Bragan Reads Right on Through It in 2021, Pt. 4

Hello again, all! I've been pretty bad at keeping up with other people's posts here lately, I'm afraid, but at least I've been good about staying on top of my own reading log. And since we're progressing rapidly toward the end of the year, it's time for a new post.

I haven't actually yet finished my first book of Q4 for 2021 yet, but here I am thoughtfully setting up my shiny new thread so it's all ready for when I do.

In the meantime, here's a newly updated recap of The Story of My 2021 Reading Thus Far:

January
1. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
2. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
3. Every Tool's a Hammer: Life is What You Make It by Adam Savage
4. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
5. The Book of Dzur by Steven Brust
6. Humans by Brandon Stanton
7. What the Hell Did I Just Read?: A Novel of Cosmic Horror by David Wong
8. Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
9. Of Muppets & Men: The Making of the Muppet Show by Christopher Finch
10. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
11. The Buying of Lot 37: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Vol. 3 by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor

February
12. Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) by John McWhorter
13. Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
14. The Legends of River Song by Jenny T. Colgan, et al.
15. The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought by Susan Jacoby
16. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald
17. Network Effect by Martha Wells
18. Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison
19. A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard

March
20. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
21. Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe by Theodore Gray
22. Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time by Robert Silverberg
23. The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
24. Geek Ink: The World's Smartest Tattoos for Rebels, Nerds, Scientists, and Intellectuals by the creators of Inkstinct
25. Bunnicula: 40th Anniversary Edition by Deborah and James Howe
26. How to Dispatch a Human: Stories and Suggestions by Stephanie Andrea Allen
27. Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose by Deirdre Barrett
28. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua
29. The Case of the Imaginary Detective by Karen Joy Fowler

April
30. Mysteries of the Mall and Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski
31. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 4: I Kissed a Squirrel and I Liked It by Ryan North and Erica Henderson
32. Treason's Harbour by Patrick O'Brian
33. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
34. Circe by Madeline Mill
35. Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks by James Goss, Jonathan Morris, Julian Richards, Justin Richards, and Matthew Sweet
36. Chemistry for Breakfast: The Amazing Science of Everyday Life by Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim
37. The Arrival by Shaun Tan
38. Enchanted Pilgrimage by Clifford D. Simak

May
39. The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
40. Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
41. Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
42. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel by Judith & Neil Morgan
43. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm the Only Squirrel in the World by Ryan North, Will Murray, Erica Henderson, and Rico Renzi
44. Brightness Falls from the Air by James Tiptree, Jr.
45. Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle
46. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
47. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
48. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

June
49. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
50. The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination edited by John Joseph Adams
51. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell
52. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner
53. There There by Tommy Orange
54. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
55. Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson
56. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer
57. Fox 8 by George Saunders

July
58. The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA's Challenger Disaster by Kevin Cook
59. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
60. The Way Through the Woods by Una McCormack
61. Flashback to 1971 by Bernard Bradforsand-Tyler
62. The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian
63. The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell
64. The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows
65. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 edited by Karen Joy Fowler
66. Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics
67. Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland

August
68. The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
69. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 6: Who Run the World? Squirrels by Ryan North and Erica Henderson
70. A Promised Land by Barack Obama
71. If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura
72. Santa Fe Noir edited by Ariel Gore
73. I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel
74. The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans
75. Animal Wrongs by Stephen Spotte
76. Doctor Who: The Official Doctionary by Justin Richards
77. Iorich by Steven Brust
78. The Beano Annual 2003
79. Who's A Good Boy?: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 4 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

September
80. Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't be Tamed by Lane Greene
81. Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry
82. The Dandy Annual 2004
83. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
84. Paranormality: Why We Believe the Impossible by Richard Wiseman
85. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
86. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
87. Magician: Master by Raymond E. Feist
88. Rush: The Unofficial Illustrated History by Martin Popoff
89. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

As usual Betty, you have an impressive list of books. :-)

>2 NanaCC: And yet, it's still not nearly as impressive as what's on my TBR shelves. :)

All right, here we go. On into October!

90. Inversions by Iain M. Banks



This is part of Banks' Culture series of SF novels, but it's set entirely on a world with a sort of medieval feel, and essentially the only SF element is the strong implication that the two central characters are, shall we say, not exactly local. Said characters being a physician attending a king, and a bodyguard working for another. (Well, technically the second one isn't a king, but, whatever, close enough.)

