I’d like to crack a joke like, “I love this title because it’s basically my life” except that would be a lie, because I’m actually killing it at adulting this year … not that I want to be. Sometimes just have to. Still, Bad at Adulting, Good at Feminism really does have an excellent title. Prudence Geerts has produced a cornucopia of tiny comics that illustrate, reflect upon, and poke fun at her own experiences, the way she sees the world, and the way the world might see her. As the title implies, she is, of course, discussing that millennial experience of growing up as the web came of age, of transitioning into adulthood in the age of social media, and, in her case, of being a woman all at the same time. There is a lot in here that I think would resonate with many readers, particularly people in that millennial bracket—but these experiences are by no means unique to that generation.

Geerts’ cartoon style is interesting. Her comics usually feature a version of herself, with occasional guest characters (mostly her cat). They present a story in a minimum of words and an economy of visuals. The most predominant comic form is that of a side-by-side of two situations, either two of Geerts, or Geerts and someone else (often a hyper-idealized stereotypical woman), to depict the “expectation” versus the “reality” of a situation. These ones in particular are always clever, and even when they don’t apply to me, I can still sympathize with and understand the point Geerts makes with each one.

Small content note/trigger warning for aromisic language: the section titled “Love Letters” begins with the phrase, “We all fall in love at least once in our lives…”, and the section is quite obviously about the ups and downs of romantic love. These kinds of blanket statements are dehumanizing for aromantic people; not everyone falls “in love” in the sense almost always meant by that phrase. One could simply change it to, “Many of us fall in love at least once in our lives…” and suddenly it isn’t a universal that excludes/erases aro people.

There may be other problematic aspects to these comics, but most of them are about experiences quite different from my own, so it isn’t really my lane to comment on that. I have some thoughts about the “feminism” portion of the adulting/feminist content … suffice it to say, I just think that I’m in a somewhat different place right now in terms of the type of feminist reading I’m looking for. But I really don’t want to invalidate the work that Geerts has put into these comics, because they do embody feminist ideas and messages, and for some people they might land.

Also, this is not the type of book I really enjoy reading. Novels are, of course, my primary jam. When I read comics, I tend to gravitate towards graphic novels. Collections of comics don’t do as well with me. If I had read some of Geerts’ comics individually somewhere, I would definitely be entertained, just as I am with xkcd, or The Oatmeal, etc., even though I’m not a huge fan of collection books in general. My friend Rebecca, who lent me this book, absolutely loved it. And I can see why she did! There are delightful things about it. She also pointed out to me that it wasn’t really meant to be read cover-from-cover, as I did, but rather dipped into and sipped at, and that’s a valid point.

And this raises an interesting philosophical issue of literary criticism. When a reader doesn’t consume a book in the way it was intended to be consumed, is that on them? If I attend an arthouse drama and then complain there weren’t enough explosions, aren’t I being a dick for not tempering my expectations to the form? So can I really even properly rate a book if I think I haven’t experienced it in a way that does it justice? Aren’t I being a grumpy curmudgeon?

I mean, you can see that I’ve obviously rated this book. But this is all just a long-winded disclaimer to remind you I’m just here to record my thoughts, and this review is probably not the one you want to be reading if you’re trying to decide whether or not to read this book. Unless you are me, in which case … you’ve already read this book, Ben. Get with the program.

Anyway, I liked many of these comics individually. I like the idea behind the collection, even if the execution isn’t everything I wanted. I definitely think that a lot of people could pick up this collection and enjoy it—for me, personally, Bad at Adulting, Good at Feminism has its moments but overall didn’t leave me wanting more.

A long time ago I read The Dervish House and commented that it hacked my brain, and that’s what I feel like Hannu Rajaniemi is trying to do with The Quantum Thief. This is posthumanist SF that reimagines the limitations and extent of a human’s personal narrative in a very extreme, mind-bending way. I don’t entirely understand what’s happening here, and that is kind of the point. Rajaniemi walks an extremely fine line between avoiding infodumps and exposition and entirely losing the reader—but it’s a line he walks well, and if you don’t mind that sort of thing, then this book is very enjoyable.

The story begins with a prison break and ends with a nearly apocalyptic scenario on Mars. Jean le Flambeur is/was a renowned, brilliant thief. He is trapped in a “Dilemma Prison”, a posthuman scenario where one literally acts out the Prisoner’s Dilemma all day, every day, earning points to avoid total, permanent oblivion. Mieli breaks Jean out of this prison so he can do a job for her—but first they need to retrieve some of his identity, which he left behind in memories on the Oubliette, a society in Mars that is ultra concerned about privacy and memory. There, Jean and Mieli get embroiled in local politics, discovering that Jean has a much more intimate connection to the history of the Oubliette than he’d like to admit.

The core of The Quantum Thief, as with a lot of great science fiction, is a question of identity. What makes you, you? Is it your body? Because this is a world where your body is mutable and in flux. Mieli’s body is enhanced from “baseline” with tech from the Sobornost, one of the many posthuman factions descended from baseline humanity. She constructs a similar body for the Jean she breaks out of prison—one that she ultimately has “root access” over. This is a world where nanotech has become q-tech—technology on the quantum level, “q dot” atoms that one can manipulate with the mind. And those human minds run as software on wetware platforms, able to become enhanced (computationally or physically) on demand. I haven’t even touched on the zoku or the citizens of the Oubliette yet!

