Bragan Tackles the TBR in 2023, pt.4

Well, I suppose we're far enough into the year, somehow, for it to be time for a new thread for the last quarter. After a nice little flurry of reading at the end of last month, my first book of October is going at a much more leisurely pace, but until I finish that, here's a recap of my year thus far:

January:

1. All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg
2. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
3. The Who Revealed by Matt Kent
4. Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker
5. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
6. Did You Just Eat That?: Two Scientists Explore Double-Dipping, the Five-Second Rule, and other Food Myths in the Lab by Paul Dawson & Brian Sheldon
7. Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman
8. Head On by John Scalzi

February:

9. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
10. The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howe
11. Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
12. The Appalachian Trail: A Biography by Philip D'Anieri
13. Pastoralia by George Saunders

March:

14. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
15. Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook
16. Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith
17. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book by Iona & Peter Opie
18. Upgrade by Blake Crouch
19. What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
20. Vallista by Steven Brust
21. Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard

April

22. A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys
23. Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
24. The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
25. The Illustrated Al by "Weird Al" Yankovic, et al.
26. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
27. Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara by David Fisher
28. The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
29. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
30. The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

May

31. The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America's Food by Matthew Gavin Frank
32. Adventure Time Presents: Marcy & Simon by Olivia Olson
33. The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
34. Letters from Side Lake: A Chronicle of Life in the North Woods by Peter M. Leschak
35. The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
36. The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects by Mike Mignola
37. Never Panic Early by Fred Haise, with Bill Moore
38. The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin
39. Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater

June

40. The Third QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray
41. Adventure Time Vol. 1 by Ryan North
42. Elemental Haiku by Mary Soon Lee
43. Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch
44. The Skeptic's Guide to the Future by Dr. Steven Novella, with Bob Novella and Jay Novella
45. Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister
46. Tsalmoth by Steven Brust
47. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
48. Adventure Time Vol. 2 by Ryan North

July

49. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
50. Smithsonian Treasures of the National Air and Space Museum by Tony Reichhardt
51. The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 edited by Carmen Maria Machado
52. Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet
53. Go Team Venture!: The Art and Making of The Venture Bros. by Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer with Ken Plume
54. The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
55. Cat on the Edge by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
56. The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders

August

58. Adventure Time Vol. 3 by Ryan North
59. Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) by David Sedaris
60. The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
61. The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
62. The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson
63. The Wonderful Doctor of Oz by Jacqueline Rayner
64. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

September

65. Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch
66. On Immunity: An Innoculation by Eula Biss
67. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
68. Fun with Kirk and Spock by Robb Pearlman
69. The House of Unexpected Sisters by Alexander McCall Smith
70. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston
71. Scattered Showers by Rainbow Rowell
72. The Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
73. Hide by Kiersten White
74. Roadside Geology of New Mexico by Halka Chronic
75. The Ruby's Curse by Alex Kingston, with Jacqueline Rayner
76. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Happy new thread! Can you believe it's the fourth quarter already?

Fourth quarter! I'm going to need to be taking out the goalie soon if I'm going to reach my modest yearly goals.

>2 labfs39: These days, I am pretty much in a perpetual state of not being able to understand how time is going to fast. :)

>3 rocketjk: I deliberately decided not to set any goals at all this year, and somehow I've still been worried about not meeting them.

77. Paperweight by Stephen Fry



A collection of short pieces by actor/author/comedian Stephen Fry, published in 1992, most of it originally written for radio or newspapers. They range from silly humor to more serious opinion pieces (although even the latter mostly tend to have some humor in them). There are also two pieces of fiction: a Sherlock Holmes pastiche which was lightweight but pleasant enough, and a two-act play that he wrote when he was twenty-two, which unfortunately was trying way too hard to be edgy and transgressive and mostly just ended up being kind of uncomfortable.

