A Closed and Common Orbit

Last year, I dipped my toes into (feminist, multicultural) science fiction at the behest of a very close friend, and this year, I am jumping straight in.  One of my favorite sci fi novels of 2016 was Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, mostly because it made me realize that science fiction can be kind and funny and optimistic and deeply moving.

A Closed and Common Orbit is the sequel/companion novel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and I prefer the sequel to the original, though the original is pretty great, too.  I think I just generally prefer stories that are more in-depth in exploring the feelings and motivations of one or two people vs those of many people.  A Closed and Common Orbit focuses on two characters whose paths mirror each other's, and I really enjoyed that.

The book has two parallel plots.  The first is around Sidra, a sentient AI who finds herself, suddenly, in a very limiting human body and has to learn how to make her way in a multicultural society with only the help of a few very kind friends.  The second is around Jane, a lonely girl who escapes life as a factory drudge and has to find a way to make a life for herself, with only the help of one very kind AI, who helps her navigate life.

I almost never want to share the plot points of science fiction or fantasy novels because I think people get caught up in the science or the magic aspects and ignore the greater message.  This book is not about robots coming to take your job or the risks of automation.  It is a deeply moving novel about defining yourself and what you stand for, when you have very few models of what to do to work from.  It's about how terrifying it can be to make yourself vulnerable to another person, and how absolutely wonderful and comforting friendship and trust are.  About how it's good to depend on yourself but also really, really great to trust someone else enough to depend on them, too.

I loved so many things about this book, but one of the biggest things is the way that Chambers allows her characters to test each other and gives them space to question and grow.  For example, Sidra challenges a friend about her body, and how she is not defined by or tied to one body.  Her friend confesses that it is hard to admit, but that it is also a lot harder to feel empathy for an AI in a spaceship vs an AI in a human costume.  Sidra is unhappy to hear this, and says so.  Her friend feels safe enough to ask more questions and come to a more nuanced view over time.  It really hits home on the importance of having a diverse group of friends with whom you can discuss important topics.

I also can't emphasize enough how glorious it is to read a book that has a generally optimistic setting.  Jane's setting is less rosy than Sidra's, but Jane has love and kindness in her life.  She's a nice person.  Sidra, too, never feels unsafe because of people being unsavory; she feels unsafe because she is a stranger in a strange land.  In general, Chambers' book is about how varied and wonderful multiculturalism can be.  It's not a perfect universe, but it's one that is trying.  And that is just so refreshing!  I stayed up very much past my bedtime to finish this one because I just couldn't put it down.  I really, really enjoyed it.  And if you'd like to try science fiction but aren't sure where to start, I think Becky Chambers is an excellent introduction to the genre!

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

I read Kij Johnson's The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe with my feminist science fiction book club, and it's the first book I've read that made me really love being in a book club.  I'm not very good at book clubs because I don't like reading books because I have to read them.  But feminist science fiction is a pretty great space, so it's not hard to get excited about reading for each meeting.  Also, the women in the club are so cool.

Anyway, onto the book!  I really enjoyed The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe when I read it, but it was only after our book club meeting that I realized on just how many levels it is fantastically feminist.  For such a slim volume (about 165 pages), it really packs a punch.  Especially when you compare it to its inspiration, HP Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I tried to read prior to reading this one, and just could NOT get through.

If I had read the entirety of Lovecraft's book, I probably would have even more thoroughly appreciated Johnson's version of it.  But I would say I read enough of Lovecraft to know that I didn't want to read any more.  Where Lovecraft seems to have no real focus except in introducing as many bizarre characters and species as possible, Johnson gives readers a more internal focus on Vellitt Boe herself.  While she is not particularly introspective, we learn enough about her to want to know even more about her.

Vellitt Boe is a professor at a women's college in a dream-world.  One of her students has run away with someone from "the real world," and Vellitt must go bring her student back.  She embarks (with zero drama) on this quest on her own, knowing that it could take a very long time and will probably be super-dangerous.  But Vellitt is someone who does what's right, and so she hops to it.

This is a short book, so I don't want to give a lot away on the plot points.  But a few things were really great and came up in our book club and really made me appreciate the story even more:

1.  Vellitt is middle-aged.  She's a middle-aged adventure heroine!  You do not find those around very often at all, and I just love that making Vellitt middle-aged and female is in itself a completely feminist way of setting up this story.  She is aware that she used to be super-attractive and that she used her charms to get her way and that, being female, her attractiveness lessens with age.  But she doesn't really miss her past, she is happy with who she is.  There's also this whole interplay with a former lover who does not look like he's aged at all, and the way they look at each other and how Vellitt reflects upon him and their past relationship is just brilliant.

2.  Vellitt is "ethnic."  Ok, ok, I admit I TOTALLY did not catch this when I was reading the book.  Ironically, the two POC in the book club defaulted to thinking Vellitt was white, whereas everyone in the book club who was white was really quick to catch onto the fact that Vellitt had skin "the color of mud" and hair she wore in braids.  Oops.  I don't think the race component in this book is as strong as it could have been, considering the author pointed out at the end that she wrote it partially to counteract the racism in Lovecraft's book.  I feel like if I missed it, it was pretty subtle, but maybe I am just not as attentive a reader as I thought.  ALSO, I would say that, based on that description, the cover of this book feels a little white-washed.  Maybe that is gray hair, but it's definitely not in braids.

3.  The girl who ran away from school is amazing.  She doesn't play a huge part, and, seeing as she's a beautiful college student who ran away with a boy, you'd think she'd be pretty flighty and lame.  But she is not.  She's strong and straight-forward and everything that is great.

4.  The setting.  Vellitt Boe's world is capricious and mercurial and does not obey the laws of physics.  We don't get a ton of detail about the world because, well, the book is 165 pages long.  But what we do get is fascinating.  For example, the sky is never the same color, it seems to roil and boil all the time.  There are exactly 79 stars in the sky.  There are gods, and the gods are not very nice.  While trying to make my way through Lovecraft's book, I felt like he just kept going ON AND ON with no point at all.  While reading Johnson's book, I felt none of that.  I am not sure why because really, many of the plot points are the same and Vellitt goes on essentially the same journey as was laid out previously.  But I think a lot of it has to do with the way Johnson describes the setting and gives us a little background on the characters that Vellitt encounters.

So, this book!  It's great!  It's not even very long but so great!  I am not sure if it is a great first foray into fantasy and science fiction as it is very dream-like and many characters that show up seem to disappear and then not matter at all to the plot.  But if you are ok with that and want to read something that is awesomely feminist but subtly so, then I highly recommend it.  And it won't take too long to read, either :-)

Review-itas: Books that confused me

Guys, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee confused me so much that I cannot even explain the cover of this book to you.  Does it fit with the story?  I don't know.  I mean, the story takes place in space, so that part is accurate.  But what is the spiky thing that dominates the image?  I don't know.

As far as I can tell, Ninefox Gambit is set in a civilization that really likes order.  There appears to be a massive mathematical algorithm (the "calendar") that oversees every tiny thing, especially in the military.  Possibly people exist outside of the military, but it is hard to tell.  There is also a very rigid caste system in place, with different groups of people going into different areas of study and conforming to very specific traits.  The main character, Cheris, is in the military leading her team and somehow goes against the calendar.  This means she's in trouble and she's given a very big, basically impossible task to go kill some heretics, for which she asks for help from this undead ghost who won every battle he ever fought, except he also turned traitor and got an obscene number of people killed.