Don’t worry about feeling overwhelmed, though. You will be way past overwhelmed. In some ways I’m reminded of William Gibson’s approach to cyberpunk stories: just toss the reader in the deep end, and let them figure out all these new terms. Whether it’s jacking and cyberspace or gevulot and spime, SF is replete with a plethora of new vocabulary. It isn’t what one invents that’s important: it’s how one uses it. Rajaniemi deploys this vocabulary expertly to make one feel like the alien visitor to this place. It reminds me a little of how Ursula K. Le Guin uses words, particularly in her Hainish stories, although Rajaniemi has obviously amped it up to a level that is, perhaps, unsustainable depending on your point of view.

Honestly, the actual plot of The Quantum Thief is so-so. It was hard for me to care all that much about Jean’s personal quest to recover his lost self, because I didn’t know that lost self, nor do we spend much time getting to know this Jean before he gets involved in these quagmire of quantum identities. Similarly, Mieli is mostly a cipher. We’re given to understand she has bargained with an entity farther up the posthuman chain of being, whom we only know for most of the book as “the pellegrini”, and that she hopes to be reunited with a lover one day. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Rajaniemi’s distaste for exposition extends to both personal and social backstories, and that makes for a slightly less rich reading experience. I don’t necessarily expect a far-future SF author to explain how their tech works—that’s just asking for disappointing technobabble. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for learning more about the history of a society and how it came to be.

The Quantum Thief is a gorgeous tapestry of science fictional literature. It’s the kind of thing you have to want to revel in and work at—but it doesn’t act all stuffy and stuck up and pretend to be better than other books for all of that. It is, at its heart, a story of detectives and criminals and rebels and thieves; it is pulp wrapped in words and philosophy, kind of making it the best of both worlds. Yes, a great deal of it will be incomprehensible, at least for a while. If that isn’t your cup of tea, you should probably just avoid this book—if you read the first chapter, or even the first page, and feel lost, it won’t get that much better. And that’s OK. If you are all right with skimming along the surface of this pond, plunging only occasionally into its depths and then coming back up for air, then you are in for a treat.

Mmm mmm mmm, yes indeed. I like superhero novels, but they don’t always work for me, and often I find myself more disappointed and critical of them than I want to be considering how avidly I seek them out. I was nervous starting After the Golden Age finally after having it on my to-read list for years. What if I didn’t like it? Should I even bother? I’m glad I did, though, because I thoroughly enjoyed this. Carrie Vaughn’s treatment of this world with superpowered people is sympathetic, compassionate, and human, and I loved almost all of it.

Celia West is the daughter of the city’s two most powerful superheroes, yet she lacks powers herself (TVTropes!). After spending much of her teens being kidnapped by would-be supervillains following the outing of her parents’ identities, Celia has managed to carve out a mostly-normal life for herself as an accountant. That is, until she gets kidnapped again, and when her parents’ arch-nemesis is on trial (for tax evasion of all things), Celia finds herself at the centre of a bizarre and convoluted series of events that threaten the city as well as her own, fragile family bonds. She takes it upon herself to dig deeper into the city’s past and the origins of her family and the other heroes here. But what she finds is going to upset a lot more people….

I was a little worried that this book would be boring and that the protagonist would lack depth, that she would be this one-dimensional character mired in self-pity for lacking the superpowers that her parents have. Or worse, that Vaughn would somehow have her acquire powers halfway through the novel, and that her arc would simply equate redemption with being able to kick ass faster than a speeding bullet. Fortunately, there is a lot more depth here. Celia’s skills are the ones she learned, from life or school or other people, and as a result of being estranged from her parents, she is a very independent person.

For a novel about superheroes, there is actually relatively little superpowered action here. We only ever vaguely learn about Captain Olympus’ and Spark’s superpowers and abilities, and we only see them in action a handful of times. The same can be said for the “B-list” superheroes in town. In fact, I might go so far as to say that this book isn’t about superheroes so much as Vaughn uses the setting and tropes of a superhero world to tell a story about family, and perhaps that is why it is so successful. Sure, Vaughn could tell a story about a dysfunctional father–daughter relationship in a world much more similar to our own—but would I have been as interested? Probably not. The superhero thing is an admirable gimmick to get me to keep reading.

After the Golden Age reminds me a lot of Mystery Men. It’s not quite as gonzo as the latter is, for that movie is definitely lampooning superhero movies even as it explores deeper issues with them. But there is a similar sensation of uncanniness, of a world similar to ours yet also so different because it has superheroes in it, that Vaughn captures here. In particular, I really like the way Celia struggles after the dark secret in her past is outed. It sucks and is unfair, the way she’s treated, and in some cases I think Vaughn has people turn on her a little too easily or dramatically. Still, it allows her to probe the delicate question of how we forgive people and move on from mistakes people made when they were much younger. As Celia herself points out, she has become a very different person from who she was when she was 17. Does that matter?

There are two things that don’t work for me in this story. One made me uncomfortable; the other just feels contrived.

Celia and Arthur’s romance made me uncomfortable. Firstly, as her parents observe, he has known her since she was a child. That’s a little creepy. But maybe I could get over that, since they are both consenting adults, except he does have that whole mind-reading/influencing thing going on. And that seems to create a kind of unfair power dynamic. I understand that we’re supposed to feel sympathy for him, especially given the way Celia discovers he hasn’t really been coping all that well with being alone, but I’d still be wary.

