Books read in January 2020

[nou]

Definitely recommend

• Laughing All The Way To The Mosque, Zarqa Nawaz (re-read). A memoir by the writer of Little Mosque on the Prairie, funny without being superficial.
• Daughter of the Bear King, Eleanor Arnason. I love the protagonist's love for bathrooms! The writing is quite idiosyncratic in places, with lots of short choppy sentences (I recall complaining about this in another book, but somehow it works here). I like that the protagonist is a 40-something woman, and that the author explicitly set out to write a fantasy that wasn’t good vs. evil.
• Swordheart, T Kingfisher (re-read). Yep, still like this, and it does bear re-reading. I'd forgotten that it was going to be a trilogy! Though there seems to be no news of the second one yet.
• The Star Side Of Bird Hill, Naomi Jackson. Three generations of women in Barbados and Brooklyn (mainly Barbados). I liked this and will probably re-read it.
• Swallow, Sefi Atta. The lives of a mother and daughter in rural and urban Nigeria. Some parts are a bit distressing, but overall it’s a positive story.
• Smallbone Deceased, Michael Gilbert. I loved the dry humour in this, and had several actual LOL IRL moments.

Maybe recommend

• Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City, K J Parker. I like the idea of this very much — a fantasy-like (albeit no-magic) setting with an engineering focus — but there are too many random sexist and homophobic parts, and although the author seems to be trying to address racism, he doesn't seem to have a very nuanced understanding of it.
• Stoner, John Williams (DNF). I stopped about halfway through this because I just really disliked the viewpoint character. It’s fine to sleepwalk through your life if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not OK to mistreat other people along the way (e.g. he doesn’t seem to have considered that if he stopped raping his wife then maybe she’d be less depressed). The writing is good, though.
• Shadows Of Athens, J M Alvey. A detective story set in Ancient Greece. I liked the inclusion of details like contraception and clothing, but I didn’t find it really drew me in.
• Gone, Min Kym. This wasn't bad, though it did seem to contradict itself in places, and also I'm sceptical that the author can really remember so many details from when she was seven. I wished there had been more technical details, like the stuff about flying staccato and the modifications she made to her violins. (I also wish she'd left her manipulative boyfriend a hell of a lot earlier, but that’s for her benefit, not mine, and if she had done then there probably wouldn’t have been a book.)
• Instantiation, Greg Egan. Not sure what I think of this collection. A couple of them stop instead of ending. I was amused to discover that he ended up doing two sequels to the one he wrote specifically to make fun of Adam Roberts.
• Slow Bullets, Alastair Reynolds. This was OK, but it felt more like there were six people on that ship than 600. Also the villain was very one-dimensionally villainous.

Wouldn’t recommend

• Monday Begins On Saturday, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (DNF). Got 37% of the way through and there'd only been two or three brief parts I actually found interesting, and it felt like it was taking a very very long time to get anywhere, so I stopped.
• Fall, Or Dodge In Hell, Neal Stephenson (DNF). This started out pretty interesting, with some nice noodling about how consciousness works and so on (though quite a lack of clue about how social media works), but about 20% of the way through it cut to a near-future where regressively-Christian parts of the USA are referred to as “Ameristan”, and that just bugged me so much I had to stop.
• Annex (DNF). Post-alien-invasion story with a teenage trans protagonist. I’ve tried reading this a few times now, but it just doesn't feel plausible to me either in terms of the worldbuilding or the tone of the children’s POV.
• Children Of The Star, Sylvia Engdahl. There's a lot of rather unpleasant ideas in here: individual genius saves the world, subjugating the masses for the good of the masses, a genetic basis for intelligence, disgust at intellectual disabilities. I also found it pretty tedious to read at times — it would have been better if it had been less long. (And a lot of it felt like the sort of job interview that Ask A Manager says you should not put up with.)

Comments

[doseybat]

Remembering that I didn't mention the Strugatsky classic which I love and you probably know already: Roadside Picnic and it's film Stalker

[nou]

Thanks! And no, I didn’t already know that one :)

[doseybat]

Glad to be able to introduce you then! Roadside Picnic is good quality classic scifi, not Russia specific, probably sexist in the same way most of that generation of literature is, haven't reread for a while - but have reread more than once. The Tarkovsky film I think is actually a lot more famous than the book but also a very different style, surreal existential depressing slow arts film.