I love how he is progressing. I like getting to know Lant and his perspective, so that his past actions make more sense and we're able to relate to him more; without that understanding he just seemed like a selfish prick before. But now he's a character I'm rooting for. It's also good to see him being the young character cutting his teeth on his first adventure in contrast to Fitz who is probably (it feels like, at least) on his last one.

And there are some truly delightful moments, several of them. There are moments with Kettricken, the Fool, Riddle, Nettle. There is an upset to the old order of things, including one really major thing that I won't spoil.

But I guess the main reason this isn't a five star read for me is that the first half is too slow for the second book in a series, and it's just too dark. I did not start off thinking of Robin Hobb as grimdark at all, but for some reason that seems to be exactly where she's going and for me that just isn't what I want to read in fantasy. I read fantasy to feel cozy, not horrified. And I value my headspace. I read all kinds of books that have all kinds of dark moments and people have to take time to heal from trauma which is something I'm very interested in (the healing part).

But I really especially didn't like dwelling in this space of prolonged trauma, such as having the threat of rape hanging over you for half of a book. That just is terrible for me. I don't know. I can appreciate the fact that there are people out there who have experienced exactly that. And that's absolutely awful and their stories should be told. But telling their stories doesn't mean we need to live in that prolonged state again and reproduce the trauma. That I don't think is necessary or helpful.

So this is a weird place to be in. After being a Robin Hobb fanboy for all these years and reading through 11 of her books so far, I'm actually wondering if I'm going to continue and read that last one or not. If someone here has read it, let me know if you think it will bother me as much as Fool's Quest did.

Will you like this book? If you like the characters from the previous books and the way that Robin Hobb does character development and you don't mind the fact that this is one of her slowest books yet, if you want to see what happens next with Fitz and you crave intensity, then this is probably for you. That is my best recommendation.

What did I like about this?

The main thing that really helped was a couple of the characters felt interesting and distinct if not necessarily super deep. I enjoyed getting to experience the lieutenant whose uniform is in rags and has over the last two years of living alone descended into various neuroticisms. I enjoyed getting to know two characters who are Ministers. The rest of the cast is forgettable. The MC is distinct and decent enough. Cheeky but not really funny.

There are many aspects of the work building that are really interesting and well thought out. The Ministers have different bodies that have adapted to space living and subsequent differences in their culture and mannerisms. They have a unique language type that uses a system of shining light with different patterns and colors.

I love all the weird mutated species in this book and how horrifying some of them are.

And yet despite those cool things, this was not a fun read. I finished it because I wanted to see the author expound on the different world building ideas but actually reading this was unfortunately painful. And the sad thing is, I feel 90% of the problems were totally preventable. I don't lay the blame at the author's feet, I lay it at the publisher's. This is the authors debut novel and I know how hard it is to produce something like this. First drafts are always rough. This just didn't get any beta readers or editing!

Before I rant, here is the premise. The main character is a linguist nerd (which is a field I've taken several classes in) and ostensibly the book is going to explore the theme and implications of immortality. The premise is that a group of criminals are given a job to extract the data with the secret of immortality from a spaceship that's been abandoned for thousands of years and is next to a dying star about to go supernova.

This data is called the Philosopher's Stone (the key to immortality) and it's a big deal to find it, imagine what this discovery could mean for humanity...but from early on there are these people called Ministers who are stated to be immortal. So that begs the question, who are these Ministers? Are they not human? Are they aliens or robots? It's not explained what they are but they are certainly quite humanoid. The story progresses along with several of the main characters being Ministers and playing large in the plot, but the narrator refuses to explain what they are to us. And that's a big problem because their existence undermines the whole premise. Apparently these ministers already have the key to immortality so then why is it a big deal for humanity to find the philosophers stone? Why would the ministers have that secret but the humans who are very similar don't? Then, a third of the way through the book we have a “big revelation” that it turns out that the Philosopher's Stone project on this ship was what birthed the ministers...you can tell that this is supposed to be a “big reveal” but it just doesn't work.

Another big thing sloppily done is that the style seems like it's supposed to be scary but never is. The horror isn't horrifying even though there are pretty gnarly creatures revealed. I never once got a rising sense of dread even though bad things were coming in the dark. I don't think the author has figured out yet how to write horror, how to build tension.

And then there are all sorts of other things done sloppily. The bad guys are pushovers, the setup is too tropey, obvious questions aren't answered, there are flashbacks that feel completely random and unnecessary, not at all connected to the plot...when you're in an active combat scene, the good guys have way too much time to talk and do all kinds of complicated things.

I didn't buy two of the twists and there were two big coincidences late in the book. Spoilers ahead but, one of the main characters reveals once we are most of the way through the book that he just so happened to be the general in charge of assaulting the MC's home planet. Really, the one person in the whole universe just happened to end up here?

There's a scene where someone shoots a hole in the hull of the spaceship and a character is “sucked out to space” and half of their body burned by a star's radiation...but then suddenly they are back in the spaceship and it's said that there was only ever a small hole shot in the hull that a different character patched quickly. So what gives? Half of your body was fried by radiation from a tiny hole? Also the other character was unscathed?

Also a big part of the premise is that a star is about to go nova so they are racing against the clock to get the data out in time. So many books get really unscientific with this topic. Stars going nova is a process that takes millions of years to lead up to. You're not going to be able to time when it happens down to the year let alone the minute and second like they do in this book! And then the idea that you can see it go nova but then you have time to outrun the shockwave...I highly doubt that that's at all accurate.

Ok. I could go on and on about the problems. I actually originally compiled a huge list. But I don't want to beat a horse to death. Here's the thing. I'm a writer, and I've hosted a writers group and worked with many writers for 6-7 years now. This book would have been an amazing first draft. Or even third draft especially considering this is a debut novel! And writing a book like this is like really really complicated. There are a lot of things the author is doing well! It's just that you have to put your book through the rounds of beta readers and multiple layers of editing starting with developmental edits and going from there. And it appears that this book just skipped all that. I think the author didn't get the support they needed. Anyways. I don't post reviews to revel in bashing things. I really don't. I don't think there's anything funny about mocking or taking a book down to size the way many reviews do. It's not been my intention to be mean in any way with this review and I hope that my intent shows. I think the author has a lot of great ideas and I would be open to reading the next book of theirs—provided it's been edited, which is usually pretty apparent in the first thirty minutes—because I would enjoy getting to know their universe more. That's all for now.

I didn't know until I was almost done with this book that it's part of a duology! Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are two parts that Dan Simmons wrote to be experienced as one story and had to split into two for publishing-industry reasons. Which is fine. But if you don't know that going into it, then the ending of this book is going to feel like there are tons of open ends...because there are. Now, setting that aside...

I adored this book. It's so beautiful and satisfying. You probably already know that! I feel like I'm possibly the last person on earth to read this modern classic of science fiction. This is literary science fiction at its best: a fascinating world, a large cast of very memorable characters, a great premise, beautiful prose perfectly balanced with action, not a word of tropeyness, just literary goodness blended so well that I could keep eating a whole bucket of this; I had to force myself to stop and take breaks!

The structure of the book riffs off of the Canterbury Tales: a group of disparate individuals travel together and each night a different one of them shares a story from their life. You have a colonel, a poet, a scholar, a priest, a consul, a detective, and the master of a great tree ship.

Each of their stories reveals a different slice of the vast universe that Dan Simmons has obviously spent an immense amount of time crafting. And it's not just that the world he's crafted is so big or impressive, it's that the specific ideas he comes up with are so striking and so capture the imagination.

For instance there's a scene where they encounter the edge of a sea of grass, and Simmons does such a good job of describing it in ocean terms that I can really see it, and imagine looking out over it and getting a similar but different experience to looking at the ocean. And then there's the wagon ship that shows up, which has a massive wheel on its underside which lets it travel over the six foot tall grass, keeping its passengers safe from the massive serpents hiding beneath. The ship has huge sails that self adjust to catch the wind and propel them across the sea towards their final destination.

He's obviously a master world builder who captures the imagination, but he has also done a great job of limiting himself and only revealing details of the world as they become relevant to the plot, never infodumping you. Every page is interesting, plot driven, and character revealing. It's just so good.

It also has probably one of the most memorable characters of all science fiction: The Shrike! The Shrike is a forbidding creature about nine feet tall made of a thicket of metallic spikes. It lives on the world of Hyperion and mysteriously murders people, appearing and vanishing with ease. No military attempts, offensive or defensive, has ever had a modicum of effect against the Shrike. It is one of the universes great mysteries. Some people regard it as a god, others a demon or monster. There is a cult that worships it.

The plot of the book is that the Shrike has gone on a killing spree much more intense than ever before, and it's killings are no longer geographically bounded to the part of the planet near the mysterious Time Tombs that it is associated with. Almost the entire population of millions of people on the planet is trying to flee. Everyone except for our band of misfits, who are going straight into the eye of the storm, under the auspices of the Hegemony, a pan galactic government.

