Finished reading Fall by Neal Stephenson. I can’t even start to analyze this through the lens of Goethe’s three questions: I couldn’t tell what Stephenson wanted his book to be (about uploading consciousness? a retelling of Paradise Lost? a fantasy quest? mad about the internet and/or religious fundamentalism?), and so I can’t even judge whether he succeeded, much less whether it was worth doing. And I can’t tell if it ended up more or less than the sum of its parts. I will say that I was kind of tired of the book around the ⅘︎ point (though the ending picked up a bit), and I feel pretty sure this wasn’t his best work. My opinions of his books tend to shift over time, though, so we’ll see how I feel at (let’s say) the end of the year.
Finished rereading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I still find the first two-thirds of the book intensely compelling. I had trouble connecting as well as with the last third, though. I wonder if it should have been expanded and broken into a second book? It’s an important part of the story, but I feel like it wanted a little more space to breathe, and a little less recounting of history.
Finished reading Translation State by Ann Leckie. I’ve loved her other Imperial Radch books, and enjoyed this one, but felt like it could have used a more vigorous edit: One character kept shifting between “disturbingly alien” and “distressed teen”, and there was a plot contrivance that bothered even me (normally fairly blasé about that kind of thing). That aside, there was lots to like, including the aforementioned disturbing aliens and Leckie’s usual explorations of personhood and empire.
Leckie fans should read this; newcomers should start at the start, Ancillary Justice.
Finished reading The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel, the final book of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. This was a huge book, and reading it felt a little bit like work, but it was absolutely worth it by the end: We know how the story must play out, even if we haven’t read the history, but it remains compelling to the last page.
Just a couple years slow, I finally had the upsight that Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz is structured like a jazz tune: The overall history of the music is the melody, and the occasional biographies of important figures are the solos.
Finished reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, followup to Wolf Hall. I very much enjoyed this. It feels like the political parts of A Song of Ice and Fire, but with a wry sense of humor, and without the fantasy elements (obviously) and glorified cruelty that became increasingly central to that series. (Or, rather, probably vice versa: That series clearly drew some of its inspiration from these historical events.)
Amusingly, the stylistic tic of Wolf Hall was transformed into a different tic which eliminated almost all pronoun ambiguity. It felt forced at the beginning, but it gradually won me over.
Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. This was a charming story about two academics — the titular Wilde, junior and diligent and quite possibly neurodivergent, and a tenured professor, lazy and charming and (Wilde suspects) prone to falsifying his research. Seasoned with little bits of horror, but still quite fun and cozy.
Finished reading The Language of Power by Rosemary Kirstein. This is clearly not the end of the series, though it ends on an adequately-satisfying note, but it’s the most-recently published. (Kirstein is apparently continuing to write.) Less Le Guin–esque than the others, but still reminiscent. I’ve enjoyed all these books.
Finished reading The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. A kind of a fantasy novel about a group of (mostly) women who gather and share knowledge, and a group of (mostly) men who hoard it, this feels like the kind of story that a younger Ursula K. Le Guin might have written.
Finished reading The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. I read it compulsively, but it was really hard, about sexism and abuse and surviving them. It didn’t help that the protagonist — or at least the narrator, maybe she’s not the protagonist — is not especially likeable. I’m glad I read this, but I can’t easily recommend it.
Finished reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell. I read it slowly and sporadically, as I do with a lot of nonfiction, and I’m not sure what to make of it. There seem to be some deep insights about how we perceive time and how parts of it are a social construction, along with digressions about labor and inequity that Odell manages to pull back to the main topic, along with bits that feel a little too woo-woo for me.
Finished reading Dead Country by Max Gladstone, book seven or one in a series, depending how you count. (It’s seven, I think.) Anyway, interestingly, this book sort of rhymed with Gladstone’s previous, Last Exit, sharing some motifs, but I think this was the better book: tighter and with less clumsy preaching.
Finished reading The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. I almost put this one down unfinished: The setting and story are incredibly inventive, and the characters’ portrayal and motivations very one-dimensional and clumsy. I actually found myself skimming parts, which I almost never do with fiction.