2023 #44 The Terraformers (Newitz)

 

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In all honesty there were long passages wherein I never thought I'd give this book five out of five stars, but the plusses definitely outweigh the minuses for me. This is an incredibly imaginative, yet very real, book. Newitz has a gift for world-making, but also weaves in extended metaphors that are occasionally heavy-handed, but too relevant to ignore. In some ways, there’s a sense that we are all part of some cosmic and cyclical raison d’etre to build and destroy and rebuild. On the other hand, there’s also a hope for taking two steps forward without the compulsory step back.

Fans of Octavia Butler's Earthseed series (e.g. Parable of the Sower ) will appreciate the "ERT" (Environmental Rescue Team) for its idealism in a dystopic context. The characters are diverse in shape, gender identity, hominid status, and Newitz challenges the idea of human vs. animal. Frustratingly, however, just as one gets attached to characters the story shifts forward in time. This is effective in demonstrating generational legacy, but leaves a hollow space, particularly in the case of the first protagonist, Destry, and her friends in La Ronge. This was a similar complaint I had of Olivia Wolfgang-Smith's Glassworks, but The Terraformers works better in terms of continuity as it serves a larger statement about some inevitabilities of humankind. Despite the darker conclusions, the book is hopeful in some ways as well, not completely reliant upon dystopic tropes of ecological demise.

The acknowledgments are an inspiration--Newitz did their homework. While I don't have the expertise to fact check every idea in the book, it is rich with vision and foresight. Newitz asks us "what if" with just enough verisimilitude that we want to seek out the answer.

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2023 #43 The Long Call --Two Rivers #1 (Cleeves)

 

The Long Call by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a long time fan of the series Vera, I was eager to read my first Ann Cleeves mystery! I deliberately chose this newer series (Two Rivers) with a new sleuth (Matthew Venn) because I didn't want to run into a story that I've already seen in the series Vera, and I wanted an untainted introduction to Cleeves's latest detective.

It took awhile to engage with it, although I recognize it is a difficult thing to introduce all new characters. Everything picks up speed in the last 15% of the book, but it is more procedural than thriller or suspense otherwise. Matthew is a troubled male detective with baggage and trauma and self-esteem issues, but is quietly competent. It is a shame that he has to get hit over the head for everything to become clear. Refreshing, on the other hand, is that he is a married gay man.

Some of the characters were a bit uneven and cloying. Cleeves offers some strong commentary on the power of abuse, and we even see how that abuse can be internalized. Some characters have an uneven presence--we meet Gaby early on, who seems so important as a flatmate of the victim, and then there's a big reveal, and then? Nothing. A final scene with Matthew and Gaby would have come full circle.

There are some interesting themes: parental relationships (Maurice and Lucy, Matthew and his dead father, Matthew and his mother, Jonathan and his folks, Caroline and her father), and bird imagery plays a significant role (the title of the book, for example).

There's an editing error wherein a character is given the wrong last name in one instance, which I'd have more tolerance for if it weren't such a procedural where one needs to keep track of all the various dramatis personae.

I'm intrigued enough to venture forth in the series, but I don't see myself following Matthew Venn for long unless he gets a bit more chutzpah, not just when confronting his own demons and traumas.

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2023 #42 Tranquility by Tuesday (Vanderkam)

 

Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters by Laura Vanderkam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Importantly, the four star rating is for the content, NOT the mode of delivery. If you do not need to listen to this as an audio book, I would highly recommend buying it in hard copy for several reasons. Each chapter is very formulaic in structure, but the "Your Turn" sections will be more effective if in a workbook mode (hard to do with an audiobook). Vanderkam has a pleasant voice, but one can only emote so much when reading numbered listicles and anecdotes. There probably is a more engaging way to convey the material, and at times the delivery sounded like AI generated text to voice, and the enthusiasm behind the directives started to sound mechanical as well.