As the story progresses, it's revealed that each one of them already has a personal connection to the Shrike, the nature of which comes out in their stories. Each story reveals more about the Shrike as well as expounding on other mysteries such as the Time Tombs, an area around which time, or entropy, seems to flow backward.

The overarching story is actually a pretty good one (which often isn't the case in books like these). And in addition I enjoyed each of the short stories inside of it. The poet's story is funny and irreverent and quite insightful about the book publishing industry. The colonel's story is a romance of sorts; it's good but be warned there is a graphic sex scene, and it turns gruesome to boot. The scholar's story is told from a father's perspective and is heart wrenching.

And each of these stories, by the way, reveal really fascinating different things about the Shrike, things which invite you to think for yourself, to decide for yourself what the Shrike is and represents. It's so well done.

And there are so many other stories interwoven into the greater story. It's fascinating to see how the people of Jewish and Islamic faiths continue in exile even after their holy cities on old Earth have been destroyed.

It's really cool to see how in the private detective's story, Dan has really built upon ideas in Necromancer and made them more evocative and powerful.

With the detective's story, I love that by wrapping it in a murder mystery, he makes me care about learning all about the Data Core, this collective of AIs that is off doing its own thing separate from humanity. It's like he always manages to wrap all the learning about he works in the most palatable way, like delicious tacos that I just keep downing.

And I also love that you discover the AIs are doing some whacky things, like recreating old Earth on a faraway planet, and creating facsimiles of certain Old Earth poets...it gets really interesting. No, you don't need to know anything about poetry to enjoy this. And unlike some other authors, Dan manages to do a great job of, even though he's continually raising new questions, he does manage to answer some as well.

I can't wait to read the next book in this series.

A sci-fi children's book—wait, what? I was very curious to pick this up because I'm really into the idea of exposing kids to science ideas early on and getting that sense of wonder going in that direction, and what better way to do it than through science fiction? Nevertheless there's a lot of difficulties inherent in introducing kids aged 8-10 to the sci-fi genre, and I was really curious to see how the author would approach it.

The heroine is Chloe, who is a cloud. She can shapeshift her body however she wants to. I thought that this choice was a rather brilliant one, as clouds are a more relatable thing that have excited all kids' wonder at some point, and having a character with a malleable body is a cool way of introducing other science fiction concepts later on that I'm very interested in exploring in my own science fiction writings: what happens if and when humans can significantly alter their bodies? Or even port their consciousness to totally different kinds of bodies, or existing in a state with no concrete body at all? How is this going to affect our senses of identity and what it means to be human? These, I feel, are the most fascinating questions to consider in this fascinating point that we are at in history.

The plot is that Chloe and her cat Louie (the two of them have a very fun relationship btw) embark on a quest to help their friend, Rainbow Oak, to create dancing flying daisies for a birthday present for his friend Willow.

One theme is the power of ideas and how to develop them. Another is why you need a robust team of other friends who will help you with many different specialties. Another is the theme of learning, being a child and asking questions and growing up. Finally, there's a sense of wonder and magic throughout.

Along the way, they travel far and wide to meet different friends who help them learn a series of things: first about the ideation/product development process (which is wonderfully simplified so that any kid can understand). I loved this part; I had never seen this done in a kids book! Showing how to do ideation and then come up with a list of most important capabilities was really cool. There's also an example later in the story where they run into a technical issue and have to challenge one of the vital capabilities(requirements), find a way to obviate the requirement, which I thought added a dash of realism to how the messy process goes in real life.

As the story progresses, they get some other friends to help them understand DNA and from there understand how to create new DNA by starting with different existing species and modifying them. This is the hairiest hardest part of the book I think for kids to get. I think if I was reading this to a kid, their eyes would glaze over.

However, the rest of the story is pretty digestible for a kid—at least I think it is; it should be noted I didn't have a kid available to test this book on—but it's fun and the voices done in the audiobook are evocative without being terribly annoying. There's a lot of fun things in here about lands of sugar pies and fantastical furry animal friends and all the things that I think would make it more engaging for kids; although I do wonder if some boys would consider themselves too cool and tough for the more sanguine parts.

So all in all I think this is a pretty solid kids book. I look forward to testing it out on kids of my own when my wife and I one day produce or acquire them (lol). I suspect it would work best at ages 8-12. I think the bits about DNA in the middle that are hard to comprehend are fine actually, I think kids will just gloss over that part at first, not fully understanding, and that's ok. If the story as a whole captures their attention then they will read (or listen) to it multiple times and as they get older will come to understand the harder bits.

My main criticism is that the ending dragged on; there was a long unnecessary journey to get back home, and they could have just glossed over that journey in a paragraph or two. I heartily recommend trying this book out on your kids.

One side note. It may bother some people that it's not explained how Chloe exists as a sentient cloud or how she can make her body firm if she's made of vapor, but it is called out at one point and a “promise” made to the reader that we will explore the answer to that question in future books; it just isn't what this book is exploring.

A NetGalley ARC was provided to me. I don't think that has materially changed my review.

One thing I've learned from Greek plays: if someone is ever abandoned as an infant to die, they are always discovered by some shepherd and reared and come back later with some unique object that proves their identity. And they come back just at the right time to upset someone's plans. Oh and before their identity is revealed, they fall in love with their sister. Gets you every time. Luke and Leia syndrome. Doh!

Menander is the greater Ancient Greek playwright you've never heard of. He was very prolific at about 100 plays or more, was considered the greatest of the comedic playwrights, and is the most frequently quoted playwright of the ancient world.

These plays are characterized by comedic turns, misunderstandings, and deceptions, usually in a very domestic setting, usually set outside two neighboring houses. There's a lot of neighborly relationships (good and bad), weddings, and the like.
Different bad actors are duly caricatured and mocked, they don't get their way, everything ends happily, and a good time is had by all. Oftentimes the villain has a change of heart at the end.

The Bad Tempered Man
This was funny. It's about an old curmudgeonly fellow who wants everyone to get off his lawn, like, overly, comedically so. Everyone makes fun of him, kind of like “are you seeing this?” And then the guy falls into a well and gets rescued (albeit not before people have some talk about whether they should just leave him down there; joking/not-joking/but-no-really...). They haul him out of the well and he has a change of heart, realizing that we need each other (cue kumbaya). It's basically A Christmas Carol. Quite funny though.

The Girl from Samos
A man comes back from a long business trip to find out his son really wants to get married to his girlfriend, like, today... His son got the girl knocked up and she has had a baby. He tries to cover up the fact that they already had a baby and gets the servants to cover for him. The father has a (wife? Mistress?), Chrysis, who is from Samos...Samos was known for being a hotbed of prostitution. Chrysis got pregnant before her man left on this trip, and he had ordered her to lose the child. She miscarries, so problem solved. But then in order to cover for her step son having a child out of wedlock, she volunteers to take their child and take care of it. Her man thinks she disobeyed him but she claims that she just found the child in the wild.

So the son has his plan all in place...his stepmother is covering for him, so hopefully no one will find out that he got his girlfriend knocked up out of wedlock, so now if he can just convince his dad and father in law to let them get married right away, then the deed can be done before anyone is the wiser. (The girls father likewise starts off deceiver because he went on the long business trip with the boys father.)

Of course it backfires and they find out and it looks like all will be lost, but then there's a reversal at the end and it ends happily.

None of this description conveys the comedic ways in which everything is delivered, but it is quite funny even in translation.

There are lots of well put saying as well; these plays are not as poetic as say Aeschylus, but there are lots of proverbial expressions that were coined by Menander and then quoted by others: in many ways he was a shaper of the culture.

There's also a recurring theme throughout of these slaves getting put into terrible untenable situations, double binds through no fault of their own. I wonder if Menander was slyly pointing out how unfair and injust that slavery is? I'm not sure. But I get the feeling he may have been a forward thinker for his time.

The Arbitration
A man is cross with his wife because when he comes home, he finds out from a slave that she got pregnant while he was gone and then gave birth. He feels ill used by his wife, goes and sleeps at a neighbor's house and hires a prostitute to hang out with him. Meanwhile, a shepherd discovers a child that was left in the wilderness to die, complete with a ring. That shepherd is apprehended by the servant of the aforementioned man, who recognizes his master's ring. The servant brings the child and the ring back to his master's house but is afraid to tell him. Finally, the prostitute puts it all together and gets the man to admit that he took advantage of a woman at a recent festival. The prostitute recognizes the woman—she is the man's very wife. The two are reconciled. It's basically the plot of the Piña Colada song.

The prostitute also gets a happy ending because she gets pursued by the man's friend that he's been staying with, and can finally stop having to resort to prostitution to get by. Very nice.