I wish I had something substantial to say about this one, but mostly... it was sort of okay? Honestly, it failed to grip me all that much. It's hard to say why exactly, because it certainly has a number of elements that seem as though they should be pretty exciting. Murder, intrigue, war, secret identities... But, while it did get more interesting towards the end, mostly I never felt particularly invested in any of it. I almost wonder if it's just because I didn't quite know what kind of story it was, going in, so my literary taste buds were set for space opera and didn't respond well to getting something more fantasy-flavored instead. More likely it's that Banks' very light touch when it comes to telling us much of anything about these characters and what they're doing here and who they are as people was a bit too light for me and left me without the feeling of having a good reason to care about them.

Ultimately, I dunno. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But... *shrug*.

Rating: 3/5

>4 bragan: That was my response to the book, too. Think Banks was working out some ideas he thought nifty - lots of symmetries and antisymmetries IIRC. But I wasn't as intrigued as he was.

>5 dukedom_enough: Yeah, honestly, it seemed like he was setting us up to expect more intriguing symmetries and contrasts than he actually delivered.

91. Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller



Lulu Miller has a weird fascination with David Starr Jordan, a scientist and naturalist known, among other things, for collecting and cataloging an extraordinary amount of fish, and for being the first president of Stanford University. In particular, she found herself obsessing over a particular incident in Jordan's life, in which thirty years of his fish-collecting career ended up in disarray on the floor after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, each specimen suddenly separated from its label. It's not too difficult to see a broadly applicable metaphor in this instance of a human trying to impose order on a world that, in an instant, can tumble all those efforts into chaos. How, Miller wondered, did Jordan keep going through things like that? What kind of mindset leads to picking your fish up off the floor and sewing the labels back onto the ones you can still identify, instead of just giving up in the face of nature's obvious indifference to your life's work?

The book that results from this obsession is partly a biography of Jordan, whose life, it turns out, takes some surprising and disturbing turns and ultimately offers up one set of answers to Miller's questions that should very much not be emulated. But it's much more a personal set of musings on chaos and order and how we perceive and categorize the world, and on how we can possibly find meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe.

I'll be honest, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about any of this at first. It was interesting, for sure, but the thought of Miller perhaps projecting her own issues onto some long-dead scientist felt mildly uncomfortable in a hard-to-pin-down kind of way. I also found her mindset and the exact nature of her philosophical journey a little difficult to connect with at times, as she perceives certain things significantly differently than I do, even if we're kind of starting out in the same place. But the place she arrives at the end of her journey is one I do feel comfortable joining her in, and along the way she weaves together a really interesting and sometimes deeply insightful tapestry of rich and important themes. So I think it's safe to say she won me over.

Rating: 4/5

>7 bragan: I love this cover

>7 bragan: I’m intrigued. Some of these early professors were very powerful in their universities and did some pretty terrible stuff (even while becoming legends in their fields). It seems like it’s potentially rich territory. Not sure if she went there.

>8 Nickelini: Seconding that.

>7 bragan: I've heard podcasts of Miller talking about this book, her writing, and other topics. It reminds me how very differently of some people can view the world. I kind of find her frustrating but generally agree with where she ends up even if it's a maddening path to get there. I'm still not entirely sure if I can stick with her for a whole book.

>8 Nickelini: The cover is even nicer in person! The fish is rather shiny, and it wraps around onto the back. (Well, I say "fish." Of course, it's not a fish, because fish don't exist. :))

>9 dchaikin: She does go there, I'd say. The biography takes a surprising or even shocking turn or two in the middle.

>10 stretch: I am definitely glad I stuck with her for the whole book. But then, I don't recall finding her especially frustrating on podcasts, so your mileage may vary.

92. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager



When Maggie was five, her family lived in a haunted house, where their experiences became so horrifying they left one day with only the clothes on their backs, never to return. At least, that's what her father's best-selling book claims. Maggie herself, to the limited extent she remembers anything at all, doesn't quite remember it that way, and her mother has basically admitted to her that all of it was all a lie. Her father, however, would say nothing about it to his dying day beyond "what happened, happened." Now Maggie has inherited the house, and despite her father's warning that it isn't safe for her there, she's returning to fix the place up, and hopefully to find out what actually happened that day.

Honestly, I'm a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Some of the details are pretty ridiculous, and it drags a bit in the middle, but it's an interesting take on familiar haunted house tropes, and it was a quick, engaging read that did keep me interested in finding out what the real story was. Mind you, I was pretty sure I figured out that real story well before the end, but while I was almost right about it, the novel did add a little extra twist to things to keep things interesting.

Rating: 4/5

93. Monstress, Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda



The sixth collected volume of the dark fantasy comic Monstress. As always, it's fantastically complicated, visually gorgeous, and full of rich, complicated worldbuilding. This one features a particularly impressive climax and a real cliffhanger of an ending. I'm also amused and genuinely impressed by the way I increasingly find myself thinking: Huh, who would ever have imagined that the relationship between a damaged, violent, traumatized woman and the people-eating lovecraftian monster she's unwillingly bound to would end up giving me these kinds of oddly warm feelings. Hell, just pulling that off would probably make this series interesting all by itself, even without any of the other cool stuff it also features.