There was a lot in this book that I did not understand.  This book is like all my fears and feelings of intimidation about science fiction coming to fruition.  Once I got to the end and things started moving a little faster and became more people-focused than calendar-focused (I still cannot grasp this calendar system, and it DRIVES ME CRAZY), I got more into it.  And it certainly ends on a high note that bodes well for the series to follow.  So I eventually got the high-level plot, but I could tell you nothing about the setting.

After my appalling showing in 2016 of reading only four books off my TBR list, I was determined to do better in 2017.  (To be fair, I set a pretty low bar for myself, so I feel confident I can beat it.)  I read and enjoyed Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, so I decided to give Sister Mine a go.  Many of the same elements that I loved in Midnight Robber are present here - a strong cultural identity, humor, and fantastic female characters at the center.  Sister Mine is often compared to American Gods or Anansi Gods because it is about a family of demigods.  But whereas Neil Gaiman's book is almost entirely about men, Hopkinson's puts women very much at the center of the story.  She plays with gender, sexuality, and many other themes while she wreaks havoc with the lives of both humans and gods.

I listened to Sister Mine on audio, and the narrator is excellent.  I don't listen to many audiobooks any more, but I was pretty much instantly drawn into this one.  I enjoyed many things about this story, but parts of it were just a bit too out there for me, particularly towards the end when things became very convoluted to me.  I really liked many of the characters in this book, but with about two hours to go, I was just ready for the book to end.  There were plot points that came up that didn't make a ton of sense to me or fit into the rest of the story, and then there was this whole section at the end that I was just... I don't know what was happening.  I feel like maybe if I were reading a physical copy of the book instead of listening to an audiobook, it would have been easier for me to understand what was happening.  Or maybe I'm just so confused by the real world that fantastical and science fiction worlds go too far for me.  Regardless, this was a lighter book than Midnight Robber for sure, with humor and pretty great family dynamics.  So if you want to give Hopkinson a try but don't want all the heavy stuff, this could be a good one to start with.  But I wouldn't say it's as strong as Midnight Robber. 

My first space opera

One of my closest friends gave me a copy of John Scalzi's Old Man's War for my birthday this year.  I had told her that I want to read more science fiction but that I find the genre a bit intimidating, especially the more traditional "space operas" and wasn't sure where to start.  She recommended Scalzi to me and then gave me this first book in a series.

Old Man's War is about John Perry, a 75-year-old man who signs up for the Colonial Defense Force (CDF).  The CDF takes old people from the Americas, gives them new, powerful, green bodies, and then sends them out to engage in inter-planetary warfare to defend human colonies in outer space.  Most of these colonies are people by Asians and Africans, who were bombed to oblivion by the western world in a Subcontinental War.

I'm really glad that my friend gave me this book to read as an introduction to space opera because right from the beginning, I felt super-comfortable with the book.  John's narrative voice is wry and self-deprecating and really funny, and I immediately felt welcomed into his world.  The story also moves pretty quickly and introduces some really great characters. The humor is just as important, if not more important, as the science and the plot and all the rest.  It's a really fun introduction to science fiction, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is unsure of where to start with "traditional" science fiction but wants to give it a try.

That said, there were a lot of things about this book that raised several red flags.  These I detailed out to my friend in very long-winded text messages.  Let me also just say before I get into all of these that both my friend and I are very feminist and very aware of white-washing and everything else that I'm about to talk about, and both of us still enjoyed this book.  Also, she said that some of my concerns are addressed by Scalzi in later books in the series, even if they were not addressed in this first book.

On to my concerns.

Very close to the beginning of this book, a pretty vile character points out that all of the space colonists are Indian (he calls Indians "Hindis" and "dot heads"), which is unfair because they lost the war and losers shouldn't get to colonize space.  All the white people (apparently being American = being white) can only get into space by joining this Colonial Defense Force.  This is insane because dot heads who lose a war on earth should not then get the protection of superior beings in space.

The whole race thing is brought up VERY clearly and intentionally, and yet, for the rest of the book, there is zero interaction with any colonists.  Based on the names that everyone on the Colonial Defense Force have, I would guess that there is also very limited interaction with anyone that isn't white or Hispanic (though everyone in the force has green skin, so "white" is a misnomer, maybe).  I know that science fiction generally has a diversity problem, so it's not that I was expecting a gloriously diverse cast here, but I was frustrated that the race thing was brought up so early on and then never again acknowledged or dealt with again.  It's like Scalzi was using the other racist jerk as a foil just to show readers how open-minded and kind John Perry is in contrast, which is annoying.  Mostly because he is using a conversation between two white men to show that one is racist and the other is not.  I would believe it more if anyone who was not white had a voice in the conversation.

And then, we are supposed to believe that John Perry is this upstanding guy who is not racist, but then he cheerfully goes from planet to planet killing other intelligent species who have built up cultures and histories over time.  There is a moment when he acknowledges how bad this makes him feel, when everyone around him acknowledges it as well.  But then they just move on and continue the destruction.  This I guess would be somewhat understandable if you're 20 years old and had never been through a war before or thought about other people before.  But again, John is at least 75 years old and had protested wars on earth.  But seems to think it's a totally different ball game out in space.  And again, they never once engage with colonists, so you don't even really know how he feels about people who are not the same as him.

There was one scene in the book that stood out to me a lot, possibly because I also recently finished I am Malala, and she spent a bit of time talking about the Taliban.  Some years ago, the Taliban destroyed ancient beautiful Buddhist statues.  There was a huge outcry for reasons I hope I don't need to outline here.

In Old Man's War, there is very brief moment in which John leaves a spaceship to go onto an alien planet.  He sees "an abstract sculpture of some description" and blows it up.  "Never much liked abstract art."  Possibly, I am a little too sensitive at this time, since this was clearly supposed to be a moment of comic relief prior to war.  But all I could think was, "IT MIGHT NOT BE UGLY ABSTRACT ART TO THEM, JERKFACE." 

And that's really where I feel like this book had a lot of unmet potential.  We're led to believe that John is this great guy because he has an excellent sense of humor, a lot of people like him, he treats his comrades well, he seems fairly smart, and he stood up against racism that one time in a pretty low-risk setting.  But then through the rest of the book, you don't  see any of the stuff he questions or worries about come back to him in terms of how the war effects him or how he interacts with colonists.  It felt very "here's the white savior you've all been waiting for!"  And that annoyed me.

That said, I think I am going to read the next book in this series.  My friend said Old Man's War is an introduction to a complex and well-plotted series.  I trust her judgment, and the book really was enjoyable if you're not as hyper-sensitive as I seem to be these days. 

Has anyone else read this series?  Any thoughts on how it evolves as it continues?

"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things."

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was nothing like what I expected.  I have not read much by Bradbury at all, but as this book is one of the most famous science fiction collections ever written, I expected it to be very old-school science fiction-esque.  But after doing some digging, I realized that the book (like all good science fiction and fantasy novels) is more social commentary and critique than anything else.

