This was surprisingly… well, not “fun”, as it’s kind of heavy and involves loss of agency and misogyny and death—but certainly engaging and interesting in its framing in the interrogation of those issues.

Basically, our protagonist here has pioneered the creation of clones, who are both more advanced than you typically see, so maybe reflective of what we now know of the possibilities regarding gene therapy and science behind stuff? No idea, I am not up on these technologies. Regardless, she has chosen work over her husband, who is an asshole, but their relationship is expounded on and is far more complex than is initially divulged to the reader.

Because, as she discovers her now estranged husband has a clone of her, and is now planning to marry her, things go sideways in her life rather quickly, spiralling her into memories of her life with him. This creates the duel narrative. The unfolding present day thriller spiral, and the reflections on her life she hasn’t really allowed herself to dwell on, which characterizes her and her husband and grants much more context to the fallout of the relationship.

While murder and betrayal ensue, we discover the psychology behind the choices being made in the present, all while a foil of herself is present, forcing her to constantly regard herself as though looking in a mirror; noticing the unnoticeable.

Very consumable and fast-paced. I found it clever in it making a pretty straight forward thriller much more compelling and nuanced, while making it all but impossible to make the reader reflect on systemic issues themselves and the hypocrisy of workplace dynamics and gender dynamics. I was pleasantly surprised with this one.

Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan of the (fictional) Dublin police force—as noted afterward, there is no such thing—catch a particularly grizzly case that harkens back to Ryan’s hometown, and a past he’s not nearly thought of or reckoned with. If any duo, far more close than most detective pairs tend to be, can pull it off, though, you’d think it’d be these two.

In fact, the book starts out essentially building the B plot, that of the complicated relationship between the two that is built on a framework neither of them is aware of. More like old patterns overlaying their behaviours, rather than a conscious decision to build a friend and partnership on. By the time the A plot starts we are absolutely saturated with character knowledge and the framing of first person narration of Ryan telegraphs that this is no simple case or relationship. He tells us he’s a liar and far from objective in this case. And that’s all true. Nor is Cassie, for her part in this positively gutting story.

It’s these kinds of books that are why women can write men and it’s so often the case that men do not write convincing women. As much as it’s about the case itself. Who did it and why. How maddening it is to work a case of child murder. It’s also absolutely about the unconscious and savage patterns were undertake in our lives every day. And how, when trauma is involved, there is absolutely a cyclical and vicious framework applied to the generally the most victimized and, for lack of a better word, broken people.

Never have I read a book that provides such vital understand and comprehension of a protagonist. Ryan is traumatized and self destructive in a noir way, but French refuses to characterize him as a loveable or heroic like that framework often does. Indeed, from the horses mouth we see and learn just how messed up Ryan is. And although he and Cassie are the people to dig into the case—we also clearly see the web of trauma and pain correlating to our main characters as well as the victim.

There is no simple, easy solution. I absolutely think this book is interrogating the fact that many traumatized people enter a cycle of pain that the Justice system simply is not built to resolve. This endless meatgrinder just continues to allow for victims to have no restorative process, becoming debilitated in numerous ways.

Unwilling to glamorize the casual pain people inflict on each other, no matter how close they are, this book is gruelling. I think it was Gaiman said a good book has every character get what they need. Not what they want. In this case the stark light feels, to me, like a few hard truths French planted with a stern flag. We can acknowledge our fascination with the darkness of humankind and with death and murder.

But we also too often skate accountability in our own thoughts and actions; unwilling to interrogate our own pain, and so we too become just another person who disintegrates relationships or replicates toxic behaviours and patterns simply because we can. Perhaps we don’t ever find another way without help. There are conversations in here that feel so intimate and relatable. Where the secret parts of yourself are put in display as you tell another person about them and it feels like you’re loading a gun with each word, handing it to them, and hoping to god that in the future, come some argument or change in power dynamics, they don’t shoot you dead.

There is far more, somehow, at stake in this story than finding the killer of a young girl. Everyone feels at a crossroads or on trial. Death hangs in the air. Even if it’s emotional stakes. Like I said, the book _starts_ with a detailed accounting of Cassie and Ryan as people and partners trying to just be people despite their past. And if you care about that then there is always a lot more at stake than a killer.

