Bragan Reads Stuff in 2024, Pt. 3

Hi, it's Betty back again with another thread full of reading! More often than not, just because I'm lazy, I don't start my new thread for a new quarter until I've finished that quarter's first book. But since I'm currently reading a chunkster so chunky that it goes well beyond "doorstop" to approximately equal the size of the door itself, I figured I'd better go ahead and do it now, or we'll be halfway through July at least before I get to it.

While we're waiting for that, though, here's a look back at the first half of the year:

January

1. 13: The Story of the World's Most Notorious Superstition by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
2. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
3. Monty Python's Big Red Book
4. The Letter of Marque by Patrick O'Brian
5. Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
6. Adventure Time, Vol 5 by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, & Braden Lamb
7. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
8. Images of America: White Sands National Monument by Joseph T. Page II

February

9. I Am the Master: Legends of the Renegade Time Lord by Peter Anghelides, Mark Wright, Jacqueline Rayner, Mike Tucker, Beverly Sanford and Matthew Sweet
10. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
11. Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
12. The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss
13. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
14. Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

March

15. If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin (aka David Wong)
16. Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
17. The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas
18. Adventure Time Vol. 6 by Ryan North
19. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
20. Toilets, Toasters & Telephones: The How and Why of Everyday Objects by Susan Goldman Rubin
21. Some Possible Solutions by Helen Phillips
22. The Colors of All the Cattle by Alexander McCall Smith
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: The Making of the Classic Film by John Tenuto and Maria Jose Tenuto
24. Married with Zombies by Jesse Petersen

April

25.The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
26. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
27. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond Tomorrow by Ray Bradbury
28. Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny
29. How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Shur
30. Clockwork by Phillip Pullman
31. The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth

May

32. Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich
33. Lyorn by Steven Brust
34. Adventure Time Vol. 7 by Rayn North
35. If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating by Alan Alda
36. Science Fiction: The Best of 2003 edited by Karen Haber & Jonathan Strahan
37. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
38. My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee
39. The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch
40. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

June

41. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading by Leah Price
42. Denton Little's Deathdate by Lance Rubin
43. Star Stories: Constellation Tales From Around the World by Anita Ganeri & Andy Wilx
44. Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren
45. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
46. The Thirteen Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian
47. The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life by A.J. Jacobs
48. Adventure Time, Vol 8: Mathematical Edition by Ryan North and Christopher Hastings
49. Swamp Story by Dave Barry

"a chunkster so chunky that it goes well beyond "doorstop" to approximately equal the size of the door itself" Great description! Happy new thread.

>2 labfs39: Thank you, I amused myself with that one, too. :)

>1 bragan: "But since I'm currently reading a chunkster so chunky that it goes well beyond "doorstop" to approximately equal the size of the door itself, I figured I'd better go ahead and do it now, or we'll be halfway through July at least before I get to it."

Kinda the same story for me. I'm determined to finally finish the Proust I'm reading and review that on my first half thread before starting a new thread. I only have about 45 pages to go, but that's a couple of evenings' reading, at the least. I'm not sure I can remember reading anything else, or imagine a future in which I read other books.

>4 rocketjk: I'm not sure I can remember reading anything else, or imagine a future in which I read other books.

That sounds like my experience of reading Ducks, Newburyport. It wasn't a book that allowed for other books to be read alongside, or tolerated any dipping in and out of. It was an immersive experience. I miss it, but I'm not ready to reread it.

>4 rocketjk: I hear ya! I've been reading and reading and reading, and the bookmark just doesn't seem to be moving much. It's a good book, fortunately, but it is not a fast read. I really am starting to wonder if I'll have any of the month left to read anything else in when I finish.

>5 RidgewayGirl: I generally don't read multiple books at once at all, myself, so I guess I'm monogamously married to this one for the duration. :)

I did it! I finally finished it!

50. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro



Robert Caro's exhaustively researched 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning examination of the life and career of Robert Moses, who spent decades reshaping New York City by building parks, bridges, roads, and housing projects, and in the process acquired so much power that no one could stop him from doing basically whatever he wanted with the landscape of the city, even when they really should have.

Moses is a fascinating subject, and he comes across here as a man possessed of incredible drive and vision, with a real genius both for engineering works and political maneuvering, but also as a man utterly seduced by the love of power, blinded by his own arrogance, disturbingly ruthless, and deeply callous towards and contemptuous of the public he was meant to be serving -- a man who accomplished impressive things but also did massive amounts of damage to both individual people and the city as a whole.