Rating: 4/5

94. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben



A book about -- you guessed it! -- trees, especially about the aspects of them that we humans tend not to perceive or appreciate. Trees, it turns out, are much more sophisticated, complicated organisms than meets the eye, especially when you consider them in the context of a forest or an ecosystem.

It's all really interesting subject matter, and I did learn some cool things, but I had decidedly mixed feelings about the book. Wohlleben gets, I think, a bit too repetitive on certain subjects, whereas with others he doesn't go into nearly as much scientific detail as I would like. (Although perhaps that's not too surprising. Not only is this book clearly meant to have a broad appeal, including to less science-y types, but Wohlleben himself is a forester, not a scientist.) He also does a lot of what I can only call anthropomorphizing, and while to a certain extent that's effective in making his point that trees are very much living things, not inanimate objects, he goes a bit further with it than I'm entirely comfortable with, and it leaves me with niggling doubts about the extent to which he might be letting sentiment trump science.

Rating: 3.5/5

I read that last sentence as sentient trump science… which somehow seemed entertaining. It’s such a cool sounding book. Too bad for the flaws.

>15 dchaikin: That version is indeed entertaining!

I did find it worth reading, but it was not my ideal book on the subject, alas.

95. Doctor Who: Peacemaker by James Swallow



A Doctor Who novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones, set in the Wild West of America's Colorado Territory. The plot involves a traveling salesman whose snake oil "medicines" have suddenly become so miraculously effective they can even cure smallpox (although not without some side effects), and a couple of dangerous alien creatures who've come looking for him.

It feels very much like it could be an episode of the show, which does seem to be the general feeling this particular line of books tends to go for. It'd make an adequate, but not an especially exciting or memorable episode, I'd say. Lots of very familiar tropes here.

It was a reasonably diverting read, anyway, but I'm pretty sure the only thing that's remotely going to stick in my head about it is the moment where I suddenly realized that these characters were wandering around in the middle of a smallpox epidemic and were then presumably going to get back into their time machine and return to the 21st century and holy crap, no, Martha, please think about the possible consequences of that! She didn't, though, and apparently neither did the author. But then, we all probably had pandemics much less in our brains in 2007, when this was published.

Rating: 3.5/5

96. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones



Nineteen-year-old Polly suddenly realizes that she has two different sets of memories of the past nine years. One involves some very odd, even fantastic events she experienced in the presence of a man named Tom Lynn, who meant a great deal to her. The other is relentlessly mundane, and contains no trace of this person at all. And as she thinks back over the life she's forgotten, she eventually comes to realize why she's forgotten it, and to consider what she needs to do save poor Tom.

It's really hard to say precisely how I feel about this book. The plot is intriguing, if a bit slow. But the subtle, complicated ways in which Jones weaves together the mundane day-to-day world and the world of faerie is really interesting, and rather thought-provoking. There is, for instance, probably a parallel to be drawn between the way young Polly gets half-understood glimpses of the supernatural around her and her child's-eye view of her parents' divorce, and I think there's some fascinating material to chew over there.

On the other hand, man, did aspects of this story make me uncomfortable. The person who recommended it to me sort of warned me of this going in, saying that it contains "a romance between an adult and a child." And that's absolutely what it does contain; there's really just no other way of putting it. This isn't quite as horrifying as it might sound. There's not really anything terribly sexually inappropriate. But for much of the novel -- especially at the beginning, as Tom first strikes up Polly's friendship in a way that left me feeling like he was going to offer her candy in his van at any moment -- it did have me squirming more than a little. "Geez," I often found myself thinking, "I know this is an area where social mores have changed a little over the past decades" -- the book was published in 1985 -- "but how the hell can the author not be aware of just how creepily this is coming off?!" Aspects of the ending, however, had me reconsidering that, and thinking that perhaps not only did she entirely realize how disturbing it was, but that that was actually part of the point. And now I feel unsettled about it all in an entirely different way, maybe.

Rating: It's really hard to know how to rate this one. I think I'm going to give it 4/5, but maybe with a rather large asterisk.

97. Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West



Lindy West re-watches (or, in at least one case, watches for the first time) a bunch of extremely popular and well-known movies from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, kinda-sorta recaps them, and offers up lots of silly, snarky commentary about them and how well they do or don't hold up.

