Speed Reviewing

So I’ve been thinking; I read a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Someone might care about what I think about what I’ve read. For a time, I was religiously recording ratings and whatnot on BookWyrm but it didn’t quite work for what I wanted it for. I’m also now on Storygraph because their recommendation algorithm is supposed to be quite good. This remains to be seen.

At the risk of making a task that I’m never going to finish, I decided to review every book I read for the first time in the past 12-ish months in no real detail, but enough to say whether it’s worth a read.

Fiction

The Mortal Engines Quartet – Philip Reeve

I really enjoyed the Mortal Engines series. I had read the first book having been loaned it during a stressed time in my first year of university but not had a chance to read the rest. I subsequently saw a series of videos by Oliver Lugg on the subject and was hooked in to borrow the audiobooks from the library.

The tone is both wacky and bleak, which is good but possibly a bit much. There’s a lot of death to a frankly ludicrous degree. I also somewhat started to lose patience with Nimrod Pennyroyal as a character, which is probably the point of him. It just toes the line between “these lives are entwined by fate” and “I refuse to believe they happen to have run into this man again”.

There’s loads to love though, and I would recommend giving it a read.

Fire and Bones – Kathy Reichs

I’ve read so many of these books that I can’t even remember what the plot of this one was. I faintly remember it including yet more will-they-won’t-they even though the needle had swung very firmly to “will” several books ago. I read it in Montréal which also made me look a little odd taking a photo of a police station (L’Édifice Wilfrid-Derome) from a boat tour, because it’s mentioned a lot in the earlier books.

An ongoing issue that’s only getting worse as time goes by is that Dr Brennan was in her 30s or 40s in the first book, and we’re now 30 years later. Despite being 60/70-something, she’s still off investigating in needlessly dangerous situations that she largely puts herself in.

Apparently Kathy Reichs wanted to call the book ‘Foggy Bottom Bones’. Make of that what you will.

Apostles of Mercy – Lindsay Ellis

This is the third book of Ellis’ “Noumena” series in which first contact happened in an alternate universe version of 2001.

I have a love/hate relationship with this series. On the one hand, it’s well enough written that I read the third book in a series that is approximately fifty audiobook-hours. The audiobooks also have some excellent voice actors in them.

However, it’s just depressing. Cora ends up physically and emotionally broken by the end of the first book. She’s even more broken by the end of the second, and then all hell breaks loose in the third. Major characters die and the aliens are fleeing a genocide. This makes for a book that’s hard work to finish, but relatively rewarding to do so.

I also don’t share the author’s self-admitted thing for extra-terrestrials…

Somewhere Beyond the Sea – TJ Klune

This is the sequel to Klune’s 2020 book “House in the Cerulean Sea”.

I read the books in back-to-back, and enjoyed the character dynamics and general “grumpy civil servant learns to love” thing. The first book is very sweet, and full to the brim with representation and positive messages. The second book also is, but in such a lecturing hectoring way I almost started skipping chapters.

Being realistic, the people who could do with the “running around naked painted neon yellow” level of “racism bad”, “transphobia bad”, “homophobia bad” and so on are never going to read a book with the description that this series has. Nor are they going to make it through the first book which is less obvious but still fairly obvious. It drifts from fiction into government PSA that being a nasty person makes you a nasty person who has no friends. I found myself mentally yelling “OH MY GOD, GET ON WITH IT” while in Tesco while listening to the inquiry chapter.

It gets bonus points for the acknowledgements explicitly calling out J. K. Rowling; I’m almost surprised it didn’t say so in the main text. It also gets points for having somewhat realistic depictions of the long tail end of trauma.

Definitely read the first book, give the second a chance.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This was the start of my “every book has to have time travel in it” period over December and January.

It depicts a series of inevitably sad vignettes of people using a special seat in a café in Tokyo to travel back in time until they finish their cup of coffee, which they must do before it gets cold or risk becoming trapped. The rules make just enough sense that you don’t really think about it around the stories of dementia, tragic accidents and missed love letters being executed by the time-traveller-of-the-week.