I really loved this collection of stories.  I have read many sad non-fiction books recently (as you all no doubt know), and one or two really sad fiction books, too.  And while The Martian Chronicles certainly has sadness, it is the melancholy type of sadness that I just really, really enjoy in books about colonialism and its effects.

And, quite frankly, that's what kind of surprised me about this book.  I know Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 (a book I have not read yet), but I guess I assumed that a 1950s era white guy from a small town in the Midwest would generally be okay with an expanding American empire.  It warmed my heart that Ray Bradbury saw America in its post-World War II, Cold War prime and said - must we continue this endless cycle?

In this collection, Earthlings (specifically Americans) colonize Mars, mostly annihilate Martian society, and then watch Earth blow up in nuclear war from afar after greater and greater restrictions and censorship by the government.  This is the bigger story.  But the individual stories all ladder up to that story in small ways.  Bradbury's key theme seems to be that small acts can have large unforeseen consequences.  He points out the way that small miscommunications, petty jealousies, tiny insecurities can grow and take on really terrifying forms.  Many parts of this collection reminded me of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, and that ominous line that is something like, "They meant no harm."  Even the best intentions can go horribly wrong.

There were some truly beautiful stories in this collection.  The Martians are telepathic, so they can read people's minds.  In the story that had me in tears, a Martian keeps changing shape to become whatever the earthling closest to him most desperately wants.  So he becomes a lost daughter or son, a thief, a friend.  As more and more people come to him, clamoring for the attention of their lost loved one, the Martian becomes terrified, shifting shape more and more rapidly, crying out for help.  And no one helps him because they just want their own needs met.

In another story, a man from New York is thrilled to open his hot dog stand just in time for the next rocket from Earth to arrive.  Some Martians come to talk to him about his land.  He panics, thinking they are going to take his hard-won hot dog stand from him.  So he shoots one.  And then he shoots another.  Finally, the Martians inform him that they are giving him more land, not taking his land away.  He is jubilant until he looks into the sky and sees a massive explosion on Earth as a horrible war takes its toll.

“It was all a mistake,” he pleaded, standing out of his ship, his wife slumped behind him in the deeps of the hold, like a dead woman. “I came to Mars like any honest enterprising businessman. I took some surplus material from a rocket that crashed and I built me the finest little stand you ever saw right there on that land by the crossroads—you know where it is. You’ve got to admit it’s a good job of building.” Sam laughed, staring around. “And that Martian—I know he was a friend of yours—came. His death was an accident, I assure you. All I wanted to do was have a hot-dog stand, the only one on Mars, the first and most important one. You understand how it is? I was going to serve the best darned hot dogs there, with chili and onions and orange juice.”

One story that touched me deeply was about an encounter between a Martian and an Earthling.  The Earthling looks around him and sees a dead planet, with dusty cities that were abandoned centuries ago by a species long extinct.  He sees only what he wants to see, the planet becoming more and more like Earth.  To him, the Martian is a ghost.  The Martian looks around him and sees a vibrant and beautiful city, full of music and laughter.  He does not see what the Earthling sees.  To the Martian, the Earthling is a ghost.  The two argue and try to convince the other of their argument, but each fails.

“Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think—the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?” The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. “But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”

These stories are obviously about the impact of colonialism on a people and culture, the use of force against someone who cannot fight you, the huge difficulties that arise when people talk past each other and do not try to understand the other's point of view.  I found these stories so moving, given the current political climate.  But there are other stories, too, that really spoke to me.  About loneliness in so many forms and how it can affect a person.  A Martian housewife who dreamed of a happier life with an Earthman.  A man so desperate for company after the population is wiped out around him, and then finds that he can't stand the only other person left on the planet.  A priest who wants to bring Christ to the Martians, even though they are not human.

I loved so many of the stories in this collection.  I do not read many audiobooks any more as I don't sit in my car for a long commute each day, but I found the audiobook version of this collection absolutely spectacular.  I listened to it while cooking and cleaning in my kitchen, on walks around the neighborhood, and over my lunch break at work.  I loved the narration.  I already mentioned that some of the stories brought me to tears.  I hope that if you try the collection, you feel as deeply moved as I did.

Two lives lived well

Jo Walton's My Real Children is one of those books that I loved and completely devoured, but I cannot entirely pinpoint why.

The story is about Patricia Cowan.  Patricia is getting older, and she forgets many things, big and small, that have happened to her over the past few years.  But she also remembers things, big and small, that she could swear happened, but don't make sense in her current circumstances.  Patricia seems to be living two lives, in two separate worlds.  Her life was all on a steady path until one day, she made a decision, and based on that decision, her life (and the world she lived in) went in two very different directions.

I love almost any alternate reality or alternate universe story, so I was predisposed to enjoy this one.  I appreciated that it was, for the most part, set after WWII rather than before or during the war.  Yes, the second world war had stunning effects on the world and how it has turned out, but events and decisions made both before and after the war have had enormous impact as well.

I am now about a week removed from having read this book and I admit that I am not sure why I loved it so much.  I gave it an unreserved 5-star rating when I finished it.  I loved Patricia, I loved how she made the best of circumstances no matter what they were.  I felt so saddened by the way her children, in both lives, relegated her to the background as she got older.  I enjoyed the subtlety with which Walton introduced societal prejudices into her narrative.  For example, in one world, Trish and her partner, Bee, seem to have no issues whatsoever with their son being in a polyamorous relationship.  It just seems to be what he chooses and they are fine with it.  They are, however, quietly concerned when their daughter marries a Muslim.  Walton does not delve very deeply into this (though, admittedly, she doesn't delve deeply into very much, which I will get to in a bit).  But most people don't like to examine their prejudices, so in a way, it was quite realistic.

Jo Walton writes about the small, personal, everyday acts of our lives wonderfully.  In all her books.  You get such a vivid sense of a character's day-to-day activities, and I really enjoy how she gives such care and attention to things that all of us view as trivial, but are the events that fill our lives.  She does this so well in very slim volumes; her stories are compact and self-contained and somehow still deeply moving and I love that about them.

That said, in this one, I just feel like there was so much that was left out.  And I say that now, but please remember that I loved it.  It is only now, a week later as I write this review, that I am mulling a bit.  We hear about big world events in an off-hand manner, in both worlds that Patricia inhabits, but never quite enough to understand what the situation is.  We see only minor inconveniences, mainly to outlying characters.  Though we have the idea that there are stresses on Trish's family in one version of her life, we don't see anything very drastic happen.  Again, this is part of Walton's skill; most people don't have hugely dramatic events in their lives, they just make the most of what they have and try to soldier on and be happy.  I wanted a bit more context.

Also, the book takes place over several decades, and in two very different worlds.  Because of that, we hardly get to know any of the other characters at all.  They flit in and out but do not have a solid presence.  Good friends from college are rarely mentioned again, the children are all vaguely there but with hardly any impact on life, spouses are either horrible or perfect with no real personality or depth, and the world keeps turning but what happens on that world is not shared in any great depth.  Because of that, at the end, when Patricia is trying to make sense of whether she would rather have a happy life in a horrible world or a sad life in a much better world, it was hard to feel compelled in either direction; I did not know enough to compare the two worlds at all.

