June Book Log

Jun 30, 2021 13:53

Hey, we've made it through half of 2021 now! Not bad for a year that, for a depressingly long time, felt like it was never going to get here at all.

And June 2021 was a very good month of reading for me!

49. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I'd already encountered most of the material in this book previously, if sometimes in slightly different form, on John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed podcast. But it was absolutely worth revisiting in book form, even if I did kind of miss Green's voice and the way he always sounds both deeply bemused and sort of dolefully amused by absolutely everything.

The conceit here is that Green reviews "facets of the human-centered planet" on a five-star scale, with full recognition of exactly how meaningless and absurd that it. The topics vary widely: plants and animals, works of art, diseases, inventions, natural phenomena... Everything from the Lascaux cave paintings to the World's Largest Ball of Paint. But each essay, in reality, is a surprisingly profound meditation on life, full of interesting tidbits of information and thoughtful reflections on both a personal and a global level. It's intimate and smart, fascinating and well-written, slyly funny and frequently moving.

I heartily recommend this either in book or in podcast form. Or, for that matter, both.

To borrow Green's rating format: I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.

50. The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams

An anthology of stories on the subject of mad scientists, from a fairly impressive collection of authors. Various different kinds of mad science are represented, including superhero, horror, pulp adventure, and science fiction tropes, with plentiful appearances from the scientists' assistants, love interests, and minions.

It's pretty good, overall, as anthologies go. There are several stories I thought were very good to excellent (including the fantastic "Mofongo Knows" by Grady Hendrix, which I'd encountered before in podcast form and was delighted to rediscover here); a few more that were quite enjoyable, if perhaps not very memorable; a bunch that were slight but still mildly entertaining; and only a couple that I actively didn't like (mostly because, it turns out, I don't find reading about super-misogynistic mad scientists to be a good time, no matter what might happen to them in the end). There's also one story (Harry Turtledove's "Father of the Groom") that was a bit funny, but would have been a lot funnier if it weren't trying so hard to be funny, and one just-kind-of-okay story that was way, way too long, especially in comparison with the other stories in the volume. (Seriously, was there a word limit no one remembered to tell Diana Gabaldon about?)

That last one does kind of threaten to bog the whole thing down for a while, to be honest, but mercifully I think it doesn't quite succeed, and there were enough really good pieces after that to wash away my annoyance and leave me feeling generally happy with the whole thing.

Rating: 4/5

51. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

This is the second book in the Simon Snow series, which has a wonderfully strange origin story. Rainbow Rowell invented the world and the characters for her novel Fangirl, to serve as the Harry Potter-esque series the titular fangirl was obsessed with. But she was so taken with them that she then couldn't resist writing their story herself. Or part of it, anyway, as the first volume, Carry On was written as if it were the final book in a multi-volume series that doesn't actually exist. Or maybe a fanfictional version of an ending to a non-existent book series... The levels of meta can make your head hurt, and they amuse me endlessly.

Anyway. This one is set after the big happy ending, and a de-magicked Simon Snow has fallen into something of a depression now that he no longer has a purpose in life. So his friend Penelope and his maybe-boyfriend Baz take him on a road trip through America, hoping that will help to snap him out of it. Along the way, of course, they have some supernatural adventures, most of them involving vampires, and end up having to dash to the rescue of a friend they were just hoping to drop in on for a visit.

I loved the previous one so much I basically read it in one sitting. This one wasn't quite as compelling, but I still enjoyed it a lot. Almost more than it feels like I should have, somehow. I mean, there's maybe not huge amounts of substance here, despite a few clever world-building elements. But it's just such a delightfully fast, breezy, fun, oddly cheering read, one that, I think, actually does scratch much the same itch as certain types of well-written fanfiction do.

The ending feels very open for another sequel, by the way, and I'm very much crossing my fingers that we'll get one. I honestly do feel like I could happily read these forever.

Rating: 4/5

52. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

This may perhaps be more accurately described not as a history of fairy tale, but as a history of the ways in which people have thought about and related to fairy tales: as facets of a national identity, for instance, or as universal guides to human experience, or through the lens of psychoanalysis or feminism. It definitely is short, though, at 180 pages. But it packs a lot into those 180 pages, giving the interestingly paradoxical sense of an author thinking very, very deeply about the subject even while barely having time to scratch the surface of it. It may, perhaps, be a little bit dense, but it's never dry, and it's full of sharp observations, interesting insights, and compelling food for thought about a genre of storytelling so familiar that it's easy to take it for granted, but that seems to contain infinite possibilities for adaptation, interpretation, and engagement.

Fascinating stuff, and the sort of book it seems like one could come back to repeatedly and find new substance in.

