This is mostly to keep track of books for my own interest. I hope to get back into reading novels and non-fiction which is of interest to other people at some point, but I've largely fallen out of the habit and mostly read to support other hobbies I have.
You can also find me at sanae@carfree.city.
I use the following rubric: 5 stars: one of my favourite books of all time 4 stars: loved this book, would recommend 3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too 2 stars: did not like this book 1 star: did not like this book and would recommend that you not read it
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With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period …
4 stars: loved it, would recommend
Copying over from goodreads, read it a while ago so my review is pretty short
A pretty quick read. Great for anyone who likes highly political medieval type fantasy (the time period - it's set in a more Asian-inspired world).
4 stars: loved it, would recommend
an old book, copying over from goodreads
I checked this book out from the library in 2020 on the day everything shut down. This is what got me into the ancient peoples of the Americas as an adult, and what made me realize I knew absolutely nothing about them.
Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back …
4 stars: loved this book, would recommend
I didn't think it was that much like Harry Potter but I used to read a lot of pre-Harry Potter YA fantasy with similar themes as a kid
(I read this a long time ago, I'm copying over from Goodreads)
I'm going through and copying over books from goodreads like 5 years ago
Content warning major spoilers for themes; discussion of characterizations
I see some comments online describing this as "just hard sci fi, the characterizations don't matter" and I don't think that's true at all. None of the characters are terribly likeable and I think that's important. This is not just a book about alien contact and the nature of consciousness, but also about transhumanism.
Almost everyone in this book has, to some degree, deliberately damaged their psyche, or been damaged by the world they live in. There are two groups of humans, roughly: those who have retreated into an idealized transhuman world, "heaven", where everyone exists alone in an idealized version of their creation uncomplicated by other humans or by any kind of meaningful happiness, or who are on their way there, or those who have needed to essentially harm themselves psychologically to remain competitive and relevant in their careers.
The main character's parents each have taken on one of those two roles: the mother pursuing transhuman/human-less bliss, the father sacrificing his family for his career in a more mundane way, both to the detriment of the main character. The only one really speaking for humanity as we know it is his ex-girlfriend - I've seen some discussions assuming his girlfriend is meant to be the bad guy here instead of someone who loves him and just wants him to go to therapy and maybe try to be happy for who he is instead of turning himself into a tool (insert meme about men will get mauled by a vampire to avoid going to therapy).
At the same time there is a strong current of self-hate in this book, of the main character for his own difficulties with empathy, despite that being his main marketable skill, something he is supposed to cultivate. It is at the end implied that the hostility he assumes from those around him is largely something he imagines and projects on other people (although we do get it explicitly from a few characters). There are strong hints that a lot of secondary characters do care a lot about Siri, and he repeatedly sabotages that, because improving his ability to relate to other people makes him worse at his job. In a world that actually valued humanity (in all its variations) he could be happy, but he lives in a deeply anti-human society (and Siri is very much human, despite his fears/hopes).
One thing that makes this book a challenging read is that the narrator is extremely unreliable on many different levels, and you have to kind of infer what his deal is not just from what he says but from what other characters say about him. I think it is very much a character driven book.
I don't know to what degree the author is deliberately critiquing certain trends in how we think about technology today, or simply is immersed in them and sees them as inevitable and horrific. The end result of all of this is that consciousness - what we think of as humanity - even just like the ability to appreciate art and stuff - is inefficient and likely to be optimized away, but that is true only in the context of this worldview. The only logical end result of this version of transhumanism is that humans are obsolete. The obvious escape from this bleak version of the world is I guess to say that consciousness is pretty cool even if it's not optimal and maybe if I can become a cyborg it will be for fun reasons and not to be better at my job.
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around …
I might do a more thorough review later, with spoilers, once I'm on my computer
I read this a while ago and re-read it. It's a challenge to read, dense with invented jargon and hard to follow just because of how weird everything is. It's probably the most nihilistic book I've ever read, and the characters are not at all sympathetic. Nevertheless, having half understood it from reading it too fast 10 years ago, it has stuck with me since then, and held up even better the second time and I'm giving it a rare 5 stars.
