It’s a shame. I really enjoyed Journeys, but my first attempt at novel-length Ian R. MacLeod falls short.

The Light Ages takes place in an alternative England where the ability to manipulate aether has jumpstarted steam engine technology somewhat. Other technologies, like electricity, have fallen by the wayside as too unreliable. The result is a grittier, dirtier, more magical and more chaotic industrialized England.

My problems stem from the writing style. MacLeod doesn’t value the nature of the scene in this book. Narration is interminable, and very little seems to happen—or things happen, but we’re told about them instead of being shown them. Ten chapters and a hundred pages in, and I don’t really have a handle on what the stakes are or why I should care. It’s a drab, dusty, dreary place to live, and I sympathize with Robert a little bit … but why, exactly, is he special? So far MacLeod hasn’t bothered to answer that, or drop more than a few frustratingly dim clues.

I went into this looking for a good ol’fashioned fantasy novel—by which I mean, something that has a little magic, a little conflict, a little fun. There’s plenty of magic in here, but it’s constrained. There’s conflict here, but it’s all in the background, under the surface, and it never boils over to the point of holding my attention. There is no fun to be had here, at least not from what I’ve read so far.

By all means, you might enjoy this book much more than I did—I don’t think it’s bad, but I just don’t want to read it right now.

Ain’t nobody got time for vampire fiction masquerading as high-octane thrillers hidden behind too many characters and subplots.

I must have added The Passage to my to-read list back when it came out and received vaguely positive reviews from some quarters. To be sure, I can see why some people would like this. Justin Cronin writes with that pseudo-noir style that works well for certain types of thrillers: everyone in his books seems like a world-weary figure who is just tired of life chewing them up and spitting them out. But with vampires!

Little of what Cronin offers here is new. Vampirism-as-disease is a tired trope, as is the idea that the United States military (or any military) would be dumb enough to try to study such a dangerous phenomenon for gain. FBI agent haunted by the past? Check. Need to protect an innocent but creepy child? Check.

And maybe if this book were three hundred pages shorter I might be down with it. As it was, less than a hundred pages in, I just did not want to continue reading. When I start making excuses to not read, it’s not because I don’t want to read—it’s because I don’t like the book I’m reading.

For me, the main issue is the sheer density and number of characters with all their backstories and incidental histories. I have an increasingly diminished tolerance for this as I get older. The one possible exception might be The Count of Monte Cristo—but I feel like Dumas justifies that, somewhat, because we need to understand where these characters are coming from in order to understand just how perfectly Dantes gets his revenge. In Cronin’s case, I’m just not interested in every minor character’s origins. So many people, so many names—it’s like an A Song of Ice and Fire novel, except with not as much death. Or dragons. But with vampires!

So here I was, less than one hundred pages in, just getting to the part with the actual “vampires.” I felt like I was an hour into an action movie without anything exploding. And that’s it: that’s my only real complaint, that this book moved too slowly. I’m not sticking it out to find out what happens next, who lives and who dies, and whether the pace picks up. If you do, all the more power to you. The Passage is not bad, not necessarily even poorly written or edited—but it was not satiating my reading appetite, so I’ve set it aside for more palatable fare.

Four years ago, I moved to England to begin my career as a teacher. Fresh out of Lakehead University's Faculty of Education, the dry job market in Ontario left me looking across the Atlantic. Thanks to Engage Education, an agency that specializes in recruiting teachers overseas for the English school system so desperately clamouring for them, I managed to land a classroom right away. When I moved back to Thunder Bay, I got on the supply list for our adult education centre here, which operates a little differently from high schools--and shortly after being hired, I got contract, and then permanent work. So I've only briefly been a substitute teacher, and never for the age groups or types of schools Nicholson Baker encounters in Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids. I was intrigued to see how his experiences tally with my own, and to get a glimpse behind the curtain of the American education system.

NetGalley and [publisher] provided a Kindle proof of Substitute for review, and it was ... well, rough--and I'm not just talking about the formatting of the ARC (which was abominable, but whatevs, I don't knock the free books). From start to finish this book is a shambles of uneven, uninteresting, and underwhelming storytelling.

Am I supposed to know who Nicholson Baker is? Because I don't. I deduced from what he mentions to the people he interacts with in this book that he is a writer, older with children grown, and that he undertook the substitute teacher thing as a project with the intention of turning it into a book all along. All that's to the good (and I have no problem with stunt books)--I just wish Baker took the time to introduce himself directly to us, to give us some context for who he is, and where he's coming from in his life. Instead, all we get is a brief description of what laughably passes for substitute teacher training in Maine, apparently, before Baker dives into recounting each of his twenty-eight supply days.