It's written in a slangy, casual, ultra-high-energy style, with lots of excited or annoyed parentheticals and rows of exclamation points and outbreaks of all-caps and such... Which, I have to say, is the kind of thing that somehow feels a lot more natural and fun when you encounter it on the internet somewhere than it does in an actual print book, especially when you're faced with two hundred solid pages of it. When the humor here does completely click with me -- when West is pointing out plot holes in Harry Potter, or reminding me of exactly how gloriously batshit insane Face/Off is, or having complicated flaily reactions to the end of Terminator 2 -- it can be positively hilarious. But most of the time it just all felt a bit... much. Or a lot much. And I say that as someone who really, really enjoyed West's previous book, Shrill, even though I seem to recall it having some of the same kind of tone, at least in places. Maybe that one kept the over-the-top stuff to more digestible chunks? Or maybe this one, despite all the political snark and legitimate points about awful writing of female characters and so on, just felt a bit too shallow, its outrage-laden humor less biting and more forced-feeling?

Rating: Doing some weighted averaging between the hilarious stuff and the way-too-much stuff, I'm going to call this a 3/5.

98. Pariah by Bob Fingerman



It's the zombie apocalypse, and a handful of survivors are holed up in a Manhattan apartment building, caught between a seething mass of the undead out in the street and a seething mass of toxic masculinity inside. There's kind of an interesting premise for a zombie story here, and a bit of humor and such, but, honestly, it really is primarily just a constant parade of dysfunctional male horniness, from the pathetic to the downright psychopathic. There are some female characters, mind you. There's the one, for instance, who somehow manages to exist mostly only in relationship to men and/or babies even when we're in her POV. And the plot device one, whose primary trait is her lack of a personality. I don't mean that she's written two-dimensionally, either. I mean, that's literally her deliberate defining characteristic, leaving her free to be used, abused, and lusted after by men without the hindrance of actually having any opinions about it.

And, OK, there is a bit of a satiric, or at least sardonic flavor to all of this, or a vague attempt at one, anyway. Fingerman certainly isn't putting these guys forward as role models, especially the vile frat boy rapist character. But, still. Ugh. It's not even so much that it's all highly unpleasant. Zombie novels are allowed to be unpleasant. It's that it gets so tedious. At one point, I literally yelled "I'm tired of hearing about your fucking boner!" at the page. Fortunately, I was alone at the time.

Rating: 2.5/5. Usually, books that I rate that low have poorer writing than this one, just on a prose level. But in this case the decent-enough writing is probably the main thing saving it from a lower rating still.

99. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman



An illustrated dark fantasy (or maybe fantasy/horror) short story by Neil Gaiman, about a man seeking a cave where treasure may be found... for a price, of course. It's a good example, I think, of Gaiman's skill as a storyteller. Although it's short, this tale is perfectly paced, doling out effective little bit of mystery and revelation, tension and foreshadowing as it goes along. And the illustrations, by Eddie Campbell, are eye-catching, varied, and integrated into the storytelling in some interesting ways.

Rating: 4/5

100. Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson



An account of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, with a particular focus on Isaac Cline, who was an officer of the US Weather Bureau in Galveston, and who lost his home and his wife in the storm.

The second half of the book, describing the events of the storm and their aftermath, is pretty engaging, in a horrible and depressing sort of way. The first half, however, which has a lot to say about things like Cline's life, the state of weather forecasting at the time, the personalities of people in the Weather Bureau, and the growth of Galveston, is a lot more dry. (Horrible, tasteless pun very much not intended.) And Larson sometimes way overcompensates for this fact by over-writing in an attempt to make such things feel DRAMATIC and OMINOUS, an approach that backfires a bit for him, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Still, there are a lot of interesting tidbits of information there. And there is a low-key but pervasive thread of commentary through the whole book about how the state of weather forecasting at the time was just good enough to foster overconfidence without being good enough to actually prevent this sort of horror, and about the ways in which ego and politics got in the way of acting properly on the information that was available. Although, since this book was published in 1999, the relevance of all of this to any 21st century hurricanes and other climate problems must remain as an exercise for the reader.

Rating: 3.5/5

I think i remember being intrigued by the first part - but it was a while ago. The (iffy?) story of the hail in west Texas and the frozen fish stuck with me. (Was that the first half?). The book really impacted me because I read while evacuating Houston for category 5 hurricane Rita, no long after Katrina. (Rita missed Houston). So i was riveted. But no clue if it was actually any good or not. ☺️ Anyway, glad you enjoyed it at least a bit.

>23 dchaikin: I can definitely see it all feeling a lot more immediate if you read it while evacuating for a hurricane! Anyway, it's not a bad book, really, but I definitely think I was hoping for something a bit better, after how much I enjoyed The Devil in the White City.

101. Things in Jars by Jess Kidd



It's 1863, and Bridie Devine, a detective of sorts with an unusual and interesting medical background, is investigating the kidnapping of a child. She's accompanied by the ghost of a dead boxer who latched onto her while she was walking through a graveyard, but that fact seems almost mundane when compared to the strange, violent, watery nature of the child herself.