All of it showcases Fry's usual style: highbrow references, a twenty-dollar vocabulary, and a lot of esoteric wordplay, all of which might feel insufferably pretentious if it weren't produced with genuine enthusiasm and a refusal to actually take itself seriously that often cheerfully teeters over into self-deprecation. Which I suppose isn't for everyone. I generally enjoy it well enough, although this collection did make it clear to me that I enjoy it more in verbal than written form. I could watch Fry babbling away as the host of QI all day, but a little bit of these pieces goes rather a long way. Which, in fairness, is something Fry himself is well aware of, and he warns us flat-out in the introduction that this really just isn't something suitable for reading straight through, but is best dipped in an out of a little at a time. I really should have taken that advice better, honestly. I read it over the course of about six days, but even that was too high a dose, and it started to wear thin for me well before the end. It didn't help, either, I'm sure, that a lot of the contents haven't traveled well across multiple decades and the Atlantic ocean, as there were a lot of very specific references that I'm sure would have been a lot more meaningful to someone in Great Britain in the 1980s than to an American in the 2020s.

Rating: I want to give this a 3/5 based on how much I ended up enjoying it, but that feels unfair, really, because I probably would feel more enthusiastic about it if I'd read it the way it was actually intended to be read. So I'm going to bump it up to a 3.5/5.

Back to The Three Body Problem, I loved it too. I'm not a very science-literate person, but when I'm enjoying a good science fiction story I tend to let things slide and not fret too much if I don't understand it all. I mostly liked the second volume in the trilogy, but I've set asid the third volume for a few years now (I own it). I found it was becoming a bit "space-wars"-ish, which I don't usually like. Will be interested to see what you think.

>6 arubabookwoman: I am sometimes a bit too science-literate to properly appreciate SF, because so much of it gets it wrong. This one wasn't wrong, though, just weird, which is more interesting. And perhaps more forgiving for those who aren't science-literate, as it's still going to leave you going WTF? a bit whether you are or not. :)

78. The Last Word by Taylor Adams



Emma reads a deeply terrible self-published novel about the murder of two women, told with a little too much relish from the killer's POV. She leaves a one-star review. The author is not pleased. And then she realizes that someone is after her...

I have to say, early on I was wondering if picking this one up wasn't a giant mistake. There's something about having the main character nitpicking a badly written thriller that makes it much harder not to notice all the imperfections and implausibilities in the work you're currently reading. But, credit where it's due, the author of this one does take some of those resulting expectations about narrative and play around with them in some at least mildly clever ways. Most of the twists still end up being pretty obvious, and I can't exactly say it made my pulse pound in suspense or anything, but it did work better than I expected it to, and the end result is a fast-reading and fairly pleasant (albeit violent) piece of slightly meta-feeling brain candy.

Rating: 3.5/5

79. The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry



Biddy lives on the magical island of Hy-Brasil, where she has been raised by Rowan, a mage who tells her she came to him as the only survivor of a shipwreck, and his rabbit familiar. But now, sixteen years old and longing to experience the outside world, she is coming to realize that there are things that Rowan hasn't told her, and that all of them are in danger.

There's some very familiar fantasy tropes here -- I am beginning to wonder if I maybe haven't seen "magic is disappearing from the world!" one too many times -- but what the novel does with them is good, and its take on the things that magic can do in the world is both interesting and very, well, magical. The plot is decent, and Biddy is a great character, clever and brave, but also completely believable as a teenage girl who doesn't feel herself to be anything extraordinary. Her relationship with Rowan, too, is complicated and interesting, being far from perfect, but strong and loving and rather moving, nonetheless. There are also some undercurrents of social commentary that aren't preachily belabored, but are well-taken.

Basically, it's just a good, solid, well-done fantasy novel.

Rating: 4/5

>9 bragan: This seems interesting. I had never heard of H. G. Parry.

>9 bragan: What Chlorine said, it does sound interesting.

>10 chlorine: I didn't think I had, either, but it turns out I did already have her The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep on my wishlist.

>11 FlorenceArt: It may not exactly be the instant classic the cover blurb wants me to think it is, but it did do what it's doing nicely and hit the spot for me really well.