The Shield
A man goes off to war, hoping to come back with enough winnings so that his sister can have a good dowry. He goes with his faithful servant, but his servant comes back with a sad tale. He was separated from his master during a crucial battle. He found his masters bloated corpse with his shield next to it. He has come home with the shield alone, which his master spent so much time taking care of, but which failed to take care of him.

Of course, it's revealed that his master didn't actually die but got his gear mixed up with someone else, and because the corpses were swollen his servant couldn't tell the difference.

His surprise return is instrumental in overturning the machinations of a dastardly neighbor Smikrenes (what a name) who wants to force a marriage upon a girl many years his junior just so he can get his greedy hands on that dowry. This would be particularly tragic since she was just about to marry a young man that she actually loves. Comedically, they trick Smikrenes into thinking that someone else has died and that his daughter (who has an even larger dowry) is up for grabs. At the end, both “dead” people are revealed to not be dead, the girl gets to marry who she pleases, and Smikrenes learns his lesson.

The rest of the plays have so many missing parts that the reconstructions of the plot are very speculative or not even possible.

Is this worth reading?
I think so. You get a completely different view of Greek life, you can learn a lot about comedy, learn what day to day normal life was like, and also I found Menander championing slaves and prostitutes and other people who society deems “lesser” to be refreshing.

The main thing I'm sad about is that we don't have more complete plays by him, which really detracts from this being as good as it could, though obviously that's not due to any fault of the translators or anyone else.

Notes on scholarship
Why have you never heard of Menander? Unlike the other great Greek playwrights he composed comedies, not tragedies, and this may be part of why he wasn't held in as high regard—despite all of those quotations, he only won the title in the athenian drama festivals eight times out of those 100 plays. Nevertheless there is no denying his genius at composing comedic plots, at developing lively characters, and at crafting memorable lines. But you've never heard of him because unlike Sophocles or Euripides or Aeschylus, we don't have a bunch of his surviving texts.

What we do have is one play that is almost complete and several plays that have large missing pieces and then tons of fragments and quotations. In recent years a lot more of his work has been discovered, and this text is the first time for much of the new discoveries to be captured in a solid translation and made accessible.

This book is organized helpfully, starting with the most complete plays and going from there with fragments at the end. I found the first few plays still pretty enjoyable because even when there are major pieces missing, the translator provides their best guess summary of what probably happened in that section based on inference, so the plot is still quite comprehensible. The fragments at the end are less interesting.

“What a tiny, stupid life I've led! I gave up everything for you! My husband, my lovers, my years and days and hours, my music, my capacity to love—gave them all away in exchange for toil, blood, and excrement! For you! For nothing! I'm all alone!”

Reading this book was worthwhile for the ending alone. The ending is inevitable; of course a book about pregnancy and rearing a child must end with the pain of when the child leaves the nest, thankless, and you have that existential crisis of identity: how could you not? This book made me think about how some of the most universal and painful life experiences that humans go through (pregnancy, and the overall relationship of a mother to her child) are experiences that I will never have, that I never can have. I feel oddly excluded, rather than relieved that I don't have to go through all that. But enough about me.

What a strange book to start off the year with!

First let's get something out of the way. The premise of this book is that a woman is married to a man and gets pregnant with an owl child...because around the same time as having relations with her husband, she also has relations with a female owl.

Yeah. I know, I know. I know. I know...

Some people would have just stopped reading there. But I have this theory however, something I picked up from C.S. Lewis' book about The Reading Life, that you should read an entire book to the end to understand the author's intent. In other words, your boy Lewis never DNF'd anything, even things that he had major issues with. He withheld all judgment till the end.

Do I take that philosophy to the extreme? No, thankfully–I have DNF'd 6 or 7 books as of this writing. I think if I read a good 20-30% of a book and there's just absolutely nothing at all, no reason at all to keep reading, then yes I feel fine with throwing the book in the trash and walking away. But usually there is at least something that a book is doing well and that I can learn from. I try to take as humble a posture as possible in my reading life...difficult, because I am quite human and therefore can be egotistical, snotty, judgmental, and jump to conclusions...but it's my aspiration.

So I kept reading. And I'm glad I did. This style alone is so interesting and well done as to be worth studying. Somewhere between a fever dream and a myth, similar to magical realism but somehow more like reading a Raymond Carver; stark with description but perfect with its dialogue.

Furthermore there's a lot of body horror, there's themes of motherhood and pregnancy and estranged marriage relations and two cultures colliding, there's all sorts of strong themes in this little tight-punching book.

There are different interpretations of what it's all about. Sometimes it seems like she's caught between two forms of madness: her owl lover has the madness of the wild, and her husband has the madness of civilization.

Oftentimes it seems the main theme though is rather that her daughters condition is a metaphor for being born with various congenital disorders or neurodivergent traits and the author is saying: just because some people are born different doesn't meant they're born “wrong” and that they need to be fixed.

A big deal is made of the fact that the daughter is missing the milestones that have been appointed by a society of people who are different than them...yes they're missing those milestones but in the meantime they are excelling in other areas. Yes her bones are brittle and she can't eat with a spoon, but she doesn't need a spoon, she can hunt and kill and eat her own prey, and she can glide across the room, an amazing trait that none of the “normal” people possess. Maybe her developmental plan should be different!

But while there are all of these themes to read into it, it also doesn't have to be about any of these other things. It's also just about itself; the story is the story. It's about learning to live with the alien, about oneness with something wild and at first disturbing, but being changed. It's about owls and what thinking, eating, and living as a nocturnal predatory bird is like. Sometimes disturbingly so. And last but not least, it's especially about the body horror of being pregnant with a writhing owl baby, which is disturbing—but perhaps only slightly more disturbing than the experience of pregnancy already is, if you think about it.

Having a spouse who is completely opposed to your child-rearing is also disturbing and a very difficult experience that many have gone through–I haven't personally, but we want to, my wife nannies, and it seems like all of our friends have kids, and so we think about kids and parenting about as much as one possibly can without actually having kids. We're thinking of adopting and/or fostering next year. But anyways.

I'm glad I read this. It's really hard to know how to rate this because sometimes it was a one, and sometimes it was a five. But that's life.

Some of the “one” moments included the sex with an owl parts and the way that the carnivore perspective was written about...I think it's interesting to think about a carnivore's perspective on life, but this was implemented in a very grotesque way...there is a bit of the grotesque to the way predators are, but I think the perspective deserved more nuance.

Ultimately what matters most to me about this book is how riveting, heartbreaking, shattering that the narrator's experience is to me. I felt so much, so viscerally in this book, even though I've literally never had any of the experiences of the narrator. Some of these passages hit me hard with those bittersweet moments that summarize so much of the grief of life. Let me leave you with some awesome excerpts.

“I've stared so long in the direction where you flew off that the sky over there looks fake, like cheap cloth, like a curtain. If I could reach out my hand and catch a corner of this curtain, then I would pull it away, Chouette, and here you would be, standing in front of me again.”

“I guess a bus may be back for me, or it may not, but either way I'm beginning to feel like it's my turn.”

Wow, that was weird.

William Paley III is a new discovery of mine, writing in a genre I didn't even know existed until recently. The New Weird genre is a reboot of the Weird Fiction genre of which HP Lovecraft is the most popular specimen. Weird Fiction was sometimes called “tentacle fiction” because of its proclivity for strange creatures other than the typical werewolves/vampires/etc. The New Weird genre is notably eclectic and known for mixing mythology and urban, mundane and exotic, and this book is no exception.

I ran across this book on NetGalley and immediately just based on the cover alone I knew I had to read more. You've got this pink-suited astronaut chick with some kind of multi colored orb surrounded by pink skulls and luminous creatures floating in an apparently underwater world, which is itself encapsulated in a huge pink brain. The description is six words: “A poisoned man dreams of astronauts.” Uh. Ok, that doesn't sound like much of a “premise”...

And that alone feels bold; everything about this feels bold and intentionally weird, like the author is saying: come with me, and I will bring you on a fever dreamish descent into madness where we see just how deep the rabbit-hole goes, my friend. To top it all off, the small press publisher, Doom Fiction, says its mission statement is to destroy the world through infecting minds by using weapons constructed only of paper and carefully placed words. I love that! The author's bio reads: “William Paley does not exist.”

I immediately had a feeling this was the kind of guy who has a weird sense of humor that I (and few others) love. I checked him out on Substack and then discovered him pulling off some awesome shenanigans...he posted about how he had this dream last night that his Christmas tree ate his dog. This garnered some responses, to which he also responded, and in the comments, more macabre details came out of his horrific dog eating tree dream. He ended with something along the lines of, “I'm thinking about cutting it up into a million pieces and burning it. The tree, that is, not the dog.”

So I had to read this book.