This is a weird and fascinating novel, dark and magical and very hard to categorize. The writing is particularly remarkable, because it often seems as if it should come across as contrived, silly, even purple. And yet somehow it really, really works. I don't know how Jess Kidd pulls that off, but my hat's off to her for managing it, and for creating something this weirdly compelling with it.

Rating: 4/5, but I'm seriously tempted to kick it up another half star.

102. Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland



A collection of science fiction stories of various types, usually with an edge of social commentary.

The stories are mostly decent, and feature some intriguing ideas, but with one or two welcome exceptions, they never quite landed for me with anything like the impact I wanted them to have, and by the time I was done with the collection, I was feeling more than a little frustrated with that. I'm not even sure what it was that was causing the general failure to click with me. I think maybe I just didn't get along very well with the writing style, which somehow felt, most of the time, as if it was telling me about the worlds the author had created rather than immersing me in them.

Rating: 3/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book)

103. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt



A history of women at JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), from its origins in the 1940s, through many decades of exploring the solar system, up to the present day (or very nearly: the book was published in 2016). For much of this time, most of the women there were employed as computers, calculating complex engineering equations and rocket trajectories by hand with pencil and paper. If you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, or read the book it's based on, this is the same type of job the women featured there were doing elsewhere at NASA. (And, yes, not all of the women at JPL where white, either.) Later on, as electronic computers began to replace human ones, they became computer programmers, as well. And by now, of course, there are many female engineers working there, although still not in the same numbers as the men.

I wasn't always exactly engaged by the writing in this particular volume. It wanders back and forth between being a straightforward history and trying to go for a "narrative nonfiction" approach of dramatizing things from various women's POV, and the two things are grafted rather awkwardly together. (This seems to be a common structure in non-fiction these days, and too few writers, in my opinion, pull it off especially gracefully.) The subject matter is certainly interesting, though. Holt covers a lot of the space missions fairly quickly and not in immense depth, but as a general overview of what JPL has done in its history, it works well enough. And the lives and careers of these women provide a really vivid illustration of what life was like for working women in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, when equally qualified men and women were seldom hired for the same positions and a woman could be summarily fired for getting pregnant. These are worthwhile stories to hear and remember, and even if I have slightly mixed feelings about the writing here, I am unambiguously glad to see these intelligent, dedicated women getting the recognition they deserve.

Rating: 3.5/5

104. Treasury of Aesop's Fables



This collection of fables, which I bought at a library sale somewhere a while back, was published in 1973, but based on the writing, I'm guessing these particular English-language versions are a fair bit older than that, and the (hagiographic and not especially enlightening) "Life of Aesop" essay at the beginning may be older still. It also features small woodcut illustrations by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).

I was interested to revisit some of the familiar fables from my childhood and maybe discover some more obscure ones I hadn't seen before, but I have to say I found this volume rather disappointing. They're not particularly engaging versions of the tales, are sprinkled with not-very-good poetry, and have appended morals that are often surprisingly hard to parse, and which sometimes seem to have little to do with the fable itself or even to flat-out contradict their apparent intent. I mean, I have certainly never seen the fox in the "sour grapes" story lauded as a paragon of wisdom before! Very often, too, these tales, in their references and sensibilities, seem to have much more of, say, 19th century England that 600 BCE Greece. Admittedly, different times and cultures adapting ancient stories to suit their own needs is fairly natural and perhaps not to be begrudged, but it's not really what I was looking for here. There also seems to be at least one odd omission: I have no idea where the tortoise and the hare might have run off to this time, but they are certainly nowhere to be found here.

All that having been said, though, at least a couple of these stories did give me a bit of a smile, being, as the kids these days say, #relatable. Like the one about the donkey who always longs for it to be whatever season it currently isn't. Who is, of course, being held up as a model for what not to do, but, man, I feel ya Mr. Donkey. I feel ya.

Rating: 2.5/5

>28 bragan: Your review gave me more than a "bit of a smile." Thanks for a fun review. Poor Mr. Donkey.

>29 labfs39: Heh, I'm glad my fable-based disappointment and identification with bad role model donkeys provides some entertainment. :)

>30 bragan: Ha, some of my favorite lines are from a bad role model donkey:
-I'm a donkey on the edge
-And in the morning we'll have waffles! (As he invites himself to stay overnight at Shrek's house)

>27 bragan: I liked this one, read it a few years back. So many stories we've never heard.

>31 labfs39: Ha, yes, that donkey is entertaining, too!

>32 dukedom_enough: It goes to show you how full the world is of stories we've never heard. So many of them belonging to women...

>14 bragan: Fear of anthropomorphizing is what has been keeping me from this book, which otherwise sounds interesting, so I was interested to see you found it there. Sentiment trumping science is something that worries me, and popular science seems to have a lot of it these days.