All of that aside, there is some really good advice and the participant responses are helpful to a point. The book looks at each of Vanderkam's 9 rules (outlined on her website but given in brief here):

Give yourself a bedtime
Plan on Fridays
Move by 3pm
Three times a week is a habit
Create a back-up slot
One big adventure, one little adventure
Take one night for you
Batch the little things
Effortful before Effortless

One of the overarching points that seems to be at the root of all the suggestions is to have increased awareness of one's own energy, and let it be the guide when determining what commitments we make. This was particularly useful in Rule 8: Batch the Little Things. Initially it feels like the opposite of a GTD (Getting Things Done (TM)) approach in some sense although really more of a recontextualization of an Inbox review. The emphasis here is on the "capture" mechanism that GTDers will recognize, rather than doing the little thing right at that moment. A good way to think about it is if doing an inbox review, the little actionable things go to a "Batch List" rather than a "Do it" if less than 2 minutes. I appreciated this because it acknowledges who hopping into email to answer something quickly can easily derail the bigger more important thing you are doing/about to do. Vanderkam says a two minute task can easily turn into: a "task hydra", a rabbit hole, or a procrastination cycle wherein you start doing a bunch of small tasks because now you are at the computer. Immediate reward supplants the longer term gain, in other words. She provides further guidance: Don't batch during your most productive hours, but set time aside maybe in the dip of the afternoon when your mental faculties aren't as energized and fresh.

Along similar lines, Rule 9 (Effortful vs. Effortless). Vanderkam encourages using pockets of leisure time (or even time confetti, a term coined by Brigid Schulte) for something more engaging like reading, rather than mindless social media scrolling. It isn't that she is suggesting one always read in lieu of social media, but to consider the more "effortful fun" first for a larger reward--working toward completing a book, for example. You will never reach the end of Instagram, she reminds us.

The narration of the study occupies too much space, and would have been more interesting if something had failed. While the narrative incorporates participant struggles, it starts to get tedious having the same structure applied to every chapter. While the book could have been shorter, it is still a worthwhile read, especially if you are skeptical in reading the list above. She does include anecdotes from participants who were initially reluctant or were immediate naysayers, and that did address my own reaction from time to time.

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2023 #41: Landscape with Invisible Hand (Anderson)

 

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I know the author.

If Salvador Dali and H.G. Wells birthed a novella together, this is what I imagine it might look like. It is a model of crafting dystopia, wherein humankind seemingly has welcomed our vuvv overlords, and "creativity" becomes the currency of survival--at least for a time. Seemingly very few stones are left unturned as the book takes aim at the climate crisis, capitalistic inequity, voyeurism of social media...just to name a few.

While marketed as a book for young adults, I think anyone who enjoys satirical dystopian fiction would enjoy this. My only issue was that it seemed too short--I didn't get to invest deeply in any of the characters, but as they are stand-ins for you, me, and possibility, I guess that makes sense.

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2023 #40:Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Zevin)

 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Is this a book about gaming? Yes and no. Is it a book about love? Very much so. Love and life are a series of restarts, and this works better as a theme in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow than a plot device. The characters are vibrant and take turns being exasperating and insufferable--in a good way should we choose to see it occasionally in ourselves. The character of Marx, in particular, is so well-crafted by Zevin that the reader is captured by him along with everyone else in his fictional world. But Marx can only really shine because of his contrast to Sam and Sadie, and his function as an anchor in the tempests constantly created by those two characters.

There's a lot here that isn't cliché. Sadie's family is wealthy. But they are just that. Her grandmother and her mother aren't stereotypes of the wealthy and privileged, as witnessed in Freda's counsel to Sadie about charity and friendship. Not that rich folks need defense or apologetics, but it was refreshingly humanizing to be able to like characters who happen to have money. There are other issues that get just a brief nod (appropriation), and others that seem to be in the background but are fairly central to the story (disability, race).

For the characters and the prose this book deserves every star. Marx encapsulates beautifully the underpinning of ludic existence: "It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever. (336)." Even if our play is not captured in pixels and bytes, we can see ourselves in these dreams of the infinite, and so this is a book for not only gamers, but anyone who dares to dream.

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2023 #39: Glassworks (Wolfgang-Smith)

 

Glassworks by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Honestly, this book is absolutely between 3 and 4 stars for me. I could give each part of the book its own rating. Like Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days, the book has separate sections that almost alone, but are also interconnected. While I appreciate what Wolfgang-Smith tried to do in terms of style (adjusting the narrative style to the time period/circumstances of each section), I did not feel that approach was terribly successful.

