Dust by Hugh Howey
[Read as an ebook from the public library] NANOBOTS. I’m going to be honest – I skipped a bunch of pages in this one. My affection for Wool had started wearing off by this time and not even Juliette’s return could pull me back into the narrative enough to get me fully invested. I still like the overall world here, but there’s just so many holes after Shift. A lot of the menace of the outside world is gone, the rituals of IT are no […]
Shift by Hugh Howey
[Read as an ebook from the public library] Note: This edition is the collection of three novellas. This is essentially the prequel to Wool, and serves to explain how and why the silos were built and what has happened to the outside world by the time of Wool. It takes place in two different timelines — one follows Donald Keene, a young Georgia congressman in 2049, tapped to help construct a new nuclear waste storage facility in the area outside Atlanta. The other follows Troy, a silo […]
Severance by Ling Ma
In the spirit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good/adequate/completed review, I’m just going to try and get my thoughts down about this book. Severance was one of my it’s->$4.99-on-Kindle-so-if-I-have-even-the-vaguest-interest-I-will-buy-it impulse purchases. I read the critics’ reviews on Amazon and friends’ ratings on Goodreads, skimmed the free sample to get a sense of what it was about, and was hooked. Unfortunately, my interest had waned by about the third chapter. Severance, which was written in 2018, takes place in 2011 and […]
A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
The children have a game: keep their parental status secret. If they keep it secret from each other, they can keep it secret from themselves. They won’t have to be the “children of” anyone. They don’t have to claim allegiance with the drunks in the Great House who let the world burn. Their game, and much of this book in general, brought to mind strong memories of “Old College Try” by The Mountain Goats. A Children’s Bible is more than what it seems. It’s presented […]
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Goodreads tells me I’ve read this three times, although it feels like more, since I’ve also taught it twice. It’s a terrifying book in the sense that it COULD happen very easily, and even more terrifying when you realize that what white women are being put through in the novel is something that ALREADY happened around the world to other women, in some form or another. I won’t bother to recap the story, because it’s been read and re-read before, plus the Hulu series illuminates […]
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
“People – and I’m no exception – seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.” The Memory Police enforce the forgetting of the things that are disappeared from an unnamed island inhabited by an unnamed author. From time to time, the people of the island wake up with the restless knowledge that something else is gone and banish any contrary evidence from their homes, towns and minds. Things disappear, […]