So, this book!  I loved it and read it so quickly and enjoyed it hugely.  But, looking back, I feel like it could have had more depth.  If you want to read about the impact that big events have on small lives, this is wonderful.  If you want something... bigger?  Then, maybe not this one.

Love and violence in post-apocalyptic Africa

As often happens when I gather stats for my end-of-year summary, I was a bit appalled by how few books I read in 2015 from my TBR shelves.  Thus, I ended the year with a book I've owned for a few years, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death.

Who Fears Death is a popular choice for A More Diverse Universe, possibly because of #Diversiverse's fantasy and science fiction roots.  It takes place some time in the future in Africa, where a seemingly never-ending war continues between the Nuru, the oppressors, and the Okeke, the oppressed.  Onyesonwu is a child of rape, an Ewu, with strong magical abilities and a destiny to end the genocide of her Okeke people.  She learns how to control her powers (to an extent) from a revered shaman but all too soon, she must face her destiny.

It took me a long time to read this book because of the violent premise; Onyesonwu is a child of rape, and that fact reverberates through much of the story.  There is other sexual violence in this novel that is difficult to read, too, and those acts also have repercussions for characters through the story.  I do not enjoy books in which females experience a loss of agency and power over their own bodies (and this happens more often than I'd like in fantasy and historical fiction).  That said, it is a realistic portrayal of what life has in store for more people than we'd like.  And in Okorafor's story, every woman, from Onyesonwu's mother to all of her friends ,becomes a change agent who is able to influence and change events.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this book, though I admit I lost some steam in the second half.  I feel like so many fantasy stories get bogged down in the whole "journey to destiny" part.  It always seems to take forever, there's always some sort of internal drama in the group that's traveling together, and everyone is just waiting for the next big thing to happen.  Who Fears Death was no exception to this, and I found myself skimming a few chapters while Onyesonwu and her friends bickered their way through the desert.  However, there were some really cool characters introduced in this section, including a whole nomadic tribe of red people who traveled with the sandstorms.  Okorafor has a great sense of creativity, and the way she can bring history and tradition and culture to life in short descriptions and interactions is really impressive.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way Onyesonwu dealt with all of the stigmas against her - being female, being Ewu, being a foreigner in her hometown and all the rest.  Okorafor used her to make so many interesting points about sexism and racism and how even those who know you best can fall prey to stereotypes and jealousy and anger.  I loved that about this book, and I am so excited to see what Okorafor does with those types of issues in her other novels.

Gaiman's superbly atmospheric short fiction

Do you ever read a book and think to yourself, this is why I love reading so much, for the exact experience of having this book in my hands and seeing these perfectly-chosen words in this exact order and understanding just how beautiful language can be?

For me, that's pretty much par for the course on any book I've read by Neil Gaiman, but I am particularly struck by how great his short stories are.  Trigger Warning is a collection of stories that Gaiman himself feels are not very tightly connected with each other, but that come together brilliantly.

I received a free copy of Trigger Warning when it came out, but I admit that I waited a while to read it because Neil Gaiman himself narrates the audiobook version, and I really wanted to listen to him narrate the stories.  So, apologies to William Morrow for the delay on this review, but I have zero regrets about waiting for the audiobook because it was very, very good and 100% worth the wait.

There are several short stories in this collection ranging from short and funny to longer and creepier to pretty much everything in between.  Most of them are in the mysterious/creepy/spooky camp, so this would be a great read for Halloween.  I read it in July, though, and got some delicious shivers up and down my back, so I suspect it would work at any time of year.

One of my favorite things about this collection is the introduction.  In it, Gaiman gives readers short descriptions and backgrounds for each of the stories he included.  So many of his stories are in appreciation of other authors or cultural figures - Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle, David Bowie, Doctor Who... the list goes on and is so varied.  Apparently, Gaiman is pretty much invited to write a story for everyone famous who ever interacts with him, and he often obliges.  And sometimes, he writes stories for non-famous people, too.  Or just because.

One of my favorite stories in this collection is "The Sleeper and the Spindle."  It turns the story of Snow White on its head a bit, gives Snow White the agency and gumption that is so often lacking in fairy tale heroines, and is, to my delight, being published as a storybook all on its own, with illustrations.  It's the sort of storybook that I would give to all my friends' children as a gift to make sure that the next generation knows that girls can be powerful HERoes, too.

There are also stories about loss and heartache, the importance of family and friends to combat loneliness, and the search for love and redemption.  I love Neil Gaiman's stories because he so often writes about people who think of themselves as uncomplicated, unexciting folk, but then he gives them the courage and the power to do extraordinary things.  And they do.  And sometimes it's for the good and sometimes it's for the bad, but it's always a beautiful story and a huge treat to read.

Note:  I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review-itas: Books I didn't love

Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta, is one of those books that so many people recommended to me.  Or, I should say, Melina Marchetta is an author that many people love, and I have never read her.  But I've had Finnikin of the Rock on my Kindle forever, and I finally read it!

Or, tried to.

The book reminded me of Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana.  It's a fantasy novel about displaced people trying to find their way home.  I really liked that part of the story - all these people, separated for years, finding each other and joining in The Quest, and trying to get home.

Unfortunately, there was also a massively inconsistent romance in the book that really annoyed me.  Sometimes Finnikin and this at-first-mute but then really talkative religious-novice (supposedly) Evanjalin are BFF, and sometimes they hate each other, and sometimes they love each other, and sometimes they want other people, and it was all just TOO MUCH for me.  Also, I thought Evanjalin was all over the place, character-wise.  So I didn't finish this one.

I did finish Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, but that's really only because I was reading it on audiobook and I figured, since the book is about the apocalypse, that I should get to the end and see what happened to the world.

In this dystopian young adult novel, the earth's rotation is slowing.  The days are growing longer, the crops aren't growing at all, and Julia is growing up.  She's 11 years old, her best friend is moving away, and she has a big crush on a sk8r boi.

It's hard to be an adolescent at the best of times, and it's probably even harder to be one when the world is ending.  Julia goes through quite a bit of heavy stuff, but she also goes through life as a pre-teen.  She loses her best friend, she faces her parents' crumbling marriage, she tries to just be normal.  I liked the way Walker mixed the extraordinary with the ordinary to show what life could really be like in such a situation - people just keep trucking on.

That said, the book didn't really succeed for me.  Julia sometimes was far too deep for an 11-year-old.  And this was a very quiet book in many ways, which isn't exactly what I was expecting from a novel about the end of the world.  I appreciate that Walker didn't fill it with massive wars or thieving hordes, but I also wish she had done just a little bit more.

Review-itas: Books for which I'm late to the party

Based on everyone 2014 Best Of lists, I am on the second half of the bell curve on reading these books.  Therefore, I'll just give you a quick recap of my thoughts, and maybe these will serve as reminder to you about them, in case you were thinking of checking one or the other or both of them out!

The Martian, by Andy Weir.  Thanks so much to Trisha at eclectic/eccentric for lending me her copy of this audiobook!  As she promised, the audiobook is really good!

The book is about Mark, an astronaut who accidentally gets left behind on Mars after a wind storm (Home Alone x bazillion, right?).  He is really quite upbeat about the whole situation, and when NASA understands what happened, the whole world works together to try and bring Mark home.

