Mice struggle to live safely and prosper amongst harsh conditions and a host of predators. …
Review of 'Mouse Guard' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Very pretty art, basic/ok worldbuilding, the interactions between the characters, revelations and general plot reminded me of a standard fantasy tabletop RPG in a good way. You won't find anything super worth dwelling into in the writing here I think, but the art is pretty and it makes for an entertaining 40 minutes.
Review of 'Fight for Scottish Democracy' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Basically what it says on the tin; an interesting, comprehensive and easy to follow account of events surrounding the "Radical War". I thought it was framed nicely and illustrated the struggle of people demanding the autonomy and lives they deserved and the predictable often violent reactions from those in power. I expected a bit more editorializing, but it reads somewhat like a Wikipedia article at times.
Science fiction and East Asian myth combine in this dazzling retelling of the rise of …
Review of 'Iron Widow' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
If you're even the least bit curious about this book after reading the premise you probably owe it to yourself to read it. A doozy mech sci-fi, historical retelling(?), YA romance book weaved together by the power of spite and feminism. As a big fan of the mecha genre I really appreciate how obviously familiar and comfortable the author is with it's themes of bodies, the instrumentalization of young pilots and exertion of imperial power.
A fascinating and insightful book on what the end(ing(s)) of capitalism look like from our current state and from the perspective of experts and scholars. As someone who's definitely not equipped to understand the totality of what this series of essays covers, I found some chapters more engaging and easier to grasp than others; I was particularly fond of chapter 2 on barbarism and capitalism, chapter 3 on feminist perspectives on post-capitalist futures, chapter 9 on movements generated from exclusion and chapter 10 which is a fascinating writeup on the language used to describe the spaces of opportunity from which liberative movements can emerge and how they are co-opted and repressed through the lens of recent Ecuadorian history. As someone in the technology area I was interested in chapter's 6 concept of FALC ("Fully Automated Luxury Communism") for which it seemed to advocate but I didn't feel like it made …
A fascinating and insightful book on what the end(ing(s)) of capitalism look like from our current state and from the perspective of experts and scholars. As someone who's definitely not equipped to understand the totality of what this series of essays covers, I found some chapters more engaging and easier to grasp than others; I was particularly fond of chapter 2 on barbarism and capitalism, chapter 3 on feminist perspectives on post-capitalist futures, chapter 9 on movements generated from exclusion and chapter 10 which is a fascinating writeup on the language used to describe the spaces of opportunity from which liberative movements can emerge and how they are co-opted and repressed through the lens of recent Ecuadorian history. As someone in the technology area I was interested in chapter's 6 concept of FALC ("Fully Automated Luxury Communism") for which it seemed to advocate but I didn't feel like it made a complete argument and I didn't come away from it with as much of an understanding as I would have liked.
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian …
Review of 'Gideon the Ninth' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I didn't know what to expect from this after 2 years of this series being talked about among people whose taste tend to align with mine in kind of ambiguous ways. I knew people liked it but I also half anticipated it to be a gamble for me on the basis of all the "memes references" and "ow the edge" talk. Both, as it turns out, were way overblown (at least to me), and instead I found an incredibly entertaining sci-fantasy novel with great worldbuilding, a clever magic system, a memorable cast, some really alluring lore, a core plot that reminded me of the Zero Escape video game series (which is a good thing), and a unique, refreshing author voice. Halfway through the 80 percents I realized I was in what I can only (unfortunately) describe as a Brandon Sanderson-style rollercoaster of a last act (I'm told Gene Wolfe once …
I didn't know what to expect from this after 2 years of this series being talked about among people whose taste tend to align with mine in kind of ambiguous ways. I knew people liked it but I also half anticipated it to be a gamble for me on the basis of all the "memes references" and "ow the edge" talk. Both, as it turns out, were way overblown (at least to me), and instead I found an incredibly entertaining sci-fantasy novel with great worldbuilding, a clever magic system, a memorable cast, some really alluring lore, a core plot that reminded me of the Zero Escape video game series (which is a good thing), and a unique, refreshing author voice. Halfway through the 80 percents I realized I was in what I can only (unfortunately) describe as a Brandon Sanderson-style rollercoaster of a last act (I'm told Gene Wolfe once referred to it as a "slingshot ending"), except it was happening in an uncompromisingly good book, and read thru to the end. Loved it.
Review of 'Point Is to Change the World' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
An insightful series of writings that range from the "scholarly" to the very personal about Andaiye's work as part of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, Red Thread (a women's org), her struggles with cancer, Walter Rodney's death, the Grenada revolution and other subjects. I didn't know much Caribbean history or background beforehand but the book was good at explaining or providing context. The writings themselves are generally easy to understand, hard hitting and well structured, like the book itself which is broken up in 4 or 5 main topics.
I don't have much experience with the murder/locked-room mystery subgenre, but I think this was fine? It has everything I'd expect from one: Murders, plenty of suspects, convoluted plots, reveals from beginning to end and a somewhat quirky detective character whose extraordinary and ultra reliable intuition makes me feel I'm watching Chris Remo solve the NYT crossword on YouTube without a single doubt he's gonna do it by the time the video's over. I find it interesting that the book is more about the how than the who, which I expect might let some people down, but even on that front it has some reveals up its sleeve.
