Walking on the Moon

The last book in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series is in a lot of ways more of the same. It’s a small character-driven story set in a well imagined SF universe. No galactic overlords will be out of a job at the end, but I find myself cheering anyway.

Galaxy is beautifully written, and I find that the universe Chambers has built is just right for looking at ideas from enough of a new angle to spark insight. Nothing’s opaque, but it is often fresh.

Chambers work often signals its themes by what’s missing in the story. In this story, human characters are not on stage much, but humanity abounds. If you find yourself looking at our world and believing that people who believe things that you can’t are space aliens, consider spending some time with these space aliens. I found it refreshing and enlightening.

Strongly Recommended.

This is another Murderbot novel, and I’ve not had much to say about the preceding chapters beyond “good fun.” in Network Effect, I found that Martha Wells brought together a lot of the character threads that she placed in earlier novellas into a powerful emotional climax in the middle of a rollicking space adventure.

She has spent those early novellas putting the sets in place and establishing character details that feel like tropes – and in some ways are – that are combined here to have more depth and power than I had been expecting. She snuck up on me, she did and in the best way. I’m not going to say much more so she can sneak up on you.

Strongly Recommended.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is Becky Chambers again creating a character drive SF story in a richly textured world. It’s more a coming-of-age story than an adventure story, but those are adventures in their own way.

I re-read my gushing review of A Closed and Common Orbit and a lot of what I said there applies to Record as well. It’s set in a different part of her galaxy, but the same intricacy and depth is there. As many SF authors do, she creates a society based on familiar social principles pushed far enough to make things unfamiliar and uses that to talk about those principles. I find the way those ideas are explored is more thoughtful and reasonable than many more polemic versions of that setup.

Her writing remains impeccable, though I did find one chapter a little more on the nose than I was expecting. It didn’t take me out of the story, but it did jar a bit.

Strongly Recommended.

I do like me some Carl Hiaasen. Fever Beach is his usual chaotic and comedic send up of politics and people who annoy him. This time he’s set his sights on right wing militia types and politicians who take advantage of them. I’m no fan of fools with guns or folks who use them for their own ends, so I enjoyed Fever Beach a good deal.

I think this was written before the uptick in ICE enforcement. I understand that these are different, but if you are looking to escape from images of folks in camo toting guns around American cities, I’d escape elsewhere.

Recommended.

I normally read books in the strict sense of the word, which is to say I don’t do a lot of audiobooks. That’s not prescriptive, it’s just the way I generally prefer to engage with books. But Nate DiMeo who does The Memory Palace, read the 1930 version of the The Secret of the Old Clock when it entered the public domain this year. I’d heard him read Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself as a bonus episode of the Memory Palace before the 2016 election. That so entranced me that I pretty much listen any time he wants to read a long form piece. So, Nancy Drew.

I quite liked it. The mystery is twisty enough that it keeps you engaged, even if the title gives a bit away. The characters are for kids, so there’s only so much going on there. But everything worked and was engaging enough without talking down too far.

What I really did enjoy was seeing how 1930 the whole book was. There’s a plot point about the fact that many roads are still unpaved. One of the characters is an elderly woman whose health is declining rapidly and without a family around her, there’s really no hope of health care without having substantial means. And the depiction of a black caretaker is right out of Amos and Andy. Nate read the book cold and his surprise at this portrayal is a thing. He presses on, but he’s outright apologetic at several points.

It was also interesting to see what people put in children’s books at the time. The strict gender roles are in effect, but Nancy is depicted as being very self-sufficient. I remember a line to the effect of “Of course, Nancy Drew could change a tire, but didn’t relish the task.” She also fixes a boat engine. Great stuff. There’s some evidence pilfering and illegal liquor as well. I think I support all of that when needs must.

I see there was a 1959 rewrite, which I expect sanded some of those edges off, but having a look at the original was good fun.

Recommended.

This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. The elevator pitch for this was that Percival Everett wrote a version of Huck Finn from Jim’s perspective. And it is that, as much as it’s any one thing.

I think a fair amount of the fun of James is riding along with Everett and figuring out what he is up to. I will say that I think he does a good job capturing the flavor of Huck Finn, which is such an oddball of great literature that I’d be hard pressed to describe that flavor with any precision. My review above mentions that in Huck Finn “there are many moments of lyrical beauty; laugh-out-loud bits of humor; huge moments of grappling with good and evil.” I think all that is true in James as well.

Strongly Recommended.

I had read Lady Chatterly before, but I went back to it because Bukowski spoke so glowingly about D. H. Lawrence in Ham on Rye. I see some of what Bukowski sees.

I couldn’t really come to Lady Chatterly without its reputation looming. It has both a reputation as an explicit story and as a literary work. By modern standards, it is not terribly salacious, but Lawrence does talk frankly about sex and the people who have it. And I think he does have meaningful insights to share, but there is a lot to say. And I have learned to be skeptical of narratives about women’s lives written by men.

I hope that Lawrence doesn’t believe he’s written the last word on intimate relationships, though sometimes it sounds like he might. A lot of the book is anchored in the time and place, though I think a fair amount of his observations are fundamental. I also think the universe of people in love is larger than he considers. All together, I find the book easy to criticize, but hard to dismiss.

Recommended.

Sister, Sinner is the a biography of a sort I don’t see often enough. Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks. I am impressed that she can make me very interested in Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, realize that she is a very important figure in the history of America, of Los Angeles, and in the history of Religion in America, and still let me decide what I think of all that.

McPherson (Semple McPherson? And there’s another husband in there later… I’ll stick with McPherson) definitely led a life. She built a Pentecostal church out of fervor and charisma. Then using the mass media of the time – radio and newsletters – made it a nationwide church movement. And then there is either a kidnapping or a faked kidnapping. And then Los Angeles politics gets involved. And when it all seems to die down McPherson refuses to let it. It is a wild story just in the facts of it.

Hoffman digs in. Everything she describes is well sourced. McPherson was a celebrity of the day on a par with British royalty or Hollywood stars, so there is copious contemporaneous news coverage as well as detailed church records and some tell-all books. Hoffman sifts it all into a narrative, but leaves the ambiguities there for the reader to weigh.

Strongly recommended.

I feel like I’m not really giving Martha Wells her due when I say this was another good Murderbot book. This was another good Murderbot book. Writing series SF is hard and she makes it look easy.

Recommended.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was kind of a thing. It caused a bunch of excitement and some hand-wringing when it (and the movie adaptation of it) appeared. I’m just acknowlegding that it is tough to talk about it knowing what it became.

I think a lot of the power of the novel is in Palahniuk’s prose. It is sharp, disorienting, and propulsive. He starts in media res and then gets confusing. I spend a lot of the book mentally off-balance in a good way. It is a lot of fun be dragged along with.

Fight Club is very much of its moment. I think a lot of the book is intended to be funny, and a lot of the jokes are references anchored in the 1990s. Palahniuk isn’t name-checking celebrities or anything so blatant, but part of the drive of his writing is referring to a movement or a mindset in a couple words that are evocative to a 1990s reader.

I’m curious how that will work as the book ages. I had no trouble playing along, but I was a young man in the 1990s. I can imagine English professors my age assigning this book to their classes assuming the students will be compelled and receiving blank stares from modern readers. But who knows? My fortunetelling abilities are not supporting my retirement.

Recommended.