aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
They travelled into the unknown and left themselves behind . . .
Professor Arton Daghdev …
Maybe I'm just not a fan of the prison planet genre, but this one does get pretty good in the second half
No rating
For a while I thought I was accidentally rereading the author's other prison-on-another-planet book (Cage of Souls) which I just didn't get into and gave up halfway through, but maybe I should have stuck with it, because I also found this one slow-going and uninterestingly written for the first half but then it really got going and I thought the writing was almost poetry in the final chapters. My new theory is he's a different writer once the extraterrestrial biology gets going and the boring human-on-human preliminaries are out of the way.
Every day, Albert Entwistle makes his way through the streets of his small English town, …
A Sweet Story of an Isolated Queer Elder Finding Community
4 stars
While this book starts off really sad (why was I reading it in public?) it comes around to being a narrative about how being true to yourself will lead to finding yourself and community. Like with Heartstopper on Netflix, your worst fears are never manifested. We really did need a queer elder Heartstopper that celebrates surviving through times when being gay would lead to job loss, prison, or worse. Whether they had to live in the closet or were willing and able to take on the challenges of being out at the time, they survived when many people didn’t.
If you are looking for a challenging queer narrative or one focusing on the issues queer people face today, you might be disappointed. If you want a fuzzy and easy book (after crying for the first 50 pages) you might fall in love with Albert and Nichole. I forgot to mention …
While this book starts off really sad (why was I reading it in public?) it comes around to being a narrative about how being true to yourself will lead to finding yourself and community. Like with Heartstopper on Netflix, your worst fears are never manifested. We really did need a queer elder Heartstopper that celebrates surviving through times when being gay would lead to job loss, prison, or worse. Whether they had to live in the closet or were willing and able to take on the challenges of being out at the time, they survived when many people didn’t.
If you are looking for a challenging queer narrative or one focusing on the issues queer people face today, you might be disappointed. If you want a fuzzy and easy book (after crying for the first 50 pages) you might fall in love with Albert and Nichole. I forgot to mention ton her, but as a young black single mother, she too goes on a similar journey opening herself up to the people around her and standing up for her needs. She could have easily slipped into a shallow stereotype, but her characterization felt well done to my eyes.
I read enough to get a flavor, and the flavor is Caveman
No rating
I realize this guy is a sci-fi legend, and a I read a bunch of his stuff as a kid (I think The Dueling Machine doesn't get enough credit inspiring a bunch of movies I saw later), but as with beer, my taste for prose has refined over the years, and this book reads like early Bond, telling the spunky female jet pilot to get her little butt out of there, and I had to stop at "oriental inscrutability." I guess that counted for DEI at the time to just have a female and Asian character, and I actually flipped back to the copyright page expecting it to be sometime in the 50s but actually it was published in 1988. So the eighties weren't that great. I give the eighties two and a half stars.
I almost wanted to DNF at the beginning but I am very glad I did not DNF. Be patient with this book. It is worth it. I cried. I laughed. It's the coming of age story that is needed because we all can't just read The Bell Jar and stop there as if that is the definitive young woman at college story. No this book has added much to this genre or legacy. There should be more books like this. Being the only poor person in a room full of people who do not get your socioeconomic background and would rather pretend you don't exist is a terrible time.
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem …
Does not deliver on the premise
2 stars
I picked this up because I was looking for works that espoused the ideas of Abundance but did a better job at either making the case for "build the stuff we want", or being a rallying cry for the idea as a political framework. That's not the premise for this book, nor does it really touch on the idea. The only thing he mentions doing more of is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the context of one prong of his thesis. So what is it?
Harris promises that he'll show the way through the climate crisis, and it turns out he means by putting forward three-plus frameworks for exercising political power to do things that the book assumes we need to do to get off fossil fuels. His frameworks: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Marketcraft is basically really strong regulation of market forces (rather than just nudges). Public power is state ownership …
I picked this up because I was looking for works that espoused the ideas of Abundance but did a better job at either making the case for "build the stuff we want", or being a rallying cry for the idea as a political framework. That's not the premise for this book, nor does it really touch on the idea. The only thing he mentions doing more of is pumped-storage hydroelectricity in the context of one prong of his thesis. So what is it?
Harris promises that he'll show the way through the climate crisis, and it turns out he means by putting forward three-plus frameworks for exercising political power to do things that the book assumes we need to do to get off fossil fuels. His frameworks: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Marketcraft is basically really strong regulation of market forces (rather than just nudges). Public power is state ownership of key industries; he gives the example of building pumped-storage hydroelectricity. And by communism he means bottom-up pseudo anarchist revolution, such as the Zapatistas. He also makes the claim that if he does his job right, his favored strategy of those three won't be favored.
For each of the strategies, he states how they might work, and what might prevent them from working. Except he devotes nearly 2/3 of the book to communism and his criticism of it is that capitalism is probably more successful at violence than communists are.
And in the last 7-ish percent of the book, he puts forward that it'll really be a mix of 2 or more of the strategies and gives surface level examples of how the strategies might mesh. And his final flourish, the one concrete organizing thing he thinks people should do, is establish "disaster councils" that work across all three strategies, but devotes only a couple of sentences to how these could work. None of what the disaster councils would do (as described) really deals with the climate crisis.
About the only thing he says won't work is laissez faire capitalism or other pure market forces. And dismisses it with a wave of his hand that it's already failed. I agree, actually, but that is easy.
Is he actually wrong? Hell if I know, but it's nearly impossible to be wrong with such a broad position. The whole thing comes across as "here's what I like and don't like about three kinds of leftism." I just wasn't very impressed, but I'm just a cranky dude on the internet. What do I know?
Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial …
Really gobsmacked that SFPL is doing a book on hallucination machines ("AI") for One City One Book this year. (This is now added to the One City One Book list.)
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem …
About to hit the final chapter and calling it a night. I'll maybe finish tomorrow. I'm really rooting for the author, but I don't think he's going to pull this thing off.
Cordelia and Aral attempt to settle down, but their wedded bliss is soon shattered because politics.
I liked this more than “Shards of Honor”, but I'm still not a member of the McMaster Bujold fan club. I still find her writing style a bit… strange, and again the questionable language pops up. Certain plot elements, which I understand are integral to future novels, just didn't interest me, and it was hard to care. But some chapters and passages really caught my attention, and I suspect I might enjoy the later novels more.
The Kamogawa Food Detectives is the first book in the bestselling, mouth-watering Japanese series, for …
Very cosy, but not much mystery
3 stars
A father-daughter duo of “food detectives” sleuth their way to recreating beloved lost meals.
Felt more like tableaus flowing into one another than a novel. Nagare, is almost Holmesian in his ability to infer what clients desire from the interviews conducted by Koishi. Relentlessly cosy, but readers have zero chance at solving any of the “mysteries”. I found it unsatisfying as it’s short on detecting, focusing more on patrons’ often bittersweet stories. Not the book I thought I was getting, and I prefer something with more “meat” on its bones.
A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism from award-winning author Brenda …
I used my time listening to the Mariners v. the Tigers in the ALDS (yay for streaming radio!) to add all the Philip K. Dick award winners to a list. That's an award for distinguished science fiction first published in paperback. Most of these, including Time's Agent, seem like stuff right up my alley.
As always, if you are on SFBA.club, all the entries have descriptions and hi-res covers. The list on other servers depends on what rando first added each edition.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and “writer …
humorous and purposeful, after a shaky start
3 stars
An unfolding lighthearted mystery but with heavy themes of despair and unlikable ensemble, the intentional misdirection of each preceding chapter makes for a shaky start that settles into a reliable pacing for uplifting comic humanity.