The way that the mayor turns out to be the villain and the coincidental grandson of the Destructor? I wouldn’t call it “far-fetched” because this is a book about superheroes, but it just feels like Vaughn is tying everything together a little too neatly. I’m not sure how much this really added to the story.

In the end, these are minor complaints. After the Golden Age is a lot of fun but also quite serious—I was tearing up at the end, although I think partly that was just because I was feeling more emotional that day. This is definitely up there with the other superhero novels I’ve enjoyed, so if like me you want more superhero fiction but have been burned by some bad stuff before, you should give this a try.

Imagine you live in a world where a significant percentage of the population has a simple but necessary job: they sit in a booth, and every so often, a light comes on, and when it does, they push a button in front of them, and the light goes out. As long as they do that, all day every day, we have electricity and fuel and plastics and all these conveniences we rely on in our modern age. Except there’s a catch (there always is): one day, perhaps quite by accident, we discover that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—when one pushes the button, a person in another country dies. At first this just seems like gross coincidence—there couldn’t possibly be a connection, people die all the time, how could the buttons be killing people? But 99% of scientists eventually agree, based on extensive evidence and modelling, that there is a link. And so many people begin to suggest, tentatively at first and then with increasing agitation, that we move away from the buttons, that we explore alternatives. The politicians deny, then resist, then most of them start to agree—in principle, at least. But they shrug and hem and haw and say things about “the economy” and “jobs” and “sensible transition timelines” and meanwhile we go on still pressing the button and killing people because jobs.

If this metaphor has been too subtle for you, perhaps you need to read The World According to Anna, which is incredibly unsubtle in its portrayal of the consequences and costs of ignoring climate change yet harrowing and effective nonetheless. I’ve read a few novels that imagine the terrible consequences of our anthropogenic future—Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife comes to mind—and often they imagine post-apocalyptic scenarios. And fair enough. What strikes me as interesting about Jostein Gaarder’s approach is how he portrays a future every bit as quotidian and stable as ours (at least in Norway), just different (and certainly rueful).

Anna is on the verge of turning sixteen, and she has a lot on her mind. She has just inherited her aunt’s ruby ring. She has a brand new boyfriend, Jonas. And her vivid imagination has her dreaming that she is other people—most notably, her great-granddaughter, Nova, who lives in a world ravaged by climate change. This weighs so heavily on Anna in the present that she determines she must do something to change this future; she must give the future generations one more chance. And so she and Jonas discuss how best to do this, while she continues to experience episodes from Nova’s perspective, and worry about the kidnapped daughter of a psychiatrist she met once in Oslo and liked because he talked to her like she was an adult.

Look, if you came here expecting a riveting plot or character development … you are going to be severely disappointed. This reads more like a novella than a novel, and most of the characters, save maybe Anna, are one- or two-dimensional stock characters who are there to help hold up a mirror to Anna’s thoughts. The plot itself is very much on rails and isn’t so much about what Anna does or doesn’t do as it is about how her state of mind changes from beginning to end of the book, about grappling with and wrapping her head around the incredibly large and serious problem of climate change.

Normally I’m all about story, and I’m the first person to criticize a book for sacrificing story at the altar of polemicism. So maybe I’m a hypocrite … but I really liked The World According to Anna. I think it’s the earnestness with which Gaarder portrays his agenda, the seriousness he assigns to young Anna. This isn’t supposed to be a rah-rah inspirational piece about a girl who suddenly stands up for climate change and “makes a difference”. It’s a message to us, a reminder that this is not an issue we can dodge. Though this book has a young adult protagonist, I wouldn’t say it is a young adult book, necessarily: adults can and should read this too, if only to be jolted from our tacit complacency when it comes to climate change.

The book starts off fairly basic, broaching the subject with the standard warnings about how climate change leads to habitat loss, extinction, refugees, etc. This is hopefully not news to most of us, even if our opinions on the severity of the phenomenon and what we should do about it vary. And if Gaarder had stayed on this level, I definitely would be more critical of the book. Instead, he goes deeper. He doesn’t just lament the lack of political will to do something (such as failing to meet emissions targets)—he laments the fact that we seem to have made our peace, as a species, with our failure to do something:

We are a selfish generation. We are a brutish generation. There is little understanding of the idea that the generations after us may need some of this energy. A word we rarely use is “save”. But words like “eco-conscious” and “carbon-neutral” appear more and more in newspapers. We have developed a language, almost a nonsense-language, which has nothing to do with reality.

Uggggh I so identify with this. Look, I live in Canada, not the United States. Most of our country, and at least the current federal government, acknowledge that climate change is anthropogenic and a serious problem (or they say they acknowledge it). Even though we’ve moved past that denial stage, though, we’ve yet to really do much about it. And often anything that is proposed gets couched in that language—carbon-neutral in particular rings so many bells. Especially here in Canada, where, yes, a significant portion of our economy is driven by resource extraction, including bitumen extraction from the Alberta oil sands: as much as our government makes noise about climate change and energy innovation, time and again it supports oil sands development, to the extent that it literally bought a pipeline to make sure the pipeline would be built. And when people protest and call the government on this hypocrisy, the politicians shrug and remind us that as much as they like the environment, this is first and foremost about jobs and the economy—because they know that “jobs” are what get them elected.

