3.5 stars Good Morning, Midnight is a perfectly nice book that I just didn’t vibe with. I appreciated what it was trying to do, and I’d say it even succeeded at it, but my taste and expectations are a little bit more “genre” than this ended up being. Goodreads summary: “Augustine, a brilliant, aging astronomer, is consumed by the stars. For years he has lived in remote outposts, studying the sky for evidence of how the universe began. At his latest posting, in a research […]
Subtle, perceptive speculative fiction short stories
I don’t often go for the short story format, but I needed to pick a book to fit the book challenge prompt “Book for a movie that you’ve already seen.” It almost never happens for me in that order, so I had to do a bit of sleuthing to find Stories of Your Life and Others, which contains the short story that eventually became the movie Arrival. I loved the entire collection of stories a lot more than I expected to. Ted Chiang has both […]
Lie down; try not to cry; cry a lot
Saga is always an emotional trip, where even the highs are touched by a rather unsettling nervous feeling. And really, only after reading the gut punch that was Volume 7, would anyone read #8 and think, “Oh, that one was actually pretty uplifting!” Volume 7 takes place on a comet that is caught in the middle of the war between Wreath and Landfall. Hazel’s collected family have settled there for some months, finding it to be a surprisingly hospitable place in the midst of the […]
monkey frown.gif (actual gif in post)
Right, so this series and I are definitely not getting along. I’m still going to finish it because everything I said in my review of the last book, and also a little adversity every now and then has got to be good for something, even if that something is an exercise in perseverance and willpower. The Time of Contempt is more of what I didn’t like about Blood of Elves: a bunch of talky-talky from set-dressing characters and, generally, an experience that rips off the […]
Unpretentious, brilliant, engaging sci-fi.
Two books into the Vorkosigan Saga, and I’m increasingly flabbergasted that it took me so long to read not only this series, but Bujold in general. These books are so competently written, and I want that understatement to be interpreted as laconic reverence, and not as an underhanded jab. The writing is uncomplicated and efficient, and is a real testament to the power of honestly good storytelling. A lot of sins can be forgiven by covering them in flowery, lyrical, and highly figurative prose. Bujold’s […]
“The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you.”
I’m a sucker for a book that promises to be a mind-bender and has a bunch of people talking about how weird it is. Enter Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. The series is about Area X, a strip of coastline that’s been reclaimed by nature and is being shielded from the general public as a military-protected “ecological disaster site.” In the decades since Area X was formed, various expedition teams have gone through the border with the mission of documenting just […]
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