And in many ways it did not disappoint. He has a way of describing things that gives you that growing sense of horror as more is gradually revealed. He also writes in a surreal style that reminds me of a dream. The characters sometimes can't believe it themselves and keep trying to either wake up or stop hallucinating, but no, unfortunately, it appears that they cannot escape from their experience.

Themes: dreaming, body horror, losing sanity, lucid dreams dripping with portents, and isolation. There are also sometimes Biblical undertones. Overall there is a sense of simultaneous wonder and horror at discovering monsters and/or locations that are terrifying and overwhelming to any mortal human. That's one of the things horror can do best: confronting us with the knowledge of our own mortality.

There is one story also that has a character with a hypersexual mindset. It's less explicit and more just disturbing. Disturbing is, really, the word for most of these stories. These stories are for if you want to fall down the rabbit hole with someone losing their sanity. The story I just referred to actually has probably the most compelling character in the whole book though, even though she isn't exactly a good person; she's negligent of her child and obsessive; she's an addict, and I can relate to her mindset because I have addictions too, and I understand that addiction brings us down to terrible levels much lower than who we were created to be. She's addicted to using her phone to try to hook up with guys, essentially. You get all of the misgivings, the back-and-forth, the self doubt, the rationalizations, all of that that makes humans in distress so nuanced. She's very human, although I do wonder if she is truly representative of the female mindset, I do feel that it represents the addictive mindset very well, although I don't know that the author ever uses the word “addict.”

The first and last stories are not so much astronaut stories; they are both squarely inside Tower Block 8, a location filled with terrors. Both of those stories involve mysteries being revealed surrounding the Captain and the Bedlam Bible and feel like they tie more into the whole of the overarching story of othe the Bedlam Bible series. As for the other stories in between, these were more actually about astronauts, but it's less clear how some of them connect. One of them is very apocalyptic. I will say, I don't think that by the end of the book I had learned very much definitive information about the overarching story. But I don't think that's mainly what the author was trying to do.

How do I rate this book? The story about the addict made it worth reading for me. The other stories had their moments but ultimately I wasn't sure what to make of them. There's an interesting Hell story, and an interesting Church of Death on the Moon which was interesting but random. Normally I dock points from stories that feel like they have elements that are too random, but I also feel like that's kind of the point of this genre (I'm intuiting that)...it's like a bad dream. When the next striking thing happens, it's not logical, but it may be evocative and have great symbolic meaning...ultimately it gets hard to fully deeply enjoy, though, if you're never really sure what the symbols represent. I guess I didn't have enough to work with to make these stories feel truly “Great” to me; some of them remained feeling a bit random. One of them, about “negative waves,” was not horrific.

So this collection wasn't perfect. Still somehow glad I read it; there were several very memorable, visceral, striking moments. The book is what it is. Ratings are all subjective made-up constructs anyways; I should just pick a rating and move on. I think I'll round up because of how original the stories are.

I'm curious to read more by this author.

If you want to read a hard science fiction book driven by the mystery of unraveling a deep cosmological conspiracy against all humankind...this is your book.

The story starts with Ye Wenjie, a little girl, watching her father, a theoretical physicist, get beaten to death in a square during China's Cultural Revolution. This is the era in the 1950s when Mao Zedong reigned supreme, and anything that anyone said could get interpreted as being against the Communist party. Her father's crimes include teaching the Big Bang...and Einstein's theory of relativity...which are construed by convoluted logic to be Western propaganda meant to undermine the Party.

I've always found it hard as a Westerner to fathom such bizarre politicizing and inhuman behavior. Scenes like that feel alien because we've never experienced anything like it here in the West.

But actually...it's not so far-fetched. I can see the extreme polarization that we are reaching in our politics today where anything and everything is politicized and weaponized. I'm afraid we are going a bad direction. But I digress.

At first glance, this first scene appears disconnected from the rest of the plot. But it's not. I'll come back to it.

Ye Wenjie is exiled for her father's “sins.” She goes to work at a secret base known as Red Coast, which sends out an enormous radio signal, the world's strongest, actually. What she's told that the base does and what it actually does are two very different things. But eventually Ye discovers the truth that only a small handful of people there know.

Spoilers from here on out by the way. There's just no way to talk about this book AT ALL without spoilers. It's not possible. Otherwise this review would be generic vague garbage.

So anyways, Ye discovers that the actual purpose of Red Coast Base is to send out the world's largest radio wave signal in order to make contact with extraterrestrials. The People's Republic of China is bothered by the fact that the USA and USSR have both sent out signals into space to make contacts with alien lifeforms, and they are worried about the consequences if aliens only heard from these other nations.

So they need to send out their own message and represent their own worldview. And of course they want to do it bigger and better and send it out to more star systems than the other nations. Hence the insanely huge radio station, which, when operating, makes people's hairs stand up on end, literally, and other weird things. It affects the local weather. It's weird.

Anyways, Ye Wenjie is a bit of an astrophycisist nerd, and she—despite her outsider status—gets promoted and given the authority (eventually) to operate the telescope and plan out their experiments because she just flat-out has the expertise that no one else there has.

One day she makes a very interesting discovery, and the way she makes it is really cool so I won't spoil all of that, but basically, she discovers a way to amplify their radio signal by millions of times. Quite literally. And there's real science behind this. This book taught me about some very interesting scientific principles, I'll just leave it at that.

And in fact, all of these details up to this point are actual history. Red Coast Base existed and did all of this.

But the book diverges from history and becomes alternate history at a certain point. In this story, the ETs phone back, and in short, the message is: Don't send any other messages out! If you do, there are aliens who will be able to deduce your location* and then they will use that to come to your planet and destroy you!

Basically, there is an interesting property of how radio communication in space works. You can only really tell the vague direction of the transmission that you received. It could have come from any distance in that general direction, so you don't know which of thousands of stars it came from. However, if you send out a message in response, and then they send you another message in response to that...now all of the sudden you have some data to work with. You know roughly how long it takes for messages to go between the two of you. Based on that you can narrow it down pretty precisely to which star the messenger is sending messages from.

So, Ye gets this message. What does she do? She actually responds. She says: Humanity is screwed up. We deserve to be obliterated.

Now let that sink in. She is a character so jaded and also so intelligent that she came up with that response. She has seen some awful, awful stuff.

So anyways, that's the first section of the book. The rest of the book takes place many years later, in modern day. I won't give away any more spoilers because some pretty cool revelations happen, but some of the things that you can expect are conspiracy theories that turn out to be true (more or less), some interesting astrophysics, super advanced aliens, string theory (higher ordered dimensions), the three body problem of course.

Also, a really interesting exploration of how Earth's nations and cultures would be effected at a global scale if it were proven that there were aliens coming to destroy us, aliens who are demonstrably several times more advanced than us. Such an existential threat has profound impacts and there are all sorts of groups that arise from this.

This story is essentially the story of humanity's struggle to survive, and the first battle to be fought is psychological. How can you give up and not lose hope when your enemy has tanks and you have clubs (by analogy)? So part of the story is about political warfare, propaganda, etc.

And because the aliens aren't arriving for another 500 years, the preparations have to take place over many generations of humanity. How does one coordinate such a vast undertaking? One of the implications is that, because the vast majority of Earth's GDP is going to be put towards building a space fleet for the defense of Earth, this means that standards of living will decline greatly and people will lose heart.

So they expect morale to reach a nadir in the future. To counteract that, once they have their plans set into motion, they take some of their officers with the highest amount of faith and fortitude and put them into hibernation, essentially sending them as reinforcements for the future. This creates a really satisfying throughline for us to follow as familiar characters wake up hundreds of years later and see how things have changed. But I digress. That's the plot of the second book in the series, not this one.

This book is about uncovering some covert sabotaging that the aliens are doing on humanity from far away. How can they even do this? It appears for a while to be absolute magic, in fact even I was fooled. But by the end of the book, the mysteries are revealed and it is quite satisfying, if a little far-fetched, and yet not outside the realm of possibility. I'll just leave it at that. There are some very wild concepts in here of what super advanced civilizations could do if they could access more than three physical dimensions.

In short, this book is awesome. I love so many things about it. It's so intelligent. The guy who wrote this, Liu Cixin, must have so much knowledge of so many disparate fields in order to pull all these things together and come up with this. It's truly remarkable. This is hard science at its best, pulled into a space opera type plot of epic proportions.

Oh yeah, and that opening scene? Turns out it's vital. The main characters are survivors of some atrocities that make them really tough, that give them certain traits that turn out to be invaluable when they are sent as reinforcements to the future in the next book, which is also awesome. But I digress.

Octopi. In. Space!