Admiring how much you get read.

>15 dchaikin: ...sentient trump science…, that's how I read it at first too. Entertaining notion indeed! (But very scary)

>34 SassyLassy: Yeah, it is an issue for that book, even though I did find it worth reading, anyway. I'm not sure if I'd exactly recommend it for someone who's been shying away from it for that reason, though.

I think the phrase "sentient trump science" is probably self-contradictory in multiple ways. ;)

And, heh, I always feel that I'm never reading quite enough. Probably because my TBR shelves never seem to get any less full.

105. Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell.



This is the final book in the Simon Snow trilogy, which itself was a... spinoff?... of sorts from Rowell's novel Fangirl, Simon Snow being the Harry Potter-esque character the titular fangirl was writing her fanfiction about. And I will never cease to be tickled by the way Rowell basically ended up writing fiction based on her fictional fan's fictional fanfiction. Heh.

This one honestly maybe feels a little too strongly in touch with those fanfictional sensibilities when it comes to the relationship between Simon Snow and his vampiric frenemy-turned-boyfriend Baz, which gets a touch overdramatic for me in places. But it's at least an interestingly messy relationship. And there's plenty else going on here, too, including a guy who claims to be Simon's replacement as the prophesied Chosen One, a bit of difficulty involving a contract with a demon, and a couple of other budding romances, as well.

It didn't sweep me along quite as quickly or entertainingly as the first two books, I will admit, but it was still fun, and I still really like the way it addresses questions of what happens after the epic saga ends and everyone is left to figure out who they are in the aftermath.

Rating: 4/5

106. Bats by Phil Richardson



Yep, it's a book about bats: their anatomy, behavior, and senses, their place in Earth's ecosystems, and their many varieties, complete with lots of colorful photographs of bats whose appearances range from adorable to freaky. It's pretty short -- about 120 pages -- so it's really just a brief layman's overview of the subject, but apparently that's exactly what I needed, because I did not even realize until now how many really basic things I didn't know about bats. The writing, I will say, is pretty pedestrian, but I did not care about this at all, because I was busy happily learning all kinds of Fascinating Bat Facts. For example! Did you know that bats' feet are constructed in such a way that they are clenched when the muscles are relaxed? It takes an actual effort for a bat to uncurl its toes, and that's how bats are able to hang securely from a perch above them even while they're sound asleep. OK, maybe not everybody is going to find that sort of thing interesting, but I sure did, and I spent a lot of my time with this book just thinking "Wow, evolution is neat."

Rating: 4/5

>106 I love LibraryThing. Where else would I go from reading about Swann's Way to the weird short stories of Alissa Nutting to bat toes in a single sitting.

>38 labfs39: We are a marvelously eclectic bunch here!

>39 bragan: Indeed !

107. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout



This sequel to Olive Kitteridge is structured much the same as the first book. Olive herself -- a woman I find a little bit difficult to like, but remarkably easy to love -- sits at the core of it, but many chapters barely namecheck her, focusing instead on on some of the other residents of her town on the coast of Maine as they live their own weird and mundane lives, lives we dip in and out of over the course of several years.

Some of these chapters worked better for me than others, but always I am impressed and moved by Strout's ability to capture some very complicated and profound human experiences in very simple language. Most particularly, in this case, the experience of aging and everything that goes with it.

Rating: 4/5

>41 bragan: I keep seeing this author popping up in various threads, usually with good reviews, but I am not feeling like reading it for the moment. I'm maybe not in the mood for those woman-with-fairly-ordinary-life type of books.
I loved (and liked) your description of the main character, though: a woman I find a little bit difficult to like, but remarkably easy to love.

>38 labfs39: I agree!

>42 raton-liseur: It may be the sort of thing I have to be in something of the right mood for, too. But Strout's understanding of what goes on inside people and her ability to convey it in remarkably few, simple words really does impress me.

108. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead



This is the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from slavery in Georgia and into a complicated and often brutal fugitive life by way of the Underground Railroad. Except, here, the Underground Railroad is a literal railroad, underground.

It's a rough, rough read, one that forces the reader to stare directly into the dark, ugly heart of America. But it is undeniably effective.

I'm a little uncertain what to make of the ahistorical/magical realism element of things. When I try to intellectually detach myself from the novel a bit, take a step back and think about it, it seems like such a strange, unnecessary conceit, one that feels as if it somehow ought to detract, or at least distract, from the painful realism of everything else. And yet, in the experience of reading it, it works. I scarcely found myself even questioning it. And it does, perhaps, provide a rather powerful metaphor in the form of that subterranean darkness.

