Grunt by Mary Roach

 

I grabbed this because I noticed it when I was walking through my local library's nonfiction section, and Ms. Roach is always interesting--and I was curious what sorts of science she'd found to write about. Turns out there was much in the way of medical science, both in the sense of treatment and in the sense of prevention, as well as digressions into intentional bad smells and the effect of sleep on cognition, not to mention things like how one armors a vehicle against IEDs and how much of one's situational awareness (at least in an actual combat or combat-adjacent context) is based on hearing. Ms. Roach writes with bucketloads of life and sparkle, and can apparently get almost anyone to talk with her, and the combination of their expertise and her viewpoint (sometimes playing up her ignorance, at least in the telling) and her prose makes for a powerfully readable book.

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

 

I grabbed this after enjoying the first two books Ms. Bear wrote in this setting, and this is nowhere near the romp especially Ancestral Night is, but it is a very good novel. It doesn't have as much sparkle as I remember the other two novels having, and it does drag some through the first half or so--things take a long time to get into place for inciting events, and some of that feels really slow and overly granular in detail to me. The prose is still really good, and the characters are mostly well-defined, and the setting has a lot of stuff going on in it, some of which feels ... not entirely good, to me: not just the pirates, but there seems to be some sense that human psychology (and that of other sentients) just has too many hard-wired flaws to make for the kind of long-term viability needed for interstellar civilization, so there's like consensual brainwashing of a sort. Ms. Bear makes her characters seem like people, even if they're people with more, or at least more direct, control over their endocrine systems; and the story, when it does get into motion, works really well. In the Acknowledgments, Ms. Bear describes it as (paraphrasing) space opera crossed with family drama, and that's not wrong.

Curious Toys by Elizabeth Hand

 

Well, this is the second mediocre-at-best novel I've read from Ms. Hand, I don't think I'll be giving her any further chances--there are too many good books out there, and my supply of free evenings is finite. For a book with so many killings in it, this is inexcusably fucking dull to read. There's probably something to Pin as a character, and I suppose it might not have seemed so glaring to persistently refer to Pin by something other than the gender he sees himself as (though that might turn out to be "they," I suppose) in the 2010s when this book was written, that already feels glaring, now. The other characters honestly barely register, and while there is eventually plenty of incident, it takes a long, long time to arrive and it's written with all the urgency of a damned laundry list. I know Ms. Hand has a reputation in several genres, but no more for me, thanks.

Bunyan and Henry or, The Beautiful Destiny by Mark Cecil

 

I read this novel tonight, it's a weirdly cynical-but-optimistic book of something that's maybe closest to Magic Realism--many of the people, places, and things in it have clear real-world analogues--and it has clear and obvious things to say about the Real World (some of those analogues I mentioned are to things in the Here and Now, not the late 1800s). Mentioning the setting in the 1800s now, there are some anachronisms (electric light seems to exist) and I have to believe that someone who knew the folklore referenced here better than I do would find some interesting Easter eggs. The story feels vaguely like a picaresque, but it does build to something like a structural climax; Paul is the main character here, though his story pauses here and there to allow other characters--John Henry, a Chinese blacksmith, a Native American woman--to tell theirs, which makes for some interesting layering. The prose is solid and has moments of sparkle, the characters stand on their own as well as together (the main villain seems like a cross between Trump and some older-fashioned huckster/snake-oil salesman, with perhaps a whiff of the original Wizard of Oz, before Baum turned him into something other than a con man) and Cecil seems to have a real handle on his not-quite-really-historical setting. Ends on a remarkably hopeful note. Not perfect, probably not great, but plenty good enough.

The Cat's Meow by Jonathan B. Losos

 

Look, one of the things about being adopted by a local stray cat is that you develop something of an interest in cats; if you have a brain that works much like mine, this means you end up reading books about cats. I read this book about cats this afternoon. It's more of a read-in-a-sitting kind of book than most books about living with cats are, mainly because it's not a living-with-cats book (though the author does enjoy the company of several cats on a daily-living basis). The author is a biologist and puts some work into unpacking the current state of knowledge on many things cat--everything from which wild species they derive from to how domesticated they are to what they get up to if they're let out of the house to wander to what sorts of shenanigans cat breeders are getting up to. It's a very readable and informative book, it doesn't feel written down to non-biologists, and it's not likely to be completely over many readers' heads.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

 

I should have quit maybe seventy-five pages in, when I realized the narrator of this novel was completely unreliable, too mentally ill to be believable about anything. I didn't stop, and it didn't get more believable, the narrator never really became anything like reliable; it was 300+ pages of delusional ranting that never really evolved anything like story bits or tension or really anything to sustain my interest. I didn't notice Alix Harrow's blurb on the cover in the library, it would have been something like an inducement--I hope this novel isn't an indicator I'll have to disregard her blurbs the way I do some other authors I enjoy.

Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen

 

I grabbed this at the library out of something like hope that it'd be better than the cover copy implied. It really wasn't. It wasn't bad, exactly, just ... mostly bland and predictable and intermittently implausible. The pacing isn't horrible, and some of the action scenes are OK, and there is the occasional neat turn of phrase, but this is a book without a lot of strong attractions for me, and the missteps it makes (the obvious and implausible romantic relationship, mostly) lead me not to look for more by the author.

Food for Thought by Alton Brown

 

Spent the last few days picking my way through this, around doing other things and reading other books--the fact it's a collection of shorter essays makes that an easy prospect. There's good stuff in here, there's funny stuff--hilarious stuff--in here. Most of the essays are about food and/or cooking, shockingly--this is Alton Brown--but this isn't a book for someone who wants to learn how to cook a thing. This is a book for people who learned to cook, or were inspired to learn to cook, watching *Good Eats*, people who probably are substantially nerdy, like Brown is. He's a solid writer, which isn't surprising to anyone who knows he was at least the primary (if not the sole) writer for all those episodes. I don't agree with absolutely everything here (I think his unitasker/multitasker thing is a useful proxy, but I don't think it's the right question to be asking--and you'll take my garlic press away when you pry it from my old dead hands) but he's an entertaining read.

American Rust by Philpp Meyer

 

This was a really blunt and kinda obvious novel, all about Rust Belt despair and depression and all the other bad things that were coming in 2007 or so when this novel was written. There's no real hope for any of the characters in it, anything they do might be the one thing to kick the legs out of their present and demolish their future. Which doesn't seem all that horrific, they mostly aren't people one is inclined to root for whole-heartedly--though in many instances the reasons they're not particularly likeable are clear. Mostly, none of them has the mental bandwidth to spare, to make any good decision that isn't basically an accident. The prose mostly feels ... muffled, I think; there are elements of something like a style, all comma splices and occasionally (intentionally) dodgy grammar, but there's a sense of remove, a failure to connect to (or with, whatever) the characters. Whatever electricity there might be does not convey through the language to the reader, aside from the occasional nifty turn of phrase. The multiple POVs are plausibly necessary to get across all the story (or stories, I guess) Meyer wants to get across, but they seemed to diffuse the novel's focus more than a little. It was not a total waste of my evening, but it wasn't a great read, either.

Whistle by Linwood Barclay

 

This is a kinda paint-by-numbers Horror novel, competently written on at least most levels--the prose is solid and even occasionally sparkles, the characters feel human and kinda lived in--but it kinda feels like a Horror novel written by someone who doesn't read a whole lot of Horror, and probably hasn't written much. Horror does kinda abut Thriller (Barclay's primary thing, I think) as demonstrated by Koryta at least--there are probably others I'm whiffing on--but this isn't really all that great a Horror novel. It feels at points like an extended homage to King's Needful Things, though with less of turning the town so explicitly against itself. Well, except for the fact it's in two timelines, which isn't at all clear from the text itself: You need to pay close attention to get that one timeline is happening approximately now (2025) and the other is happening in late 2001 (I think, it's never really clear). For a while I thought Barclay was playing games about communications and availability of information, but he just wanted some separation, probably because he wanted to say something about lingering bad vibes or something. I'm very distinctly underwhelmed, here, but I might look into one of the Thrillers Barclay's written, just to see how he does on turf he's more familiar with.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

 

Yeah, my affection for Hiaasen is reasonably well-documented, and this book goes to show (at least mostly) that even when he was maybe not at his peak he could still write hilarious novels. The story here is probably a bit on the scattershot side, maybe even jumbled, but it at least mostly holds together by something like force of will; the characters are varyingly goofy, there are people with good hearts and cracked brains, and there are people with empty hearts and dull brains, and there's at least one person who's deranged to the point of being like mindlessly evil, and they mostly get what they deserve (except perhaps for one character who's going to be looking into getting a real estate license in Florida, and even he has had to thoroughly re-examine his choices and his goals). The prose sparkles, there are laugh-out-loud moments throughout, and Hiaasen's gift for making wildly insane dialogue sound plausible and almost reasonable is on nearly constant display. The fact Hiaasen loves Florida in spite of itself (or at least in spite of its people) is all over this novel, maybe more than some of his more recent ones.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

 

I kinda thought this was going to be a narrative about a kinda weird online experience/interaction, but it turned out to be a very different kind of interesting book. Ms. Klein uses her Doppelganger experience to frame topics such as the political drift in the West (particularly the US) in the past decade-ish, Zionism, the autism spectrum (and healthcare more broadly) and several others. There are enough topics discussed that the book could feel disjointed, but Klein writes well enough that the segues come across as mostly natural, the tone of the book as mostly conversational--in spite of what is clearly a great deal of assorted research. There is a lot of political thinking in this that I've come across in other "further left than mainstream US Politics" writing, but someone who hasn't been exposed to that could do worse than to read this. Maybe someone else has written, or will write, the book I thought this was, and maybe eventually I'll read that; I have no regrets about reading this.