But there has to come a point where we ask what moral price we are willing to pay to guarantee “jobs” for people in our country. The button analogy might seem simplistic, but that’s basically the effect of the fossil fuel industry, albeit on a more attenuated, less one-to-one scale: the actions we take to extract and then export or consume oil and gas here in Canada have a tremendous effect on a global scale, up to and including endangering the lives of other humans (not to mention the mass extinction that Gaarder harps upon in this book). So far we seem OK with these negative consequences because they are indirect enough and far enough away that we can ignore them long enough to sleep soundly at night. They aren’t “in our face” yet.

Gaarder is quite critical of the way politicians spin this to be about jobs and economics:

The world needs more oil and gas to lift more people out of poverty, they say. But they’re lying. They know they’re not driven by the interests of the poor. They know better than anyone that the rich countries’ consumption of yet more oil and gas will only make matters worse for the very poorest. It is the oil companies and the richest oil-producing nations who want more profit.

Nailed. It. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in the aftermath of the ridiculous straw ban debacle, and this is why my environmentalism, like my feminism, must be intersectional and anti-capitalist.

So much of the rhetoric around climate change today is predicated upon our obsession with individualism and individual action. You need to do your part: use less, consume less, buy less, waste less, recycle more, shop more responsibility, etc. Company not environmentally-friendly enough for your liking? Don’t buy from them! It doesn’t matter if they’re the only game in town (or the only viable option sometimes, cough, Amazon, cough)—you have a duty to use your wallet to vote! If you use a straw, you are morally responsible for the death of every single dolphin. Ever.

Individuals definitely have a role to play in reducing carbon emissions. I use LED bulbs and turn the lights off when I’m not in the room. I try to drive less and cycle or walk more. I hang my clothing to dry, weather permitting and provided, you know, a tree hasn’t fallen and knocked over the clothesline pole (sigh). I’m not trying to say that we are all, individually, off the hook. We should try to reduce our individual footprints, consume less, recycle more, avoid extraneous plastic, etc. That’s a laudable goal.

But it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. Individual action alone cannot stop, reduce, or ameliorate the effects of climate change. Because the biggest polluters, the biggest consumers, the most egregious offenders, are the corporations that profit from carbon emissions and the governments that enable this behaviour. And I’m very happy that The World According to Anna goes there, that Gaarder actually makes this case, rather than simply charging his readers to be more eco-conscious or environmentally responsible on their own recognizance. We need to shift the paradigm from “save the whales” to “burn down this capitalist system and build a more compassionate one in its place” (less catchy, I know, but I bet we can fit it on a T-shirt if we write it in Comic Sans!).

There is one more quotation I need to draw your attention to, because when I read it, I literally said, “Whoa.” It crystallizes Gaarder’s thesis, and indeed, is probably the most direct address from the author to the audience:

We’re young. We have to testify that the climate crisis is not a conflict between nations. There’s only one atmosphere and no national borders are visible from space. This is a conflict between generations, and the victims are young people today.

Let’s unpack this, because there is a lot gong on in these four sentences, and I love all of it. First, I love the phrase “climate crisis”. Can we use that instead of the weak-sauce–sounding “climate change” from now on? Because we are in crisis. Second, although the whole “no national borders are visible from space” chestnut is about as old as the Apollo program, it is still true and obviously needs repeating, since many people still don’t seem to get it (what is the point of America being “great again”, lol, if the rest of the world is on fire?). Third, the idea that this is a conflict between one generation and the next might seem obvious once you hear it articulated in that way, but it is still a potent statement. And that’s why I disagree with people who might pan this book for lacking direct conflict: the whole point here is that the conflict is between Anna’s generation and Nova’s rather than with anyone in Anna’s life directly.

I really like the way Gaarder frames this. So many stories about climate change frame it as human-vs-nature conflict: we have to survive these extreme weather events; we have to rebuild after some kind of climate-related disaster. That might make for an entertaining blockbuster movie, but it disguises the fact that climate crisis is not human-vs-nature. The Earth is not and has never been “in conflict” with us as a species; it is simply doing what it does best: adjust until it returns to equilibrium. We have upset that equilibrium, and while it is unfortunately too late to return to how things were, we could at least reduce how far the pendulum needs to swing. If we don’t, we suffer and the next generation suffers even more.

Gaarder doesn’t ignore the fact that climate crisis has negative consequences today, either, as demonstrated by the subplot involving Ester Antonsen’s kidnapping. I recently finished In Search of a Better World, last year’s Massey Lectures, which is all about how we need to do better at acting on our convictions about human rights the world over. So maybe this is just more on my mind lately, but it occurs to me that climate crisis is a human rights issue. So many people are affected by the loss of habitat and environment—and more broadly, the next generations have a right to inherit a planet that is as diverse and beautiful as it is now, not less.

Sophie’s World is one of my favourite books of all time. This is not Sophie’s World and nowhere near to it—and actually, that’s fine. I’d be concerned if Gaarder could churn out a bunch of novels as compelling and sublime as that (although Eco managed it, I suppose). Not every novel needs to be Sophie’s World to be moving or important, and although The World According to Anna might be too didactic and bare-bones for some people’s tastes, for me it definitely stirred up and provoked a lot of thoughts and feelings. And that is really all I can ask a good book to do.

