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Books in Early 2025
Feb. 10th, 2025 04:12 pmWavewalker: A Memoir of Breaking Free by Suzanne Heywood - The true story of a girl whose parents took her on a sailing journey around the world that was supposed to take a year and turned into a decade-long debacle. This should have been subtitled “My Parents Were F—ing Nuts.” The father was the real driving force in their terrible choices (he was a flighty, moody alcoholic with a flair for tax evasion), but the mother had her own set of bullshit (also an alcoholic, plus grossly selfish/entitled and deeply resentful of her daughter) and collectively they clearly got sick of being parents in favor of chasing this dream. I would never have read this if it was fiction; but the fact that the daughter wrote it and the forward talks about getting her brother’s recollections while she wrote it told me that everybody came out safely—though reading it, a lot of that was dumb luck. As it was, it was a fascinating look into people who made choices that I never would have. I was genuinely surprised in the afterword to learn that the parents stayed married and the daughter still spoke to them.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - A sci-fi tale about a man who realizes that his dreams rewrite reality and, in searching for a cure, happens on a doctor who tries to actively use them to change the world. I’ll admit, the ending surprised me by NOT being a standard sci-fi twist: All of the changes enacted by George’s dreams over the course of the story basically stack together to create the messed-up new world he lives in going forward. The fact that he doesn’t overwrite them all or write himself out or create the real world as we know it now is actually pretty unusual at this point. The aliens and their untranslatable knowledge of dreams feels like a hanging thread, and it’s never made clear how much “should” have happened versus was created by George. But the moral shines through (as with all the best classic sci-fi) that you need to work with the rest of the world to actually change it for the better, and accept that all actions have good and bad consequences.
The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop - The memoirs of the woman most famous to my generation as Emily Gilmore, and most famous to an earlier generation for originating (and inspiring) Sheila in A Chorus Line. And in between, she’s lived an entertaining life. She gives a lot of gratitude and basically only has bad things to say about two people (her father and her ex-husband) and she is keenly aware that the Gilmore Girls fans want to be assured that cast all loved each other. I give a lot of credit to her ghostwriter because this nails her voice and feels like she dictated it.
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire - Some of the Wayward Children books are standalones, focusing on one kid and the world they find their first Door to; and some revolve around the ongoing narrative and require knowledge of the greater continuity. This is very much the latter; perhaps the most so thus far. It’s a direct sequel to Lost in the Moment and Found, following Antsy’s time at the school and her return to the Store, along with continuing the narratives of several of the other characters. I think I like the standalones better; they tend to work as complete stories of their own where this feels more “interstitial”, like parts of it should have been a full and proper Antsy-focused sequel and parts are moving around the various chess pieces at the school to get them ready for the next book.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach – Hilarious and introspective, though it comes with a boatload of content warnings, as Phoebe goes through a very realistic “trauma conga line” (including parental death, miscarriage, infidelity, and pet death) before accidentally arriving in the middle of an insanely-elaborate wedding while intent on killing herself. But instead of doing that, her blunt honesty and no-fucks attitude leads her to accidentally end up in the confidences of all of the “wedding people,” who all turn out to be deep and multilayered and most of whom accidentally teach her valuable lessons about what she actually wants from life. Also, a car gets fucked. (Offstage, but the repercussions are hilarious.)
Legends of Localization: Undertale by Clyde Mandelin - Mandelin, aka “Tomato,” is a video game translator, and while he didn’t translate Undertale into Japanese, he knows a lot of the people involved and was able to get ahold of a lot of their notes and supplemental documents, and then dissect a lot of the choices made in localization and how Toby Fox’s original intent was brought as fully as possible into the Japanese version of the game. After the first two Legends of Localization discussed translating games from Japanese to English, a book on the reverse brought a new level of depth to the topic.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - A sci-fi tale about a man who realizes that his dreams rewrite reality and, in searching for a cure, happens on a doctor who tries to actively use them to change the world. I’ll admit, the ending surprised me by NOT being a standard sci-fi twist: All of the changes enacted by George’s dreams over the course of the story basically stack together to create the messed-up new world he lives in going forward. The fact that he doesn’t overwrite them all or write himself out or create the real world as we know it now is actually pretty unusual at this point. The aliens and their untranslatable knowledge of dreams feels like a hanging thread, and it’s never made clear how much “should” have happened versus was created by George. But the moral shines through (as with all the best classic sci-fi) that you need to work with the rest of the world to actually change it for the better, and accept that all actions have good and bad consequences.
The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop - The memoirs of the woman most famous to my generation as Emily Gilmore, and most famous to an earlier generation for originating (and inspiring) Sheila in A Chorus Line. And in between, she’s lived an entertaining life. She gives a lot of gratitude and basically only has bad things to say about two people (her father and her ex-husband) and she is keenly aware that the Gilmore Girls fans want to be assured that cast all loved each other. I give a lot of credit to her ghostwriter because this nails her voice and feels like she dictated it.
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire - Some of the Wayward Children books are standalones, focusing on one kid and the world they find their first Door to; and some revolve around the ongoing narrative and require knowledge of the greater continuity. This is very much the latter; perhaps the most so thus far. It’s a direct sequel to Lost in the Moment and Found, following Antsy’s time at the school and her return to the Store, along with continuing the narratives of several of the other characters. I think I like the standalones better; they tend to work as complete stories of their own where this feels more “interstitial”, like parts of it should have been a full and proper Antsy-focused sequel and parts are moving around the various chess pieces at the school to get them ready for the next book.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach – Hilarious and introspective, though it comes with a boatload of content warnings, as Phoebe goes through a very realistic “trauma conga line” (including parental death, miscarriage, infidelity, and pet death) before accidentally arriving in the middle of an insanely-elaborate wedding while intent on killing herself. But instead of doing that, her blunt honesty and no-fucks attitude leads her to accidentally end up in the confidences of all of the “wedding people,” who all turn out to be deep and multilayered and most of whom accidentally teach her valuable lessons about what she actually wants from life. Also, a car gets fucked. (Offstage, but the repercussions are hilarious.)
Legends of Localization: Undertale by Clyde Mandelin - Mandelin, aka “Tomato,” is a video game translator, and while he didn’t translate Undertale into Japanese, he knows a lot of the people involved and was able to get ahold of a lot of their notes and supplemental documents, and then dissect a lot of the choices made in localization and how Toby Fox’s original intent was brought as fully as possible into the Japanese version of the game. After the first two Legends of Localization discussed translating games from Japanese to English, a book on the reverse brought a new level of depth to the topic.