My favorite part of this book was the gallows humor that Mark displays through its entirety.  We get to know him through his log entries, and you can just tell that he has many frustrating, painful, weeping moments, but he does not share any of that on the log.  He's upbeat and positive and really, really funny, and it's just so heart-warming to hear.  And then all the people working to save him, too - also very heart-warming.

Sometimes, I felt like the language was a little too technical for my tastes, but at the same time, I thought that the technical aspects were really fascinating.  I don't think I fully comprehended just how inhospitable a place Mars is.  Mark went around wearing his space suit pretty much everywhere.  And I can't imagine that was very comfortable.

One thing really annoyed me about this audiobook (and I admit that it annoyed me a lot).  Pretty much everyone with a non-Anglo name got a foreign accent.  There was one German astronaut, so I understood giving him a German accent.  But there was a main character who was ethnically Indian and a side character who was ethnically Asian, and both of them had very stereotypical accents.  Even though there was nothing in the story that implied that they hadn't been born in America.  And, in fact, their phrasing and language made it pretty clear (to me, at least) that they were American and therefore would have had American accents.

To be fair, there were also stereotypical Texan accents for people from Houston.  But that's just as annoying!  Just because someone lives in Texas now doesn't mean they have a Texas accent!  And the Indian guy lives in Houston, too - why didn't he have a Texan accent?

So, yes, that frustrated me.  But truly, the narrator did a great job of capturing Mark's voice.  And the story is really fun and enjoyable to read.  So don't let that turn you off!

Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay.  This collection of essays was very entertaining to read via audiobook.  My only problem with books like this one, in which strong feminist women speak their mind about the world-at-large and women's rights specifically is that I often think they are preaching to the choir.  Actually, calling that a problem with the books is wrong.  There's nothing wrong with the books.  It's more that I get so riled up and very, "Amen, sistah!"

But then I realize that probably the people whose minds I want to change and whose minds the author wants to change are not reading this book, and I feel quite sad.

Maybe I'm wrong, though!  In which case, I think Gay's collection is a good addition to any bookshelf.  I liked some essays more than others, which is only to be expected.  My favorite was about how people today expect to find characters in the books they read "likable," especially female characters, and how flawed that approach to reading is.  I took this essay to heart because I'll often finish a book and think - great writing, but GOSH, those characters were horrible!  And my enjoyment will be less than if I liked the characters.  But as Gay points out, the point of a story isn't only to write about you and your friends, it's to take you outside of your realm of experience.  And so we should not look only for likable characters, we should look for great characters and stories that move us.  I really took this advice to heart, and I plan to be much more aware of my reaction to stories and characters in future.

There were many other wonderful essays in this collection, and I'm sure if you read it, you might go home with very different takeaways than me.  But that's much more a positive than a negative!  If you've read this collection, what do you remember most vividly about it?

Only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes...

Midnight Robber is the first novel by Nalo Hopkinson I've ever read, but it won't be the last.  I have had the book for a few years now but have always shied away from reading it.  It's science fiction, a genre I don't read very often (but am getting more into!), it's written in dialect (patois), and, more to the point, the main character is a victim of incestuous rape.

But I finally opened up the book and read the first few pages.  I was so drawn into the story that ally my qualms just disappeared.  Midnight Rider is the story of Tan-Tan.  After Tan-Tan's father commits an unforgivable sin during Carnival, he escapes (with 6-year-old Tan-Tan) to New Half-Way Tree.  Tan-Tan must learn to adapt to survive, and so she takes on the persona of the Midnight Robber, a Robin Hood-esque, smooth-talking, vengeance-seeking rhyme master who helps people in need and punishes people who cheat.

At first, I really struggled with the dialect in this book, especially because I would read a few pages here and there during Thanksgiving week, quite distractedly.  I never got into a rhythm.  Finally, over this past week, I was able to read at least 50 pages at a time, and that really helped me.  While I still stumbled sometimes and had to reread sentences, it was much easier, and I became much more immersed in the world Hopkinson created through the language she used.

Hopkinson's universe is based on an Caribbean culture, dominated by the African folktales and sprinkled with Indian influences.  Just as I loved Aliette de Bodard's Eastern influence in her science fiction, I really, really appreciated this in Hopkinson's.  Here's a universe where Carnival is the biggest holiday of the year, everyone has a helpful eshu (the trickster teacher of African tales) in her ear, and children go to bed hearing stories of Anansi and the Midnight Robber.  I especially appreciated the way Hopkinson weaved her main story with folktales about Tan-Tan as the Midnight Robber. I love folktales and just ate those sections up.

I also liked the way Hopkinson progressed her story.  I don't want to give too much away, but as I said at the start, Tan-Tan goes through some truly horrible stuff in her early life.  Hopkinson shows how this abuse affects Tan-Tan's ability to trust other people, to form friendships, and to meet new people.  For example, Tan-Tan flirts with every man she comes across because she cherishes the feeling of her being in the position of power, when she's been powerless for so long.  And Hopkinson also evolves that feeling into the Midnight Robber, Tan-Tan's alter ego who is confident and witty and strong and doesn't pull any punches.

There's also a lot of symbolism in this story.  There's another intelligent species on New Half-Way Tree, and the way people treat that species is much as you would expect.  There's Tan-Tan's desperate need to escape from a past that keeps coming to find her.  The gender bender of Tan-Tan becoming the Midnight Robber while a man waits patiently at home for her to return.  The lawlessness of convict towns slowly becoming more civilized and the impact something like that has on the environment and ecosystem around those towns.

I admit that the characters in this story didn't draw me in nearly as much.  Tan-Tan is the central character, and while I liked her, she kept me at a distance.  Other characters come in and out of the story without any real personality or development, even when they are quite integral to Tan-Tan's life - her mother, the town doctor, her best friend Abitefa.  I wish we had seen more of these characters and how they saw and interacted with Tan-Tan.  But maybe Hopkinson didn't want to take away from her main character and put all the focus there.  I do hope that in other books, there is more a cast of characters than just the one.

That said, the positives outweighed the negatives here.  There's so much, more than enough to sink your teeth into and ponder over several nights.  I'm absolutely going to read many more books by Nalo Hopkinson, and I recommend you to do the same.  Especially because

Late to the party, but still loving Firefly

So, after some marathon reading for A More Diverse Universe, followed by a marathon of clicking and commenting on all of your wonderful posts, I pretty much took this week off from reading and blogging.  What did I do instead?

I DISCOVERED THE AWESOMENESS OF FIREFLY.

Yeah.  Welcome to 2002, Aarti.  I'm over a decade late to this party, but what a party it is!  I made my way through the entire first season in less than a week, and then watched the movie Serenity, too.  It was amazing!

Firefly is set a few hundred years in the future.  Humans have created new earths and spread through the universe.  There was a war, and now many of the central core planets are controlled by the Alliance, a Big Brother type of government.  The Alliance basically ignores the frontier planets, though, and that's where many people (including those on the Serenity spaceship) spend a lot of their time, flying under the radar (pun totally intended).

So what you get in Firefly is science fiction with a generous dose of the romance of the Western frontier, and a lot of commentary on social issues.  And lots of very, very funny scenes.

And you get all that with a wonderfully diverse cast!