This series continues to be less good than I'd like it to be, and I continue to be at a loss as to why. The art is great, the worldbuilding is genuinely interesting, the questions and themes it raises do grab me, but I'm having a hard time buying the characters' different voices and their relations with the world and each other. I'd almost like it more if it was told in third person. I'll pick up Vol 3 at some point, so it's doing something right!
This book is Mulan x Three Kingdoms with a dash of Baru Cormorant, which is to say, it attempts to encapsulate some of my biggest likes in fiction in a tightly written package and manages to do so with flying colors. I find it funny that right after I finished Three Kingdoms, the next book I happened to pick up couldn't stop talking about the Mandate of Heaven, used li as a unit of length and had characters comparing themselves to Zhuge Liang. I guess it was written in the heavens!
Two centuries after the first European ship sailed to the Malabar Coast and made landfall …
Review of 'These Savage Shores' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Excellently written and beautifully illustrated, this is close to a perfect one shot. A literal vampire arrives in southwest India with metaphoric vampires the EIC and we quickly realize who's the real essence-absorbing monster come to ransack the shores of Malabar and beyond. It doesn't feel like its short length is a detriment at all, even with the expansive plot and multiple POVs. A real lesson in narrative economy IMO.
Convenience Store Woman (Japanese: コンビニ人間, Hepburn: Konbini Ningen) is a 2016 novel by Japanese author …
Review of 'Convenience Store Woman' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
What a weird book. I'm writing this at a time when I haven't really wrangled my feelings about it. It's very well written/translated and it took me very little time to finish it. It's also a really well realized dark comedy in the sense that its exaggerations and caricatures all scratch at something real, whether it's the weight of societal expectations, the way people give themselves to the capitalist machinery or the need for structured behavior in general - and I didn't know whether to feel bad or laugh. It's argument is also complicated further by the existence of Shiraha, someone who, to me, represents the person who can kind of see the system for what it is but reacts to that by seeking to bypass it or benefit from it, and connects it to an extremely toxic worldview as a result. I think I liked this?
"That girl's got more wrong notions than a barn owl's got mean looks."
Esther is …
Review of 'Upright Women Wanted' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
You'd think a novella set in a far-future version of the USA in which its infrastructure has decayed to the point of turning it into the wild west and rogue librarians turned freedom fighters smuggle anti-state contraband and fight to liberate people from the oppression of a fascist dictatorial government would be pretty good.
Complete and unabridged, Moss Roberts's translation provides an authoritative, annotated English-language version of one of …
Review of 'Three kingdoms' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Reading Three Kingdoms is a capital-P Project. 120 chapters chronicling close to a 100 years of Chinese history, the fall of the Han dynasty, the emergence of the Shu, Wei and Wu states and their eventual unification by the Jin dynasty. A kingdom long united must divide, long divided must unite. I read this titanic book over 10 months, 12 chapters at a time, and it proved to be a fantastic way to do so: I got enough content every month to think about, never got bored and never forgot what was going on when I hopped back in.
And I really enjoyed my time with it; like Moss Roberts, the translator of this excellent unabridged version, says in his closing essay, this book can be considered a historical text, a novel, a drama - it has it all. A cavalcade of major and minor characters, most of them memorable, …
Reading Three Kingdoms is a capital-P Project. 120 chapters chronicling close to a 100 years of Chinese history, the fall of the Han dynasty, the emergence of the Shu, Wei and Wu states and their eventual unification by the Jin dynasty. A kingdom long united must divide, long divided must unite. I read this titanic book over 10 months, 12 chapters at a time, and it proved to be a fantastic way to do so: I got enough content every month to think about, never got bored and never forgot what was going on when I hopped back in.
And I really enjoyed my time with it; like Moss Roberts, the translator of this excellent unabridged version, says in his closing essay, this book can be considered a historical text, a novel, a drama - it has it all. A cavalcade of major and minor characters, most of them memorable, outrageous and terrible at decision-making, at times guided by foolish ideals, and at others the natural inertia towards power that leadership brings. It's a book concerned about what it means to be a good ruler, or someone who serves their ruler, and how that doesn't guarantee success. And sometimes it's about a mischievous wizard that pranks said rulers with troll magic, building ridiculous shrines to change the direction of the wind, doing dream interpretation, or summoning a maze to confound an enemy's army.
And it's really well written. It may have been written in the 14th century and that may lead someone to imagine it being hard to read, or constricted by antiquated literary conventions from said times. Far from it, it deploys drama, twists, sometimes tightly paced and sometimes drawn out battles, both in the battlefield and at kingdoms' courts, superbly. Gambits upon gambits are layered on top of each other when master strategists find themselves at opposite ends of the battlefield. Poems, letters and even children songs litter the pages and color the action on the page. I laughed out loud, I... well, I mostly laughed. But it's good! It's not hard to see where its popularity comes from and why it has come to be known as one of China's 4 classic novels.
I'll admit that the first 3/4s or so are more exciting than the latter parts of the book, full of more supernatural feats, legendary heroes and history-shaking battles; history doesn't always lend itself to exciting final confrontations or epic finales, and by the time the book reaches its conclusion it's more of a fizzling out than an energetic burst, but I thought the earlier parts provided enough momentum that the novel kept me hooked to the end.
Also: Shout-outs to the Romance of the Two Networks podcast, a fantastic reading companion to the book that also happened to fit well with my 12-chapters-a-month reading schedule.
