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.
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Success! Phil in SF has read 45 of 28 books.
An inquisitive life-form finds there’s more to existence than they ever dreamed in an imaginative short story by New York …
In Alafair Burke's electrifying thriller, Dead Connection, a rookie detective goes undercover on the Internet dating scene to draw out …
@pootriarch Reviews, comments and quotes are federated nicely. Even lists mostly are. But federating the book database itself is hard. When is an author the same author? When is a book the same book? When is it okay to override what someone entered for a book with what someone else put on another server?
The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based …
And with the addition of this book, I've now completed the Pulitzer Price for History list on SFBA.club (sfba.club/list/115/s/pulitzer-prize-for-history). If you follow me, there should be a version of the list on your server. I've added descriptions and high quality covers on SFBA.club; what shows up on other servers may be a crapshoot.
Phil in SF
boosted
Art history encompasses the study of the history and development of painting, sculpture, and other …
Good intro to the concepts and some key figures of art history. As a personal aside, I've been taking up shifts working the counter at a small art gallery, so I got to "test out" some of my newfound art history chops in real time. So while I can't hope to compare to the veterans, I was at least able to avoid embarrassing myself too badly--so I can consider that a testament to the utility of this book.
The delivery is economical, and uses accessible language. I feel like this is the author's voice coming through: some sentences give the impression they were tacked on as afterthoughts, or maybe as part of a final edit pass. They feel parenthetical, but they're not actually in round brackets, and the author does very little to explain them.
This kind of lack embellishment (or "didactics" for the art folks hehe) is the style …
Good intro to the concepts and some key figures of art history. As a personal aside, I've been taking up shifts working the counter at a small art gallery, so I got to "test out" some of my newfound art history chops in real time. So while I can't hope to compare to the veterans, I was at least able to avoid embarrassing myself too badly--so I can consider that a testament to the utility of this book.
The delivery is economical, and uses accessible language. I feel like this is the author's voice coming through: some sentences give the impression they were tacked on as afterthoughts, or maybe as part of a final edit pass. They feel parenthetical, but they're not actually in round brackets, and the author does very little to explain them.
This kind of lack embellishment (or "didactics" for the art folks hehe) is the style of the book. I liked it, it lent itself to a brisk pace of reading, while leaving lots of little breadcrumbs for further research and interesting thoughts to puzzle over.
Phil in SF
boosted
"A resonant look at that most mysterious of fish, the eel--including their biology and epic …
One of those bookshelves in a shared accomodation on an island in the hauraki.
Became a comfort book over the months afterwards- clearly written by someone who cared about the stories that he was being told. Has tapped into/made me low key obsessed with eels now…
In Alafair Burke's electrifying thriller, Dead Connection, a rookie detective goes undercover on the Internet …
I've also had Alafair Burke's 212 on my TBR pile for a while, but it's the 3rd book in the Ellie Hatcher series. So I went and got the 1st book in the series on Libby because I hate starting series after the first book.
The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, …
Reid Malenfant has a plan to go to the stars, and it's very Musk-like even before Musk was a thing. OK fine. Most of the first 12% of this book (which is where I pressed the eject button) is taken up by a sophist discussion of the chances of human survival. So here's the argument: either human population grows exponentially/polynomially, it levels off at a sustainable level, or it crashes. Following so far? The fact that you are alive means that the most likely outcome is the third. Here's the logic: In the first two scenarios, the vast majority of all humans will live in the future. So if you picked someone (you) randomly, you'd most likely be in the far future! Because you are here, the most likely outcome is that humans die off soon. In the story, within 240 years at the most.
First of all, this is …
Reid Malenfant has a plan to go to the stars, and it's very Musk-like even before Musk was a thing. OK fine. Most of the first 12% of this book (which is where I pressed the eject button) is taken up by a sophist discussion of the chances of human survival. So here's the argument: either human population grows exponentially/polynomially, it levels off at a sustainable level, or it crashes. Following so far? The fact that you are alive means that the most likely outcome is the third. Here's the logic: In the first two scenarios, the vast majority of all humans will live in the future. So if you picked someone (you) randomly, you'd most likely be in the far future! Because you are here, the most likely outcome is that humans die off soon. In the story, within 240 years at the most.
First of all, this is not a plot. Or characters. Or poetic language. Or description. Or ... any of a hundred other things that would be interesting. This is someone smoking too much pot and explaining their pot-infused philosophy to you. If an author wants to set up a coming apocalypse there's so many better ways to do it than this "clever" thought experiment.
Second of all, this therefore means that if humanity does survive into the far future, they have sent a message back in time to us with instructions on how to survive. That whole sophistry just sets up Reid Malenfant's purpose to be to look for the message from the future. This whole first part of the book is just to set that up. That makes no sense and I had to read it all for that reason? Give me a break!
At this point I searched for reviews of the book to see if anyone said the later parts of the book are worth it. And the top review of Manifold: Time that Google referred me to is one from Kirkus. It's fairly spoilery, so if the above BS is actually intriguing to you, don't click the review. Anyway, I've no interest in reading the schmoz that's described there.
DNF at 12%.
The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, …
Good lord.
Phil in SF
boosted
From the internationally bestselling author of Tigana, All the Seas of the World, and A …
Set in Ferrieres, Kay’s alt-version of medieval France, in the city of Orane, Thierry Villar, tavern poet, is about to become in embroiled in affairs much more complicated than a rivalry for Jolis de Charette’s affections.
As usual, I found Kay’s prose beautiful, filled with sentences I love reading. The way he ruminates upon fate, feelings, and fortunes, and the inevitable bittersweet of his characters lives is once again extremely rewarding. Written in the Dark is yet another tile in the Sarantine mosaic, and I really enjoyed it.
Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future. Otherwise, he lives an ordinary life. …
Updated the Locus Awards lists I curate to include the winners announced tonight, including this book, which won for Best Science Fiction Novel.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he …
Content warning Contains minor spoilers
A story about a high school science teacher who gets sucked (willingly) into humanity's attempt to save itself from "astrophage", a microbe that has the capability of living on the surface of the sun because it lives on energy. The problem is that astrophage will dim the sun by 10% and that will kill everyone.
The story begins with Ryland Grace waking up on a space ship with no memories. The device allows Weir to go into the history of astrophage through flashbacks, and also allow some things to not be told to the reader because Grace doesn't remember them... yet. Anyway, Grace realizes he's at Tau Ceti because it's the only nearby star system that isn't infected with astrophage and he's there to figure out why.
Project Hail Mary has a very 80s feel to it. Very gee whiz exploring the universe is very cool. A lot of plausible sounding science, if you accept the premise that a microbe can absorb the sun's energy, store it, and then propel itself at nearly the speed of light through releasing that energy.
Most of the characters appear in flashbacks explaining how we got here, and those characters are fun caricatures. Unfortunately only one of them, Eva Stratt gets any real repeat scenes. She's the administrator who is put in charge of Project Hail Mary. A wondrously amoral character that can command the militaries of any of the world's powers, including detonating nukes in Antarctica and force-drafting scientists to the project who really don't want to be part of it.
The primary story happens on the Hail Mary in the Tau Ceti system with Grace alone trying to figure out what to do. The plot is a series of scenes of problems appearing, Grace thinking and sciencing his way through them, followed by a short respite or flashback before the next problem appears. Grace solves all of them, but this isn't competence porn. He's incredibly sloppy in a way that really does remind me of my high school science teachers.
This is clearly written to be a major motion picture or a streaming series, so I expect there will be ample opportunity to consume this story that way soon.
A young man caught between two disparate worlds searches for his place in the universe …
On a space station, no one knows you are the former Patty Hearst. Kidnapped by terrorists, Patty Heart shoots her adoptive father when the rescue mission arrives and is convicted of that. In some sort of deal, Patty gets probation and anonymity on a distant space station university. OK, It's not really Patty Hearst, it's Ira and his adoptive father is a senator in a race of alien conquerors of Earth, and this is somewhat of an analog for indigenous kids getting adopted by White colonizers. OK, but the story is too short to get into Ira's inner life and that's needed to make the ending not feel didactic.
“Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?” That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no …
After a string of less than enjoyable Reacher novels, this was one I liked. As frequently happens, Reacher stumbles into a town based on its name ("Mother's Rest"). Turns out there's crime happening there, and Reacher is a one man A-Team. Reacher and former FBI Michelle Chang form a duo looking for her partner, Keever who stumbled on something happening and then disappeared. Reacher and Chang go from Mother's Rest to Oklahoma City to Chicago to Colorado Springs to Los Angeles to Phoenix to Menlo Park and finally back to Mother's Rest mostly because the actual criminals in Mother's Rest are very Keystone so Lee Child has to introduce lots of other elements to fill out the book. Which is all acceptable to me… except that the Menlo Park dude is someone building a super secret search engine for the "Deep Web" which Child explains is the Tor project. Searching …
After a string of less than enjoyable Reacher novels, this was one I liked. As frequently happens, Reacher stumbles into a town based on its name ("Mother's Rest"). Turns out there's crime happening there, and Reacher is a one man A-Team. Reacher and former FBI Michelle Chang form a duo looking for her partner, Keever who stumbled on something happening and then disappeared. Reacher and Chang go from Mother's Rest to Oklahoma City to Chicago to Colorado Springs to Los Angeles to Phoenix to Menlo Park and finally back to Mother's Rest mostly because the actual criminals in Mother's Rest are very Keystone so Lee Child has to introduce lots of other elements to fill out the book. Which is all acceptable to me… except that the Menlo Park dude is someone building a super secret search engine for the "Deep Web" which Child explains is the Tor project. Searching Tor project web sites is not hard. Anyway, as long as I don't know how something works it's easy enough for me to suspend disbelief and enjoy it! And I did, other than the stupid "search the Deep Web" parts.
Phil in SF
boosted
With the Nebula Award–winning Uprooted, Naomi Novik opened a brilliant new chapter in an already …
Content warning very minor spoilers, trying to keep them vague
3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too
I liked the kind of fairy tale aspect to it - there's magic but not too much, a lot of the drama is very local and personal, focused on relationships between people. Most of the fantasy elements are familiar, but also enough of a new spin on things to be interesting.
The story is a bunch of people writing in first person with no labels as to who is who; you can generally tell immediately who is who, it feels a bit gimmicky though. Some of the characters are just a lot more interesting than others, and I often found myself impatient to switch back to a more interesting character. Some characters seem kind of redundant with each other and I started to confuse certain pairs near the end, some characters' perspectives seemed included mostly because it was needed for plot reasons, and I noticed that in more action-filled scenes it was usually the perspective of an outside observer to the scene that was narrating which I'm not sure always worked. I think it would have been better if one particular characters' perspective was not shown and you discovered his view of things more gradually over time.
There was also a thing that happened between the main character and another protagonist that seemed kind of morally dubious but the story seemed contrived so that it was ok for her to do that thing. Like most of the protagonists are anti-heroes to some extent but this felt kind of out of place.
Interestingly for a story revolving so much around certain marriages, it was distinctly un-romantic in a way I kind of liked. I feel like fantasy novels with female protagonists - especially ones who are more or less within medieval gender norms - tend to be very romance focused and this was much more about politics and intrigue.
I think I generally liked the first half of the book more when the story was smaller and more personal in scope and less about kingdoms and so on.
It didn't really have much to do with Rumpelstiltskin.