The people on Serenity come together for many reasons - often escaping their past or on a quest for adventure or on the run from authorities.  Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his first mate Zoe are the two main characters.  Both of them fought against the Alliance in a war, and their friendship is one of the highlights of the series.  It's rare to see friendship between men and women on-screen, and this is an excellent example.  They trust each other implicitly, and there is never any sexual tension between the two of them, which I LOVE.

Firefly features four female characters, all of whom are capable of talking to each other about things other than men, and all of whom excel at their chosen vocations.  I'm thrilled that this show aired over 10 years ago and got all this right, and that it was such a cult hit.  (Sadly, not a ratings hit.)

My favorite character switches from one episode to another.  Zoe is often up there, but I also am a big fan of Jayne, who is basically the muscle of the operation.  He usually has the best lines, and while he isn't portrayed as being very bright, he has a wonderful character journey and some very raw moments.

I just wish there was more!!

There IS a comic book series, Leaves on the Wind, that takes place post Serenity (the movie sequel to the canceled TV series), and the compendium comes out next month, so I will ABSOLUTELY get my hands on that.

Between Aliette de Bodard, my current read, Howl, and this Firefly series, I'm totally hooked on science fiction!  I may have to return to Battlestar Galactica and finish off that series, too.  Any other recommendations for quality sci fi from all of you?

Whoa, timelines are complicated when you are a time traveler

Ok, so these books by Connie Willis are absolutely massive, weighing in at over 1100 pages combined.  I am reviewing Blackout and All Clear together as they are technically two halves of the same book, but were separated due to the large size.  However, you really can't read All Clear without reading Blackout.

It's pretty difficult to do a summary of such a huge book without giving away spoilers.  Suffice it to say that three historians travel back in time from 2060 Oxford to 1941 London during the Blitz to observe what life was like for civilians during such a tense and stressful time.  And things go very, very wrong, so the three of them are basically stuck in WWII.  And then they get even more stressed out because it's possible that they are having an impact on historic events - what if they changed the course of history?  Uh-oh!

I have been going back and forth over whether I should even review these books.  There are already a lot of reviews out there, and I am not sure I have much more to add to the discussion.  I fell in love with Connie Willis when I read To Say Nothing of the Dog, which was wonderful and hilarious and romantic and not really in the same style as any of her other work.  Then I read The Doomsday Book, which was not funny at all but very tense and quiet.  Blackout and All Clear are a mix of all of these - there are moments of humor, quite a bit of tension, though not a whole lot of quiet.  Obviously, in the midst of the Blitz, there are a lot of sirens and booms and planes.  The books are long but read very quickly, mostly because you are so stressed out about what is going to happen that you are incapable of doing anything but reading very quickly to find out what happens next.  Willis definitely knows how to write a nail-biting, stomach-clenching story, and she's in fine form with that here.

Willis also really knows her London map, buses to Underground to streets and back alleys.  She makes sure that all her readers know that she knows the map, too.  I think the book could have been cut by at least 20% if she would stop telling us all the directions and transfers that her characters kept taking.  They got old to me after a while, but I can see how telling everyone just how many stops were closed down due to bombs, and all the complicated ways people had to get around instead, was a great way of adding to the setting and atmosphere of this story.

Truly, these books brought to life just how harrowing living through the Blitz may have been.  I think the London Blitz is one of those moments in time that the English like to look back on with pride at getting through, and I expect it's romanticized quite a bit.  After all, it's not like the English weren't crossing the Channel and doing much the same thing to other cities on the Continent.  Willis goes full throttle into the romanticism, calling out the many unsung heroes that kept St. Paul's Cathedral standing, that helped save friends out of the rubble, that worked to keep up the spirits of their comrades with plays and dramas and small, unexpected gifts.  And I liked that.  I am sure that there was looting and fighting and all sorts of horrors that happened during the Blitz, but hey, sometimes you just want to hear about the good things and not the bad.  There is a time for gray areas and people with complex motivations, but perhaps a story about everyday heroes is not the place for them.  I respect that.

My main complaint with this book probably isn't a fair one, so I'll just touch briefly upon it here.  Couldn't there have been just one person of color in the story?!  I mean, there's this Badri guy who seems to just kind of mess up people's space-time coordinates (assuming he is South Asian based on his name), but he is the ONLY ONE, and he can hardly be counted as even a secondary character.  I mean, come on.  These historians are traveling back in time from 2060 - there's probably a lot of mixed race people at that time.  And maybe they are mixed race, but their names and physical descriptions make it hard to believe that they are.  And then there's the people in London, which was the seat of a global empire, and apparently NO ONE there was not white, even so.  It bothered me a lot.  In a book of 1100 pages set in the midst of a massive world war, I feel like there could have been one person.

Anyway, I have talked in zero ways about the plot or the characters of this book, and have managed to write quite a bit.  I don't really want to talk plot or characters. The plot is a bit complex and I don't want to spoil what was really a great ride for you. And while I enjoyed the main characters, I didn't fall in love with any of them. Really, my heart belonged to the secondary characters in this one, and they make so many of the scenes so wonderful that I have a feeling you will fall for them, too.

Review-itas: Japan Edition

Guys!  I went to Japan in May, and due to the long flights and some down time, I got some reading done.  I am reviewing a couple of the books separately, but I think I can do the two below as mini-reviews.  Not because they are not complex books!  But because sometimes, brevity is a virtue, and I need to practice it.

Scattered Among Strange Worlds, by Aliette de Bodard.  I told you before why you should read Aliette de Bodard, and I stick to my story here.  Scattered Among Strange Worlds is a collection of two short stories, one set in the same universe as On a Red Station, Drifting, and one set on Earth, though a future, different Earth.  I enjoyed these stories for many of the same reasons I enjoyed On a Red Station, Drifting:  they center on thoughtful women who are just living each day (though the first story does include the reminiscences of a rabble rouser, who is also a thoughtful woman), and they focus more on civilian life during a time of strife than they do on war maneuvers.

The first story is set at a funeral and has a wistful tone.  It really shows how people start revolutions and movements with a lot of hope and optimism for how things will change, but often ... things don't change that much.

The second story is set in France and the main character is a mermaid.  This story was also about well-meaning people trying to improve the lives of mer-people by bringing them to land, but the mer-people were just unhappy and desperate to fit into a world they did not really like.  This story referenced colonialism to my mind, but I find references to colonialism everywhere.

Both stories were very good, and I plan to read as much de Bodard as I can in future.  I recommend you to do the same.

Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves is the only book by a Japanese author I read while in Japan.  I often try to read books written by authors from the place I am visiting, and I often fail at at this endeavor.  I also took The Devotion of Suspect X with me on my trip, but for some reason, it did not appeal to me.

The Sound of Waves is set on a Japanese island during the 50s or 60s.  It's a pretty remote island; everyone knows everyone else, and everyone fishes for a living.  Shinji is a young fisherman who is not particularly smart but is very hard-working and strong.  Hatsue is new on the island and generally pretty, so obviously everyone is intrigued by her, including Shinji.  The two meet and like each other instantly, but it's hard work being secretly in love on a tiny island, and the two become victims of gossip and misunderstandings before long.

