Book 57: Killing Gravity by Corey J. White

I think reading this novella after reading all of the Murderbot stories meant it really suffered in comparison--it's not the same exact kind of story, the central character is a human with special powers rather than a murderbot, but it's got a lot of the same elements and feel. And I did really love parts of it, especially those involving Seven, the main character's tiny cat-like pet/companion, and the main character herself, Mars, is an entertaining voice. But I never particularly cared about the world building, or really understood what the overall point of the book was, so while it was a pleasant enough read, there wasn't quite enough for me to latch onto.

Grade: B

Book 56: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

I really enjoyed this novella! It's the story of a group of bandits in a land that is in the midst of a war that no one acknowledges. They are working to deliver somewhat legitimate goods to a city as a cover for their extremely illegitimate goods they are trying to sell. But along the way they acquire a waitress, who used to be a nun of the Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, and they are forced to bring her along. She has secrets, and various of the bandits have secrets (one in particular), and it's just a lovely folk tale of classic characters with a twist, and a really entertaining read. I don't want to say much more about it than that, but I thought it was lovely.

Grade: A

Book 55: You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson

What a charming book! This is for me pretty much the platonic ideal of a contemporary YA story about a young queer Black girl just trying to make it through high school and find enough money to go to her dream college. In this particular case, Liz goes to school in Indiana, where the prom every spring is the biggest event in town, and being crowned King or Queen is worth a ten thousand dollar scholarship. And so she has to enter, even though she's a bit of a wallflower and this means she'll have to spend time with her former best friend Jordan, the most popular kid on the football team.

There's a great friends group with constant teenage angst, and a fantastic queer love interest named Mack who loves the same band she does, and a really interesting and complicated family life, and it's just a really nice read where you never worry too much about whether it'll all turn out okay, and the stakes are real and mistakes and choices matter, but nothing is life-ending. I really enjoyed it and can't wait to buy it for a GSA library.

Grade: B

Book 54: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Boy I loved this book. It's a collection of speculative short stories, all of which manage to be the most interesting kind of sci-fi for me: they are deeply, deeply invested in exploring what it means to be human, and how we function, and how that would extend into multiple different settings and realities. The prose is so easy to read and fall into; it feels deceptively simple. And even his stories that are the clearest metaphors (Exhalation, for one) are so well done that you don't feel like you got hit across the face with it. They're simply another opportunity to figure out how we live. I took this out from the library but I may need to buy a hard copy. A wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 53: Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All by Laura Ruby

This is a book club book that I had read half of but failed to finish reading in time about a year and a half ago, and I had forgotten so much of it that I just started over from the beginning. And I'm really glad I did!

The structure of the book is that it is told from the perspective of a ghost, who is following a pair of sisters at a Catholic orphanage during World War II. The narrative goes back and forth between telling the story of Frankie and her younger sister Toni, and piecing together the history of how the ghost died, and why she's there, and what she remembers. It tells the very real story of the aftermath of the Depression flowing into the war, while weaving through the stories of a number of women whose lives were, as always seems to be the case, controlled by and halted by men.

When I originally read the first half of it, I found some of the conceit of the book to be a bit hard to take, and I don't know if I just got used to it or if the payoffs in the second half of the book just made them easier to accept, but it bothered me less this time. I also was completely blindsided by a death I knew had to be coming; the way it was told just gutted me, and it's yet another book I've read during the pandemic that also captures the strange remove of living through major events that somehow seem distant from your own life, until they're not. All in all, a really nice read.

Grade: B

Book 52: Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

 If you are up for a solid space opera romp where a person who's alone finds a team in the middle of a new universe she didn't know existed, and that person is also a woman of color who dates women, then boy do I have the book for you! 

Vivian Liao is a great character, and this is a space opera that's almost a portal fantasy--on the day she's about to undertake actions to completely transform life on earth by way of becoming a benevolent tech dictator, she is instead pulled into space, and is immediately on the run and gathers a group of four other people who are attempting to deal with the mysteries of the universe. There's a structure and a mythos to the universe at large, and they're well developed while also fairly standard representatives of the space exploration genre, but it's really Viv and her four new friends that I cared about. As a related comment, there's a revelation about two thirds of the way in that feels like it should be a bigger surprise than it is, but because the overall story is compelling enough, I didn't find that to impact my enjoyment of it. This book doesn't reach the heights of the novella he co-wrote last year, but it's a very good read. 