I love it when science fiction authors bring their expertise to bear to reveal fascinating depths. Adrian Tchaikovsky, quickly becoming one of my favorite science fiction authors, is a zoologist (the section of biology dedicated to animals), and his expertise really shines through. In the book prior in this series, he explores what it would look like to have sentient arthropods (spiders), and it was fascinating, if a little more squeamishness-inducing. Children of Time, the second book in this series, could easily be read as a standalone book, for those who feel the need to skip over reading about spiders in depth. But anyways.

I love the premise of this book. What if there was a sentient alien species that were cephalopods (octopus-like)? It's obvious he has done a ton of worldbuilding work here, but he also has structured the book so you don't get infodumped on too much at once. Instead you get to discover cephalopod society throughout the plot unraveling. The conflicts are driven largely by misunderstandings between four different types of species: one hominid, one arthropod, one cephalopod, and one...one which is crazy, and I'll get to later.

So basically, humans are terraforming a planet that is 90% water. With so little land available for humans to live on, it makes sense that the terraforming process is mostly going to focus on building up life in the (currently lifeless) ocean. They start with micro-organisms and work their way up. One man, a marine biologist named Senkovi, ends up being separated from the rest of his crew and, long story short, is able to take on the terraforming process of this planet at his own discretion. Because of this he is able to introduce his pet project to the planet: uplifted octopi.

Uplifting is a concept explored elsewhere in science fiction literature, whereby an existing species is made more intelligent through scientific processes, and we can explore the concept of what a sentient species would look like if it had the evolutionary background of some type of animal other than hominids. This is exactly what Senkovi does for his octopi. The thing is, he develops them in space, and (spoilers ahead)...

His experiment works too well. With a little help, his cephalopods become so intelligent that they are breaking outside of the environments he designed for them and taking over the space station he lives on.

Side note, octopi are known to figure out all kinds of things on their own. In the ocean, they pry open clam shells to eat the meat. The intelligence that allows them to do that has been sufficient for them to figure out how to unscrew jar lids, disassemble all kinds of devices, escape from aquariums over and over...it's really not recommended to have an octopus as a pet, much as people think it sounds like a good idea, for this reason. Also for the reason that, because they are so intelligent, they experience what only a few species on the planet are intelligent enough to experience: boredom. Octopi get quickly bored if confined in a glass box with very little to keep them entertained. They appear to get depressed over time. Of course, it's impossible to know exactly what octopi really feel, but the symptoms are relatable.

So anyway, these uplifted octopi escape from the lab in space, and quickly adapt and evolve to space. Turns out, they are actually much more well-adapted to space than humans are, since they are used to operating in a three dimensional environment. They populate the water world and mine it for resources, but they also expand outwards to the stars, designing their own kind of spacecraft, which, naturally, are filled with water instead of air.

Tchaikovsky explores the implications of having spacecraft that are designed to be filled with water instead of air. The craft take a lot longer to accelerate because of their weight, but this the water also provides cushioning that helps them survive higher rates of acceleration. Their craft are designed to be spherical in shape. Also, their battles in space are interesting because when a projectile punctures the shell, the water squirts out into space, instantly freezing into ice.

But this isn't the only thing Tchaikovsky explores. He explores how their language would be different, how their modes of communication would be different, how their different thought patterns would effect the building up of civilization at a large scale, how their politics would be different, their warfare, how their natural curiosity affects EVERYTHING...

There's too much in this book for me to succinctly summarize, but one of the most interesting things that factors in is their nervous system. Basically, cephalopods have two “brains”—if by brains you mean centers of neurons that (it is believed) do computations. One is in their cranium, just like for humans. but the other is actually in their tentacles, an organ of neurons dispersed throughout them in high concentrations that Tchaikovsky calls, in this book, their “reach.” (Some biologists go so far as to say that it's like octopi have nine brains—one in their skull, and one in each tentacle.)

In addition, in this book when two octopi struggle with each other, something happens in that swirling of tentacles grasping each other. Information is passed along. I wasn't able to find scholarly literature that proves this phenomena happens currently, but hey, who knows? It would explain some of their interesting behavior, such as when octopi fight with each other and then suddenly break apart, one of them changing its mind and now supporting the other as the new alpha.

Tchaikovsky is theorizing in the worldbuilding of this book about what cephalopod consciousness is like. He theorizes that, essentially, it would be like having a massive subconscious capable of doing complex calculations, which all happens without you thinking about it or knowing how it works—it just does. The implications of this are profound, and lets their technological development advance at a prodigious rate in some areas—but, with a key difference from how scientific advancement happened in human's history. For cephalopods, it progresses without their scientists consciously understanding HOW they are doing some of the things that they do. And there's a lot of implications to that too.

Anyway, I know I'm nerding out pretty hard on this, but the point is, if you've ever wondered how cephalopod civilization could differ from ours, this book is amazing.

And I haven't even touched on another major component of this book, and that explores another alien planet with a life form that did NOT originate even remotely from Earth. Right from the get-go, the explorers discovering this planet are intrigued. It has all of these floating creatures in the air, which are able to, in this thick atmosphere, propel themselves like jellyfish do in water. There are other creatures which appears to drift with the winds, kind of like blimps. And on the ground, there are all kinds of other living things.

The planet has an entire ecosystem built up on fundamentally different building blocks at the cellular level. I don't understand all the technical details, but essentially, these species don't have DNA, but they do have something akin to RNA. And, among other things, one of the other differences on this planet's ecosystem is that they don't have hard and fast plant-animal distinctions. They have a lot of creatures that float about similarly to blimps, and they may have a migration phase, followed by a rooted phase where they dig into the soil in one location and gather nutrients and reproduce.

But the craziest life form on this planet is not at all visible. Not at first. I told you there would be spoilers right? Major ones coming...

The most fascinating species in this book (even rivaling the cephalopods) can be best thought of as a viral hive mind. This idea of his is phenomenally cool. And terrifying. But essentially, what if an alien species could infect all kinds of different species virally, and also had a distributed consciousness? When it infects a new host, of course, this part of itself is not able to directly communicate with the rest of the species. But the different colonies find ways of communicating with each other because the way they infect their hosts is subtle, as if it slips in between all the cells that exist already...it retains the intelligence, memories, everything of the infected host. And then it comes into psychic union with its host: meaning, the two minds merge.

The implications of this are far-reaching as well, but I've already spoiled enough of this book for you. Seriously, go and read this book immediately if these concepts interest you at all. The chapters written from the perspective of the viral hive mind are fascinating. And weird. But gradually, its ways of thinking become more and more comprehensible.

And the cool thing is, unlike so many other sci fi books that have explored parasitic aliens, in this one he actually moves beyond mere horror—although there's a bit of that as well—but he eventually moves into another phase in the book of de-monstrifying the other, meaning: what if a species like this wasn't just some awful predatory species? What if it was the hero of its own story? What if it didn't view what it was doing as bad, because, after all, after it infects hosts, those hosts are always glad that they were infected in hindsight? Never mind that their thinking is changed by being infected, lol...but in its view, it helps its hosts achieve enlightenment, a greater consciousness of the universe which extends through all the physical realms all the way from the cellular level up to scale that humans are aware of.

I loved this book, and iImmediately ordered the next.

*Technically the correct plural of octopus is octopuses, but Adrian chooses to use octopi because he argues it sounds way more awesome, and I agree. All language is made up anyway.

I was confused for the first half of this book as to why it is so beloved. The setup is that the main character's mother dies and he (Mersault) goes to her funeral, which is at the “home” (their equivalent of a nursing home) that he resorted to letting his mother live at because of his meager income.

You would think that having this death early on would be a fruitful ground to make the story interesting in a variety of ways. But instead it is made into the dullest affair one can imagine; mundane; everyday; no tension; no plot; no beautiful metaphors; in short he does absolutely nothing with this potentially powerful part of the story. At this stage, one can only wonder: what exactly is the point??

Life from Mersault's point of view is dull. There's nothing to draw myself to this aimless character and in fact the way he lets himself be pulled into doing despicable acts shows me he has zero moral compass; in fact he's a despicable person because of this.

Why should I care about such a person? He's the opposite of inspiring.

But then, halfway through the book, things majorly change. Huge spoilers, but the character commits a murder. That's where the real plot takes off with an investigation, time adjusting to prison, and a trial that are all much more riveting.

It's also where I finally realized that this book is a sketch of a character archetype: the modern young man who has had all meaning stripped from him by growing up in modern society and so has nothing to care about, no causes, nothing matters if he does or doesn't do it.

The essence of the novel is about the existential angst that is the result of the fall of religion in society. For the atheist who has become completely disillusioned with not only the concept of God but of the ability to find meaning at all, how does one go on?

Our character, Mersault, doesn't feel anything deeply at all, he has no shame, no fear, no guilt, no joy. And so the feelings he does have are: boredom, mild interest, curiosity, droll amusement. And this novel is meant to illustrate the absolute worst path that that listlessness can take one down, and asks the question: what happens when they are faced with the direst consequences? When he goes to prison and goes on trial and then is faced with execution, will this character change? Can these extreme circumstances finally push him into a place of finding some sort of meaning in life? Some sort of character growth?