Very mixed feelings about this one. Zazen is the kind of nihilistic, meditative tract that a lot of people rave about. Vanessa Veselka definitely examines a lot of the paradoxes inherent in the way some adults conduct themselves during those often aimless days after school and before middle age. At the same time, I did not have a good time reading this, and I never really enjoyed any of the characters. But I do wonder how much of that is the book and how much might be my own internalized literary misogyny….

Della Mylinek has a PhD in paleontology but doesn’t know what to do with her life. So she has moved in with her brother and his wife, works at an ostensibly vegan cafe, and half-heartedly engages in the pseudo-radical discourse of the people around her at work and in her life. After witnessing the thrill of bombs, both real and threatened, Della decides to call in her own fake bomb threats—at least, she thinks they’re fake, until some of them turn into actual bombs.

Zazen is supposed to be, I think, a commentary on the way we often feel impotent in a supposedly democratic society. Our society has been co-opted by the power of corporations and the mega-rich. To compound the issue—and this is really what Veselka tries to get at—the grassroots efforts to help individuals band together to put pressure on governments and corporations are themselves often co-opted or fragmented. Veselka portrays this in the way the various characters around Della interact, alternatively working together and arguing about the best way to resist, the best labels to use, etc. Della is extremely cynical, having grown up in a leftist household and then having steeped in academia for a decade. So eventually, as she finds herself more and more drawn to certain radical elements, she has to consider what she really wants: does she want to stay, to leave, or just … do something?

I had a hard time getting into this book, because Veselka never seems to establish why Della begins drifting towards such extreme actions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve been where she is, but I’ve felt a similar type of ennui, I think, and I definitely have friends who have been in Della’s shoes—and as far as I know, none of them have entertained bombing a power substation. While I don’t reject the notion that someone like Della could become radicalized, I just don’t see it in the way she is portrayed here. She’s just bored and aimless.

“Bored and aimless” kind of describes my overall reaction to Zazen. Much like its cover, this entire book feels dreary and washed out. That isn’t a comment on its quality per se—I actually think the writing here is rather good—but its tone. This isn’t the kind of book to be reading during a rainy end-of-summer week, and the fact I wasn’t that sympathetic towards its protagonist doesn’t help.

Yet a part of me wonders whether I would be this critical if this book had a man’s name attached to it. Veselka’s writing reminds me a little bit of Douglas Coupland’s, for instance. It’s true that I’ve largely moved on from Coupland after really enjoying him in my impressionable years of high school and university, but I still like aspects of his writing. So maybe part of it is an age thing, and I’ve just outgrown my personal phase of enjoying coy commentaries on the dystopian aspects of our modern world. Still, I suspect I would unconsciously tolerate this type of prose from a male author more so than a female author, because we’ve been socialized to take men more seriously, and it behoves me to recognize that I have these biases.

Zazen is the kind of book that will appeal, I think, to a certain type of reader—I realize this is a kind of tautological declaration, but bear with me here. You’re going to know if you like it when you read it, and you’ll know fairly quickly. I don’t think it is overly pretentious, but it is close proximity to pretentiousness. Sometimes that works for me and sometimes it doesn’t (for a variety of reasons), and in this case, I’m coming down on the latter side.

I picked Textrovert up on a whim because the premise looked interesting. The premise is interesting, and I liked many of the individual elements of the story … yet it just didn’t come together for me. Lindsey Summers has a fantastic idea of a story and competent writing, but there’s something missing.

Keeley thinks she has lost her phone; when she retrieves it, she learns it is actually another student’s phone, and he is away at football camp for a week. So they agree to forward messages, and then they get to know one another. Keeley finds she can be more forward when texting with Talon—almost flirtatious. But there is more to Talon than she knows about, and these secrets will interfere with her relationship with her twin brother, Zack.

Summers has a great set-up here, and I have to give her credit for all the moving parts she puts into the mix. Although some of the reveals, such as Talon’s identity, are telegraphed a little too overtly for my tastes, they are still executed in a satisfying way. And I don’t envy Keeley the choice she has to make in the end; I could see it going either way (though I’m not really surprised by the way it does go), because this is a good example of YA fiction where the love interest isn’t a stereotypically “good” or “bad” person but an actual, complex human being who has made mistakes. Often the hardest decision we have to make is whether or not we choose to give someone a second chance. Honestly, not sure what Keeley sees in Talon to begin with, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.

I got through Textrovert in a couple of hours—it isn’t very long. Moreover, it is extremely straightforward. Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, there’s a twist that threatens their relationship, and in the final act we learn if they can surmount that obstacle and still be together. Keeley is worried about which colleges she should apply to; she is navigating the rocky transition of her and her brother’s relationship from adolescence to adulthood; her brother and Talon are both involved in football … in other words, very typical teenage stories.

I love some of these individual subplots. I really enjoyed the way Summers portrays the dynamic between Keeley and Zack. Despite being behind on schoolwork and constantly losing her phone, Keeley seems to be “the responsible one”, even though Zack is “the golden boy”. Zack defines himself, at least for now, around football—that’s how he is choosing a college. Keeley doesn’t know what she wants to do; she feels aimless, and she resents both her twin and her father for pressuring her to choose a California school. These are all readily identifiable traits, and I like how Summers develops the theme of choosing your own path. Similarly, there’s a small but significant conflict between Keeley and her best friend, Nicky, regarding the amount of time they spent together over the summer and Nicky’s opinions about Talon.