Allow me a brief aside: America, what is wrong with you? Why can people with no experience in education become substitute teachers simply by taking a night school class for a few weeks?? I knew your education system was underfunded and that teachers themselves receive very little in the way of support or respect, but I didn't realize the situation was so dire that you're basically letting substitute teachers walk in off the street. No wonder things are in the state they're in.

None of this is meant to besmirch Baker or his intentions, though. He's pretty clear that he just wants a better understanding of how schools function in this day and age, and whether they are really serving our kids the way we want them to (spoiler: they aren't). As someone who fights that battle on a daily basis, I really empathize with him and respect him for leveraging a broken system to get that experience. He certainly seems to try to make genuine connections with some of the students he supervises. Unfortunately, the manner in which he relates his substitute experiences to his readers leaves much to be desired.

Each chapter corresponds to one day of substitute teaching and goes like this: first Baker describes the dispatch call and tells us which school he'll be at and what his position will be. Then he shows up at the school, gets his plans and ID badge, etc., and makes his way to the first classroom. He and the students say the Pledge of Allegiance, and then the day commences. For the rest of the chapter, he basically retells every notable conversation he has with students. While these are occasionally interesting or humorous, they gradually start to add up into a block of banal, boring exchanges.

That's something I've always wondered about in non-fiction books and memoirs: how, exactly, do authors remember these conversations so word-perfectly? Baker doesn't mention taking notes, and it doesn't seem like something he'd have much time for. Does he have some weird perfect recall? Or are these conversations fictionalized versions of what he can remember passing throughout the day?

In any case, the first few chapters of this are fine. We get a good sense of what Baker's day as a substitute is like, of the challenges he faces, the rhythm of the school day, etc. Baker holds no illusions about being a good teacher or even substitute teacher; he is admirably self-deprecating and quick to acknowledge mistakes. Occasionally he makes one-off observations, or his tone communicates his frustration with the system and what it does to kids, or he shares advice given to him by other teachers. These moments are few and far between, however, and they are unfortunately the only things that pass for introspection in this book.

Otherwise, Substitute is literally just twenty-eight chapters of Baker telling us, in minute detail, what passed in each of the classrooms he was in. I was not expecting this format. I went into this book hoping for someone to discuss substitute teaching in a holistic way, for them to relate their personal experiences back to what they perceive to be faults (or virtues) of the education system. I was expecting a lot more analysis, a lot more substance. Instead, drawing these conclusions is left as an exercise to the reader. There isn't even any conclusion or afterword where Baker tries to draw it all together: the last chapter simply ends with him mentioning that this was also his last day substitute teaching, and then the book is over. All this leaves me to wonder: so what?

Reading twenty-eight of what verge upon transcripts of days in a classroom is, to put it bluntly, dull. It's doubly dull for me, since, you know, I spend plenty of time in classrooms as it is. Even when Baker is in a staff room or other non-contact area and has conversations with teachers, they are about as mundane and far away from talking about teaching as you can get. I'm not sure what this is meant to do, other than add verisimilitude--is he attempting to show people that teachers are harried, flawed humans just like the rest of us? I don't know. All I know is that by Day 10 or so, I started skimming, then I outright flipped to the end, hoping there would be some kind of format shift into a more reflective mode. And even towards the end, when Baker describes something as interesting as a lockdown practice, he never shifts gears. This is a long, excruciatingly detailed book, and the only verb to describe reading it is to trudge. I trudged through this.

So I can empathize with Baker, and I appreciate the rare moments he seeks to show us how the system seems to be ignoring individual kids in favour of collective results. But there I go again--I'm reading into it, projecting my own hang-ups about education onto the book. I'm not sure a reader with less knowledge of the education system would draw those same conclusions, because there is no real point or thesis in here. It's more of a diary, than anything, and it long overstays its welcome. If Substitute reminds me of anything, it's those long, dull, dry textbooks I'm so happy that we're finally rid of.

There is a school of thought rising in popularity which wants coding to become a mandatory subject in schools. I have some thoughts on this, but that is neither here nor there for this review. Rather, it’s just interesting that for all the talk of teaching kids to code because it will lead to “better jobs”, there isn’t much emphasis on teaching about the way Big Data is redefining our lives. From data mining to algorithms to the much-vaunted buzzword of 2015, the “blockchain” (blech), the explosion of computational capacity in the last two decades is literally changing the world, and we don’t talk enough about it. Oh, you see the headlines, the surface tech news. But unless a Snowden shows up and drops a payload of documents, it doesn’t make much of a ripple. And even these ripples subside.

Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies is a very academic examination of the consequences of our society’s increasing dependence upon and fascination with data collection and analysis. Roberto Simanowski points out the tension inherent in this fascination: more data can help us be more efficient, make societies better—but it comes at the cost of privacy and security, and it is not always a neutral force.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher, Columbia University Press. The book appears to have been previously published in German two years ago but came out last week in this English edition. This would explain why I had a hard time getting through it, I think: the writing definitely sounds like it has been translated into English. Academic texts can be dry enough in one’s native tongue; translated texts can be even harder to grok sometimes.

And to be fair, I think I was anticipating something less academic and more pop culture-y, and that’s on me for not reading the description more carefully to pick out choice words like “philosophical”. So I went into Data Love expecting something on the order of The Numerati and instead got something closer to Reason, Faith, and Revolution (and we all know how that turned out).

Whatever the reasons, however, I’m still not fond of Data Love as an academic text. The organization is a mess. Simanowski jumps from topic to topic seemingly at random; I cannot for the life of me discern any governing thread or theme running through the book or any semblance of purpose to the chapters. This goes beyond being lost in translation (which only explains issues on a sentence/paragraph level) into being lost, period (at a chapter level). I’d finish a chapter, sit back, and go, “Wait, what did I learn from this?” Heaven forfend I ever had to read this as part of a philosophy course! Simanowski knows his stuff, cites people I’ve heard of (like Evgeny Morozov, that delightful Internet curmudgeon). Having gone to set it down on the page, however, he does not successfully organize his thoughts into coherent, easily summarized points.

So I gave up. I’m trying to do that more often these days.

Look, this is not a fatally flawed book. The subject matter is of interest to me, obviously, and I think if one is in the appropriate mood and one’s mind properly girded for an intense, introspective look down the mined rabbit hole of translated philosophy texts, then Data Love could be good. Don’t take my DNF as damning critique, but do take it as a warning that you can’t just jump into this one on a whim and expect to love it.

Sam Sykes drops us off very much in media res in Tome of the Undergates. Often I love that kind of thing—exposition is for chumps! But as with my experience with An Ember in the Ashes, perhaps trying to read this just after Desert Bus for Hope was a bad idea. Or perhaps it was having an antihero as a protagonist.

This reminds me a great deal of Best Served Cold. I can see the appeal of this book; I can see why people would enjoy it. There are definitely elements to it that I enjoyed a great deal. But the way Sykes handles the ensemble cast, combined with not feeling all that invested in this quest that they're on, means that I ultimately didn’t care much for it.

Would I come back to it in the future? Maybe. At this point, though, I want to be reading books I really want to finish, not books I think I should finish.

Probably a mistake to start this just as Desert Bus for Hope started; I should have known I wouldn’t get any reading done last week.

In any event, I couldn’t get into An Ember in the Ashes. I don’t think it’s a bad book, or even badly written (though I’m not sure its style is for me). I just didn’t connect with either of the protagonists, and the characterization is a little too clear-cut for me. All the Proper Nouns and things like the Martial Empire and Scholar Empire leave a dystopian-YA taste in my mouth. If I were in a different mood I might overlook this to find a better book beneath, but I’m at the point in the year and my reading head-space where I’m not going to spend extra time trying to get myself to like a book.

DNFed for me, but don’t let that bother you.

I don’t remember how The Devil You Know ended up on my to-read list, except maybe that a lot of people compare it to The Dresden Files, one of my favourite fantasy series of all time. Yet it’s worth noting that I like The Dresden Files in spite of its noir elements, and I like Harry Dresden in spite of the streak of casual chauvinism that runs through him. The Devil You Know is noir with a patina of paranormal, and Felix Castor is chauvinism on overdrive.

Maybe if I had read this book rather than listened to it I could have toughed it out past the 50% mark, which is where I called it. But my library only had the audiobook version, so needs must. When Felix described the latest femme fatale in the following manner, I nearly vomited:

But it was her smell that was having the strongest effect on me … subtle harmonies of musk and cinnamon and dew-wet summer air overlaid on sweet rose, heavy, seductive lily and undisguised human sweat … the total effect was indescribable, the smell of a woman in heat.