That is at least one way of reading it. I also am aware that Albert Camus, the author, was a philosopher who created the philosophy of absurdism, which basically postulates an progression on from nihilism, an answer to the question of how to find meaning. Basically, absurdism is the idea that yes, you accept that life has no essential meaning and is random and hard, and then you respond to that by embracing the absurdism of finding meaning in something that has no meaning. Life is absurd; embrace it, and enjoy it anyway.

I felt that he explored this philosophy perhaps a bit more convincingly in The Plague. In The Stranger, he has a moment of feeling happy at the end that isn't very well explicated, and that's it—he then dies. So it's hardly an inspiring rally call to make me want to be an absurdist.

Nevertheless this book does very succinctly illustrate the nihilistic problem and show the absurdist solution, if perhaps too briefly and abstrusely.

In summary, the second half is riveting, but I consider the main flaw of this book to be that for the first half, it takes way too long to be able to understand “what is the point of all this?”. I'm glad I read it. I might read it again because I suspect the first half of the book will be much better when I know where all of this is leading to.

I can't give this book five stars due to certain flaws, but nevertheless, it really is one of my favorite books, one of the few books I've read twice. Why?

My father was a philosopher, part of that class of people whose books are the absolute hardest to read: full of obscure words and words that have been redefined either by them or by other philosophers that they assume you have read. We once read a philosopher in an ethics class who loved to use the word “ubiquitous.” Ubiquitous. Do you know what ubiquitous means? It means “commonplace, ordinary.” Apparently the irony of using such a non-commonplace word for a word that means commonplace when straight over that philosopher's head.

And it is just completely unnecessary to use an obscure word if it doesn't give you any extra sense of meaning over the common one! I have no patience for pretense.

As such, I have always had a love-hate relationship with philosophy. After all, what questions could be more important to contemplate than: Is there such a thing as free will? Is there God, and if so, what can we know about such a being? How do we know what is true; how do we come to knowledge accurately?

I spend great time contemplating these things and I have my thoughts on them, but it's hard to know if you're truly having an original thought or just reinventing the wheel if you don't take the time to actually read all of the existing work in that field.

Thus far in life, I have not had the energy to really go through it all, although I have been investigating ancient Greek and Roman philosophers; I have a vague notion of one day reading all the way up through modern philosophers, but I'm just not going to commit to that level of torture—I mean, pleasure. Yeah, that's what I meant.

Anyway. I stumbled upon this book when I was a teenager, and it was perfect for me. Sophie's World is about a Norwegian teenager who starts getting letters in her mailbox with philosophical questions enclosed. First through letters, and then in person, an older man—a philosopher—teaches her all about philosophy, starting from the ancient Greeks and going chronologically through history, showing the progression of thought, how each new era builds on another, showing the cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Did I mention that this older man is having a friendship with her in secret for quite some time? It isn't until the final act that he meets her mother. And that's the one reason I just can't bring myself to give this five stars. I just...no, nothing sexual happens. But it's just creepy. I just...how did the author think that that would sound ok and fine? But anyways. Setting that completely aside, because at the end of the day, it just sounds bad, but nothing inappropriate happens. So.

For me the whole premise of teaching me the history of philosophy in laymen's terms, simplified as much as possible, with an overview that's quick but not too quick, and couches the whole thing in a narrative, is just great. Is it perfect? No, I mean obviously when trying to cover such a technical field concisely there are bound to be things that he leaves out that some people think are important. Now that I've read a bunch of Plato, I noticed when I re-read Sophie's World that there were a couple of points that I disagreed with him on. But overall, I think he did a pretty good job of summarizing Plato and Socrates. I'm not really qualified to say whether he did the same for the other philosophers, but he gives the impression of being pretty fair and even-handed and not fanboying too too much over his favorite philosophers.

This book has been invaluable to me so that I can get an overview of all of philosophy and feel more comfortable with the general topology of the landscape. I re-read it a year or two ago and took copious notes. I will return to them time and again as I continue my journey slowly—veeeeery slowly, because I don't want to get burned out—on the epic journey of philosophy.

How does one rate a book which changed your life? You don't “rate” it. Normal considerations—style, organization, even your personal opinions of its content—fall away in the face of life change.

When I came into recovery in 2012, the book Alcoholics Anonymous did not impress me. I was seeking help for a different addiction, not alcoholism. I learned that Alcoholics Anonymous was the first twelve step program from which all others sprung. Ok, fine, that's nice historical information, I thought. But I failed to see why some meetings had us read so much from “The Big Book,” as people in recovery circles colloquially call the book titled Alcoholics Anonymous. I preferred the books which addressed my addiction specifically.

Time passed, I got sober, I worked the steps, my depression lifted, shame guilt and anxiety too became all much much less. My relations with other people got a lot better and I became able to see, whenever I got into self-pity, resentment, or control, how whenever I am disturbed, there is somewhere inside me that I have a part to play, that even when I truly am a victim of circumstance, that healing only comes about by focusing on my part, not other people's. I could write a lot about my experiences finally getting free of resentment towards people I thought I could never forgive, or the various epiphanies I had on the road surrounding things like powerlessness, willingness, surrender, what the heck is up with this Higher Power thing, openmindedness, control, self pity, and forgiveness. But there are already so many written accounts of the life change people have experienced, and in fact, that's what most of this book is.

The point is, after a few years of progress, I began to struggle quite a bit. I finally bit the bullet and asked someone to be my sponsor who really intimidated me—not because their personality was intimidating, mind you—but just because they had so much sobriety and wisdom, they were what people call “old timers.” I was always really afraid to ask a true old-timer to sponsor me (“sponsor” means “mentor”, essentially). But when I finally did ask one of them and he said yes, I started to work through the steps again in a much deeper, more meaningful way than with the 10 sponsors I had had prior. It was so good.

And one of the surprising things was, he taught me the 12 steps not through the texts that are specific to my (our) addiction, but instead through the text known as Alcoholics Anonymous. I had ignored it for years, thinking it didn't apply to me. But when we really dug into it, I discovered just how deep and rich it is.

The first 20% of AA (the Alcoholics Anonymous book) is “the program,” explaining what addiction is (alcoholism specifically, but you can translate in your head to your own disease of choice), and explaining the solution, how to work the steps. There is a chapter called “We Agnostics,” specifically for those who really struggle with the whole Higher Power thing. The path toward believing in God is made as broad as possible to invite in even died-in-the-wool agnostics and atheists. It really is amazing how many people I have met in recovery rooms who were before totally shut off to the concept of God, and yet discovered in these rooms a faith they thought they would never have. How did they come there?

In short, it's this: you come in desperate. “No one comes into their first meeting on a winning streak.” Not a person on the planet wants to admit to being an addict. All of us come in after some kind of bottoming out experience.

And that bottoming out doesn't have to be going to prison or being divorced or having a near death experience. For some of us it's being fired, or being found out by a spouse. For others, it's seeing the consequences on children or other family members. For some of us, the event itself was not of such enormous dramatic significance, it was more of a last straw, it was more just that we were sick and tired of being sick and tired: filled with anxiety, depression, toxic shame, deep-seated guilt.

Or for me, it was finally getting the clarity that, despite all I had ever said to the contrary, that the reality was that my disease was in fact progressive, and realizing with dead certainty that it was going to get a lot worse if I didn't get outside help, and quick, too. I got to what AA calls “the jumping off point,” that place where you can't imagine life without alcohol (or whatever your drug is), and you also can't imagine a life with it either. If you've never been there, it's impossible to describe the utter despair that sets in. But thankfully, along with that despair comes the “gift of desperation.”

Through most of my life, I had been able to do anything I set my mind to. At school or with jobs or with personal relationships or other goals, I could do it! Just apply my willpower and creativity and intellect, and I could figure anything out.

But then I ran into this one area of my life where that didn't work: my addiction. After dozens of ways of trying to not do it or to manage and control doing it, I finally came to that place of realizing with dead certainty that nothing I could do would make any difference. I was trapped.

I have to laugh at myself right now; I intended to review a book and instead this is turning into a memoir. Maybe that's ok. But for the sake of getting on to the book, suffice it to say: I considered myself hopeless before walking into a twelve step program. I had tried a psychiatrist and drugs, legal and illegal, I had tried counseling and exorcisms and all manners of trying to outsmart myself and set boundaries and have accountability...none of that made a dent. The twelve steps is what got me free.

To clarify, when I got into recovery I also did some other things that helped. I did a lot of more targeted therapy as well, which I believe helped in a supplemental sort of way: it gave me clarity as to why I “needed” my drug. But in-and-of-itself, all that self knowledge did not get me sober. And without establishing sobriety, I was going nowhere fast.