This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

 

My brother-in-law lent this to us, with a strong recommendation, and after enjoying One Last Thing Before I Go greatly, a couple-few years ago, this moved up my priorities list--I'd been looking for it intermittently, with no success. Unsurprisingly, it has a lot in common with the other Tropper novel I've read, all banter and humor, skittering on the razor's edge between love and hate. Tropper's characters almost all have history with each other, here, that past fuels the anger and the love, the grudges and the emotional ties that keep them all bound to each other. Tropper's ear for dialogue is approximately unmatched, and his characters all feel real and distinct. The story drifts some, there's a little muddle around the middle, but it ends with the sort of clarity that makes the exact nature of what comes next irrelevant. It's a really good novel, and I'm happy to have read it.

Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby

 

This was the first of Cosby's novels I read, or even heard about it, and I figured I'd give it a reread to see how it holds up. It holds up fucking brilliantly, as it turns out. There are some glorious turns of phrase inside, and the story is ... pyrotechnic. The characters are all believable and well-individualized, and their actions are mostly tied to their motivations (Slice does a thing for reasons that aren't clear, but it's not wildly out of character, really); the mains are fricking saturated in pain and grief, everything they do carries that sting and that stink, even the relatively upbeat (redemptive, even!) ending doesn't wash either away. It's a starkly beautiful novel, probably the one where I discovered that preference in myself.

Lamb by Christopher Moore

 

Considering how big a fan I consider myself to be of Christopher Moore, it's taken me a distressingly long time to get around to reading this. It's really, really good, and might be one of the novels that marks his turn toward writing novels with more serious ideas (or at least that address more serious ideas) at their core. Moore's Jesus is a remarkably syncretic one, and is exposed to Confucianism, and Buddhism (complete with Shaolin monks) and Hinduism; and he brings back elements of all those things when he returns to Galilee. As the Afterword says, that's more reflective of something like commonalities than of actual influence. There are laugh-out-loud-funny bits in the book, but it doesn't make inordinate fun of Christ, or Christianity, or its characters (well, except for some louts who really deserve it). I might have Moore I like better, but this is really strong.

The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree

 

A nonfiction book about how books and libraries survive (or maybe mostly don't) war, about how books are in many instances less glamorous than artworks, less dramatic, more targeted for destruction when the destruction of a culture is part (or most) of the goal; it's also about how books reflect what wars are about, how they shape the soldiers at the front and the people away from it. The Nazis, of course, come in for the majority of villainization, here, but they aren't the only ones to destroy or steal books; and they had and/or were built on a real literary culture--several of the Very High Nazis at least fancied themselves to be authors, and Germany had a lot of books in a lot of libraries before World War 2. The Soviets also treasured books, knew how they could work to shape society in ways contrary to the desires of the government. Both the Nazis and the Soviets destroyed books and libraries specifically to eliminate all traces of things they didn't want, and both made sure many books were published and sold that reflected what they valued. At a bit over 400 pages, this is obviously very much an overview, but it's reasonably well-written and was definitely worth bringing with me on vacation.

The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller

 

Every now and then I end up reading books in short order that make it seem as though I have some sort of theme, or at least comparison/contrast thing, in mind. I grabbed this because it seemed interesting at the Warehouse-sized Dumpbin I found it in, and I read it tonight for the same reason. The fact it's about a gay creator dealing with the scars of his childhood makes it sound as though it has more in common with Bury Your Gays than it really does. This is much more a novel about hate, and about hanging onto it until you realize it's killing you and everything you hold dear, then letting go; it's also a novel about gentrification and about what gets lost when the developers (and shortly thereafter the hipsters) move in; it's also a novel about love, in the epilogue a preacher delivers a sermon around the idea that love is harder than hate, in many senses. The novel is very worth reading, it has a lot of characters, all operating with their own agendas, all distinct; it has solid language and Miller has a superb ear for dialogue. I suppose there are things in this novel that Chuck Tingle was screaming about, but it's not as tragic as it could be, death isn't so final.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

 

So, I remember when Chuck Tingle published wacky pornish novels that were mostly content free, where the jokes were pretty complete in the titles. This is not a wacky novel, and it struck me as remarkably humorless considering ... all that is and goes into Chuck Tingle and his works. The story was nothing special, had some plausibility issues (though magic-tech is a longstanding thing, so I'm not going to snark) and the characters other than the narrator registered mostly as blurs. Clearly Chuck Tingle has things he wants to say about being gay and art and gays in the narrative arts and stuff, and I mostly agree with those I have opinions on ... but this really isn't all that great a novel, which is a particular disappointment to me, because Chuck Tingle seems to be a genuinely great guy. Oh, well.