Rating: 4.5/5

>45 bragan: I read The Underground Railroad a few weeks ago and had a similar thought at first: why play with such an historically important and already meaningful concept. And yet, in the experience of reading it, it works. Yes. And in addition to being a powerful metaphor, it also allowed the author to condense periods of travel: going from Georgia to South Carolina could be accomplished within a page or two, allowing the plot to focus on the places and people rather than the travel, without leaving anything out.

>46 labfs39: It did occur to me that that may have been a major motivation to do it that way. Which ought to feel like a cheat and a contrivance and something that completely breaks any sense of narrative truth. And yet it doesn't. I genuinely don't know why it doesn't, but I'm impressed that Whitehead not only pulled it off, but pulled it off so smoothly you barely notice him doing it.

109. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson



This little volume is exactly what the title says it is: a book about semicolons. Watson looks a bit at the history of the semicolon, where it came from and how its usage has changed over time; examines the ways in which various writers have used the semicolon; and tells some interesting stories about how ambiguous punctuation in written laws has had surprisingly big effects. But it's about more than that, too. Watson's central idea here involves changing how we think about grammar rules and the way we apply them. She's also not remotely shy about voicing plenty of other opinions on related subjects ranging from linguistic snobbery to the proper way to approach the interpretation of laws. It's all very thought-provoking, and Watson's writing is lively and fun to read. She picks great examples of other people's writing to talk about, too.

All-in-all, it's much more interesting and entertaining than you might expect any book about semicolons to be, even if you're the kind of person who's interested in reading books about punctuation to begin with. (Which I am, obviously.) It's also gotten me to think a bit differently about semicolons. I confess, I've long felt reluctant to use them even when I've really wanted to, out of some sense that others would find them pretentious or distracting, but I'm remembering now how fond of them I once was and how useful they can actually be.

Rating: 4/5

110. The Adventurists by Richard Butner



A collection of short stories all with a fantastic or slightly surreal feel to them. Which is something I often like, but most of these, despite the obvious recurring theme of people returning to places where they grew up, just didn't feel like they had any real point to them. Lots of buildup with very little payoff, emotional or otherwise. I honestly wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that the author just built them all around random elements and images from his dreams, although the prose itself is clear and matter-of-fact and anything but dreamlike. The overall result is plenty of stuff that's perfectly readable and mildly interesting but seldom very satisfying.

Rating: 3/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

111. The Circle by Dave Eggers



A dystopian satire (although at times it feels barely satirical) about social media and tech companies, featuring a corporation called The Circle, which is sort of like Google, Facebook, and Twitter all rolled into one and then made even more cult-like. The folks at The Circle not only fail to value privacy and cheerfully subordinate it to the desires of capitalism, they actually regard it as something akin to a moral evil. And they see it as their mission to make the world a better place.

It's a good premise, very Black Mirror-ish, and I appreciate the way Eggers carefully avoids straw-manning his targets (even to the extent of being willing to stipulate to some of the positive effects of the Circle's approach that I really don't personally find particularly creditable). But I'm afraid I never liked it anywhere near as much as I wanted to. The whole thing just feels entirely too heavy-handed. Certainly we did not need 400 pages to get the point, and I can't help thinking that it would have been far, far more effective if cut down to the length of a novella.

Rating: 3/5

112. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher



Carrie Fisher talks about being cast in Star Wars, the affair she had with Harrison Ford while filming (which she had previously spend decades not talking about), and the awkward legacy of fame that the movies left her with. She also includes excerpts from diaries she kept at the time, which she'd recently rediscovered, most of which center on her relationship with Ford and the turmoil it caused her.

Fisher's writing is a bit unpolished, often kind of rambly, and sometimes a little too self-conscious, but there is real charm and honestness to it, too. The diaries contain some painfully sharp writing, and some poetry that ranges from surprisingly good to, well, less so. And they present a picture of a very, very young woman wrestling with her own insecurities and her feelings for a married man who never seemed to express any kind of feelings of his own. Honestly, I can't exactly say I enjoyed reading them, just because they made me feel far too much like a voyeur, emotional and otherwise, even though she never goes into any of the gory sexual details.

Rating: 3.5/5

113. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente



Humanity's first contact, unexpectedly, comes in the form of fish-flamingo creatures (or, more accurately, lots of projections of the same fish-flamingo creature) who have come to invite Earth to participate in the intergalactic version of Eurovision. They've also picked out our contestants: the remaining two-thirds of has-been glam rock group Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, who are no longer even speaking to each other. And they'd really better not come in last, or our species will be deemed to have failed to prove its sentience and be exterminated.