Absolutely incredible debut. My only qualm is the prose being uneven. However the themes feel incredibly well realized and meaningful. This book had a real impact on me. Mostly because I read something like Bewilderment and I don’t see reality. I see the Disney channel. When I read about people just trying to be okay for most of the day, and being caught up in destructive patterns, I see reality. I see the human condition. That’s the fine line these kinds of books walk. And this one does it with absolute grace.

Exquisite description in the very smallest of moments that add up to the totality of a nuanced, queer experience. I am not completely sold on the structure here, but the content is incredible and affecting. Highly recommend it.

A short and taught little book about a housewife who buries her feral side to allow her role as mother and wife to subsume her and be the sole source of her happiness. When husband invariably goes astray in their contract, her pain unearths trauma long buried, as she becomes more and more unhinged.

Gorgeous prose. Love these stories, where women maneuver to a place where they don’t allow societal norms and socialization to dictate every aspect of their identity. Some people didn’t like the ending, but I felt the shift was more clear than most imply. And completely against what some of the lower ratings seem to have inferred. It is subjective, to a point. It’s interesting that I didn’t extrapolate the ending some have. Makes me like it more, to be honest. Great edition to the unhinged women canon.

This book feels meandering at first, but it quickly becomes deceptively layered and intersectional—often in surprising ways. It touches on disproportionate victimization of marginalized people on issues people ought to have heard of, such as representation in incarceration versus population and common misconceptions, micro aggressions and outright racism; as well as other systemic issues, such as the mass, violent Displacement of indigenous people resulting in generations of indigenous people disconnected from their people and land because of “reeducation” and entering foster systems.

Tookie works at a bookstore after serving a long sentence. She has a relationship with the tribal officer who arrested her. She consumes indigenous stories through the lens of colonial authors because own voice authors are few and far between. The most frequent customer at the shop comes to represent a lot of complex issues with regards to displacement and identity with indigenous peoples, and when she dies, actually becomes a ghost that replicates colonial behaviour at a personal level on Tookie.

In some ways the story is very strange. It’s very concerned with a lot of particular books, generally well regarded novels in western lit. The plot doesn’t really drop a hook until just short of Halfway into the book. It establishes a lot about Tookie and intersectional identity in all the characters up to that point and it does, I think, manage to weave it altogether.

For a story about being haunted and dogged by generational issues that continue to intrude into the present, it initially feels like it has little stakes, but the pay off is quite good if you can latch onto and enjoy the overall voice and odd sort of curiosity it cultivates. I liked that it dodged western perspectives in its structure and the main narrative tension, and I simply haven’t seen these themes interrogated quite like this, so I quite liked it. It’s my first book by Erdrich and it made me excited to read more from her.

“It would be fair to say I fucked myself.”

This year I’ve read more celebrity memoirs than I have ever in my dang life. I picked this one up because I remember seeing a tweet by Sharon Stone where she was pretty much just begging people to realize that Covid was not hypothetical bullshit and she’s putting people in the ground because of it. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I remember it was desperate and full of rage. My library recommended this to me and I instantly recalled that tweet.

It opens with Stone talking about her having a stroke and what it was like to bleed into your brain and your face. Then have a doctor advocate for an extremely dangerous procedure that would probably kill you, had not a nurse speak up with an alternative, allowing her to fire her doctor and buy time enough to figure out what was happening. It turns out she needed to have some kind of spinal surgery, relearn how to walk, and get back the use of her short term memory. They found that out eventually because she begged her best friend, telling her that she felt like she was dying, to convince them to take another shot at a diagnosis by using a microscopic camera that was moved up to her brain stem, which was disintegrating, or something?

That’s how this thing starts, okay.

It ends with Sharon Stone, for maybe the fourth time, reiterating how much victims of sexual assault and abuse need solidarity and compassion and help and closes it out with hot line numbers.

In between she talks about things like being told she wasn’t fuckable enough at 34 to make it in the business 6 months before she started in Basic Instinct. Or how her producer told her on another set to fuck her co-star because then they’d have good on screen chemistry. She told him, and others, that if fucking a shitty actor to make him an _okay_ one, she suggested they all go fuck him themselves and leave her out of it.