In the first section we meet Agnes and Ignace. While slow to build in plot, this is where Wolfgang-Smith's gift for language is on full display. Written with a beautifully archaic elegance, there are moments of stunning simile: "If Ignace heard the menace in her voice, he did not signal it. She curdled in it herself--the spite she had absorbed and music now express to survive, like some blind and slimy subterranean creature." Like a gothic novel, we gain tremendous insights into the dark nights of the character's souls, whether driven by depression, abuse, or just the murky trenches of human existence. Agnes, in particular, is an astoundingly robust character who transforms with a self-consciousness that is honest: "She understood the appeal now, of this brand of abuse. There was an evil comfort in it." While the book could not have ended with the first section, I do wish we had simply extended the story of Agnes and Ignace because what followed really diminished my love for the book.

The second section does tie directly to Agnes and Ignace, who, for reasons not fully explained--but implied--have undergone a transformation from people we might care about to aloof artisans who are terrible parents. That in and of itself might have been interesting, but the section focuses on their son Edward. His lack of self-esteem, obviously a symptom of his upbringing, began to wear thin. At least initially, his love interest Charlotte was a far more engaging character, and just seemed to make Edward's self-disparagement and impulsive behavior all the more irritating. Then, Charlotte, too, transforms. These change of characters are a theme, as it turns out, and I found myself wanting to just gather them all in a room and take stock of where everyone started and where they wound up. That isn't a criticism and was in fact one of the aspects that kept me going. And even in this section of the book, we get wonderful, highlight-worthy sentences: "It was like Edward had traded his soul for seventy-two hours of tin-pan euphoria." Chef's kiss.

Edward's last years provide a quiet, almost invisible, backdrop as we meet his legacy in the third section. Wolfgang-Smith skillfully retraces her steps just enough to answer some questions that are important for everything else that comes later. It is when the character of Novak attends a Broadway play and meets Cecily that I felt things started to unravel a bit. Novak goes from a slightly grouchy realist to an obsessive savior figure and while there are enough psychological clues as to why, I didn't care enough about the focus of her obsession to want to keep following. The end of that section just went a bit off the rails for me.

Finally the book ends with the story of Flip. Here there are some very well crafted "hints" where Wolfgang-Smith drops something in passing, and we only later realize the significance. I loved that part of this final section. Flip and Tabitha are twins, and relate to the other three parts in a less direct, but interesting way. The problem is that Flip is even less likeable than young Edward, so again I was faced with a pathetic and tiresome "protagonist." By the time she transforms, it really didn't feel like enough, and the last section of the book was hard to finish.

Ultimately, however, I'm glad I did finish. I suspect other readers might resonate less with the first part, and more with the last, or the middle two sections. And I applaud the effort here, particularly since I believe this is a first novel--it is a hugely ambitious undertaking to write across four generations, shifting both style and plot directions. I will eagerly pick up Wolfgang-Smith's next novel, because her capacity for crafting beautiful sentences is some of the best I've encountered. The title of the book is fitting on many levels, and the book is very strong in some ways, but even a beautiful kaleidoscope can become too dizzying.

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2023 #38: Lessons in Chemistry (Garmus)

 

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I began reading this book, I was prepared to wind up with a "meh" for an overall review. I was wrong.
Elizabeth Zott is a heroine in her own time, and ours. We need not work hard to translate the sexist transgressions of the 50s and 60s to today. Maybe we don't fully identify with Elizabeth, but Garmus provides Calvin, Harriet, Mad, Walter, and even Six-Thirty to fill in the gaps. Writing omniscient narration for the dog provided something more than whimsy. There's truth in animal sense. Six-Thirty is the sage observer, and the little windows we get into Six-Thirty's mind are sometimes as heart-wrenching as they are smile-inducing.

I am mildly sympathetic to the fatigue expressed by some regarding feminists being cast as social misfits, but I feel this particular character is a real opportunity to understand neurodiversity and how one's calling and focus can shape how they relate to the world. This is why Calvin and Elizabeth find each other. I can also see how some expected an easy beach read, but discovered some really crushing scenes of the terrifying reality that many women face. Garmus owes no one an apology, from my perspective. It is exactly that these scenes are interwoven into more comical and lighthearted engagement that makes this such an excellent book. The cover's mid-century vintage design might belie the true nature of the book, but isn't that the entire point? It encapsulates the status of women in the 1950s it its use of that art.

There are yes, a few bra-burning clichés of feminist narratives, but they are used sparingly and with care toward the protagonist's character, so they seem plausible and less like clichés. What appears at first to be the central relationship of the book, is soon supplanted by a "it takes a village" story that includes villagers with secrets and skeletons aplenty, but who are ultimately so human in their stumbling and bumbling and sometimes successful attempts at growth.

An absolute favorite book for me.

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