First, the the effect is not “indescribable” when you just literally described it. Second … ew. That’s gross. Like, people smell, sure, and sometimes people augment their smell so they smell differently, I guess, but if someone smells like that then there is a problem and you should run the other way, not have a drink with her.

But then it got worse, because not a minute later, the narrator utters the sentence, “I was disconcerted to find that I had an erection.”



(I so seldom put GIFs in my reviews, but this really calls for it. And I do love Kate Stark.)

SERIOUSLY, I DON’T NEED TO KNOW YOU’VE GOT AN ERECTION BECAUSE A WOMAN SAT NEXT TO YOU, BUDDY. OH MY GOD.

We won’t even get started about the exchange between Felix and a bad guy (?) about how Felix is “an arse man” and how apparently these little details are important things for this dude to know about the people he works with.

Look, the writing here is just crude. And I don’t care if that’s par for the course with this subgenre, nor do I care if you like that kind of thing—I don’t. So I am noping the hell out for more interesting and better pastures. The premise and plot development weren’t particularly compelling anyway. I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

This is somewhat outside my usual reading remit. I actually kind of bought it accidentally. I gave it a try, but honestly this weekend is just kicking my ass, so it’s not the best time to be reading something that doesn’t immediately appeal to me.

DNFing this because if I finish it I’m not going to like it, and that isn’t really the book’s fault. It’s not a bad book, but I’m not in the right mood, either to appreciate its charming points or critique its flaws. Sometimes the best decision is to just set something aside and reach for something I know I’ll enjoy.

Reader, I have done something I didn't think I would ever do. Not only have I had to DNF another book just before the end of the year, but I …

… I skipped to the end!

Yes, I know! Sacrilege! But I could not finish Crosstalk. The constant storm of interruptions from Briddey’s phone and the people in her life was literally causing my introvert brain to feel anxious and stressed. If I have any praise for Connie Willis in this book, it’s only that her writing is good enough to manifest the negative symptoms of over-connection in my own body.

Chocolategoddess’ review captures pretty much all of my thoughts about this book, from the potential to cause anxiety all the way to Briddey’s lack of intelligence or agency, to the problems with all the other characters. She goes into much more detail about this than I’m willing to.

Briddey a bimbo. I don’t use that word lightly. When the story begins, she is head-over-heels for this guy Trent, who is so obviously a basket full of red flags. But no, she—and all the women in her office—think it’s “so romantic” that Trent wants to get an EED with Briddey before he proposes to her so that she can “feel how much” he loves her. I can feel the contempt and sarcasm dripping from every sentence Willis has written; Crosstalk is a deliberate pastiche and send up of romance and also an ersatz romantic comedy (more on that when I discuss the ending). Briddey is supposedly in some kind of executive position at a tech company, yet it’s unclear what she actually does (or how she ever accomplishes any work with everyone interrupting her).

The constant interruptions are supposed to be funny, a social commentary on how we are all too connected these days. I get it. I empathize and sympathize, Willis. Yet exaggerating it to the level of farce creates a new problem, because it undermines Briddey’s credibility as a protagonist. She has boundary issues in the sense that she literally has no boundaries. She lets her family access her apartment any time they want and hasn’t communicated clearly the fact that they can’t constantly be calling her at work. I would get if it’s one problematic family member, but it’s all of them, including the 9-year-old who acts more like a 13-year-old. (Having skipped to the end, I understand there’s a plot justification for Maeve’s precocity, but it is still jarring and she is still a total Mary Sue by the end of the book.)

Carrie at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has another great review that echoes a lot of what I’ve said here as well.

Briddey’s lack of agency bothers me so much because there’s really no point in spending all this time in her head (literally) when she’s just along for the ride instead of coming up with ideas herself. After she has her EED installed, she literally spends the next day or so letting other people make decisions for her. And that’s kind of the point where I stopped reading, because I was just done.

I skipped to the end because, despite my misgivings about the writing, Willis had me wondering what was actually going on. The revelations are both more and less interesting than I was hoping. This could have been a much better book had Willis taken things in a different direction. (I’m reminded a bit of Slan.)

Read the two reviews I linked. Don’t read this book if you might feel at all overwhelmed by constantly having the narrative interrupted. I’m not joking: near the end of the book Briddey is trying to have a conversation with another character and Maeve butts in every two lines of dialogue.

To echo another reviewer: “Even though I did not finish it I know I did not like it so - 1 star.”