A murder mystery set in Saudi Arabia. I liked it well enough but there was something ultimately unsatisfying about the book. Then there were also some troubling reviews I read questioning the accuracy of the world depicted. Part of the reason I wanted to read the book was to get the double pleasure of a familiar genre and to learn more about another culture. Yet if the setting is inaccurate, I worry I feed myself falsehoods. For those reasons I won't continue with the rest of the series.
Reviews and Comments
I like to read science fiction, fantasy, poetry, philosophy, romance, and sometimes big-L literature. I'm on Mastodon at sfba.social/@dys_morphia I have a blog where I sometimes write book reviews rinsemiddlebliss.com/tags/book-review/
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Dysmorphia rated Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: 4 stars
Dysmorphia rated Thinking, fast and slow: 3 stars
Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman
In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, …
Dysmorphia rated Her Smoke Rose Up Forever: 5 stars
Dysmorphia rated Anackire (Novels of Vis, #2): 3 stars
Dysmorphia rated White as Snow: 3 stars
Review of 'Finding Nouf (Nayir Sharqi & Katya Hijazi #1)' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Dysmorphia rated Brightness Falls from the Air: 4 stars
Dysmorphia reviewed The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
More than anything, Joel wants to be a Rithmatist. Rithmatists have the power to infuse …
Review of 'The Rithmatist' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Another fun, light read from Sanderson. His approach to "magic" is even more machinistic that in the Mistborn books, and the steampunk aspect is a bit facile. This is a YA book with a preposterous premise, but I can forgive it because the plot and mystery carried me along.
I'd happily give this book to a young reader as a morality tale. There's a charming friendship between a boy and a girl, dealing with class differences, examples of mentorship from adults, and the novel idea that you can do a lot of good with hard work without being the chosen one.
Dysmorphia reviewed The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow, #1)
In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto …
Review of "The Sparrow: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)" on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
While the main characters were fairly interesting, the world building was weak. For all the time the characters spent thinking about theology, they sure didn't think through the ethics of their actions very much. As an example, they land on a new planet and decide to eat the food. The first thing they eat is an animal. Here they are on a planet that they know has at least on sentient species and they risk killing and eating an animal. Maybe that's realistic of the sort of stupidity Jesuits in Space might engage in but I didn't see a hint that the author and/or speaker found their actions even a little bit problematic either.
Nothing could have lived up to my expectation of Jesuits in Spaaaaace I suppose.
I'm generally pretty interested in theology, but this was all the boring kind of how do we know there is a God …
While the main characters were fairly interesting, the world building was weak. For all the time the characters spent thinking about theology, they sure didn't think through the ethics of their actions very much. As an example, they land on a new planet and decide to eat the food. The first thing they eat is an animal. Here they are on a planet that they know has at least on sentient species and they risk killing and eating an animal. Maybe that's realistic of the sort of stupidity Jesuits in Space might engage in but I didn't see a hint that the author and/or speaker found their actions even a little bit problematic either.
Nothing could have lived up to my expectation of Jesuits in Spaaaaace I suppose.
I'm generally pretty interested in theology, but this was all the boring kind of how do we know there is a God and is he watching and does he love us and what about the problem of natural evil. I had mistakenly believed that ethics would be discussed along with theology but it was absent. So was the possibly rich field of dealing with the Other in the form of aliens with a totally different approach to ethics.
Maybe I'm made of stone, but the prolonged deaths, mutilations, cannibalism and rape didn't make me cry or even make me cringe. I find it hard to believe that Jesuits who send dudes alone to scary parts of the world had no experience with rape victims. Or that they would assume someone stuck in an alien brothel with his hands gruesomely mutilated had somehow chosen to be there? I get that this is something that someone who hasn't actually met any Jesuits might think they would do, but it doesn't ring true to me.
I don't even know if I would recommend this book. It's not that it's so bad, but it's not that good, and it is sort of gruesome, and sort of whiny, and life is short and there's a lot more stuff you could read instead.
Read this if you're a fast reader or really into shallow theology. Like if you liked the theology in Prometheus this will seem really cool and deep by comparison.
Dysmorphia rated Mort: 3 stars
Mort by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett's hilarious fourth Discworld novel established once and for all that Death really is a laughing matter....
'He is …
Dysmorphia rated Reaper Man: 3 stars
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett (Discworld (11))
They say there are only two things you can count on ...But that was before DEATH started pondering the existential. …
Dysmorphia rated Thud!: 3 stars
Thud! by Terry Pratchett (Discworld, Book 34)
Koom Valley? That was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. …
Dysmorphia reviewed Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Change or die: the only options available on the Durallium Company-owned planet GP. The planet's …
Review of 'Ammonite' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The strengths of this book were ideas, character development, and atmosphere. The biggest weakness was pacing. I don't quite know if it was a weakness, really, but this is not a book that sucked me in, which is something I've come to expect from contemporary novels. I had to choose to keep reading rather than getting pulled along. Maybe then the fault was mine for expecting light reading, and getting something a bit closer to literary fiction.
It's hard to write a review without giving too much away. I'm normally not shy about spoilers but this is the kind of book where uncovering the ideas is a big part of the pleasure. Anyway I do recommend it, if for no other reason than that it's quite different from the kind of sci fi you'll find out there normally.
Dysmorphia rated Zahrah the Windseeker: 3 stars
Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor
Zahrah, a timid thirteen-year-old girl, undertakes a dangerous quest into the Forbidden Greeny Jungle to seek the antidote for her …