This book has won several awards and is something of a modern classic.  I admit that I'm not sure why.  Maybe it was just my translation, but I didn't think it was very memorable.  I did enjoy many aspects of the novel.  There are beautiful descriptions of island life, the theme of Japanese traditions at war with western influence, the impact of cruel gossip in a tiny tine, the sacrifices people make for family.  And it was refreshing to see a story about two teenagers who didn't really have much angst - there wasn't really a love triangle, the two didn't toy with each other's feelings, and they were pretty much completely honest with each other.  Woohoo!  But I didn't find the characters very interesting.  I think Mishima has written longer novels, too, so I think I may check one of those out - perhaps the characters will have more time to develop in a longer form novel and I will be more engaged.

The future, Asian style

I first heard about Aliette de Bodard's novella On a Red Station, Drifting on Stainless Steel Droppings.  I wanted the book as soon as I read Carl's review and promptly went over to Amazon to purchase it.  So I hope you read his review, too, and that it has the same effect on you as it did on me.  I don't read much science fiction, so I thought a novella written from an Asian female perspective was just the thing to get me to dip my toes into the genre:

For generations Prosper Station has thrived under the guidance of its Honoured Ancestress: born of a human womb, the station’s artificial intelligence has offered guidance and protection to its human relatives.

But war has come to the Dai Viet Empire. Prosper’s brightest minds have been called away to defend the Emperor; and a flood of disorientated refugees strain the station’s resources. As deprivations cause the station’s ordinary life to unravel, uncovering old grudges and tearing apart the decimated family, Station Mistress Quyen and the Honoured Ancestress struggle to keep their relatives united and safe. What Quyen does not know is that the Honoured Ancestress herself is faltering, her mind eaten away by a disease that seems to have no cure; and that the future of the station itself might hang in the balance…

There was a lot that felt unfamiliar to me about this book.  I don't read a lot of science fiction, so already I felt a bit out of my depth right from the start, with all the action taking place on space stations and distant planets.  I also don't know a lot about Vietnamese culture, and therefore wasn't always sure if I was a little lost because I didn't understand the culture or the setting.  Regardless, I was a little lost :-)

But I expected to feel a little lost in reading a new genre, and I didn't mind very much. There was a lot that felt familiar, too, for those that know the fantasy and science fiction genres well - a once-prosperous place now fallen on hard times with a large population and limited resources.  Failing infrastructure.  A long, never-ending war that has taken away the heroes and left the defenseless alone.   You know the story, right?  But that's where de Bodard takes off into the awesomeness of a feminine perspective and an East Asian influence.  

It is so rare (really, ridiculously rare) to see a woman's perspective in fantasy and science fiction, and even more abysmally rare to see the perspective of someone of color.  It was so refreshing to read this book, with its two central characters both women, and neither of them with a romantic interest or "God, I wish I was prettier" thought in their heads for the whole book!  Rather, both women were concerned about their friends and family and their ways of life.  You know.  Things that normal people care about.  And, much like in real life, there is no villain in this story.  There are just people with different perspectives who misunderstand each other and want different things.

And the Vietnamese perspective was so great, too.  On a Red Station, Drifting gave me such a zing of excitement because it is such a wonderful example of all that fantasy and science fiction can and should be.  It provides such a unique lens on the traditional hero story, one that includes things that are so important in Eastern cultures:  respecting your elders, ancestor worship, and strong family ties.  de Bodard brings these themes into her novella so seamlessly that you can easily imagine a future in which Eastern culture dominates, and see just what the positives and negatives of such a culture would be.

I'm pretty impressed that de Bodard was able to pack so much punch into such a short novel.  Clocking in at just over 100 pages, On a Red Station, Drifting is not a huge commitment and therefore is an excellent introduction to the science fiction genre.  It's also a lovely reminder of how many different ways there are to tell a story, ways that are influenced by culture, history, gender, religion, and different ways of viewing the world.  Highly recommended.

What if religion is really just a computer program?

Alif the Unseen, by G. Willow Wilson, has a really great cover design.  I love the Arabic window shape and the lettering.  And the circuits!  It fits so perfectly with the story, I just love it.

Let me tell you about the story so that you can see just how perfect the cover is.  The back cover summary is good at sharing the plot without giving away key details, and it certainly inspired me to pick the book up, so here it is for you:

In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the State’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the head of State security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.

There was a lot going on in this book.  Arab Spring, computer hackers, a Big Brother-type government that spies on its citizens (ahem), the idea of books as programs, religion, stories and so much more.  It was a bit overwhelming, but certainly ensured that I kept reading!  In many ways, Alif the Unseen reminded me of Ready Player One, though that could just be because they both involve tech nerds saving the world from large, scary conglomerates, and both of them have a lot of technical and background story that bogs them down.

One of the key insights of Alif the Unseen is that religious texts such as the Qu'ran adapt and change with the times even without editing one word.  They are a bit like computer programs, and if you can code the books into an advanced computer, then you can know everything about everyone in the world.  This was very difficult for me to wrap my head around, and all the metaphors that Wilson used to try to help me understand were lost on me.  I still enjoyed reading the book even without this knowledge, but I feel like I missed something important.

There were a few things about this book that I truly loved.  The first was how Wilson portrayed Dina, a very religious Muslim woman.  When we first meet Dina, we get the impression that she is dowdy and conservative and not a very fun or interesting or confident person.  Many of us would read through the lines and assume that the lack of fun and interest and confidence was due to her beng such a religious person.  But as the story goes on, Dina is just magnificent.  She's strong and loyal and kind and practical, and she is all of those things without ever losing her faith and belief in her God.  So often, Muslim women in books are portrayed as oppressed, as victims who allow other people to tell their stories for them.  I love how Dina had her own voice and how amazing that voice was.

I also really enjoyed the challenge that Wilson brought to her readers about what we believe and don't believe.  Many people believe in their religions passionately and whole-heartedly.  But while they believe some things, there are others that they ignore or believe to be metaphorical.  Such as burning bushes, fornicating gods, and jinns.  Why is this?  How can we believe that some miracles are possible but not others?  Why do we accept some things on faith but require so much proof for others?  We are willing to give so much of ourselves to our technology but we do not give that same trust to what we deem the guiding force in our lives.

I did not love this book completely.  Alif really bothered me, and parts of the story felt clunky and too long.  But I am so glad that I got to know Dina, who was such a wonderful character, and that I had the opportunity to reflect on how I read stories and internalize them and incorporate them into my life.

Who knew playing Pac-Man could save your life?

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was a big hit in the book world a couple of years ago, so of course I only got around to reading it now.  The novel wasn't even on my radar until I saw that it was an available audiobook at the Chicago Public Library, and then suddenly all of the positive, gushing reviews I had read of it on the interwebs came back to me, and I was quite happy to download it.

Luckily, the audiobook version is awesome.  I have been uber-lucky recently with my audiobook selections (well, except for Mrs. Dalloway, but that was not the fault of the narrator, just an issue with the book format succeeding on audio).  Will Wheaton narrated this book and he was absolutely fantastic.  I do not really "follow" audiobook narrators, but I may just start following Wheaton because he did this one really, really well.  Even at the start of the book, which took forever to get to the point, I was thoroughly engaged because he was so good at showing Wade's enthusiasm and excitement and you couldn't help but be enthusiastic, too.

