Walking on the Moon

This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective.

That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job of balancing the ethereal with the mundane. The characters are drawn with a poetic blend of abstraction and specificity. She addresses the big picture of life on earth and how weird it is to work in space.

Man, that should be candy to me, but it does not quite come together. It always feels just a touch too writerly. I understand what she is aiming for in the abstraction of her characters, but instead of inhabiting that space between a living being and a symbol in a story they just seem like literary constructs.

Look, the book won a Booker prize. In general the folks who hand those out are better judges of writing than I am. But I am not a fan.

I did read the Aeneid. Obviously there’s a huge body of criticism and annotation that I’m not going to be able to add anything to. But for the record, I found it interesting as both a narrative and as a telling of a national creation myth.

I wouldn’t call it completely rip-roaring as a narrative for the modern reader. It is epic poetry about people who lived a couple thousand years ago and while many of their emotions are ours, there are many concerns that are not. And beyond that, these are embodiments of national virtues and outright Gods. Not completely relatable.

Yet I enjoyed a lot of it. I didn’t realize that this was a primary source of the Trojan Horse story. It remains an unbelievable narrative, but the story of the sacking of Troy was more affecting than I was expecting. Telling the story of early Rome as a prophesy embossed on Aeneas’s shield was new to me also. It’s a transparent way to teach some Roman history, but still interesting.

That’s mostly just me rambling. It’s the Aeneid. If you are curious about this time period or classic epics at all, it’s kind of a must.

Recommended.

Peter Swanson has put together a book that’s a little bit murder mystery, a little bit character study, and – for me – a little bit nostalgia trip. Kill Your Darlings starts with a murder and follows our characters back through time to show how we got here. He does a nice job both telling us who they are and what happened to lead us to the events that start the book.

It’s a little bit of a gimmick to work backward through time. I think it works pretty well here, partially because of the murder mystery connection. A mystery reader who found the style gimmicky could still imagine the building flashbacks as facts uncovered in investigation. I thought it was a reasonable way to build the characters.

Swanson ties his characters to specific ages and dates that are within a year of my birth. He also takes them on a junior high trip to DC that I also took. I wind up feeling a bit of extra nostalgia for that.

Overall an interesting story told with some panache.

Recommended.

I’d heard little bits and pieces about Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley for a while but never got around to reading it. (I know there’s a movie, but I haven’t seen that either.)

The book is pretty much a character study of what I’ve seen described as a “charming sociopath.” I can’t really quibble with that characterization. Highsmith shows us this fellow in vivid detail.

It’s a good read. The writing is great, the plot is suspenseful. I spent the book living in Ripley’s head in a way that’s difficult to pull off.

But I still find it a more interesting book to talk about than to read. Picking away at Ripley’s motivations – and maybe Highsmith’s intent – is a lot of fun. Probably worth reading just to do so.

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.

Man, this book. I really enjoyed it, but it is a ride. Haruki Murakami does a thing in The City and Its Uncertain Walls that I have a hard time describing, but that I really enjoyed. This is very keyed to who I am as a reader, so if this doesn’t sound like fun to you when I describe it, it probably won’t be.

This is a book that’s very metaphorical and metafictional and inhabits a magical reality. Murakami is not coy about this. His characters are largely readers and librarians and his POV character directly says how much he admires the genre.

For this reader, the metafiction and magical realism are slippery. I do love a book with levels of interpretation, but symbolism and metaphor are fragile. It’s a bold way to tell stories because there’s no net. If too many strands of symbolism and metaphor fray or fail to connect, the reader drops. Doing this across cultures (Murakami is Japanese and I’m not) is even harder. Other authors have dropped me.

I should probably also say that I went into City without knowing anything about it beyond its cover blurb.

The novel is divided into 3 books, each a different time in our narrator’s life, connected by his relationship to and from the titular city. Though which city the title refers to is probably also open to some interpretation; it’s that kind of book. Each of these books are rewarding in their own right and in their interconnection. The narrator is engaging even though he’s carrying a lot of symbolic weight. The settings and situations are evocative and engaging. The writing is beautiful, even when the meaning is obscure.

And the meaning is often obscure. Even within a book the connections and interpretations can feel tenuous. Reaching between the books feels more so as the characters change and new characters come and go. How a character relates to an idea changes as they do, and this manifests indirectly in this work. Except when it’s explicit.

This kind of interpretive juggling is fun for me, so I really enjoyed myself throughout. By the end, I’m still putting pieces together and looking forward to considering the whole thing from different angles and deciding what I think about it.

Then I read the Afterword and I feel like the whole thing changed again. I have no idea if that was Murakami’s intention or not. This is the kind of book where small changes in a reader’s frame of mind can create big shifts, so it might be that a couple words in the Afterword catalyzed a big change in how I thought about the book.

So, a ride. And a fun one, honestly.

A must.

I picked this up because I remembered that I liked the last Cherie Priest book I read without remembering all the details. The Drowning House turned out to be a well wrought supernatural thriller set in a modern Pacific Northwest.

To clarify the “supernatural thriller” label: it’s somewhere on the boundary between horror and action. There are plenty of very spooky scenes, including the initial chapter, that will scratch itches for scares. But in the end it’s about a showdown between Good and Evil with outsiders in over their head, a fair amount of derring do, and suspenseful confrontations.

What makes this all work for me is Priest’s pacing. The early more horror-centric chapters really drop us into the unknown waters of whatever creepy events are coming, but without filling in any useful details. We have some of the questions and then we meet our protagonists. Priest strings us along, letting both the players and the situation reveal themselves in good hair-raising time. Until suddenly the reader realizes that the spookfest has become an actioner and that they really do care about these folks who are caught up in it. I had a lot of fun.

Strongly recommended.

Havoc is a thriller with an interesting set-up. It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos. She’s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband. It is set in the pandemic, but that’s basically not a real factor in the story. Christopher Bollen occasionally invokes it as a difficulty in managing travel or contact but in another time plenty of other causes could fill those plot holes.

Overall, Havoc is well crafted and diverting. Our narrator is interesting, but obviously untrustworthy. If nothing else her justifications of her casually sowing strife in others relationships smacks of self-deception. A lot of the fun is figuring out what is really driving her and why.

And on paper the answers are interesting and satisfying. The plot gears all mesh. There are dropped hints that slipped under the RADAR. All the things that make a psychological thriller work are there.

But for me, the big twist just rubbed me the wrong way. I know it is just me, but the reveal just took me out of the story in a way I could not recover from. Probably worth a try if you are not me.

This is a kind of high concept history book. Take the signers of the Declaration of Independence and do a capsule biography of each of them. It provides a way to take a slice of pro-revolution (well, mostly) Americans and dig into their lives. They are going to be relatively well documented and give some kind of a slice of life in the Colonies around 1776.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese do a good job running these folks down and telling their lives in pretty interesting capsules. There is a lot of variation in outlook and experience of these people. It’s a good reminder that America has never been monolithic. But the bios are necessarily short and if someone interests you, their chapter is over pretty quickly. As an invitation to reading more history, that can be effective, but I have already swallowed that pill.

More Martha Wells Murderbot. I do not have a ton to say about it beyond that earlier review. This continues to be fun and interesting. I see that there’s an overarching plot line going on, but I’m only barely paying attention to it. I am enjoying watching the Murderbot’s character develop and being engaged by the plots.

It’s fun. Recommended.