Literary-Fiction

**No Lasting Impression ** It’s harder than expected to write a review of Islington after a few months. I certainly remember the main characters, but like paint after too much mixing, all the characters have bled together into a brown shade of grim determination. With sufficient time travel and interwoven plots, it’s difficult to even tell the books apart. Much of the book is rereading the same story from a new vantage in time, with the reader adding pieces to previous knowledge, rather than navigating a new plot. The extended sequences in a purgatory-like time capsule were my favorite part of the book, if only to escape the steadfast drumbeat of sacrifice, speeches, and pontifications on free will. Overall passable, but didn’t leave an impression. ...

**Origami Permutations on Wealth ** Origami was never about the finished product. For me, it was the act of folding, taking an inert shape and transforming it into something unrecognizable, and doing so through crisp folds neatly executed. The Chosen and the Beautiful feels like Origami. Nghi Vo takes the story and material of Great Gatsby but folds it differently, with just enough wrinkles to keep a reader spellbound. Rather than tell the story from the perspective of the cardboard cutout Nick, Vo focuses on Jordan Baker: queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers. Vo captures the spirit of cultural unease lyrically: Being a guest suited me […] and as I went along I was turning into a marvelous mimic. I copied the Featherstone’s polished manners, the Banner’s midatlantic accent, and the Wilkens easy command of those they deemed their social inferiors, which was to say, everyone. I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity. ...

** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...

**18th book of 2021: How the world ends. ** It’s not difficult to envision childhood trauma and sexual frustration as the shaper of global catastrophe. After all, men with childhood trauma and issues with women are the ones who already nearly ended the world. (see: One Minute to Midnight ) Once the wrong fires are lit, * “[t]he whole world now, one vast uncontrolled experiment . . . and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” * ...

** 17th book of 2021: Sex, Politics, Apathy. ** I have a rule when it comes to scifi: if the main character starts talking esoteric politics while engaging in strange sex, I’m out. House of Suns takes as its premise that humanity has spread through the galaxy, and planet-bound civilizations rise and fall in mere millennia. The only way to maintain civilization for longer periods of time is through clone family lines, known as shatterlings. These families roam the galaxy, fix stars with pseudo-dyson-spheres, trade with new civilizations, and meet for family reunions every 200,000 years or so. Family lines spend most of their time either in cryo or traveling at relativistic speeds, free to wander the galaxy, but clone club has two rules: ...

Animal Farm levels of allegory about life-or-death instincts deployed in the pursuit of status, the willful blindness of the wealthy toward inequality of opportunity, and the thucydides trap.

** 79th book of 2020: Rhythm of ‘body keeps score’, followed by the rhythm of bore. ** Too often in fantasy, the hero’s journey consumes so much available bandwidth that, that the difficulties of high stakes situations are lost in the compression algorithm of novel writing. Elements like individual trauma or coalition politics are ignored entirely , leaving readers with conversation chess robots who plan every social interaction 4 moves in advance and stare at defeat and carnage unfazed in and deftness that mere mortals cannot dream of. ...

** 76th book of 2020: Class struggle isn’t new ** “What was it about these steep, western, water-locked cities, Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco? All three I’d visited, and in all three, the money flowed straight uphill.” The book exudes a bitterness about class society, where at the end of the belle-epoch, “all people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.” Our protagonists gawk at riding in rather than on the train car, or eating “gnocchi that might have been pinched from the ass of an Italian angel.” Yet beyond the cardboard cutout villain and our protagonist who mainly a narrative camera lens, it felt like the book didn’t have much to say. Even the title is a rehash of old concepts. The 8th century Tang poem comes to mind: 朱门酒肉臭，路有冻死骨: ‘While the poor masses freeze to death outside, the rich let wine and meat putrefy from excess.’ ...

75th book of 2020: Lost in Calculations Read through this in one sitting, which was about as long as I think I would be able to suspend my disbelief. The world itself held promise, like a rotary calculator working through a math problem. Every obvious crack in the worldbuilding is addressed by some expository aside. Yet characters are part of worldbuilding, and that’s where things fell apart. The main character was consistently mean, sarcastic and indefatigable. While this is a bold character choice, it strained credulity. The entire school, and premise of the book, is that everybody is playing Queen’s Gambit worthy mental chess with one-another in order to stay alive. There are themes about inequality, but the plot makes me think it should be a book about trauma. If only 50% of the students survive, there are no teachers in order to serve as emotional role models, it feels like the place would turn into hunger games faster than the hunger games themselves.

72nd book of 2020 - Nice Escape. It’s November 3rd, as the American republic follows perilously close to last days of the Roman republic: a contested election, extreme partisanship, and cries of criminality. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when my candidate didn’t get elected and my girlfriend at the time left without warning. But wait! What is that coming in outside of the object of Jupiter? Surely, just because we can’t explain the strange trajectory or lack of spin that doesn’t mean life… but when the photos come back the evidence is clear. ...