Rating: 4.5/5

53. There There by Tommy Orange

This novel follows a large and varied cast of Native American characters as they all converge on a big powwow held in Oakland, California, each of them bringing their own complicated motivations, feelings, and life experiences with them. But violence is heading there as well...

Tommy Orange's writing is amazing. The prologue alone, which describes the literal and figurative dismemberment of America's Native people and the ways in which they have adapted to survive, is as powerful a piece of writing as I have encountered in recent memory. He has an excellent feel for character, too. Even the people we see only in very brief glimpses feel thoroughly complex and real. The only thing I'm not entirely sure about here is quite how I feel about the ending... I wasn't really expecting all these life stories to be tied up neatly, but there's even less of that that I was anticipating. It's a little disconcerting, but then I think this is the kind of novel that ought to disconcert the reader a little, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that any neater resolution would have done the book a disservice.

In any case, it's sharp, thoughtful, painful, truthful-feeling writing, and I'm more than a little in awe of it.

Rating: I think this one has to get the full 5/5.

54. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A man wakes up, alone, on a spaceship. He's only very slowly beginning to remember how he even got there, but it quickly becomes apparent that he's on a mission with incredibly high stakes. In fact, the entire future of humanity depends on him remembering what he's there to do and coming up with some way to do it. And it is not going to be easy...

I almost feel like I shouldn't enjoy this one anywhere near as much as I did, because aspects of it are just incredibly, ridiculously implausible. Like absolutely everything about how this mission was put together and why this particular guy is part of it, not to mention the whole contrived amnesia gimmick. But, boy, did I enjoy it a lot, anyway. Like, a lot. It's a fun, fast read, one that's nerdy in all the best ways, with some real tension (especially towards the end), some surprisingly emotional moments, and some cool science-fictional ideas. And, doggone it, sometimes you just really, really want to watch super-smart (yet relatable) people coming up with clever ways of solving problems and overcoming obstacles. Basically, it's the sort of thing that will probably appeal to just about anybody who liked The Martian. Heck, part of me can't believe I'm actually saying this, given all the aforementioned ridiculousness, but I honestly think I enjoyed it more than The Martian.

Rating: a surprising 4.5/5

55. Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson's new book is very much like her previous one. There are lots of hilarious, wacky, often mildly ribald anecdotes from her life, usually featuring her own adorkable awkwardness, random encounters with Texas wildlife, and/or surreal arguments with her long-suffering husband. (Even the chapter titles for this stuff are likely to put a smile on your face: "And Then I Bought Condoms for My Dog", "That Time I Got Haunted by Lizards with Bike Horns," "And That's Why I Can Never Go Back to the Post Office Again"...) Other entries are more serious and poignant reflections on the various mental and physical illnesses that she struggles with, featuring words of wise and gentle, but never sappy encouragement to herself and others for getting through them.

I will say, I think I didn't love this quite as much as her previous two books, maybe because I was in less of the right mood for it, or maybe because she's already used up most of her very best stories. But that is a very high bar, anyway, and still leaves a great deal of room for me to like this one a lot. Which I did. And I suspect anyone else who enjoyed those, or who reads her blog, will like it too.

Rating: 4/5

56. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

In 1726, in a small town in England, a physician is called to the bedside of a woman who is giving birth... to a rabbit. A dead rabbit. A dead, grotesquely dismembered rabbit. What could possibly be going on here? Is it the greatest medical discovery of the ages? A miracle sent by God? Something the woman must have brought on herself, somehow, with her thoughts or her actions? Those are the only reasonable possibilities, right?

Bizarrely, this is actually based on a true story. Although "true story" may be something of a slippery concept, and that is in fact the main theme of the novel: the ways in which human beings convince ourselves to believe things that may not be true, the ways those beliefs can take on an independent reality of their own once they're at large in the world, and the ways in which people with the power to do so project and impose those beliefs onto the lives and the bodies of others.

One might possibly complain that the novel ends up getting a bit heavy-handed with those themes, or that it seems to promise to be a very different kind of story at the beginning than the philosophical meditation it basically turns into. But for me, it worked quite well, and the ideas it's examining feel at once like universals of human experience and as if they've very, very specifically relevant to the world we're living in right this moment.

Rating: 4/5

57. Fox 8 by George Saunders

Like a lot of George Saunders' stuff, this small volume seems harder to describe than it feels like it should be. Let's say that it's a talking-animal fable for adults. It starts out cute and kind of funny; gets sad in complicated, unresolved ways that you don't see in ordinary fairy tales; then ends on a moral and a pointed question for human readers that are, on one hand, as simple as they can possibly be, and on the other, as complicated as human nature and human civilization.

Of course, George Saunders, being George Saunders, makes this work, in his own strange kind of way.

Rating: 4/4
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1009951.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

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