Tag Archives: book-review

July 19, 2024 · 7:53 pm

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet: AI in Space

I didn’t include this one in my roundup of books I’ve read about AI lately, but it could fit. Becky Chambers wrote The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in 2014 and like so much good sci-fi it anticipates the questions and issues that come to matter as technology changes and humans adapt (or don’t) to those changes.

What interested me in the book was not (though M. may be disappointed to learn of it) the questions of AI sentience, embodiment, identity and rights (and I’m not sure those questions were explored with sufficient nuance – though I’m promised the second book in the series does more), but rather the ideas of family and belonging – and what is owed and required of filial relationships.

We get to these ideas by way of the Wayfarer’s crew and their relationships with one another. The Wayfarer, a long-haul tunnelling ship (at one point the reader gets an explanation of space tunnelling that I gather must make sense but I glossed over because it was too much physics and not enough anything else) plays host to an interspecies crew, each with motley (and often fraught) backstories and species-specific uniqueness. Toward the end of the book one of the tech’s, Kizzy, explains why her crew-mate, Jenks doesn’t need to thank her for helping him. Her explanation is something about why Jenks as her brother (not by biology but by choice) can’t ever get rid of her, that their relationship, unlike a romantic one, is resilient and enduring (though I take exception to her framing of a sibling relationship as not needing work or gratitude). Like so many chosen-families, the Wayfarer crew each find moments in the narrative to explain to the reader why and how they have come to the ship and to the other crew members as those they choose to spend not just time with, but to build family. Lest the reader miss this meaning, Sissix, the Aandrisk character who, as a function of her species, intentionally chooses different kinds of families over the course of her life, explains in somewhat pedantic terms the absurdity of assuming that birth equates family and the idea that instead family is a function of care and of need.

I don’t read enough science fiction to know if this is an exceptionally good or exceptionally average representation of the genre, but I enjoyed it. With an ending that felt neatly wrapped – and sufficiently open for a sequel – it did leave this reader with some hope for our earthly-human future. A feeling of hope that, given everything else you might be reading today, may be sufficient reason to pick it up.

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July 19, 2024 · 12:47 am

James: Just excellent

I’d requested Percival Everett’s James from the library before my week of holiday, but it didn’t arrive on time. Oh well, I thought, it’ll take me a month of reading six pages at bedtime to get through it. Not so! The kind of book – the excellent, brilliant, unstoppably great – book that you hungrily read in snatched seconds before someone-needs-help-with-their-sunscreen or you-work-a-regular-job-and-have-to-do-that-job-and-that-job-is-not-regrettably-reading-this-excellent-book.

A rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a story I know well because I had a record – a record! – recording of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and listened to that record until it was beyond scratched and no longer playable, but could still recite long stretches – and if this was the 80s answer to the exhaustive library of audiobooks R and L listen to I’m not sure who comes out the winner as That Was a Good Record. ANYWAY), but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s slave.

The early ‘adventure’ narrative of Jim attempting escape and Huck joining him while he tries to escape the inevitable violence of his father, continues with the set-piece adventure scenes you’d expect: near misses, narrow escapes, and confounding characters up to no good. All the while the book explicitly and implicitly explores how race means, how it matters and when and to who and what the literal and bodily consequences of racism and violence look like. And how utterly absurd – and crushingly consequential – slavery is as an idea and a practice.

Perhaps not more than race, but alongside it, James is a book about the significance – and here I mean importance and the quality of signifying or giving meaning – of writing, reading, naming, crafting, telling and hearing stories, speaking – and how you speak – and of representation. Scenes of James claiming his name, or the costs of keeping a pencil, or the risks of telling – or not telling – Huck of his family. All wrapped up in what power is made and held in those who own narrative in who they will write/tell about, when and how (in a way that is obvious in a book that is a retelling of the story from the perspective of the historically marginalized-dehumanized Jim into the protagonist, author and creator but is nevertheless threaded consistently and brilliantly throughout the book).

As I write this I worry you will think this is a dry, boring book that is meant to be taught in second year literature courses (it is definitely not dry or boring but will also almost certainly be – or already be – taught in second year literature courses). Not so – this one has plot pacing that moves, all the while dropping impeccable sentences that just hang with gut pulling perfection.

So stop reading this rambling but enthusiastic review and go get the book already.

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July 11, 2024 · 12:01 pm

All the Sinners Bleed: Ah, now this is a mystery

S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed was a refreshing reminder that mysteries do not have to be badly written, predictable garbage (see my very recent experience reading Ruth Ware) and can, instead, hold rich writing, subtle characters and engaging plot.

Following the first black sheriff in Charon county (some southern town that is as much a character in the book as any of the people) (as an aside – how bananas is it that police officers are elected) as he investigates a serial killer, the book cares in equal measure for the thriller plot points that kept this reader up late as it does about the social context where seven black children could go missing with their disappearances uninvestigated for years. With some side plots about white supremacists protecting statues of confederate leaders and other threads following the aggressions that fill his day the reader sees the complexity and injustice Titus has to sit in or respond to just to do his job.

*spoiler: I appeciated, too, that the serial killer was not – as I spent most of the book assuming – a character we’d spent time with as readers, so it wasn’t a whodunnit so much as a thriller-mystery focused on Titus and how he finds the killer.

And some exceptional descriptions of dinner.

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July 3, 2024 · 4:16 pm

One Perfect Couple: Like its reality TV show counterpart, irresistible and terrible

I am way at a cottage with L. and B. and our kids and so wanted a book I could read in the four minute spurts between needing to find someone their bathing suit or reading someone else Robert Munch or chasing someone else with a bottle of sunscreen. Cue a best selling thriller – Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple.

What great timing for a book about a reality TV show that features couples brought together on a remote island to undergo some challenges and through the challenges break up some couples and couple-swap. Great timing because K. just recommended “Perfect Match” which is – minus the murder – the same plot of this reality TV show and so watching and reading them at the same time served to consolidate my sense of self-loathing for giving any of my time (never mind my reading and viewing time) to such terrible media.

Terrible in the case of One Perfect Couple because while the premise and opening chapters promise enthralling thriller where you can sink into a page-turning ripper it just… doesn’t deliver. I’d be more inclined to read the novel version of the reality show the novel begins with (but I guess I’m already watching the show). As the book progresses and the survivors of the giant storm are trying to keep alive, there’s a ‘murderer’ only it isn’t any kind of whodunnit so much as there’s a guy killing people and everyone else sort of lets it happen until they don’t. So maybe it’s trying to be an exploration of how good people stand by and let bad things happen? Or because it’s the women who ultimately come together to stop the Bad Man it’s meant to be a feminist take down? I suppose either are plausible, but neither really come together in the end. Instead we’re left with a sort of shrug of complicity and eventual spur to action with a less than satisfying climax where you can already anticipate how things will go.

Maybe the most interesting is whether I keep watching Perfect Match. Oh that’s true, as suspenseful as One Perfect Couple, which is to say: not at all suspenseful. Of course I will.

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