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.

Alice by Christina Henry

 

So, I've recently kinda fallen for Christina Henry's writing, in a more explicitly Horror context, though I've known she'd written some novels that were spins on older stories that are generally thought of as "for children" (though I'd submit that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass have pleasures for adults) and it's possible The Girl in Red is one of these, though that doesn't have much in common with "Little Red Riding Hood" past a couple of signifiers about the main character. This is definitely one, though: There are references to the book/s all through this, though this is absolutely not some sort of crypto-sequel, or some sort of thinly reskinned retelling. This is a novel that works on its own, and probably would for a reader who somehow knew nothing of the original novel/s. It's grim and grimy, and it reminds me a lot of some of Alix Harrow's work, especially The Once and Future Witches with its vaguely alt-historical setting. The prose here moves beyond solid into borderline magical, with some elements actually managing to be heightened without detracting from the story; the characters--especially the mains--are thoroughly considered and well conveyed, and the story itself fucking rips. There's a wide feminist stripe running through the novel, but that's not a bad thing; the novel clearly has things to say about power differentials and male gaze and plausibly things like animal rights (the Rats of NIMH Easter egg was ... unexpected) as well as things like the rich keeping the poor firmly under the soles of their boots. Really, really good stuff, here.

Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

 

Grabbed this in spite of my not preferring series fiction, because Block is usually fun to read, and good for a few chuckles. This hit those marks pretty precisely. The novel is copyright 2008, so it's not wildly obsolescent in terms of the technology at play (though I think Block whiffed on the cameras at tollbooths). The story is ... a little indirect, the POV spends a lot of time on the run, then settling down, before he has his revenge on the people who framed him for a very public killing; the fact the POV is a hitman complicates the morality, here, at least a little bit. He's not a horrible person, but he's capable of being very much not a good one, either. There are layers here and much to be interested. This isn't Block at his funniest, but there's still wit and sparkle all over, here.

Time's Undoing by Cheryl A. Head

 

This was a novel that I really wanted to like, about the long stain of racism and how its victims have struggled to have lives and loved ones they cherished, and about answering questions about your family older than your parents. Alas, it's really not a very good novel: The prose just lies inert on the page, with no sparkle or joy and barely any signs of life; the story is kinda obvious, especially once you twig to the author's premises and priors; much of the incident that *isn't* about racism in policing in the Deep South strikes me as amazingly implausible; the fact one of the POV characters turns out to be a ghost is something like cheap; the multiple timelines end up serving little purpose, the heart of the story is in the present, not the past, the events of the past probably would have been better served if they'd been reduced in number (and in overall length). This is a novel that wants to use its story to say something, and I agree with what it's trying to say, but the story itself completely fails to carry the weight, here.

The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak

 

This is not a novel I would have expected from Rekulak, the fact it's his first might be connected to that (though causality might point any possible direction). It's not really a thriller or crime novel, it's a pretty straightforward bildungsroman set in 1987 New Jersey, where the main characters (and his ... I guess they're his friends) live the hellish lives of high school freshmen--high school freshmen who for various reasons don't really fit in anywhere than each other's company. There's some relatively minor crime, and some awkward early love, but the primary story is the main character realizing he's good with computers, even though he's tanking in all his classes. (He seems to have maybe something like ADHD, but that's never mentioned--and it wouldn't have been in 1987.) It's not a horrible novel, but it really didn't do a whole lot for me. I guess the disjunction between the main character's knack for computers and his failure to thrive in school just didn't work for me, and though my high school years were various kinds of unpleasant they weren't the same kinds as happen to the characters here. I don't feel as though I wasted my evening, but oh comma well.

The Fireman by Joe Hill

 

Well, this was my reading this weekend, nearly 800 pages. It was interesting to read a plague-apocalypse novel that all happened in the apocalypse, no aftermathy stuff, no gods or devils or AIs playing at either: Just people trying to survive a disease with some traits that at least look supernatural on the surface (fungi are occasionally weird, but I'm not gonna buy spontaneous human combustion as a symptom, here). The characters are mostly distinct and believable, but there's some incident that skitters on the edge of implausible, even in a novel that at least gestures at the supernatural being possible in it. It's easy to point at precedents, here, but this mostly ends up standing on its own, and it's pretty good.

Trashlands by Alison Stine

 

This was really not a very good novel, clearly aiming for "kaleidoscopic" and landing on "scattershot." Way too many POVs, way too many narrative threads, way too little of anything more than the vaguest of throughlines. The setting being one in which all the environmental chickens have come home to roost, specifically on the already disadvantaged, does not make things better. Thuddingly bleak and depressing, to put it kinda mildly. On the micro-level, the prose, the dialogue and all-a-that, it's not bad, though there's not much sparkle or joy to the prose (arguably, given the setting and the thuddingly bleak and depressing overall tone, sparkle and/or joy would be out of place). I see the author has won a Philip K. Dick award for another novel: Given his glaring flaws as a novelist, one should probably take any award named for him with some skepticism. I kept wanting to tap out of this novel, but I figured maybe it would go somewhere, do something, that would be worth the while. It never did.

Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams

 

This is an interesting little novel, more literary than anything else--at least as I see it--though there's definitely some SF-adjacent premise that needs swallowed before you'll enjoy the novel. Heck, probably before the novel would even make sense. The novel is structured a little weird, with pretty distinct individual story arcs that mostly resolve in sequence, though there are some throughlines, and there is some sense that the sequence of resolutions is necessary. There are some pretty strong messages percolating up from the subtext, about tech and business and art and happiness and conformity. There's probably something about all the lies we tell ourselves, or at least allow ourselves to believe, wrapped up in something that smells strongly like the placebo effect. The prose is smooth and practically invisible, the characters are remarkably well-defined, though some might be more reliable than others (I don't get the feeling any of them is wildly unreliable, but it's always worth remembering--especially in something that bends at least a little literary--that the characters might not be telling what's actually happening around them). I grabbed it in spite of some skepticism, and I'm glad I did, there's a lot to like, here.

When These Mountains Burn by David Joy

 

Grabbed this from the library when I saw it, because I'm basically in some kind of love with David Joy's writing, and oh my gawds this is a brutal and beautiful novel. It's at least a little more hopeful than Where All Light Tends to Go, the ending turns almost elegiac, just the last handful of paragraphs as one of the POV characters is pondering the differences between the mountain life he was born into and the mountain life he's going to be leaving behind. Joy writes with belief and empathy and his prose is sweet like blood, his characters make choices they know are bad and they still often aren't prepared for how bad things will get, how heavy the consequences will be for their actions; he never shies away from telling their truths, from showing their pain. His novels are strong stuff, but they're worth it.

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

This turned out to be a more complicated novel than James was, at least in some ways. Some of that might have been the explicit intellectualism of the narrator, some might have been the insertion of another (much shorter) novel inside it--one probably too short to play as a novel for real, but enough to serve the larger purposes. The story is ... more nuanced than the cover copy, or reviews of the movie made from it, might lead you to believe. The language is well handled, both in the narrator's own voice (so to speak) and in the thing he writes out of some combination of rage and self-sabotage and desperation and pain; the characters all seem very much themselves, with the exception of the character who's slipping into dementia. The novel has a lot to say about a lot of things, identity (both in the sense of racial and in the sense of self) is the primary one, though there's clearly some amount of poking at the literary establishment of the late-1990s, when this was almost certainly written (publishing date of 2001). It's a pretty strong novel, though I can't pretend to understand the vast majority of what the narrator was writing about when he wasn't, erm, narrating.

We Ate the Dark by Mallory Pearson

 

It became clear within the first fifty pages that this was a novel about a bunch of Appalachian witches dealing with a murder and the Powers behind it. I kept reading anyway, and I really regret that choice. It's murky and muddled and the characters are barely distinct from each other and at the end the putatively good characters seem to have sacrificed another world and all the people on it. I wish it hadn't taken over four hundred pages to get to that ending. The fact the author seems to have at least occasionally reached for heightened prose and basically ... failed to get there did not improve things.

Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi

 

Grabbed this little nonfiction book somewhere while we were on vacation a couple of months ago, it's a reasonably well-written book about what being a long-haul trucker is like, and what parts of their job and work environment play the largest parts in why some small number of them end up being murderers (and some smallish percentage of them end up being serial killers, as that term is defined in mainstream culture, which is different than its meaning in law enforcement) There are interspersed sections from the POV of former sex workers, and from law enforcement and social workers who are working to get those who are victims (most of them, as the author sees things, and I'm not inclined to argue) out of the life, as well as bits relating fragments of various investigations into murders committed by truckers. While the book is reasonably informative and well-written, it seems like 250-ish pages that could boil down to this: Serial killers have always been able to do more killing if they've been able to move around, and serial killers have always been able to get away with killing sex workers because in many places and many times they're women who won't be missed; given that trucking combines mobility with access to sex workers (at truck stops seems to be fading, but there's still a culture around the business) it's not at all surprising that long-haul trucker is a job that some serial killers would find attractive and appealing.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

 

I grabbed this because the idea of a novel about a protopunk band threatening a reunion seemed interesting to me. I wouldn't say there's nothing interesting in this, but I liked the novel a good deal less than I hoped. It's basically (mostly) the same story as any band that struggles and kinda makes it before the members come to kinda loathe each other. Also, the main story is the narrator (who's a fictional editor at a fictional music magazine working on a fictional book about the fictional band) working to forgive the Other Woman in her parents' marriage, and also probably her father, who died before she was born. It's plausible Ms. Walton knows this, but it's kinda buried under all the pseudo documentation. Because the text is mostly in the form of interviews (interspersed with the narrator's notes) the novel struggles of course to be kaleidoscopic rather than scrambled; it lands somewhere in the vast middle ground, there. The characters are reasonably clear, even if many of them are types someone with a knowledge of rock and pop history will recognize. The novel has things it wants to say about racism and sexism, both in culture overall and in the entertainment biz (at least the music division) and one of the reasons I was so disappointed was that I agree with those things, I just don't think the novel really did a good job of saying them--which probably connects to the fact I didn't think it did a great job of telling its story.