The first time I read it, it was more emotionally impactful - more horror than sci Fi and in ways I was not at all expecting. The second time I felt like I could at least wrap my head around it completely.
Coming back in the age of LLMs certain concepts about what …
I might do a more thorough review later, with spoilers, once I'm on my computer
I read this a while ago and re-read it. It's a challenge to read, dense with invented jargon and hard to follow just because of how weird everything is. It's probably the most nihilistic book I've ever read, and the characters are not at all sympathetic. Nevertheless, having half understood it from reading it too fast 10 years ago, it has stuck with me since then, and held up even better the second time and I'm giving it a rare 5 stars.
The first time I read it, it was more emotionally impactful - more horror than sci Fi and in ways I was not at all expecting. The second time I felt like I could at least wrap my head around it completely.
Coming back in the age of LLMs certain concepts about what intelligence and sentience actually are start seeming a lot more relevant. Some of the ways the main character is unable to relate to other people reminds me of some of the dangerous Internet subcultures that have grown prominent in the past few years. It feels alarmingly more relevant than the first time despite not being at all about any of these things.
The characters are not like conventionally sympathetic but I think you have to approach the book with a willingness to empathize with a broader range of people than most books ask you to - not in the sense of being bad people but of being people who relate to the world differently than most people depicted in fiction.
The vampire thing is unnecessary and out of place, you could have the exact same story and not call them that
Two books I've read that I would say are most similar are Annihilation and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (not the movie though)
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous …
"we are a young species. we don't know how to hold in our hands the tools we have made."
3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too
This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.
What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.
Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being …
3 stars: enjoyed this book, you might like it too
This is kind of a weird review because I feel like it was a different book than what I expected.
What it ended up being was a history of how femininity was socially constructed, in the context of social class, in Britain over the last few hundred years, and how the construction of modern femininity (as distinct from medieval femininity) was very closely intertwined with the construction of social classes as the middle class emerged. It did this largely through the lens of embroidery. It felt surprisingly modern in how it talked about gender as something changing and socially constructed and existing in the context of other socially constructed concepts, but it did feel very narrowly focused on Britain and Britain-adjacent areas.
Except for at the end in the more modern area, I don't think it really demonstrated embroidery being subversive. Embroidery was used to enforce norms of femininity. At the same time, women rejecting embroidery, in the context of the various feminist movements, often reinforced the idea that things associated with women were inherently inferior. It did talk about how people related to embroidery in different ways and how people could make a world of mandatory embroidery/mandatory femininity more tolerable and find some agency within it, about how embroidery could both trap women and offer them freedom, but it felt rather incongruous with its title. I feel like the book described the situation honestly and accurately, but if you were hoping for more subversion, there isn't a lot in this book.
It actually so far doesn't talk a ton about embroidery directly but there's a lot of interesting things about how notions of gender have evolved. In medieval times (and this is mostly talking about Britain), women were viewed as defective men; this obviously was not great but gave women more freedom than they could later have - a woman could for instance learn a trade so long as it didn't interfere with having kids and stuff, but it was just assumed she'd be worse at it. But it wasn't viewed as a threat to men in the way it later was. Whereas in the Renaissance came the idea that men and women are defined in opposition to each other, that it's the duty of women to be feminine in part because women have to be feminine for men to be masculine. The idea that binary gender as it exists in …
It actually so far doesn't talk a ton about embroidery directly but there's a lot of interesting things about how notions of gender have evolved. In medieval times (and this is mostly talking about Britain), women were viewed as defective men; this obviously was not great but gave women more freedom than they could later have - a woman could for instance learn a trade so long as it didn't interfere with having kids and stuff, but it was just assumed she'd be worse at it. But it wasn't viewed as a threat to men in the way it later was. Whereas in the Renaissance came the idea that men and women are defined in opposition to each other, that it's the duty of women to be feminine in part because women have to be feminine for men to be masculine. The idea that binary gender as it exists in today's society comes out of the Renaissance is not something I expected.