I wish I had a really good word for those books that you become completely addicted to in the moment but know that this obsession will end pretty quickly once you finish it.  It's like a massive word gorge session, followed by a long book nap after which you vaguely remember having read a book in a very short amount of time but since it was so fast, you can't be sure if it was all a dream or real.  I don't know how to describe this better than that - why don't words exist for this experience?!  I assume it has been a common occurrence ever since books came into existence.

Hopefully at least one of you knows what I am talking about.

Joint Musings: Doomsday Book

Marg and I read Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog together and loved it.  We agreed to do a buddy read of Willis' more famous novel, Doomsday Book, as quickly as possible.

Two years passed.

And now here we are with the discussion, just a little bit later than we had planned.

Doomsday Book is a time travel novel that takes place in the mid-21st century and the mid-14th century.  Kivrin, the main character, is a scholar of the Middle Ages and wants desperately to go back in time and experience it for herself.  So she does, against everyone's better judgment, and ends up in a small English town outside Oxford and tries to assimilate herself into life in the early 1300s after getting violently ill.

Meanwhile, in the 21st century, there has been a horrible outbreak of an unknown disease and everyone is under quarantine.  Willis uses these parallel story lines to show just how much has changed and how much has stayed the same over seven centuries of history, and just how devastating a pandemic can be, if you don't know how to treat it.

Below is the second half of our discussion.  The first half is over at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.  Go check it out and then come back here - I promise the post won't have disappeared in the meantime :-)

And thanks to Marg for reading this with me!

Musings: The Chaos Walking Trilogy

I listened to the Chaos Walking trilogy in audiobook format in a very short amount of time (especially considering the length of the third book!) on my commute to and from work, at the gym, while cooking, on the bus... pretty much everywhere.  The series starts with The Knife of Never Letting Go, continues with The Ask and the Answer, and ends with Monsters of Men.  It takes place on a distant planet called New World, where human settlers have been living a subsistence lifestyle for about 25 years.  The native intelligent species, the Spackle, appear to have been almost entirely wiped out.  Everyone on New World can hear everyone else's thoughts - those of their neighbors, of their horses, of their dogs... everyone.  Except the women.  But there are no women in the town where our hero, Todd Hewitt, lives, so he really can hear the thoughts - the Noise - of everyone around him.

And then one day he must leave home with his truly wonderful dog, and he meets a young girl, Viola, who is a new settler to New World.  And as the two get to know each other on their adventure, and as we meet other characters in the books, we realize that much of Todd's world is built on lies upon lies upon lies, and it's difficult to know who to trust and what is true.

Reading Suggestions: A More Diverse Universe

 
So many of you have signed up to participate in the A More Diverse Universe blog tour, which has been the highlight of my week.  How many of you?  FIFTY!  That is a seriously amazing number.  And if each one of you can get one more person to participate - well, I think you know that if you do the math, that makes 100.  I can't even tell you how glorious it would be to get a century's worth of people reading and reviewing books.  I'm going to aim high, but I'm already so, so happy!

I understand, though, that people are having trouble finding books to read.  This is part of the reason why this blog tour is so important!  It is so difficult just to find books that qualify for the tour, and there are only two requirements for the tour:  POC Author, Speculative Fiction genre.

So I thought I'd help you out a little bit with a list of authors and books that might strike your fancy.

Salman Rushdie - I feel like Rushdie is one of those authors who is offended when people say his novels are "fantasy," but the fact remains that Rushdie's work is often steeped in magical realism.  The Enchantress of Florence is about the Emperor Akbar of Mughal India fame and his beloved and beautiful wife, Jodha - who may or may not have existed.  Beautifully written, with a strong and flawed central character, and wonderfully evocative of India.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a young adult novel that Rushdie wrote for his son about a young boy and his storyteller father and their fantastical journey together.

Sarwat Chadda's new young adult novel The Savage Fortress is about an Indian-English boy who returns to India and sees elements of the Ramayana come to life.  I haven't read the book yet, but there is an excellent review of it over at The Book Smugglers!

Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon has been on my wish list for a long time.  Based on the mythology and history of North Africa and the Middle East, this is a welcome, fresh take on the traditional epic fantasy novel.

And speaking of the Middle East, it's hard to mention it without thinking of the Arabian Nights!  If you want a traditional take on these timeless tales, check out Husain Haddawy's "authoritative text."  For a more modern take on the novel, try Rabih Alameddine's absolutely wonderful  novel, The Hakawati. 

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a similar story by Grace Lin about the power of storytelling in a young Chinese girl's life.  If you are looking for something quick but engaging, or want to read a book with beautiful illustrations, this one's for you!

If you want a different spin on Asian fiction, give When Fox is a Thousand a try.  It's described as combining "Chinese mythology, the sexual politics of medieval China, and modern-day Vancouver to masterfully revise the myth of the Fox (a figure who can inhibit women’s bodies in order to cause mischief)."  Sounds good to me!

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King is one of my top reads for 2012.  An amazing story about Native Americans trying to make it in the modern world - I loved the narrative style of this one, alternating between the characters and the narrators and sharing so many lessons along the way.  This is a book I plan to purchase in hardcover very soon.

And it's hard to mention Native American fiction without mentioning Sherman Alexie!  Flight is not my favorite book by Alexie, but it is a very powerful look the modern foster care system and the children that are so impacted by it, for better or for worse.

Further south in the Americas are the magical realists of South America.  I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude in high school and still remember some of its most vivid scenes.  I've had The House of the Spirits on my shelf for years, but have still yet to read one book by Isabel Allende.

One of the books I have out of the library and plan to read for this event is Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize-winning semi-autobiographical novel about a young man, his affair with an older aunt, and a man who writes soap operas.


Octavia Butler - I don't think there's much I need to say about her!  She's the most popular author on this blog tour by far.  I found Kindred very moving and have heard many positive things about the rest of her books, too!

Nalo Hopkinson - A Jamaican Canadian who draws on the Caribbean traditions of oral storytelling to create vivid stories

N. K. Jemisin - Hit the fantasy world by storm a few years ago with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, an epic fantasy novel about racism, classism, interfering gods, and being true to yourself.  She's in the midst of writing a new series as well.

Nnedi Okorafor - A Nigerian American author who has won a lot of awards, including the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Africa.  She also writes young adult fiction that features Nigerian culture.

Samuel R. Delany - This author is most famous for his novel The Einstein Intersection, which won the Nebula award when it was published.  His book Tales of Neveryon takes on the topic of slavery in an Eastern setting.


Graphic novels more your style?  Then you have a TON of options!  The entire manga genre is open to you :-)  Or try Hiromi Goto's Half World, which Jill of Fizzy Thoughts tells me is really, really great!  It's about a girl who must go to the Half World to save her mother from a creeptastic villain.  Goto has written other novels, too - find her on GoodReads!


Don't have enough time for a full novel and want to read a short story instead?  Check out one of these amazing anthologies and pick one that grabs you at the first line!
Dark Matter:  A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
The Apex Book of World Science Fiction
So Long Been Dreaming:  Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy

WHEW!  That was a lot, and not even the tip of the iceberg!  I hope that sends you out on a highly enjoyable search for books and authors and that you find even more that you can recommend and share with us, too.  I can't wait to see what you choose!