What did get me sober was a moment a couple of years into the program where I finally got desperate, sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I prayed a prayer. I had had a great deal of difficulty with believing that even if there was a God, how could I ever know if I was being guided by God? I certainly couldn't trust the voices in my head: I was extremely delusional! So I prayed: “God, you know I have trouble hearing your voice. So here's what I'm going to do. I am just going to do whatever the hell my sponsor tells me to do, no matter what—short of jumping off a bridge—and trust that that is your will for me.”

I most certainly did NOT tell my sponsor that I had prayed that prayer. But here's what happened. My sponsor told me to go to seven meetings a week and make five phone calls a day and work the steps regularly. I gasped with horror—“I don't have enough time to do that!”—but I had said I would go to ANY lengths. So I committed to doing it. On top of that, he would give me random one-off assignments all the time, as if the meeting and five phone calls a day weren't enough, the son of a bitch! But I did it.

And something miraculous happened. I had never been able to string two or three sober days together before, but finally I did. I got sober for a week before relapsing. Some more time passed, and I got sober for a month. And then longer and longer. For me it was a progressive victory thing, but eventually I got to where I was going years at a time. And even more important, recovering in a deeper sense than mere sobriety.

Why does the twelve steps work? Part of the explanation is pretty simple. There's research to back up the idea that the opposite of addiction is connection. Going to all those meetings and making all those calls forced me to finally actually be known by others instead of isolating.

The other part was working the steps. That's where, for me, the more lasting life change comes in so that I don't relapse and get myself into worse trouble than before. That's where the book Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) comes in.

What are the steps?
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The foundation of the program is steps one through three, which can be summarized as: “I can't; God can; I think I'll let Him.” The rest of the program can only be done meaningful if relying on God to help; because we addicts are in no position to be able to do the rest on our own.

But for most of us, the first three steps are insanely difficult. Admitting you're completely powerless over your addiction is really hard, and admitting that you aren't fit to manage your life at all is even harder. And then there's the second step: so many people just can't get down with the God business. And then the third step, also known as surrender? What does that even mean? I struggled with all of these.

People will have all kinds of arguments about these concepts and hate them for a variety of reasons, one of which being the reliance on God. All of these arguments, however, actually meant nothing in the face of death. If you are drowning in addiction, you no longer care about whether something “makes sense” to you: you get to a place where you realize that if there is a solution out there, it's going to by definition be something that doesn't make sense to you, because if it did make sense, you would have tried it already! And because I was drowning, I became willing to try anything, to go to any lengths.

So I turned to working these steps not out of logic but out of a necessity to try anything that might possibly work for me. It felt like the last house on the block—there was nothing else left but to kill myself. Yes I was in a dark place. But if you're going to kill yourself anyways, what do you have to lose? So I threw myself into it.

The first part of this book (after the forewards) is a chapter titled “The Doctor's Opinion.” I skipped this the first time, not realizing how critical that it is to getting me to understand the true nature of my disease. It's an open letter from a leading doctor at a hospital for the treatment of alcoholism, someone who had seen thousands of cases and knew right off the bat which ones were helpless cases: it didn't matter how many second chances they were given, they were helpless to stop themselves from drinking again. He admits frankly that everything science had thrown at cases like these had very little effect. And then he goes on to detail how now hundreds of such cases (the “hopeless variety” of alcoholic, as he calls them) have come to recover, and are changed men. The mere existence of this letter is incredible: you have a very prominent doctor putting his reputation on the line, putting it in print that he absolutely recommends a SPIRITUAL program as an actual treatment for something recognized by the medical profession as a disease (alcoholism).

After that we have Bill's story, the founder of AA. He was a crazy SOB before recovery, not someone you would have wanted to know. His story is remarkable. Then we have chapters titled There Is a Solution and More About Alcoholism. These outline the problem in stark lines.

Then you have a chapter We Agnostics, that helps address those who are atheistic and agnostic and shares the stories of many people who began with that belief system but were then able to progress slowly into having faith. Everyone is free to define their Higher Power in whatever matter works for them. For many agnostics, the first evidence they have of God is the fact that they are hearing the stories of all the other alcoholics in meetings who have gotten sober, and watching some of those transformations happen before their very eyes. And so their first basic conception of a Higher Power is the group, or whatever power it is that is miraculously causing the alcoholics in their group to get sober.

That was my experience as well. As I got to know people in my program who had been really hopeless, who had done awful, terrible things, and yet here they were telling me they were sober—and the thing is, you can sniff out bullshit to a certain level, and these people did not smell like bullshit. And there is no way that the person who they are describing in the past is the same person that they are now, that I'm witnessing them being. Not everyone in recovery is a saint, but I zoned in on a handful of people whose lives had undoubtedly changed. Since then, I've gotten to witness firsthand some pretty incredible stories, too, been at someone's first meeting and then seen them go from depressed, sure of impending divorce, a self-centered self-pitying wreck unable to go a few days sober, to becoming such a transformed person, a person that people go to for spiritual life advice—you can't make this stuff up.

So anyways, that made me pay attention. That did something for my faith that no amount of logic or theology or philosophy could have ever touched a hair of.

Next are the chapters titled How It Works, Into Action, and Working With Others, which outline the whole program, all twelve steps, in just 45 pages. How It Works alone covers most of what the program is. It's a really hard program, but it's also a very simple program and in fact the only reason it's 45 pages and not much less than that is that there are plenty of examples and time spent on objections. These chapters are where the meat is, the life change. I have underlined and annotated the mess out of this section and come back to it again and again; you start to know the page numbers by heart, and I find myself telling others “go read pages 60-62, that deals with exactly where you are, and let me tell you my experience with applying those pages to my life...” Yes, I have become one of THOSE people. But hopefully not in a bad way.

After that there are chapters To Wives, The Family Afterward, To Employers. Honestly these feel dated but they still have nuggets.

Then there's A Vision for You, supremely helpful for vision-casting. This takes us up through page 164.

The remaining 400 pages of the book are the personal stories. One after another, alcoholics from every kind of walk of life share their stories. The first third of them are founders, the next third are people in the second wave, and the final third are people who came into AA after it was well established. The stories seem to have been picked for diversity of experiences: being a minority, being a woman, various careers and experiences like homelessness, co-addictions, codependence, divorce, prison, death of loved ones. All of them follow a general format of first sharing their story, letting you see just how bad it gets, then showing what changed, and then finally, sharing what wisdom or advice has helped them the most.

I love that some of these stories have so much meat on them. I have underlined and annotated many of these stories, some of them just as heavily as How It Works.

The style of writing is rather bare bones. It doesn't always SEEM to be profound, and it's written in a slightly different vernacular. Sometimes things seem common sense, or I didn't understand why they were making a big deal about different points...but now I do, because when I've gotten stuck in recovery I've discovered that the old timers that I turn to for advice invariably point me back to the big book for the answers. In short, even with all the quibbles, it's impossible to rate this book as anything other than five stars because it has helped me profoundly to change at the deepest levels of how I operate, of how I do life. And because all the other recovery books that I get a lot out of are derived from this book.

No one will ever convince me that the twelve steps “don't work.” I've seen hundreds of people come into the recovery rooms. The vast majority flake out: either they never come back at all or they work a half-hearted program for a couple months and then quit. Some people come to meetings regularly but never actually work the steps. Of all the people I've seen come into these rooms, I have yet to see someone really roll up their sleeves and work the program and NOT see life-changing results.

This stuff works: it works too well for people to believe. I've heard some people criticize and say “it doesn't work,” but as soon as you ask them some basic questions it invariably becomes obvious they have never worked it at all. And I was one of those for a while; I didn't think I needed to work something like that because I was smart and it insulted my intelligence. I was too smart for my own good.

When I struggle it's usually for that reason. It doesn't make sense to me that the twelve steps have anything to do with establishing sobriety, much less any of the other advice that's been given to me by sponsors throughout the years. But I realize that whatever the solution is, it has to be something that doesn't make sense to me, otherwise I wouldn't have the problem that I do.

I'm just grateful that this program exists because without it I'd still be deep in my delusion, or worse yet I'd probably be dead—for when I'm in my disease I get suicidal.

Thank God I'm not there today. This program gave me hope, gave me examples of people just as bad off as me who actually recovered, and gave me freedom from toxic guilt and shame. Those issues are molehills today compared to the mountains they used to be.

So yeah, I'm a believer. And I can't apologize for it. Some things are worth believing in.

“Pride and Prejudice meets Communism!” I've always found that description humorous and descriptive, although not necessarily super fair. Gaskell was a contemporary of Jane Austen and wrote about romance and high society.

As for the communism, it's halfway true. It's more about the origin of the idea of the capital holding rich having for the first time a relationship with labor unions that isn't completely antagonistic, that is a little bit more complementary. This makes the books political stance distinctly socialist; not communist, by the definitions set forth by Karl Marx.

