Books read in August 2019

[nou]

I have a new policy for these book posts — from now on I’m going to have a completely separate section for books written by friends/acquaintances. It just feels a bit weird making judgments on them in public. (Even though everything so far, including this month, has been either “Definitely recommend” or “Definitely recommend if you’ve read the previous ones in the series”.)

Definitely recommend

• The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley. Quite gory in places, and I did occasionally wonder if it was going to breach my (very low) “too much horror” threshold, but it never actually did. I wasn’t surprised to see a copyeditor thanked in the acknowledgments — the whole of the text was just beautifully finished, with no rough edges getting in the way of the story.

Maybe recommend

• Earthseed, Pamela Sargent (re-read). I read this when I was a kid, and decided to re-read it as part of working out which of my paper books to keep and which to send to the charity shop (to make room for other books). I’d either forgotten or not realised it was YA, which isn’t really my thing now. I remember enjoying it when I was younger though. (Also, I started this in February and only finished it in August. I’m not very good at remembering to finish reading paper books.)
• Binti (re-read), Binti: Home (re-read), and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor. The way mathematics is used in these novellas bothered me the first time I read them, but this time round I just accepted that the word in the Binti universe doesn’t mean the same thing it does in the real one. Mathematics in Binti isn’t a matter of creatively and rigorously working out the properties of abstract structures; it’s a sort of meditation based on mental repetition of integers and simple formulae. But I don’t understand why their smartphones astrolabes don’t have backups! In any case, I’m unlikely to re-read these. They’re fine for what they are, just not something I feel drawn back to.
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers. I don’t like the implication that long nails are hideous and make your fingers useless, nor the assertion that that your average academic does nothing other than “teach the past”. I liked the framing whereby the narrator explained things from their time (which is in our future) “in case they’ve become obsolete” — a good way to get around infodumping. But why don’t disabled people get to go into the astronaut gardens? I find this author’s books a little frustrating since they’re overall very close to things I really want to read, but they all have aspects that somewhat spoil it for me.
• Flowers At Dawn, Singai Ma Elangkannan translated by A R Venkatachalapathy. There’s a lot to like about this! It’s set among Tamils in Singapore during the Second World War, and it talks about food (including being creative about it during shortages) which is always a bonus, and the author really gets you to care about the main characters. But I could have done without the storyline of a man aggressively and damagingly pursuing a woman who’s not interested.

Wouldn’t recommend

• 84K, Claire North (DNF). DNF mainly because of the really annoying fragmented sentence thing that made it unnecessarily hard to follow what was going on and who was saying what. It’s set in a dystopia, and it struck me as somewhat unrealistic that people were still allowed to pay for things with cash.
• Utopia Five, A E Currie. That’s not how games work; you don’t just set up a world and put people in it without designing an actual game. Also I don’t think defibrillators work like that. And it seems really implausible that a world where a climate change incident had killed billions of people would really decide to organise its future around storing and processing massive amounts of data, like electricity generation doesn’t have a carbon cost. The idea that ubiquitous security cameras can entirely prevent crime seems very strange, and if they don’t have crime, why do they have prisons? (I didn’t appreciate the prison rape joke either.) I wished there had been some exploration of the negative effects of universal surveillance, and some acknowledgement that not everyone is happy to release the data they produce into the public domain for companies to profit from.
• Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard (DNF). Captures the “women aren’t people” vibe of On The Road surprisingly well. Also I love how Naomi Klein used her introduction to plug not one but two of her own books. I got 20% of the way through, disliking the author/narrator more for every page I ploughed through, and gave up after he asserted that his company “needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family”.
• Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. People went to university at 14! I’d forgotten that this is where “big-endian” comes from. The author is obsessed with poo, the narrator is a massive sycophantic grump, and sentences should not contain 137 words.

Written by friends

• Incalculable Diffusion, L A Hall. The latest in the series.

Comments

[damerell]

I like Hurley, but she's a bit unremittingly grim; halfway through that one we come to the woman who eats her own aborted offspring and of course she does, no-one ever tucks into a ham sandwich in a Hurley book.

[nou]

I think brought to term, not aborted? Not quite the same thing.

Definitely not a food-focused book though. From a quick skim though, I think tubers, broth, mushrooms, and fresh greens are the only proper food mentioned. (I’m not counting clotted protein gel as proper food. Or, you know, lots of other things.)

[pseudomonas]

sentences should not contain 137 words

For some reason I'm feeling got-at…

[nou]

I suppose it could be worse!

[pseudomonas]

😱