Great premise, good execution, some very powerful scenes. Lacking a bit of connective tissue, and I suspect suffers a little from being in translation.

The Paradox Paradox – Daniel Hardcastle

This book is doomed. Rather like the universe in it.

First, the book is excellent. It’s if Douglas Adams wrote queer fiction fifty years later than the Hitchhikers Guide and stuck with the time travel subplot to its logical conclusion. Its chapter numbers aren’t in order. There’s a sassy sentient cloud.

I’ve followed Dan (aka Nerd³) for years; from his YouTube channel, to his brief game-design period, to his also excellent first book “Fuck Yeah Video Games” and podcasts “The Podcats” and “Fuck Yeah, Doctor Who”/“Too Fast Ten Forward/Impossible New Worlds/LoROAR Decks”.

There’s a photo of me failing at face looking normal at the Edinburgh book launch of FYVG, where I waited for several hours in a queue then had a very brief chat about SSRIs. He and his partner Rebecca are one of the reasons I finally went to get diagnosed as autistic, as they’ve both talked a lot about it in their Patreon podcast.

Imagine my continuing horror therefore that he’s been absolutely screwed by a publisher that screwed up having all the money for a book in advance and a guaranteed audience. They did this so incredibly badly they’re now in administration having not paid him, nor many other authors for years. Scratch that, they’ve gone into administration twice (at time of writing). This following a situation where they kept moving the publication date around, screwed around with the cover, edited the thing with machine learning tools (badly), robbed him of a place on the bestsellers list and generally were terrible at their jobs. He now has to find £40k to transport and house the books that Unbound failed to send out before they went into administration.

If I had to critique anything, it also slightly suffers with “the people who need the messaging to be as clear as it is were probably not going to read it”. Hardcastle talked a lot while writing it about wanting to get the representation right for a whole slew of things, which I think he managed.

I thus can’t recommend this book, because it’s basically impossible to buy at the moment. I’m excited for when it finally gets its time in the sun (and said sun is not exploding).

The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley

A while back, I watched the first few episodes of a Spanish TV series “El Ministerio del Tiempo” which presents a premise that the Spanish government has been sitting on a collection of time doors to the past in a secret government department where they’ve “rescued” famous people like Diego Velásquez. It was pretty good, although I did find the idea unlikely that Franco was happily keeping his magic time travel doors a secret and didn’t completely rewrite history for his benefit.

This book has nothing to do with the series¹, but still features a secret government department and semi-famous people “rescued” from history for experimental purposes. It has a somewhat split narrative, in which they tell the real story of Graham Gore who died on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage on the one hand, and an unnamed narrator who works for aforementioned shadowy government department helps Gore acclimatize to the future.

It’s a solid book – so solid it’s already in production for a series by the BBC – that’s only slightly preachy and has some interesting exploration of generational trauma and the Khmer Rouge.

Space Opera – Catherynne M. Valente

Lots of potential, doesn’t quite stick the landing.

I should probably expand on that. It’s clearly written with a lot of love for both the Eurovision Song Contest and science fiction. It’s also written with a lot of love for run-on sentences.

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambiguous glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

That’s just the first sentence of the second chapter “Rise Like A Phoenix”. Yes, the chapter titles are all Eurovision songs.

The book also ends just as it gets to what felt like the middle of the second act (or, as it happens, the semifinals of the intergalactic song contest the human race is having to participate in in order to not be removed from the universe).

It’s fun, but hard work because of the writing style, and none of the characters are particularly likeable.

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

I picked up ‘Cat’s Cradle’ because I was watching another Oliver Lugg video in which he ranked every Kurt Vonnegut Book. He ranks it very highly.

There’s a lot to like, if you’re into slightly absurd dread. The calypso religion. The Ice IX causing the death of all humans by accident after a frozen corpse falls into the sea because the tower it was being kept in was crashed into by a plane. The Hook. This is just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head.

If ‘Space Opera’ is zany science fiction, then ‘Cat’s Cradle’ is zany political science fiction.

I wasn’t enamoured enough to want to read another of Vonnegut’s books immediately, not least because of the state of the world at the moment, but could be convinced in the future.