Also in medieval times, embroidery was more of a communal activity, often done in the service of a church, through projects that required multiple people and someone to plan and direct it. However the association with the church and with nobility meant it was suitable for signaling not just femininity (with embroidery moving from the public to the private sphere) but also social class. This coincided with a move towards the home as an isolated sphere of femininity vs one that overlapped with work (farmwork, workshops etc). After the change towards embroidery being a mark of domesticity it became a way to enforce domesticity: early on in this process women might design patterns that interested them and embroidery was part of a larger (though feminized) education, whereas later on it became part of a preoccupation with making sure everyone was working all the time, and there was a shift towards samplers and towards executing difficult, standardized tasks rather than creativity. Making girls do embroidery, often with messages emphasizing obedience and meekness, became a bigger part of it.
There's also an interesting thing about the story of St Margaret, who is originally said to have killed a dragon and was associated with childbirth, and how her story got censored over time as that was considered unwomanly.
Apparently women in medieval times were pretty active in a lot of jobs (including ones governed by guilds) and could even have positions of leadership in various industries, though typically were paid less and subject to various limitations, and that this was more true during the early middle ages
So far it's talked about how the gendered division of labour in the context of embroidery was something invented by the Victorians who were obsessed with medieval times and wanted to use their assumptions about medieval times to justify the social hierarchies of the time. Also how the notion of women as non-workers (with embroidery as an example of non-work) was used to create the notion of middle class as well as constrain women's roles (I'd always thought that concept came later, like after the invention of the washing machine)
In 1519, Conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops ride into the floating city of Tenoxtitlan …
4 stars: loved this book, would recommend
Spoiler free version
Edit: I guess I never mentioned that this book is about the day that Moctezuma met with Cortez and all the things that were going on that day. One chapter is Moctezuma taking a nap
On one level this is a work of historical fiction. I love historical fiction, though I haven't read much of it since high school. Especially the political kind, and we've got all the things you'd expect of historical fiction in an imperial court: a mercurial, autocratic, deeply flawed ruler; a court full of people who live and die by their wits, some sympathetic, some not; constant danger and the threat of violence amidst the beauty of one of the great cities of the world, and even in this case a crisis brought on by the barbarians at the gates. I find myself really wanting to …
4 stars: loved this book, would recommend
Spoiler free version
Edit: I guess I never mentioned that this book is about the day that Moctezuma met with Cortez and all the things that were going on that day. One chapter is Moctezuma taking a nap
On one level this is a work of historical fiction. I love historical fiction, though I haven't read much of it since high school. Especially the political kind, and we've got all the things you'd expect of historical fiction in an imperial court: a mercurial, autocratic, deeply flawed ruler; a court full of people who live and die by their wits, some sympathetic, some not; constant danger and the threat of violence amidst the beauty of one of the great cities of the world, and even in this case a crisis brought on by the barbarians at the gates. I find myself really wanting to read more historical fiction after this, specifically set in one of the many ancient empires of Mesoamerica or South America, there is so much potential there.
It's described as anti colonial- there are several ways this is true, but one thing in particular is how it portrays the people incorrectly referred to as the Aztecs as a complex group with their own agendas, and with the Spanish being kind of secondary to it all. Just getting to hear the story from their perspective was great.
The names are a little hard to follow. I invented mnemonics to keep them straight. But I've seen much worse, at least the names are all distinct. It seems like a bad criticism of the book.
There's a lot more going on. I feel like I need to reread to fully understand it - in particular I'm not sure what the ant was about. A lot of people do a lot of drugs as the story goes on, including it seems the narrator, and I feel like it could use a few reads to wrap my head around it.
