The Last 2021 Books
Dec. 30th, 2021 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI only read 15 books in 2021, and three of them were in the last week of December.
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanen McGuire – Each book is the Wayward Children series is about a child going through a magical doorway into another world and how that experience changes them. This one is nominally about a girl who loses horses and finds herself in a world full of centaurs, fauns, kelpies and other hoofed mythological creatures. This book was actually about the cruelty of little girls, about chosen family, about “othering” in general, and about the necessity of heroes. (I think there’s also some criticism of the “Great Man” theory in here too, but that’s more in-depth than I need to get into.)
The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko - Similar to many other sci-fi stories (The Long Earth and Fair Coin come to mind, of books I’ve enjoyed), this revolves around a person who finds a device that allows him to jump through parallel universes; which he uses to exploit the differences between them. Unfortunately, the reality of both his life in particular and the multiverse in general make that much more complicated than it seems. I really like the sci-fi aspects and give him credit for writing fairly realistic fight scenes (people get hit once or twice and don’t get back up) and trauma (characters who commit violence are clearly affected by it afterwards); but his characters don’t always have the most consistent personalities over the course of a larger work. John and John Prime bleed into each other too much when it clearly isn’t supposed to be deliberate. While this is a complete story that ties up the character beats, there is a much larger universe and mythos that it only scratches the surface of. As Melko likely intended, I’m going to buy the sequel.
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke - This book is written entirely as a series of Slack conversations, and features a man who has inexplicably been sucked into his office’s Slack workspace and can’t escape. This features workplace romance, incompetent bosses, unreasonable clients, mild sci-fi elements, useless automated help services, and extremely funny snark. Especially if you’re familiar with small-company “professional” Slack conversations. My only complaint is that the Lydia plotline gets pseudo-resolved but never really explained. But this is a fast read and super fun.
Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanen McGuire – Each book is the Wayward Children series is about a child going through a magical doorway into another world and how that experience changes them. This one is nominally about a girl who loses horses and finds herself in a world full of centaurs, fauns, kelpies and other hoofed mythological creatures. This book was actually about the cruelty of little girls, about chosen family, about “othering” in general, and about the necessity of heroes. (I think there’s also some criticism of the “Great Man” theory in here too, but that’s more in-depth than I need to get into.)
The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko - Similar to many other sci-fi stories (The Long Earth and Fair Coin come to mind, of books I’ve enjoyed), this revolves around a person who finds a device that allows him to jump through parallel universes; which he uses to exploit the differences between them. Unfortunately, the reality of both his life in particular and the multiverse in general make that much more complicated than it seems. I really like the sci-fi aspects and give him credit for writing fairly realistic fight scenes (people get hit once or twice and don’t get back up) and trauma (characters who commit violence are clearly affected by it afterwards); but his characters don’t always have the most consistent personalities over the course of a larger work. John and John Prime bleed into each other too much when it clearly isn’t supposed to be deliberate. While this is a complete story that ties up the character beats, there is a much larger universe and mythos that it only scratches the surface of. As Melko likely intended, I’m going to buy the sequel.
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke - This book is written entirely as a series of Slack conversations, and features a man who has inexplicably been sucked into his office’s Slack workspace and can’t escape. This features workplace romance, incompetent bosses, unreasonable clients, mild sci-fi elements, useless automated help services, and extremely funny snark. Especially if you’re familiar with small-company “professional” Slack conversations. My only complaint is that the Lydia plotline gets pseudo-resolved but never really explained. But this is a fast read and super fun.