The setting is Dickensian, a polluted city full of commerce and soot, with poor downtrodden workers struggling to survive.

Our heroine, Margaret, is unusually empathetic and a strong peacemaker. She's one of favorite characters from any book I have read in this era. She is a newcomer from the country, new to an industrialized environment. The daughter of a parson, she is used to visiting the poor and doing as much good as she can to help people understand each other. She vaccilates between the world of the poor and the rich, between the workers who are striking for their rights, and the family of John Thornton, one of the mill owners.

Unlike many a book that has been written on social and economic injustice, this one is actually interesting. Gaskell doesn't strawman either side, and in fact explores each quite thoroughly, showing different individuals, factions, and viewpoints inside of each side. Through her heroine Margaret, she seeks to find common ground, an art form all but lost during that time period...

And sadly, it's all but lost today. Would that more people thought like Margaret. It's such a rare gem to find meaningful discourse, seeking to understand, searching for common ground, unifying instead of dividing. To do the work of a peacemaker is really hard work, and often thankless. Many people will say that if you're not for us you're against us. That's where we are in American politics today; the moderates are attacked by both sides, torn apart like a sheep among wolves. But nevertheless...I digress, but the point is, Gaskell is doing something really interesting in this work that is healing to my soul.

The heroine, Margaret, is one of my favorites. She's strong, imperfect with her impetuousness and a touch of (unintentional) haughtiness. But she's strong, a unifying force, someone with a higher perspective.

Her biggest flaw is probably her haughtiness—she thinks of herself as “Someone,” for she comes from minor nobility and there are all sorts of Victorian concepts of what all that entails. Because of that she can be seen as more a product of her environment and when contextualized, she's ahead of the curve—her maid Dixon actually gets more offended for the family's sake than her family does, which makes for a comedic twist.

The comparison with Jane Austen is inescapable, and in many ways this is similar; these are rich nobility during the same time period having some of the same dinner parties and concerns. But here we have a lot of the poor's perspective too. And where Austen's novels are really only about romance with only a dash of other topics, Gaskell's novel is about romance but is also truly about at least two other things. One is the coming of age story which is quite strong here; I won't say more than that for fear of spoiling things for you. The other is a searching for resolution to war between those with capital and those without. And this is far from the demonizing, revolutionary talk of the Communist Manifesto. The tone is more similar to Charles Dickens (fitting since he was a mentor of Gaskell's). It's more a perspective of really seeing the plight of the working poor with great pathos, really seeing it.

And Gaskell also seeks for us to really understand Thornton. Far from falling into the pit of “all rich people are scumbags,” she explores his psyche in insightful detail. She shows what many people overlook, which is that someone like Thornton came to be where he was precisely because of admirable traits: because of how capable, determined, hardworking, creative, and industrious he was, precisely because he could see and understand things that few do. It also shows his examples of charity and kindliness, much of which Margaret draws out, but which was quite latent before she entered his life.

She also doesn't deify the rich as I have seen some books do. In fact, Thornton and especially his mother have become a bit monomaniacal, and it's love for Margaret that helps free John from his crusty shell and connect with his heart again.

I also loved reading this for the characterizations. Everyone seems to be basically a caricature...but a well-done caricature. I feel like they are epitomized representations of certain archetypes; distilled forms. They make me feel things. Mostly palm-to-forehead things. But things nonetheless, because they feel like Gaskell is making fun of things that need to be made fun of.

I like how Gaskell sets up a pretty huge hurdle for the love story to overcome. The Thorntons basically think Margaret is a complete snob. And that misunderstanding makes sense in context; it illuminates the suspicion that the new money has for being looked down upon by old money, which is another major theme. You see what you expect to see. Well done.

Quibbles? Well, as in all Victorian romances, it ends immediately with engagement. The two lovers haven't spent any time really getting to know each other in depth. That's always puzzled me about these books.

I also have other quibbles with the ending feeling a bit rushed, and it taking is a bit too long in the middle to get there. The pacing could have been a bit better.

Overall? I strongly liked this book. I liked it even more than the Jane Austen I have read so far...with that said I haven't read the great P&P or Emma yet so that could change...but I really thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm looking forward to reading more of Gaskell.

In the near future, Earth is collapsing under famine and ecological and political struggles. But the focus of the story is not on these. It's on Hadiz, a brilliant woman at a top research facility in Lagos, Nigeria. She discovers how to travel between different universes, at first as a way to try to save her version of Earth, but when it comes to be too late for that, instead she has to pivot and figure out how to make an escape from her home to one of the other versions of earth.

In the process, she ends up having to set free an AI from its normal constraints in order to gain its help. This creates serious implications down the line that she doesn't have time to contemplate, but you get the feeling will drastically impact the plot later (and it does).

But in the meantime, Hadiz makes all sorts of amazing discoveries about the other versions of Earth, which are amazingly diverse. She discovers that for every different way that things could have gone, for every random thing determined by quantum physics, the universe splits. There are almost infinite universes out there.

When she travels, she stays in the same location on earth as where she left. It's a different earth, a different version of Lagos—or the land there at least; most of the universes don't have life. But some do. Unknown to her, there is a whole coalition of hundreds of thousands of worlds, known as the Pandominium, and they regulate and control the travel between worlds which she is unknowingly encroaching on. All of this you learn within probably the first 1/5 of the book.

The exploration of other Earths is fascinating. The Nigerian culture is a refreshing experience, and then there's the romp through all the versions of Earth that exist in a multiverse where there are branches at every possible random choice in the chain of causality that stretches all the way back to the Big Bang. It's breathtaking.

When looking at a very similar Earth it's interesting to see all the little variations and trace lines, connecting the dots gradually of how one thing could have affected another, resulting in larger diversions from our own reality.

And then sometimes we look at ones that diverged massively and those are also very interesting, especially looking at the way that sentient life could have developed from a different non-ape-like species.

And then there is other life out there that is very fascinating...being vague to avoid spoilers but I will just say that it's super interesting.

As the story unfolds, there is a great pan-dimensional conflict unfolding. There's all kinds of prejudices of organics against machines and vice versa, carnivorous people groups against herbivores, and so forth. There's politics and intrigue and conspiracies. Carey launches us onto an ambitious, grand ocean of worldbuilding, and demands that we swim. Fortunately, he also guides us into the deep water gradually, step by step. I consider this a great case study for myself in how to gradually introduce the reader to a vast world that the author has built.

And then, our main characters have their own conflicts that are much smaller in scale but as the plot progresses, ends up being entangled in these much grander conflicts in interesting ways.

There's also a whole section of the book with its own planet that we focus on with people very different from Homo sapiens and an awesome character...unfortunately it's hard to talk about any of that without feeling like I would be ruining part of the experience of reading that firsthand.

This book also has very relatable antagonists to the point that I find myself rooting for them and then remembering that hold on, if they succeed, that's going to be very bad for the protagonists who I care about even more! That's really good.

There are so many things this book does well. There's very memorable and likable characters, there are truly tough villains, nobody is an idiot, the setting and plot and characters are all interwoven, so many things.

This book also has the distinction of having the most interesting military subcultures that I've read, maybe ever.

There's also a great sense of wonder. The book starts off feeling a little bit more like hard science fiction with just enough explanation of physics and such things that it helps you buy into the premise but then the book becomes so much more.

Gosh. And just the fact that all of this amazing setting and worldbuilding is revealed primarily through action, through stuff happening in the plot. This is definitely one of my favorite works of science fiction. Ever.

The notion of whether machines could be considered alive is also explored quite intelligently in this book, but again done so by the plot pushing the conversation forward...I love this book. There is so much in here. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series! I need it now.

This was charming. I was enjoying the view of southern life from a slightly alien perspective. The pronunciation of Southern slang was spot on in the audiobook version which I was listening to. The setting was quaint, and the paternal figures and even minor characters were memorable and likable. I was having a good time as the story began.

Then it ended. What? I checked and double checked. There were the credits right there after these 4 chapters. No story had happened yet. I would really describe these first four chapters as a backstory that covers the early years of the main character's life before getting to the main actual story, where Stuff Happens. But no.

This audiobook is 1 hr long, so maybe 8,000 words or so. It would have felt more accurate to call it a short story.

More to the point there needed to be more of a clear rising and falling action with resolution (plot) in order to feel like a cohesive complete story. I guess this could be called a coming of age story. There is one transformative event that happens toward the end. But there just isn't enough conflict or rising tension.

But here's the thing: I was thoroughly enjoying myself before it ended. Maybe the author just needs to keep writing?

One more thing: there needs to be more alien-ness in something called My Alien Life.

I received an ARC copy of this thanks to NetGalley. I don't think that has materially affected my review.