The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester

 

I've read a few other of Winchester's books about natural (mostly geological) things in the past, and I have enough brainspace dedicated to weather and such stuff that I figured this would be worth reading. It is emphatically worth reading. Winchester has a lot in common with Mary Roach, not least in his occasional discursiveness, at least in this book, where he's writing more about concepts and some thumbnail events to illustrated them for the interested (and perhaps somewhat knowledgeable) layman--something like his books on Krakatoa or the San Francisco earthquake can get more detailed about more singular events, which is a different sort of book. His prose is solid, rising to come impressive occasional heights, though his voice remains thoroughly British. The choice to structure the book to parallel the Beaufort Wind Scale is particularly clever, lets him work from winds people barely notice to winds that are impossible to ignore. Really readable and packed with information.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikivsky.

 

Well, this is a hilarious and grim SF novel. Plausibly a little hope at the end, but only after things have been shown to be utterly and completely fucked. At this point there've been enough stories told from the POV of robotic protagonists that Tchaikovsky isn't breaking a tun of new ground with that, though his depiction covers much of what makes the character tick; In some ways it's a different way to invert *Huckleberry Finn* than Everett took, to make the escaped (or "escaped") slave also the naif, which isn't to say that was entirely intentional, just that it's kinda there. The writing here is mostly deft, lots of sharp turns of phrase and some interesting ways the robots in the setting communicate with each other--or at least how that communication is phrased. The characters here are mostly distinct, though there are really only a very small number of throughgoing ones. The story does kinda slog through the third quarter, but it wraps up pretty well. I hadn't read any Tchaikovsky before, he tends to write trilogies at least, I think, and those aren't super easy to find at the library as a bolus; I might look for something, though, this was interesting and fun.

The Boundaries We Cross by Brad Parks

 

This is a competently-written thriller that hits harder than it probably should, given that it kinda seems as though it's built around the sort of coyly lying narrator that's become popular, lately. That impression is at least mostly wrong: The narrator is deeply unreliable, but he's not at all coy--there are other dynamics at work, here. The novel also has the stuff going on with the thirties-aged male instructor maybe/maybe-not boinking one of his attractive teenaged students, and there are of course unfoldings around and about that, that would probably come off badly in a less-well-written thriller novel. The POV narrator isn't especially likeable at first, but he does get better, some of the unfoldings do a real beat-down on his ego and/or self-image. The other characters do not all come off super-interesting or nice, but a lot of that might be the various accruals of privilege so many of them have. I kept almost putting this down for the first half or so of it, but the back half made that mostly worth the going.

This Train by James Grady

This is not as bad a novel as last night's novel, but it's not very good, either. It's dominated by a voice almost as affected as late-stage Elmore Leonard, it feels as though the author was more concerned with the voice than with actual, you know, writing: it judders and stop-starts and rings false and hollow every time it tries to slip inside someone's head--and it tries to slip inside practically everyone's head who's on the fricking train--because the voice does not put words together in a way at all like how people put words together as they speak. The dialogue is mostly in that authorial voice, so it likewise rings false and hollow. There are occasional moments of like authorial insight, but they are quickly and inevitably subsumed into the voice. The story is a pretty basic heist--shockingly, on a train--with some honor-among-thieves stuff especially toward the end; there might be interesting stuff going on with that story, but (say it with me!) it's buried under and subsumed by that immensely annoying, gruesomely affected authorial voice.
 

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

 Wow this was a bad and unintelligent and entirely unsubtle novel. Demonic possession by way of a cheap Fox News knockoff--but somehow laden with bothsidesism, especially toward the end. Lots of graphic and gruesome violence that somehow ended up not really mattering, and a bunch of characters who were all various shades of implausibly unlikeable. The prose is pretty readable, all in all, at least when Chapman isn't trying to do some nation-scale apocalyptic riff on "all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy." (The King rips are fricking blatant here, y'all, and really not at all well done.) I'd read another Chapman novel that seemed kinda mediocre but this one was outright a waste of my evening, which I just kept reading out of a kinda bloody-minded masochism (or maybe optimism) I guess, and I resent the book and I kinda hate myself.