That’s around the time she says it would be fair to say she fucked herself. She reported people who harassed her and others, reported people who showed up drunk or high or ill prepared, and when she was asked to do things she didn’t want to do, she said ‘no’.

That doesn’t even go into her personal loss and abuse. It’s a pretty heavy book. I wasn’t expecting it, to be honest. She laughs at herself as well, it’s not all tears. Saying she repeatedly has put her foot in her mouth but continues to grow and learn.

I think, because I listened to it on audio, this hit in unexpected ways. Usually memoirs like this are read sort-of without emotion, or by someone else, and it almost always is worse than just reading the book. However, Stone narrates this incredibly well. She doesn’t try to control her voice. You can tell she is about to lose it as her voice warbles or pauses. Turns out she can deliver lines extremely well. Who knew?

A retired cop moved to a small town in Ireland. Of course, he’s not really processed anything about his previous life and rather than deal with his baggage he figures he better just start over elsewhere. New house, new person, right? When a problem is unearthed, he finds himself slipping into old patterns. Constantly finding himself unable but to insert himself into a situation he doesn’t completely understand.

Again, French produces something like contemporary upmarket fiction. It’s liminal and striking. She has her own pacing and fairly subversive themes. Usually critical of archetypes, like here. The foundation is put down so intentionally and methodically you can’t help but see the craftsmanship. And where other books like it couldn’t pull it off, every one of French’s books seem to hit some kind of sweet spot for me. It doesn’t feel literary. It’s got to be that weird upmarket thing you hear about. Right?

I just love how astute her fiction is regarding various forms of character people have. It’s articulated in a nuanced, often multi-faceted way. It’s prism fiction. Character driven. Adjacent to crime and mystery. Turning a flaw into the beating heart of the story. It’s competent, well executed, well delivered, and entirely it’s own thing, to my my mind.

I think it might be like paying for those question mark gift bags, except it always delivers. You have some expectations based on genre conventions and maybe having read her other works. But ultimately, you’re not getting that. But you like whatever the heck it is you took out the grab bag.

Hell of a Book is a weird book, let’s get that out of the way. And I’ll say this: I like weird books. This is a book about an author who wrote Hell of a Book with a “disorder” (something Malka Older would term a narrative disorder, btw) where by reality is a liminal space. He’s not entirely sure what is “real” and what isn’t. And he’s old enough to know that when you have that problem and live with it long enough, well it’s more important how you react to, and discern, things that may be entirely imaginary. If they are… imaginary.

One such ostensible entity is the seemingly simulacrum of the authors childhood. Or is it a generalization of every black man’s childhood? The talk where they have to educate their own child in racism. In cooperating with the police and diminishing themselves in favour of white peoples’ comfort. Passing, essentially. Only the darker the skin the more difficult that is to do, and the entity the author (who has no name in the book) perceives is described as being as black as possibly, basically; therefor unable to navigate society with ease at all. And as we learn throughout the book, the chapters alternate between the author and A boy’s life story, possibly the boy the author sees, possibly not—we don’t know—there is some responsibility to be negotiated regarding the well being of black people.

The author may externalize this responsibility, literalizing it as the child. Interacting with the concept as a person, as he struggles to figure out what kind of author, and person, he wants to be. What should be codified in the text? What will the next book be? What are the pros and cons of racializing himself on the page? There’s a lot of very complex questions posed. Some have answers. Some are there to be posed to the author to be posed to the reader, I’d argue. And some of those do feel a bit perfunctory. They’re discarded in favour of new ideas or notions, often times waiting to be picked up again and naturally tied into the ongoing themes and core concept, but never are.

However, what this book attempts to communicate overall is accomplished. The writing is very engaging. It’s sometimes funny, other times incredible somber and dark. It will, at the very least, I can say with confidence, make you think about a number of issues and the author (-function) and the role of the author in present day. With parasocial relationships and media and the ability for fans to simply be able to communicate with you directly, in any number of ways. I think it actually is a hell of a book.

