Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

 

I couldn't tell you when exactly I fell out of love with Greek Myth, but it happened somewhere along the way. This is a book that does a wonderful job of reminding me of at least part of the why: The deities (and in many cases, the heroes) of Greek Myth rarely behave much differently than spoiled toddlers. In this book that is absolutely true. The monsters aren't monsters, the heroes aren't heroes (Perseus especially comes off as an annoying twit--but so do Hermes and Athena); the gods are privilege personified, and the kings are better than the gods only for having less actual power. There's enough wit and anger here to qualify this as satire, I think; unfortunately the wit fades over the course of the novel, and by the end there's just the bitter taste of anger, before the story kinda fritters away. There is some sparkle to the prose, here, especially in the first quarter or so, but the characters have a tendency to kinda blur around the edges. While I started the novel with spirits and hopes high, by the end I mostly came away with the sense this novel had One Weird Trick, and I just got tired of it.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

 

It's always a pleasure to read a Chandler that's new to me, and this was new to me. It has all of Chandler's typical strengths--atmosphere, dialogue, crystal prose--and is the first one of his novels I've read that didn't seem obviously like two stories pasted together. There's still some murk in the plotting, of course; and the amount of alcohol some of the characters consume seems to make it implausible for them to function anything like as well as they do. Some of the casual racism (and other cruelties) in here will be upsetting to modern readers, but it does go a long way in the direction of showing the crassness of some of the characters (arguably including Marlowe). I'm still wanting to read more Chandler.

The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

 This book seemed as though it might be some sort of Appalachian Noir type stuff, something on the lines of what David Joy's been doing, all criminals in the mountains of the American Old South. And it is, though it's really not as ... taut, mostly, as Joy's novels. There are historical elements, things from the US Civil War, floating to the surface between the chapters, as well as elements of the various characters' backstories--threads that seem to imply there are family connections at least some of the characters don't know about. Most of the slack in the novel probably comes from the time skips, as the novel slides past weeks or months. The characters are reasonably well-differentiated, and the dialogue works, but the narrative prose kinda lies inert. Not an entirely engaging read, though it does have things it wants to say about getting out of poverty, and violence.

Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen

 

So I knew this was probably an older Hiaasen, but I didn't realize until I sat down with it this evening that it was from the early 1990s (copyright 1991)--so this is from Hiaasen's early wacky-gonzo phase, before his somewhat more serious one, which has given way to his current more satirical one. I mean, there are elements of this novel that are Florida (at least, Florida of the time) writ large and exaggerated to absurdity, but here the point is mostly humor, there isn't any larger point being made, there are no real-world personages being specifically targeted. That said, the pacing of the novel is mercury-quick and slippery and the dialogue and characterizations are spot-on. There are some things that are at least a little but implausible, but they work in the novel, mostly by dint of sheer authorial will in some cases. A very good novel to sort of pluck out of the past and read, to start my reading year.

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

 This is a really angry book, for really good reasons. Doctorow's analysis of what has gone wrong, why, and how seems pretty spot-on from where I'm sitting. Forty years of social, political, and economic choices have led to multiple entities that are too big to fail and too big to care, obviously in tech but in other areas as well. The last part of the book is a series of prescriptions for fixing society (and coincidentally the Internet) and I'm less sure of those working as actual solutions--though I guess I'm more dubious of them happening than I am of them working if they did. At best, the odds are against us, and I'm pretty sure the game's rigged, but I don't really see much other hope. If enough people read this, and enough of them get motivated to act, we might have a chance.

Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

 

Twenty years ago, I was not a person who cared all that deeply about what Wil Wheaton was doing; I am not now a person who cares all that deeply about what Wil Wheaton was doing twenty years ago. This is not me slagging on Wheaton--he seems as though he's intelligent and reasonably self-aware and interesting and decent; this is me commenting on the fact this memoir is basically his blog from the early Aughts, collected. This edition has footnotes (some of which have footnotes) taking up most of the page space on most of the pages, which makes for a juddering read. Many of those footnotes seem to be Wheaton beating himself up for not being the person then that he would want himself to be now, which ... well, he could show himself some grace from time to time, maybe. I didn't even make it a hundred pages in before my growing disinterest summed with the exhausting read to nope me out.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

 

This was a book I'd heard some decent things about, and while it's not a horrible novel, it's really not a crime story, it's more of a conventional coming-of-age thing, kinda steeped in a sort of small-town Southern coastal-rural poverty. It's told in two timelines from at least two POVs, but that complexity doesn't really add much other than the need to keep track of when you are and whose head you're inside of. There's vibes of something like a love story, here, but it's not really a great one. There is a crime in the novel, maybe, and at the end at least one character thinks he knows who did it, but in order for his theory to be true at least one character would have to behave really oddly and a snippet of poetry (poetry) to be literally true. That solution seems out-of-character and implausible. So it's ambiguous, from the reader's perspective. The voice here seems deeply coastal Southern, both in narration and in dialogue; the characters other than the mains don't really seem particularly distinct, but the primary POV wouldn't see them as such. Oh well, not horrible will have to do.