Cleaning Up My Book List
May. 23rd, 2023 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhat If? 2 by Randall Munroe - Another book of amusing speculative science by the XKCD guy, which starts with replacing the solar system with soup and goes from there. Highly entertaining. (And it also sparked ARR trying to read every Randall Munroe book we had in the house!)
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu - Jethrien got this for me because she knows I love a good time-travel story, but it ended up being a little too up its own ass to really be good. It’s an extremely self-referential exploration of time travel as a matter of perception, from the view of a man who wasted his 20s in a dead-end job (as a time machine repairman) after his father drifted away (by getting lost in the past, both literally and figuratively). It’s a clever metaphor, but it gets stretched too thin in the execution to really work.
Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton – Wheaton wrote a bunch of blog posts. Then he assembled and annotated the blog posts into a book called “Just a Geek.” This is that same book (or at least the first half is), but heavily annotated with everything he’s learned since. (The second half is later blog posts and essays, again with new annotations.) He does a lot of apologizing for sexist, racist and generally jerkish stuff he wrote in the original blog posts; and notes the ways his thinking has changed since. Because a lot of the material was original short essays for online consumption and this was clearly annotated over time, it gets very repetitive on certain details. I feel for him—he clearly had a hard childhood and a lot of baggage to work through—and I’m happy he got to a good place, but I think this would have been a stronger book if he started from scratch, or at least tore apart the original posts and only used a few choice examples. The footnote annotations make the book harder to read continuously and the material loses emotional oomph when you bounce around among annotated essays written months apart. I came out of this with a very firm understanding of his relationship with his parents, and a very scattered understanding of his career post Star Trek.
And while I’m here, let’s do a little spring culling of the book list, too:
Book of Koli by Mike Carey - I normally like Carey’s work, but this was a little too dark and a little too sci-fantasy for it to grab me on my first attempt, and then I discovered it was only the first book of a trilogy, and I wasn’t interested enough to commit to going back.
While I kept telling myself I was going to read Against All Silence by E. C. Myers (who’s a personal friend), I found his sci-fi Fair Coin novels much more compelling than the thriller Silence of Six and I’m far enough removed that I can acknowledge I’m not going to pick the series back up.
Similarly, I had kept Myths and Mortals (Numina Book 2) by Charlie N. Holmberg on my list because the first book had been interesting, but clearly not compelling enough and now I don’t remember any of the characters or plot points to pick it back up.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu - Jethrien got this for me because she knows I love a good time-travel story, but it ended up being a little too up its own ass to really be good. It’s an extremely self-referential exploration of time travel as a matter of perception, from the view of a man who wasted his 20s in a dead-end job (as a time machine repairman) after his father drifted away (by getting lost in the past, both literally and figuratively). It’s a clever metaphor, but it gets stretched too thin in the execution to really work.
Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton – Wheaton wrote a bunch of blog posts. Then he assembled and annotated the blog posts into a book called “Just a Geek.” This is that same book (or at least the first half is), but heavily annotated with everything he’s learned since. (The second half is later blog posts and essays, again with new annotations.) He does a lot of apologizing for sexist, racist and generally jerkish stuff he wrote in the original blog posts; and notes the ways his thinking has changed since. Because a lot of the material was original short essays for online consumption and this was clearly annotated over time, it gets very repetitive on certain details. I feel for him—he clearly had a hard childhood and a lot of baggage to work through—and I’m happy he got to a good place, but I think this would have been a stronger book if he started from scratch, or at least tore apart the original posts and only used a few choice examples. The footnote annotations make the book harder to read continuously and the material loses emotional oomph when you bounce around among annotated essays written months apart. I came out of this with a very firm understanding of his relationship with his parents, and a very scattered understanding of his career post Star Trek.
And while I’m here, let’s do a little spring culling of the book list, too:
Book of Koli by Mike Carey - I normally like Carey’s work, but this was a little too dark and a little too sci-fantasy for it to grab me on my first attempt, and then I discovered it was only the first book of a trilogy, and I wasn’t interested enough to commit to going back.
While I kept telling myself I was going to read Against All Silence by E. C. Myers (who’s a personal friend), I found his sci-fi Fair Coin novels much more compelling than the thriller Silence of Six and I’m far enough removed that I can acknowledge I’m not going to pick the series back up.
Similarly, I had kept Myths and Mortals (Numina Book 2) by Charlie N. Holmberg on my list because the first book had been interesting, but clearly not compelling enough and now I don’t remember any of the characters or plot points to pick it back up.