Unfortunately, these individual subplots don’t come together in a unified, harmonious way (at least for me). I’m left wanting more from Textrovert. Really, I think what I’m missing is a more profound look at Keeley’s character development. We’re told that she is only this way with Talon, that she isn’t nearly as outgoing with others … but we don’t get to know her very much before she meets Talon, so it’s hard to see that. We learn she has an ex, and we briefly meet him later on in the book, but we learn very little about their relationship.

Textrovert has some fun and successful elements to it. I like a lot of the set-up and the subplots. Nevertheless, I think it could have gone deeper into so many of those elements and delivered an even stronger, more kickass story. This was a pleasant diversion in the time I read it, but it hasn’t left much of an impression.

Surprisingly the first Anne McCaffrey book I’ve ever read! Just never got into Pern…. Anyway, The Ship Who Sang is a collection of shorts following Helva, a person born with so many congenital defects that her body was installed into a shell so her mind could develop and become a Brain Ship. It’s an interesting concept, and each story explores different challenges that Helva faces as a human being with a very different type of embodiment. The stories build on each other to culminate in a final expression of Helva’s freedom of choice. McCaffrey explores a lot of compelling issues with nuance, yet I found her writing overall leaves much to be desired.

Helva’s human body is born with too many physical deformities for her to ever live and interact successfully. In this world, people in such situations can often be adapted to become the human component of a Brain Ship. With her neural functions connected to a larger ship, Helva is the ship. And along with a mobile human companion, the “brawn” to her “brain”, Helva performs delicate missions for the Central Worlds. These missions usually involve cargo transport, sometimes delegate transport, and often call upon Helva to use her judgment as a living mind. Each story shows how a routine mission can quickly turn into a catastrophe, however, and places demands on Helva’s cunning and compassion.

I think why The Ship Who Sang works, and why I’m giving it 3 stars despite not liking the writing style that much, is that McCaffrey diligently explores what it would mean to be … a ship. The first story, obviously, sets up Helva’s life and portrays her first partnership with a brawn. It provides insight into Helva’s personality, the way she relates to the world through, in her case, singing. The next stories examine how Helva reacts to being pushed to various extremes of sorrow, anguish, anger, and guilt, each time forcing her to make decisions no one really likes to make. In all of these stories, McCaffrey reminds us that Helva, despite being a ship, is still very human. She has human feelings, human desires, at least on an emotional level.

How this translates in terms of love is probably one of the key themes here. What kinds of relationships can Helva have with her fellow human beings? I don’t always agree with the way McCaffrey develops this theme. Although physical sex/desire would seem to be ruled out, there are moments of … weird … sexualization of Helva. At one point she ruminates on how shorter men supposedly have bigger penises—like, why would that matter to you, and also, that’s not how it works anyway. And at one point, one of the male characters talks about ripping off the access panel to the shell that contains her human body, which we’re supposed to infer has been suspended in a pubescent or pre-pubescent state to make sure it doesn’t outgrow its shell. There are numerous references to Helva being a “tin-plated virgin” or “tin-plated witch”, and look, I know this book was written in the 1960s, but it’s set in the far future, and that’s still pretty clearly sexual harassment. Indeed, the attitudes towards sex and gender are pretty conventional and one-dimensional: very heteronormative, very much “women fall for clever/strong men”.

Also some weird eugenic stuff in “The Ship Who Killed”? Helva and her companion have to collect embryos from planets who have enough stock along the appropriate “racial” and “genetic” lines to help out a colony rendered sterile. Just, the language that McCaffrey uses is very clinical and smacks of eugenicism. In general, the intergalatic society she depicts in this universe is a utilitarian, perhaps even authoritarian one, and though we don’t learn a whole lot about its overall structure, it doesn’t come off as a happy place.

So I guess my bottom line with all these observations is simply that McCaffrey makes a valiant attempt to explore the idea of a human brain controlling a starship … but it’s myopic in many ways. There must be better stories since that have explored similar concepts but with a more diverse representation of human experiences. The Ship Who Sang was diverting, enjoyable to read—a little bit dry in terms of the writing, especially the dialogue and characterization—but not as radical or far-reaching as I want in my science fiction.

Sherlock Holmes was, unsurprisingly, my jam when I was a kid. I preferred Poirot, even then (just something about Christie’s writing or the Belgian detective’s emphasis on his “little grey cells”), but Sherlock was cool too. I love reading stories that try to put a new spin on the Conan Doyle adventures, whether it’s transposing them to the 22nd century, hiring Ian McKellen to play a dementia-ridden Holmes, or gender-swapping Holmes and sending her to a Connecticut boarding school! A Study in Charlotte is the latest in a fine tradition of these types of stories, and Brittany Cavallaro demonstrates her Baker Street chops while also providing a fine mystery to unravel.

Jamie Watson moves back to the States from London on a rugby scholarship, ending up at the same school as Charlotte Holmes. The two are descendants of the original Watson and Holmes, respectively—this is a world where these two are real people, and Conan Doyle was just Watson’s literary agent. Anyway, they make tentative steps towards friendship, only for the process to be drastically accelerated by murther. Worse still, the murtherer is framing Holmes and Watson! So without police support and working against the clock, the two of them need to figure out who would do such a thing. But Holmes is, like her ancestor, slightly damaged goods, and Watson has his own issues to sort through.