Grade: B

Book 51: Network Effect by Martha Wells

 Murderbot!!! When I started reading this book, the first novel after four novellas, I did wonder whether this story would truly feel like a full novel after so many shorter adventures. And the answer is that it really did! It built on the first four novellas a lot, but the emotional and logistical arc of both Murderbot and the people and other AIs in its universe really demanded a full novel's worth of exploration. 

After three adventures where Murderbot basically took a very dangerous gap year and learned important things about itself, it was reunited with its clients/people/certainly not friends. It then goes on another adventure that's even bigger and scarier, reunites with a character from one of those three novellas, and discovers that as much as it hates having feelings it does in fact have them. One of the central joys of this series from the very first novella is the contrast between the extremely dry narrative voice of a not-person who thinks humans are inexplicable idiots and its continual reckoning with its own emotions and desires. A sheer delight! I think this is my favorite of the series since the first novella itself. 

Grade: A

Book 50: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

 When this was listed as one of the Big Books of 2020 last winter, I decided to give it a shot. And I'm not entirely sad I did? But I'm also not sure whether it was worth it. 

The premise of this book is examining the sexual relationship that Vanessa had with her high school teacher Jacob Strane when she was 15 and he was 43. The narrative goes back and forth between 2000, when their relationship began, and 2017, when Strane is accused by other high school students of abuse during the #metoo movement (which is referenced but never directly named). Vanessa's narrative voice is understandably unreliable when it's the 15 year old POV: she believes this to be a romance, rather than abuse, and the reader sees his manipulation and gaslighting almost too clearly. But 32-year-old Vanessa is also unable to see the relationship the way the reader is meant to. There is such a grating dissonance between her interpretation of events (a romance), and what they actually were (statutory rape and abuse of power, among other things) that it's hard to know how to respond as a reader. 

It's also a remarkably unsubtle book. There are observations and critical critiques worth making related to all of this: Vanessa came of age when Britney Spears and internet countdown clocks to various teenage girls turning 18 were common, and the conception of an underage girl actually having the power and control over grown men was presented as a version of feminism. And the biggest political scandal of the '90s concerned the most powerful man in the U.S. being brought down and made helpless by an intern, who wielded even more power than he did. But the book requires Vanessa to barely be a person in her own right in order to make these observations. She is so utterly alone during her entire experience, and is betrayed by every possible source of support (with the exception of her therapist she started seeing six months before the book began), and even the version of #metoo that exists in this book is unable to help her, because she's the wrong kind of victim: the victim who convinced herself she wanted it. But that's not actually very uncommon at all, especially in the specific scenario of being groomed by a man like Strane. It ends up reading like an odd "I'm not like those other [abused] girls" story, and I can't get past wondering what the point of the narrative is meant to be. Is the revelation supposed to be that victims of abuse often convince themselves that it was actually love? I kept waiting for this book to land for me, and it never did. 

Grade: C

Book 49: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

I saw this book mentioned on a goodreads newsletter about eight months ago, I think, and immediately put it on hold at the library. I had been wanting to read a book about the Blitz ever since reading Blackout and All Clear, which I enjoyed but also found myself lacking the historical grounding to really understand what was happening to Britain at that stage of the war.

When I started the book, my impression for some reason had been that it was a look at the Blitz from the point of view of a Londoner, but in fact it's actually a telling of Churchill's first year as Prime Minister, from May of 1940 until the following spring. It relies on the diaries of one of his private secretaries and his daughter, Mary, as well as correspondence between Churchill and many other major players in the war, including Roosevelt. I found the framing to be very effective, and an extremely detailed and yet readable first read on a historical event that I knew relatively little about. The last couple of years I have been deliberately attempting to fill in a lot of the blanks I have in my understanding of history, both through historical fiction and then through popular history books, and it's making me revisit other pieces of media that I didn't fully understand because I lacked the necessary context. If you're at all interested in a book that explores how the Blitz began, what England did (and didn't do) in response, America's involvement in the war prior to Pearl Harbor, and how the Blitz ended, I highly recommend reading this.

Grade: A