This was a lot of fun. The plot's pretty thin, with a somewhat rushed-feeling ending and probably as much time spent on describing the various weird aliens and their history as on advancing the story. But I honestly don't think I care very much. The various weird aliens and their history are interesting, in a way that's half genuinely creative SF worldbuilding and half utter ridiculousness, blended together surprisingly seamlessly. There's a lot of laughs, some sardonic philosophy, and a bit of real heart, and ultimately it does a decent job of scratching that itch left behind by Douglas Adams.

Rating: 4/5

>52 bragan: Not my cup of tea, so I'll pass on this one, but I really enjoyed reading your review! It does convey the fun you had reading this book.

>53 raton-liseur: Thanks, I'm glad to know I can entertain others as a book entertains me. :)

>52 bragan: I liked this one a lot. At one point there were to be sequels, but I haven't heard anything recently.

>55 dukedom_enough: I'm not sure what you'd do for a sequel to that, but whatever it is, I'd definitely be there for it.

>48 bragan: This sounds like one I would enjoy. I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's response when asked for writing advice: "Never use the semicolon." A student of mine went through one of his books and found only one!

>57 BLBera: So he broke his own rule, but only very slightly!

114. A Lost Lady by Willa Cather



This short novel was published in 1923, but it begins several decades earlier, in the American West. The lady of the title is Mrs. Forrester, the wife of a man who amassed considerable wealth in the railroad business, but who, in the course of the story, finds himself in what such folks might call "reduced circumstances." It's told from the point of view of a young friend of the family, who idolizes her as having all the virtues considered most fitting to a woman of her social class: beauty and charm and a certain air of purity. But, through his eyes, we also see tiny glimpses of the woman behind that exterior, someone flawed, and much more complicated, and sadder.

I'm really impressed by Willa Cather's ability to make a character like Marian Forrester feel so much like a real, complex person in such a surprisingly minimalist way. Everything about her is more suggested than explored, and it doesn't feel like that should work remotely as well as it does.

This is also an interesting glimpse into a small piece of American history. A history, it must be said, that invites judgment from 21st-century readers with its causal racism, its ingrained classism, and its musings on the whole Manifest Destiny thing as a lovely, idealistic dream, albeit one now giving way to a sort of degraded banality. Such things can sometimes be uncomfortable to read, but in this case I felt mostly a sort of anthropological fascination with it all.

Rating: 4/5

>52 bragan: What a great premise! I have only read one other book by her, Six Gun Snow White, which was fine but nothing more - even so your review has rather tempted me to have a go at this one.

>60 wandering_star: The only other things I've read by her so far are her kids' novels The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and sequels, which I loved.

I suspect Space Opera might be the kind of thing you have to be in the right sort of mood for, but which hits the spot really well when you are.

>61 bragan: I started Space Opera but wasn't in the mood for it at the time. Theoretically I should like it so I'm saving it for when I'm more amenable to ridiculousness.

>62 rhian_of_oz: Probably a good idea! I hope you like it when you feel more ready for that kind of silliness.

115. Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buff by Ken Jennings



Ken Jennings talks about his experiences being on Jeopardy! (over and over and over...) and what his life was like before, during and after his unprecedented run of wins. Interspersed with that, he talks about trivia: its history as a pastime, why it's interesting and whether it's worthwhile, and what kind of person turns that pastime into a full-blown obsession. (Jennings himself honestly seems to have been born to it. Some of the stories about what he was like even as a small child do kind of make me feel much better about the fact that I haven't won seventy-four games of Jeopardy! in a row. I like trivia, but I think I'm lacking some gene for it that this guy was born with.) He also talks a lot about particular trivia contests and events, including college bowl quizzes, rigged 1950s game shows, and a weird town in Wisconsin where the biggest event of the year is an insanely nitpicky fifty-four hour trivia event.

I found some of the trivia-obsessed people and places he visits a lot more interesting than others, but overall this was an entertaining read, and I love the way he peppers the book with trivia questions to challenge the reader in a way that makes them part of the narrative. And his descriptions of his Jeopardy! career are especially interesting, and much more exciting than I might have expected from the fact that I already knew perfectly well how the whole thing went.

Rating: 4/5

Catching up late to your thread because I forgot to star it (and forgot to set my homepage notifications to my groups rather than starred), but you've got some really interesting books up! I'm particularly interested in two that I have that I haven't gotten around to reading yet, Why Fish Don't Exist and Things in Jars—both of which are going to stay in my pile, thanks to your reviews.

>65 lisapeet: Welcome! Never too late to drop by! :)

I hope you enjoy those when you get to them. Things in Jars, particularly, surprised me with how much I enjoyed it.

Well, looks like that's it for me for the year! Thought I'd finish at least one more, but it was not to happen.

I'll try to get around to setting up a new thread in the new group soon. Until then, Happy New Year, and Happy Reading, all!

Nice review of Lost Lady.

>68 edwinbcn: Thanks!