At first, I was worried this book would try to hew too closely to Holmesian tropes or stories, especially when it seemed like the murderer was trying to replicate elements of Sherlock’s original adventures. Fortunately, Cavallaro soon moves beyond such simple homages. She creates a much richer world, one in which Charlotte and Jamie are their own distinct people beyond the traits they might have inherited from their ancestors. If anything, Jamie feels much more fleshed out and three dimensional than the original James Watson, who was always a bit of a stock everyman narrator to provide a little distance from Holmes. I like how Cavallaro works in things like Holmes’ super-competent brother (Milo rather than Mycroft), with whom there is always a bit of rivalry but also a lot of sibling support. Same goes for the Moriarty connection. Basically, if you’ve read a few of the Sherlock Holmes adventures or consumed any related spin-offs, there’s enough in here to make you smile without making you feel like you’re drowning.

The actual story is also first-rate. Cavallaro seems to telegraph the identity of the murderer fairly early on (at least in my reckoning), yet the actual solution is much more complex. I like that Holmes and Watson don’t “team up” with the police from the start—I was nervous, at first, about the whole kid-detective vibe, which Cavallaro even lampshades with the detective’s jibe about “Encyclopedia Brown” (ugh). Holmes and Watson read as very mature for 16/17-year-olds, and I really like that. You can tell they are very young yet on the cusp of adulthood, not always making the decisions an older adult would make but also maybe taking a few more risks. Although Sherlock and Watson meet in medical school, most of their adventures take place when they are older, and it’s very interesting to see Cavallaro translate that dynamic into a slightly younger phase of life!

The frequent references to having to “manage” or “take care of” a Holmes as a Watson are also delightful in a post-modern way. I know these aren’t necessarily original and often come up in other adaptations. Nevertheless, Cavallaro hands it deftly, with wit and also empathy. I like that Jamie has to deliberate about how to trust Charlotte—and that moment where he finally decides he has reached the limits of that trust is so telling and so dramatic!

What really makes A Study in Charlotte stand out, though, is that if you strip away all these allusions, it’s still a good mystery novel. That’s what Cavallaro should really get props for. Anyone can write a Holmesian story. Many people can write a good mystery novel. To combine the two, with a YA twist and a 21st-century transposition—that’s real skill. And for the mystery not to lean so heavily on the Holmesian elements is really impressive. You don’t have to be familiar with Sherlock Holmes; you can read this story with zero knowledge of those elements and still have a great time.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy was published in 2015, and I was a little worried that being three years old would already render it obsolete. Fortunately, I was wrong. Stephen Witt’s explanation of the rise of mp3 and the transition from CDs to digital stores to streaming, along with the corresponding piracy, is clear and detailed and incredibly fascinating. This is the type of non-fiction I like: full of facts and figures, but organized in such a way that it tells a compelling story while you’re reading.

Witt starts off in the late eighties and early nineties. He essentially tells two parallel tales: Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at Fraunhofer invents and perfects the mp3, while Dell Glover works at a CD printing plant in North Carolina, where he becomes the leading source of pirated music. Along the way, we also spend time with Doug Morris, a prominent record executive, and various pirate groups and the law enforcement officers trying to shut them down. That might sound scattered, but Witt manages to bring everything together into a coherent and unified look a the the past thirty years of the music industry.

I’m a little younger than Witt. His introduction places him in college in 1997, cramming a 2 GB hard drive full of pirated tunes. I turned 8 in 1997, and I wasn’t much into music at that point. In fact, I was a very late bloomer when it came to forming personal musical tastes and beginning to collect my own music—I think I was well into high school, by which time the iTunes Store was well established. Although I did buy or receive many CDs (mostly movie soundtracks and classical stuff) around that age, my first real experience with collecting music was already digital. I never much got into pirating—I missed that golden age, coming in just after Napster when everything had fragmented and you had to try your luck with torrents and Kazaa or Limewire. I had no trouble getting iTunes Store gift cards for my birthday or Christmas and spending those on $0.99 tracks and $9.99 albums; I chafed at the DRM, for sure, and celebrated when Apple did away with it. Since then, I’ve moved on to another storefront, 7digital, mostly because I try to avoid using iTunes itself these days. I haven’t subscribed to any streaming services—I like to own my music, even if it does exist as lossy bits on a hard drive.

I love how Witt balances the social history with a technical explanation of the workings of the mp3 format. As a mathematician, I’m fascinated by the information-theoretical underpinnings of the mp3. Witt goes into a lot of detail regarding the experiments that Brandenburg’s team did to tailor the mp3’s compression algorithm to best store the components of audio that human ears can detect. In particular, we learn a lot about the struggle to capture in the best fidelity the “lone speaker”. Alongside this technical overview comes the chronicle of the mp3 repeatedly facing rejection from MPEG as a new standard. I never knew that it basically lost out to mp2 as the format of choice—at least until some fateful twists and turns made it into the number one format for streaming pirated music, and then … well, the rest is history and the mp3 is here to stay.

By the same token, Witt provides more detail about the history of music piracy than I ever knew. Obviously early pirated music had to come from CDs, but I didn’t know they were being smuggled so brazenly out of the manufacturing plants. And I didn’t know the nature of the underground community, the way there were l33t groups who took pride in orchestrating and coordinating a release of a pirated album ahead of its actual release date. I really enjoy learning about these kinds of subcultures that existed in the earlier eras of the Internet but have now morphed or disappeared. The Internet has moved so fast in the past ten years that it’s easy, especially for us young’uns, to forget there have been entire movements that sprang up and died off prior to that time.