The Hunger Games prequels – Suzanne Collins

I first read The Hunger Games books in my first year of university. They’re fine enough books, with some rich lore, well rendered characters and political theatre that makes sense in a way that it often doesn’t in YA fiction. I just found with every book that I immediately lost interest as soon as the actual Hunger Games start. Partially because I just found the core “teenagers murdering one another” bit deeply uncomfortable, which is probably the point, but because we go from a rich tapestry of political shenanigans to Katniss complaining that a boy likes her for weeks.

I never really intended to read the prequels until I watched a still ongoing series of YouTube videos on the geography of Panem and the Hunger Games, which made me rethink my position and give the prequels a shot. The result is that I respect the series a lot more than I did. There’s a surprising amount of philosophy in them.

Sunrise on the Reaping

It’s very clear that Collins is concerned about propaganda and edited histories.

This is probably the peak of the series – not too much Hunger Games, copious political intrigue, several answers to questions that have been rattling on for the whole series and some level of catharsis.

I’ve seen several reviews where people reading the last few chapters have been in tears, because you know where it’s going and can’t stop it. I don’t think I’ve ever cried at a book, but it’s certainly a powerful thing.

Well worth a read, if you’ve read the rest. Poor Haymitch.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Published and set before ‘Sunrise’, ‘Ballad’ gets a much more nuanced review.

It has minimal Hunger Games, a massive point in its favour, because it’s not told from the perspective of a tribute, but the young Coriolanus Snow who is the principal human antagonist of the original trilogy. Centering Snow seems to have garnered some ire from people who, frankly, can’t have read the book because they think it’s supposed to make you empathize with him. This is not the case, although it could be because he’s fairly unlikeable all the way through, being a conniving schemer with delusions of grandeur and also being eighteen years old. I would also – slightly facetiously – argue that the main characters are in fact Lucy Grey and Sejanus, because they’re the ones who fit the mould of the protagonists from the other books; being forced into the Hunger Games against their will, making it out alive only to have to face the reality of life.

However, ‘Ballad’ also suffers with being a school drama with the Hunger Games attached. There’s a massive tonal dissonance in “oh, I have gym class, then need to do my homework for the local psychopath and go snog the tribute I’m helping to not die”.

It also makes so much more sense than the film.

If You Can’t Take The Heat – Savannah Inez (Savy Leiser)

I read this because it was

1. Free
2. Written by someone whose YouTube videos I’d been watching non-stop for a week who
3. Wrote it to try to get into the head of Colleen Hoover whose books are just bananas and I have no desire to read whatsoever.

I’ve not read any of Leiser’s other works (either as herself or her romance pen name), but given this slightly silly book was still well written if a bit much, it might be worth giving it a shot in the future.

The Soul’s Guide to the After Death – Gwenna Laithland

Yet more YouTuber books, this is the second book of click clacks gentle parenting sensation Gwenna Laithland and, for reasons which continue to confound me, I listen to all of her podcasts with her friend Tori. This is despite having absolute disinterest in parenting, and not caring about the American Revolution; though clearly I care more about the books.

I also perplexingly read her parenting book last year, which was also charming, funny and well researched.

For a book that’s only four hours in audiobook form, it packs in plot and character, and Gwenna does a great job of reading it too. It’s genuinely funny, and dark, and emotional.

Well worth a read. Take note of the content warnings though.

The Darkness Outside Us – Eliot Schreer

There’s two countries left on earth, enlightened but very capitalist Federation (clearly the US) and backwards, militaristic, and isolationist Demokratía (clearly Russia). We’re off to space to rescue the daughter of an oligarch (and the protagonist’s sister) from Titan. There’s a clear HAL 9000 homage.

As survival horror goes, it’s pretty good. As science fiction, also pretty good. It’s also the slowest burn romance I think I’ve ever read and good grief is the protagonist irritating.

It leaves you asking “WHY!?” but not in a good way.

