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Books read in 2021 so far (with brief reviews): Part 2
My computer is behaving itself again (knock on wood); here's some more books!
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #1)
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #1)
- Sci-fi (cyberpunk, interplanetary, survival) novella. Adult.
- Incredible, perfect, flawless. Read in a single day. While baking a very complicated cake.
- One of those space robot books that's really about depression, trauma, autonomy, and personhood. Bait For My Friend Group Specifically.
- I made a playlist! It has one song on it: Paint It Black, by the Rolling Stones
- It's actually a very fun, exciting, adventure-filled, life-affirming book. But that is the tone.
- Strong narrative voice, simple writing.
- Also, alternate-world stories where characters are casually queer in ways that add to characterization and story, while the main plot is primarily about solving mysteries, resisting corporate power, daring escapes, and generally being Extremely Badass? Are something that can actually be so personal, and I feel incredibly lucky that I'm in a place (physically, temporally, and in terms of personal book-researching skill) where I can find as many of them as I want.
- Overall: I liked it, I thought it was very good, would reread (once I'm done with the series), would recommend widely.
- High fantasy/portal fantasy with dashes of urban fantasy and steampunk influences. Teen.
- One of my closest friends was obsessed with this series in middle school. Every time I asked her if I should read it for the past seven years, her response has been "Don't; it's bad." She finally relented and lent me her copy, and I'm having a blast.
- If I were reading this as a preteen, I think the character I would have most imprinted on was Grimalkin (the cranky-yet-helpful magic talking cat). No, I wasn't into Warriors as a kid, but I came close. Yes, I wore cat ears to class and school picture day.
- Good fight series, a solid dose of not-entirely-derivative ideas. I'd almost call them original; I wouldn't call them fresh.
- Painfully heterosexual while at the same time being exactly what you would expect a group of closeted queer twelve-year olds to go wild for. Not queerbaiting; I don't think that at the time of writing the author understood that gay people were real. Just vibes.
- Overall: I liked it, I thought it was bad, would not reread, would not recommend
- All I have written in my journal for this one is "10/10 Martha Wells is just giving me everything I want."
- Builds well on the first book, and similarly gripping. I put this on hold at the library as soon as I finished the first, and I put the third on hold as soon as I finished this one.
- I'm very fond of the title for this one: it directly references a moment when a character remembers a parent calming them down by describing fear as an artificial condition, while also feeling like a play on the phrase "human condition," and additionally nodding to ART, a nickname Murderbot gives to another character.
- Speaking of ART...I really like ART. I'm such a sucker for characters who decide you're their friend after one conversation, which didn't even start off friendly, especially paired with characters (like Murderbot) who have approximately zero friends and wouldn't know what to do with one if they had one. I'm a little like that offline, sometimes.
- Also, squishy un-street-smart polyamorous scientist family...I love them...I love how well they treat Murderbot...I really love all the characters here.
- Overall: I liked it, I thought it was good, would reread (when I'm done with the series), would recommend.
- Space opera. Adult.
- Finished this the day after Artificial Condition and the note in my journal is "Ann Leckie is just giving me everything I want."
- Enjoyable political maneuvering, cool battles, emotional moments that are delivered with a light touch but leave a huge impact.
- A friend just finished the series, shortly after I did, and we've been messaging back and forth unpicking the romantic subplot apart for nearly a week; the levels of nuance are delicious (and they're really cute together).
- This series plays with concepts of identity really well. A highlight in this book is the hints we get of the Presger's alien conception of identity, which we get hints at in conversation with Translator Zeiat, but none of the characters take the time to properly piece together (they have much bigger problems) and thus is left as a fascinating exercise to the reader.
- Overall: I liked it, it was good, would reread, would recommend.
- Heist, alternate-world pseudo-historical gritty low fantasy. Teen/Young Adult.
- This is a reread. To be more precise, this is at least my fifth reread, and probably closer to a tenth. I used to be really into these books.
- Inspired by someone describing Nina and Matthias' dynamic in Shadow and Bone (the TV series loosely based on this series and its companion series), me wondering how closely it matched the book, oh look where did all that time go.
- Surprisingly, the book still holds up, after several years and intensely critical readings (including one where I tracked every time any character's eyes were described to make a point about white-centric beauty standards and value judgements around lightness and darkness). Somehow impossible to put down, even knowing literally everything that's going to happen, almost by heart.
- It's a very tightly-written book. A lot of what looks like pure description, a joke, a colorful aside, is doing double-duty as foreshadowing, a callback, a reference to an as-yet unrevealed backstory. Every plot point echoes at least one other. Every single plot twist is led up to and justified in a million invisible ways. When we move between character POVs, the metaphors change to fit the new narrator's interests and upbringing -- and across the two books, we have nine POVs, each with a distinctive, believable, complex perspective and voice (it should have been ten: Kuwei deserves to show us the world through his eyes. It's still impressive).
- I can't imagine any of the above translates well to the screen. Moving to the screen also eliminates three out of the five senses, and this is a book where I could smell every scene. I don't visualize very much when I read, but this is an intensely physical book and it slips me inside the POV character's bodies like I'm putting on a glove.
- I'll be among the first to admit this book has issues with its portrayal of race and systemic oppression, but rereading reminds me that it does far and away clear the bar of "multiple three-dimensional characters of color whose emotional lives are treated seriously and sympathetically, and whose relationship with their cultures is individual, nuanced, and not all that defines them." Which is not the highest bar that could be set, but is also far from the lowest.
- Overall: I still like it, it's good, would reread (again), would recommend (especially if you're considering watching the show).