2.5 rounded up

This is about primarily about Erasmus, a monastic monk in a futuristic, Roman Empire allegory society where science is so feared and anti-intellectualism gained such traction, that these monks were contained in monasteries called Concents. Depending on the type of science they do, they are sorted into different orders, all of which only open up to the outside world every so often. From every year to ten years to one hundred years to one thousand years (if I recall correctly). Thus sort of siloing each cluster to not be able to do much “damage”, a rejection to when a more than even a nuclear bomb was invented.

When a small group of contrarians spot a UFO on the sky and try to figure out what the heck is going on, the plot spins off from there. Of course, that particular inciting incident for the plot to begin is about 150 pages into this 968 page book. So we spend most of our time familiarizing ourselves with the world and the characters up to that point.

Perhaps it’s to be expected that this book is one of a couple interesting ideas that uses paper thin plot and characters to convey the ideas and explore them (somewhat). After all, I did subject myself to Snow Crash and The Diamond Age previously and those are very much like this, in that respect. But I was told this was much more intelligent and more interesting.

The ideas are actually much better articulated and somewhat less trite, but it by no means uses the form of the novel as a an exceptional vehicle for the ideas being explored. At a thousand pages and heralded as an “idea” focused book, you then also have to compare the form chosen to other ways to examining and articulating the ideas. The whole point of this form is to engage with the format.

But reviews about what the book is about and the ideas contained in them are better and more entertaining than the book itself because the plot takes a backdrop, we spend all our time with characters that are poorly drawn and almost to the point of YA mouth breathers in their diction and intelligence when discussing anything. The ideas they discuss don’t fit well in their mouths because for most of the time they’re talking about inane love lives, a B plot that is laughably bad. And once again Stephenson shows he simply cannot write convincing women and they almost always are relegated to plot devices. A bit of trolling about rape culture in this one but not an actual rape as a plot device, so maybe a modicum better than the two previous, at least.

So who is this for? If you aren’t aware of platonic realism and nominalism, and you like the concept of monastics being scientific based, world building that is occupied with trolling anti intellectualism and being satirically sometimes clever-sometimes, I would say, eye roll worthy bad, and you simply don’t care about plot and characters (much like the old tradition of sci-fi, I’d say), then this book is probably for you. There are meaty chunks of explanation—generally through dialogue and exposition—regarding physics and math and philosophy that I think are pretty easy to grasp, which is to be commended. There’s visual aids sometimes that are fun. It can be quite engaging.

But it is also not a fun reading experience nor a good use of the novel format, especially at nearly one thousand pages, to justify my recommending it to absolutely anybody. If you are adamant against doing reading on these concepts in any other way and must have it through your fiction, and you somehow don’t care about the vehicle and manner of its conveyance otherwise, I guess it’s for you. As someone who does not like comedy, and thinks it’s almost always not pulled off well and generally undermines the actual subjects under discussion, much of this doesn’t work for me.

It’s YA contemporary in its language and diction, tropes, characterization, humour, and sentence/paragraph structure. The characters match that, with their archaic gender performance and social interactions and drama. It is completely grating at times. The voice is not well crafted.

However. Technically a story was told and the ideas conveyed. And, as mentioned, the interrogation of these concepts does feel pretty novel to me. It’s the best novel of his I’ve consumed. 3 stars.

Vulnerable and, of course, poetic. I found this to be a really compelling read, especially when narrated. There is a frank mode of explanation that speaks of lived experience growing up as a gay indigenous man in Canada, and how our society and culture directly affect him on a day-to-day basis.

Topics range, and don’t feel like they have too much of a through line. The structure is probably the weakest link here, for me. But quite a few of these struck home and were quite moving. It’s well written, though uneven at times. I found it to be quite solid and comparable to other collections, where perhaps not everything discussed will be of interest or correlate to what was said previously, but I imagine there is something here for anybody to relate to.

I think it might be a mixed bag for people in so far as how often he brings up other authors and their work, and how he relates to the work. He’s fairly alright at giving summaries of things discussed, but it’s obviously difficult and abstract if you haven’t read them yourself. I generally don’t like this kind of short hand… but neither is it un substantive. Fortunately I had read some of the references and in some cases it made me think a bit differently about them.

Plenty here to recommend. For some reason I thought this was a poetry collection and so I’d been putting it off. Must have conflated it with something else. Well worth a read.