Blitzed by Norman Ohler

 

I read this this evening after dinner. It's a short book--barely a hundred pages longer than the Scalzi I read in the coffee shop--but a dense one. It makes a convincing case that the Germany was the drug dealer to the world (at least to Europe) after World War I, and after a brief flirtation with anti-drug moralism turned that pharmaceutical expertise inward, making sure the soldiers and officers--and the high command--were suitably wired. Ohler seems to have found evidence (or be interpreting it) that indicates the Blitzkrieg, especially as applied to France, was fueled and possibly inspired by the amount of methamphetamine the Wehrmacht were consuming. He also seems at least led to believe (the record is intentionally and unintentionally sparse) that Hitler's gradual then sudden decline was fueled by the amount of drugs of all kinds that his personal physician was injecting him with; this is usually seen the other way around in histories of the Reich--that his physician was unable to prevent said decline--but Ohler seems convinced (and he is convincing) that the physician was causing it. Fortunately the nature of this kind of nonfiction book means the translator can focus more on meaning and clarity than on trying to capture some ineffable character of the prose, and the translator here did more than well enough. Interesting stuff that might long-term change some of how I think about the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht, well worth reading.

The God Engines by John Scalzi

 

I read this, this morning in a coffee shop. It's a good novella if more than a little grim, and easy to read as saying something about religion in the real world--and not really something nice. The prose is not Scalzi at his breeziest, which does fit the themes of the story. There are some interesting twists and turns in the novella, the reality of things reveals itself to the characters in the novel (at least the human ones) at roughly the same pace as it does to the reader--though I suppose some readers might twig to some things in it more quickly than I did. I've seen this around in the local libraries I spend time in, and reading it was worth the small effort to check it out and the short time it took me to read it.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes

 

This is another very good novel by Ms. Labuskes, a story that gets kinda complicated but resolves nicely; her habit of writing three timelines that end up (at least mostly) coming together by the end is an effective technique, and she's always clear there are multiple timelines going on--it's not ever some lurking gotcha. The prose is solid and the characters are solid and well-complicated; the setting seems to have some basis in experience and research; the events going on around the story are gritty and real. Ms. Labuskes is clearly something of a romantic at heart, because she gives so many of the characters in her novels love-story-ish endings--that's not a complaint, it's often one of the primary tensions needing resolution. The mystery portions of the book feel pretty organic to the rest of the story, and the climax is suitably chaotic.

Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville

 

Apparently I have read too many mediocre-at-best vampire novels lately, because this was like 350 pages of grinding on my nerves with its predictability. Someone in the blurbs mentions a twist in the middle of it that I think I saw coming at least 50 pages ahead--this is just predictable regurgitation of tropes, some vampire, some detective (there's a detective on his own downward spiral in the novel). None of the characters are particularly interesting as heroes or as villains (or as antiheros or as sympathetic villains, it's possible the novel considers itself above and/or beyond such considerations--fine, none of the characters are really interesting as characters). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, if kinda stolid and inert, which might be weirdness caused by the Irish author trying to write like an American; he mostly succeeds, the dialogue isn't horrible, the places feel as though he night have been to them a time or three. Even the twist in the epilogue is predictable. Not bad enough to force me to quit, not good enough that I don't resent that.

Foregone by Russel Banks

 

This turned out to be a stranger novel than I anticipated, not so much in any genre or genre-adjacent sense, just that it's told strangely, in a strange voice (those are not the same thing). The ... primary POV/narrator--though he's not exactly narrating in first-person--is dying imminently of cancer that is affecting his central nervous system, especially his brain (or the treatment for the cancer is doing so, the difference doesn't seem important) so his memories and thoughts and his ability to express them are all in doubt, though his sincerity and his rage at his struggle are not. The narrative starts out as a relatively straightforward and believable thing, but gradually then rapidly becomes wildly disjointed and harder to discern the truths of. The themes actually clarify, though--maybe even emerge--as the narrative fragments, and the novel has some pointed things to say about the ways people (mis)treat and (mis)use each other, and the lengths we will go to tell and hide our inner truths, and the way/s we see our lives and the duration of them and their inevitable end. It's not an easy novel, textually or thematically, but it's a strong one, and I found it well worth reading.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