The Cadfael Mysteries – Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter)

On the hunt for something to fill in the Kathy Reichs niche between books, I have started on the books in the Brother Cadfael series. I expected a slightly schlocky medieval mystery novel. What I got was a lot of history and the mystery relegated to the second half behind a well rendered version of 12th century Wales in ‘A Morbid Taste for Bones’, and the Anarchy in ‘One Corpse Too Many’.

I don’t object to this, and Pargeter was clearly very knowledgeable about the time period. The structure is just very strange.

Non-Fiction

1983: The World At the Brink – Taylor Downing

Around the release of Fallout London, I went through a phase of reading and watching everything I could get my hands on about nuclear eschatology.² This was recommended to me as a potted history of near misses during the height of the cold war, including the Able Archer 83 incident, and Stanislav Petrov ignoring the early warning system. Worth a read, if in the right mindset, and a good reminder that systems are run by humans for better and for worse.

Untypical – Pete Wharmby

I had this recommended to me by the internet as a discussion of late diagnosis autism, how he fits into the world (or at least tries to) and what the world could do to make life less of a trial for those who don’t necessarily fit in. It’s very well articulated, and a lot of it relatable. I’m forever glad that I don’t have issues with sensory overload.

Everything is Tuberculosis – John Green

Everything is tuberculosis and this is all that (long time YouTube fixture, and occasional novellist) John Green has been thinking about for the last few years now. This is a well-crafted history of the disease which has shaped much of the human story in many ways. It also talks about more recent problems, like the tools needed to diagnose and treat the disease not being available to those who desperately need them due to high prices from manufacturers and severe economic inequality.

Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have – Deborah Frances-White

If ‘Somewhere Beyond the Sea’ is the book the people who need to learn that, yes, being whatever-phobic is bad are never going to read, then ‘Six Conversations’ is the one they actually might. The premise is that we start from the idea of people naturally aligning themselves into a stamm – the German word roughly equating to tribe which Frances-White uses to sidestep the English word’s problematic undertones – and how we can communicated between them. From there, we can deconstruct why we’re scared to talk about certain topics via questions that she poses.

A really great read, and clearly well researched.

Algospeak – Adam Aleksic

Having often had to address questions of the ilk “you’re a youth, what on earth does x mean” to the school-aged in my life because I was out of touch as a teenager and continue to be as an almost 30-year-old with an interest in linguistics, I had high hopes for this book. It’s more surface level than possibly expected, but is a good summary of the ways that the massive connectedness of the internet is accelerating linguistic change in ways that we have real reasons to be concerned about, but also is only a faster and more connected version of a story as old as human language.

The word “unalive” can go and die in a hole though, along with the word censorship algorithms that spawned it.

The book’s fine, like his YouTube shorts, just more.

Web Comics

Everything is Fine

Everything is not fine in the world of Everything is Fine. Not one bit.

The comic’s great. Being a webcomic, it has access to tools to really heighten its effects, like well timed thematic music and long scrolling panels.

It’s still coming out, and still a complete mystery. A dark, gory mystery with cat heads and fire.

Star Catcher

Star Catcher is the second slowest burn after ‘Darkness Outside Us’ on this list, but it’s also incredibly sweet, nuanced, and beautifully rendered. It also earns its slow burn and false starts, because it makes plot sense with the most relatable depiction of depression, anxiety and trauma response I’ve seen in any of this sort of fiction.

It’s not long – I caught up in an afternoon. Go support it.

So what have we learned

I read a lot. I’ve now written a fair chunk, reflecting on what I can remember from the plot of books I read often several months ago.

This list didn’t even include the several re-reads including:

• ‘Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers’, and ‘Better Than Life’ – Grant Naylor (Rob Grant/Doug Naylor)
• ‘Differently Morphous’, and ‘Existentially Challenged’ – Yahtzee Croshaw (which exemplifies the shadowy government department for magic written by a YouTuber genre)
• ‘Mockingjay’ (from the Hunger Games trilogy, in preparation for the prequels) – Suzanne Collins
• ‘Good Omens’, the full cast recording with the TV series cast

nor the books I’ve started and not finished, nor the book I’m currently reading “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O”, which is yet another book with time travelling civil servants.

You know, there might be a theme here.