I also like how we have a very nuanced portrait of the music industry. It’s easy, in my opinion, to be sympathetic to pirates and artists both, and to have a bit of a one-dimensional view of the music executives. Yet Witt emphasizes how, for better or worse, there was a symbiotic ecosystem happening among artists, executives, and consumers. And as the technology changed, of course the industry changed—but why it changed the way it did is so incredibly fascinating.

And then there’s Dell Glover. He grows and matures over the decade he pirates music. He starts as a risk-taking, cool car–driving bootlegger and turns into a more responsible father who decides he no longer wants the heat associated with pirating. It’s interesting to see Witt recount the details of Glover’s involvement in what was quite literally this international operation to leak new releases.

There are a few aspects of How Music Got Free I didn’t like, mostly to do with Witt’s writing. At times, some of the analogies he uses felt dated or awkward or just in bad taste, like when he compares something to an alcoholic who can’t avoid the bottle or something along those lines (it has been over a week since I finished the book, so my memory has already blurred). I just remember thinking, “Um, that wasn’t necessary, where is your editor, young man?” At other points, Witt either introduces or fails to introduce concepts, technologies, parts of history, etc., that don’t need or definitely need, respectively, that introduction. Just some odd editing choices overall.

None of that dampens my enthusiasm for this book, though. It’s a lovely little history of a particular part of the music industry, the era that was the jump from physical to digital media, and some of the internecine conflicts among artists and executives and fans and audience alike. How Music Got Free lives up to the expectations set by its bombastic title, and I learned a great deal from this relatively short non-fiction read!

The kind of dystopian novel I’m often lukewarm about, The Unit has a blurb on the front cover from Margaret Atwood, which really tells me all I need to know. It’s science-fictional but also hangs on to that notional “literary fiction” tag, as if it doesn’t want to stoop too much into the genre ghetto. Whereas Kazuo Ishiguro’s dive into organ donation is a meditation on personhood, Ninni Holmqvist is more interested in the value of certain types of people—namely childless, older people. Not at all shocking but certainly thought-provoking, The Unit is a calm dystopia for people who can’t stomach Black Mirror.

Dorrit has turned fifty. As a childless woman of that age in Sweden in this world, she has to leave the outside world behind and relocate to a Unit. There, she lives in relative peace and socialist comfort—when they aren’t harvesting her organs or running medical experiments on her, that is. But no, seriously, The Unit isn’t dystopian body horror. It’s all very civilized in the most bureaucratic and banal ways, as so much evil is. Dorrit resigns herself to her fate, except then, of course, she falls in love.

I had really weird feelings reading this. I’m verging on 29 (in fact will have turned 29 by the time I publish this review), am childless, and also partnerless. The Unit is an extremely amatonormative, allocisheteronormative world, and so as an aromantic person, this was a tough read at times. It feels like men and women in this society are heavily motivated to shack up, or at least have sex—indeed, at times Dorrit relates stories of women “tricking” men into impregnating them and then abandoning the man to his fate. There doesn’t seem like much room for queer relationships of any sort in this society. Holmqvist only tangentially touches on this (Dorrit’s elder sister, who is a side character and extremely minor side plot, is apparently gay). But that’s about it. Otherwise it’s all, “Oops, you didn’t make babies, you get sent to the Unit.” Dorrit’s own relationship once in the unit is frustratingly explicitly heteronormative, despite some wonderful homoerotic tension between her in and another character (at least, in my opinion).

Holmqvist provides an author’s note with some explanations, which is nice. As a childless woman herself, she explains how she conceived the story after considering how she might be “dispensable” in her society. While I’m not sure I agree with her interpretation, I do understand where she’s coming from. And I don’t mean to imply she’s condoning The Unit’s social set-up—in the best tradition of dystopian fiction, she is of course attempting to critique our own society’s hang-ups through an exaggerated version of it. I commend her for the attempt … I’m just not sure it’s all that radical enough or goes far enough, and there are dimensions missing from the social commentary (like the missed opportunity to explore queerness more deeply). I’m not saying she needed to make Dorrit a firebrand revolutionary there to overturn the system—I get that she’s portraying a more subtle story. Nevertheless, The Unit is a very … tame … dystopian work.

Other observations to consider: this is a very meditative and character-driven piece. There isn’t much action. Dorrit narrates the minutiae of her life, explaining to us how she feels, providing exposition as she goes. I generally enjoy books like these, but I also can’t read a lot of them back to back, because they do take more work than more dialogue-driven or plot-driven novels. If you like this kind of thing, I think you’ll enjoy dipping into The Unit, maybe sipping from it over several days. If you want something faster-paced, or something louder, then you’ll likely be disappointed.

In short, The Unit is quite a focused story. I don’t think it’s for everyone. I’m ambivalent about it: I like a lot of what Holmqvist tries to do, but I also wish it was something more than it is. So while I’m happy I gave it a chance, I also can’t sing its praises extremely loudly. It’s no Handmaid’s Tale … yet it’s a sight better than some of Atwood’s more recent forays into dystopia, that’s for sure.