 I know this is a classic of science fiction (you can tell because it's one of like thirty SF books you can still reliably find in your local public library) but It's a book that if people were reading it for just the story it tells, and not for the gender-related stuff it brings with it, I ... don't think people would really be clamoring about it. It's slow; and the primary narrator is unpleasant and hapless and staggeringly naive, for someone sent to make First Contact, there are few decisions he makes in the first three-quarters of the novel that are not obviously wrong; it has scattered within it interludes of folk stories of the world the novel's set on, which serve mostly to distract, and to show off that Le Guin can write stuff that makes just as little sense as myth tends to. The gender-related stuff--the people who functionally only have gender a few days a month (and while pregnant)--is clearly the point, here, and this isn't a subtle novel (though it shows its age here, as well). I kinda skittered along the surface, here, never really felt engaged by anything in the novel, though I can't really point at anything in the writing itself other than the age of it. The extra stuff--an introduction and an afterword--don't really add much value, here. I read this (and of course "Omelas") while I was in college and then read basically no other Le Guin ever, and after reading this I kinda think I know why.

A History of Fear by Luke Dumas

 

Yet another deeply unsurprising and uninspiring horror novel, one that goes to great lengths to put its subtexts in garish neon, refusing to trust the reader to figure some things out. Also one that mostly doesn't bother much with the whole interesting story thing. When you see the cliches in the first thirty pages, and spot the parallels between being pursued by the devil and being closed and LGBT+ in the first hundred, and then the novel unwinds just about the way you'd expect based on that ... it's hard to have much in the way of good and happy thoughts about the novel, it's a bit of a labor (in the Herculean sense--like cleaning out the Augean stables or something) finding kind things to say. The prose is, I guess, solid enough in its inertly stolid way, this vaguely epistolary novel that doesn't shift its authorial range by even a semitone. Gawds know the characters are pretty much all a muddle, and the way the characters in the novel persist in denying what seems to be the diagetically objective truth of the main character's experiences with the devil (at least, that he had experiences with the devil) is kinda baffling, considering some of the evidence they're ignoring. Oh, well, I probably should have stopped reading the when there was a cliche so bad I reread the passage to make sure I was understanding it correctly; I did not, and I own that choice.

The Cage by Bonnie Kistler

 

This book is very much playing in the Legal Thriller category, but it takes a long, long time to get started, and the first-person narrator is clearly unreliable and not ever telling the reader something. Her big secret comes out in the end, after some extensive over-clever legal maneuvering--it might be plausible legal maneuvering, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems a bit on the too-clever-to-actually-work side, it relies on the narrator being the only clever lawyer in the novel. None of the characters are particularly interesting--the first-person narrator is a clever lawyer but otherwise as shallow as a sheet of paper, and the antagonists have even less dimensionality than that; most of the characters are like specks or dots. The prose is kinda flat and the author keeps inserting chapters from villainous POV, which honestly doesn't work too well for this, having the plots and plans revealed by the first-person narrator finding them seems as though it would have made for a more engaging novel--though her unreliability might have been a problem, there. The fact the novel skitters around a couple of timelines, at least at first, doesn't do it any favors, either, but that does settle down some toward the end of the book as things start to happen in the actual timeline where the story lives. Not great, but not as bad as it seemed for like the first half.

You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White

 

I heard about this in my wanderings online, and there seemed to be some hype about it. While the prose is functionally and structurally sound, the novel itself is a bit of hot and noisy mess: There's a mess of pointless body horror wrapped around what could have been an interesting horror story about identity and the loss thereof--the main sure as heck isn't really the person he believes himself to be, and probably hasn't ever really been, between being trans and an autist and (judging by the events of the novel) deeply kinked; most of that ends up reading as self-loathing and a certain kind of weakness--he's certainly much more a character things happen to than he one who does things. And while the novel does have things to say, they aren't so much "subtext" as they are flashing neon signs; missing them would almost be an act of will. The "shock" of the ending is visible tens of pages out or more, and I spend most of the back third or so of the novel just kinda waiting for things to resolve. For a novel that wants to throw so much body horror at the reader, it struck me as kinda bland and tepid, but I've read a lot of horror and my mom was an OB nurse, I knew the basic facts of pregnancy and childbirth before I was in kindergarten, they've never grossed me out or scared me; I'm probably very much not the person White was aiming to shock with this novel. Not horrible, which given the genre is maybe not the ringing endorsement it might be.