Walking on the Moon

This turns out to be the kind of quirky sitcom someone of my age might have run into in a neglected time spot on an off channel. It’s the kind of show you wouldn’t quite believe was aired until you ran into someone else who had gotten into it and you wound up spending a couple hours talking about it at a party. It’s working inside the form but with the kind of stylish takes that seats it in its own world. It’s not where you live, but is fun to spend time in. Sonoko Machida does a great job creating that feeling in a novel.

The whole thing is set in a seaside Japanese town, specifically in a convenience store. But, it’s a quirky TV sitcom convenience store. There are larger than life employees, a weird ecosystem of neighbors, some customer or employee with a problem- one to a chapter – and strange product placement moments for the fictional products of the fictional store seamfully inserted. It’s all quirky and fun and I quite enjoyed spending time there.

Recommended.

Annalee Newitz’s latest is a simple book to sum up. Some robots open a noodle shop. There’s more to that to it, of course. To the pot Newitz adds politics, decency, a love of San Francisco, and a delightful sentient contract that wants to live and not ask too many questions.

It’s a lot of fun, compassionate, well written, and has interesting ideas. It does seem a little shallow and maybe YA. That’s not a criticism. This is a good book to hand to younger readers or to take to the beach or on a flight.

Recommended.

John Scalzi is very good at finding a good hook for a story. Redshirts and Starter Villain can both be described in a sentence and are fleshed out into interesting fun reads. When the Moon Hits your Eye is the same. The hook is that one day Earth’s moon inexplicably turns into cheese. He spends the rest of the book looking at how that affects people.

Scalzi does a really nice job picking the people he’s going to talk about and also the topics he’s going to use them to touch. There are little stories about how headlines drive entertainment, and deep moments of grappling with the ineffable. There are lots of funny moments and the prose crackles.

At the end, though, the word I’d use to describe this book is “sweet.”

Strongly recommended.

I really admire the folks who have taken a swing at summarizing Tricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, because it’s such a thankless task. I mean most of the ones I’ve looked at seem accurate – or at least defensible – but none of them really captures the experience of reading it.

A summary is never the totality of a book, but there is so much going on in here in so many ways, that you’re going to leave the path pretty quickly. And I say that with delight. Whatever is going on in Another You, I liked it.

Lockwood is a poet – it says so right here in this novel – and perhaps that’s why so many lines of this book are whole worlds unto themselves. Any single sentence can send you down the rabbit hole. And they just keep coming, those sentences. It is fascinating and amazing that she can also make those sentences cohere into a story that can be incompletely summarized as well.

This all worked for me, but it is definitely a big swing. You’ll know pretty quick if it’s for you.

Strongly recommended.

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.