User Profile

Kelson Reads

KelsonReads@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 9 months ago

Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy and comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him.

Mostly reading science fiction these days, mixing in some fantasy and some non-fiction (mostly tech and science), occasionally other stuff. As far as books go, anyway. (I read more random articles than I probably should.)

Reviews are cross-posted on my website and I have a blog dedicated to Les Misérables.

Fediverse Main: @kelson@notes.kvibber.com (GoToSocial) Websites: KVibber.com and Hyperborea.org

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Ursula K. Le Guin: The Telling (2003, Ace) 4 stars

Thoughtful tale of culture vs monoculture

5 stars

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs and sequels.

We see it first in Sutty's memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she's trying to understand, one that's undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few …

avatar for KelsonReads Kelson Reads boosted

Where do folks go to get DRM-free epub books when they're trying to avoid Amazon and Barnes & Noble?

I use bookshop.org and thriftbooks.com for my hard copies of things, but I LOVE my eBooks too.

Right now the only advantage to Amazon is that I can legally break the DRM, so the book is truly mine once I purchase it (I won't buy eBooks I can't unlock). But I'd really like to find alternate sources of DRM-free books. Ideas?

reviewed Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente (Space Opera, #2)

Catherynne M. Valente: Space Oddity (Paperback, 2024, Saga Press) 4 stars

The Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation …

Exactly what I needed in October 2024

5 stars

Not quite as fun as the first book, but it's just as absurd and chaotic.

I started reading at the beginning of October, in the final weeks of the 2024 election, thinking: wow, this is exactly what I need right now! As things went along it got more cynical, and the story read like a bunch of totally disconnected threads, each with its own flavor of absurdist despair, and I just felt like I do not need this book right now.

And then at the end, everything came together in a moment of catharsis, and I found myself thinking yes, this is exactly what I need right now.

Life is beautiful. And life is stupid. (Unfortunately, beautiful is stuck behind a paywall, while stupid is free.) And we could all benefit from a read-through of Gorecannon's list of Unkillable Facts.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Jeff Deck: The great typo hunt (2010, Harmony Books) 3 stars

A cross-country road trip with a Sharpie

3 stars

I've mellowed on the subject of typos since this came out, but it was still an interesting read. The best road trip stories are not just a list of events and locations, they're about how the travelers change over the course of the journey. Deck starts out so hyperbolic and grandiose that he comes off as pretentious, but quickly discovers the issue is more nuanced -- and more socially fraught -- than he'd expected.

Retail workers vs. corporate policy, trying to avoid stepping in racial stereotypes, indie shopowners who might be more interested in fixing a misspelling but not have the resources to get it fixed.

It's also a bit more complex than the "two friends on a road trip." He has three different companions, one on each leg of the trip, each of whom brings a new perspective, and they get into the prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar. …

T. Kingfisher, Lauren Henderson: Summer in Orcus (Hardcover, 2017, Sofawolf Press, Inc.) 5 stars

What kind of quest would Baba Yaga send an 11-year-old girl on?

5 stars

An odd but appealing mix of whimsy and horror, turning portal fantasy tropes on their heads. Baba Yaga, the ultimate witch of Russian folklore, is the quest-giver. Summer's home life is shaped by her mother's severe anxiety. A wolf isn't a threat, but a staunch ally (and a were-creature who turns into a migratory house at night -- you thought Baba Yaga's house was the only one that walked around?). A lich refuses to move on until he finishes his to-read list. Geese are fierce warriors (OK, that part's realistic, except these geese carry spears too), which is fortunate, because 11-year-old Summer herself isn't going to be able to take down the mysterious Queen-In-Chains causing the rot that's slowly destroying Orcus all by herself...or is she?

It's a bit less cohesive than some of Vernon/Kingfisher's more recent YA/older kids' novels, partly because it was originally a serial and partly …