Hello! I just discovered that I'd missed your whole Q3 thread so am posting here so I won't lose this one. Too many books in the Q3 thread to comment on all the ones I wanted to! But a couple of things - count me as another fan of The Greenlanders, I'm glad you liked it; and thank you for the review of The Three Body Problem - it's one of the books that I've owned so long it's lost its appeal, and your review has me intrigued again.

>13 wandering_star: Hi! Glad to know you made it here this time!

I think both The Greenlanders and The Three-Body Problem are books that worked much better for me than it sort of seems like they should, but I am far from complaining about that.

80. The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore



Two men named Wes Moore grew up in almost the same place at almost the same time under very similar circumstances: poor, Black, raised without a father in a neighborhood ravaged by violence and drugs. Wes Moore, the author, managed to have a highly successful life and is now, more than a decade after this book was published, serving as the governor of Maryland. The other Wes Moore was sentenced to life in prison for his part in a jewelry store robbery in which a policeman was fatally shot. Wes Moore, the author, found himself unable to stop thinking about the coincidence and the extent to which it seems like each of them could have so easily had the other's life. And in this book, he tells both of their stories.

It's an interesting and depressing look at what life is like for young men growing up in such circumstances, and, for those privileged enough not to have any idea what it's actually like to experience this kind of life, a useful one. But I can't escape the feeling that there's something a bit unsatisfying about this as a book. Maybe it's just that the author doesn't have any answer to the question of what it is that made the difference in the two men's lives, other than pure, random luck. Which I think is a good answer, and almost certainly the right answer, and I applaud him for resisting the temptation to invent any easier, neater, more self-serving ones. But having come to accept that lack of other answers, what do you do with that? What insights do you take away from it? There aren't a whole lot of those here, either, and while I'll take a shrug and an "I don't know" over a simplistic made-up answer any day, I am still left with a sense of something slightly incomplete.

Rating: 3.5/5

81. Adventure Time Vol. 4 by Ryan North



The fourth collection of comics based on the Adventure Time TV show, because even after watching all of the sequel/spinoff Fionna & Cake, I still cannot get enough of this stuff.

This one starts with a one-shot featuring Magic Man, which was OK, then gives us a multi-part story in which Finn, Jake, and the Ice King explore a particularly interesting set of dungeons. Which was fun, and weird, and kind of creepy, and featured a lot of the Ice King being unbelievably tragic. And, man, even though, like Jake, I find myself wanting to shout, "DUDE. STOP MAKING ME SAD," the truth is, I eat up tragic Ice King with a spoon. Like a big old bowl of sad, weird, crazy ice cream.

Rating: 4/5

>15 bragan: Great review. I read this book long ago and didn't review it, probably felt I couldn't do it justice. Interesting to read some of the less starred reviews....

>15 bragan: I'd had that one sitting on the TBR for ages and ages and ages. It was one of those ones I kept coming back to and thinking "I really should read that soon," and then not doing it. I feel like maybe I would have appreciated it more with less build-up, honestly, but I'm glad to have finally read it, at least.

82. Sleep Donation by Karen Russell



In this very short novel (or perhaps it's a novella?), a plague of insomnia has been sweeping the world, one that can only be treated by donations of sleep from others, and we watch a woman whose job it is to recruit these donations struggling with the ethics of her job and her approach to it.

Which makes this sound like an interesting but fairly straightforward sort of science fiction story. It's not. It's odd, hard to get a handle on, and, perhaps fittingly, rather dreamlike. Aspects of it feel deeply realistic, and others fantastic or almost mystical. The writing is a bit strange, too, giving the impression that the writer was happy to just throw all kinds of weird descriptions and metaphors at everything to see what stuck, with some results that are breathtakingly perfect and others that are borderline nonsensical. In a different sort of work, I might criticize that. In this one... maybe it works.

Thematically, it feels like it could, perhaps even should, be saying something simple and clear, but the more I try to draw one-to-one comparisons with obviously relevant real-life scenarios, the more I find my brain slipping around and getting lost in complexity and metaphor. Whatever I might make of it, I will say that it resonates strongly with issues about disease and treatment, capitalism and exploitation, generosity and greed, privacy and intimacy.

Rating: 4/4