Caro goes into all of it, good, bad, and complicated, in deep and specific detail. The resulting work is a hell of a tome: 1160 pages, not even counting the extensive end matter. It's not a quick read, either. It took me about three and a half weeks to finish it, and I don't think I've ever taken that long to finish a book, even one this length, in my entire life. Not when I was reading it straight through rather than picking it up intermittently, anyway. But even if it's far from zippy, it's surprisingly absorbing. Yes, there were parts where my attention waned, but far fewer than I'd have expected, given how very detailed it is, especially considering that I have no personal connection to, and only the vaguest familiarity with, NYC.

I think what really makes the book so engaging is that the story of Robert Moses ends up touching on so many big, broad, important topics far beyond the man himself, interesting as he was: the changing nature of cities over the course of the 20th century, the question of whether parks should exist primarily for the preservation of nature or for human recreation, the often devastating ways in which America has become utterly dominated by the car, the complex and disillusioning ways in which the business of government gets done, the outsized influence that individual personality quirks and petty feuds can have on the course of history, the pernicious ways in which racism and classism have shaped urban development, the corrupting influence of power, the extent to which public opinion is a product of the press, and the nature of human hubris.

Lots of food for thought here, in other words, and even though it ate up the better part of a month during which I otherwise might have read half a dozen other books, I am very glad I picked it up.

Also, immense props to Robert Caro, because I can barely imagine what a truly staggering amount of work must have gone into this.

Rating: 4.5/5

>7 bragan: Congrats! It's a significant doorstop, and one I'm unlikely to read, despite your excellent review.

>8 labfs39: I feel the same!

>7 bragan: Congratulations! I'm still in the region of chapter 30 or so and enjoying it very much.

>7 bragan: Re: Moses, my sister-in-law has a PhD in the history of the tenants' rights movements in New York City. Her fine book (I may be prejudiced but, seriously, I think it's a good book) on the subject is When Tenants Claimed the City: the Struggle for Citizenship in New York Housing. Of course, Robert Moses figures prominently. Roberta quotes one of the veteran leaders of the movement as saying, roughly, "Everybody thinks Robert Moses is a great man these days, but I can assure you that when I knew him he was a son of a bitch."

Congratulations on getting through the Caro book, and I'm very glad you found it worth the time in the end. And thanks for the great review.

Thanks, all! I feel like I've really accomplished something. :)

>11 rocketjk: Oh, man, if you had to sum up 1160 pages of biography in one sentence, you could do a lot worse than that quote!

>7 bragan: Oh man, I really do need to read this, despite the length... and I'm a slowish reader, so it will probably take me twice as long as you did. But I'm an almost lifelong NYer, with a great interest in the intersection of its history and politics, so that sounds like the book for me. But wow, no ebook format? Is the text in the print version a reasonable size? I'm not a large-text person, but those fat mass market paperbacks with the teeny tiny text are really hard on my aging eyes.

>13 lisapeet: It really does sound like something you ought to read, then, and probably something you will find even more fascinating (and, frankly, infuriating) than I did. The version I have is a large-sized paperback, not a small mass market one, and I'd say the text is pretty normal-sized. If you only have issues with it if it's especially teeny, hopefully you'd be OK... assuming you don't have any problems with your hands, that is, because, man, this thing was hard to hold!

I am a bit surprised there's no ebook version, though.

>13 lisapeet: I have a copy you could borrow! I loved it and read the whole thing over a few weeks while visiting family one December.

>7 bragan: Really interesting, and by the sounds of it, I'd say you did well to get through it all in 3.5 weeks.

>16 SassyLassy: I suppose it really only took a long time by my previous standards, but the truth is my reading has slowed down enough in recent years I should probably stop trying to apply those.

>7 bragan: There's an SF story by James Blish in which the antagonist is "the Port Authority of Earth". Apparently Blish did not like Robert Moses.

>7 bragan: Congrats! This is an intimidating book both in depth and scope. Something thought about tackling but know I never really can, even if still tempted by your excellent review.

>18 dukedom_enough: That's hilarious. I've read some Blish, but that detail wouldn't have registered with me before, I think.

>19 stretch: Hey, if I can do it, you can do it!

51. Disenchantment: Untold Tales, Treasury the First presented by Matt Groenig



The animated series Disenchantment, which finished up on Netflix last year, never remotely held a candle to Matt Groenig's previous show, Futurama. (Although, admittedly, that's such a high bar that even Futurama itself couldn't always manage it.) But, by and large, I found it entertaining enough. So when I saw this graphic novel collection based on the show going cheap, I figured I'd give it a shot.

It must be said, this is a pretty nice-looking book. It's a thin but sturdy hardback, with colorful artwork that captures the visuals of the series perfectly. And interspersed among the comics stories there are lots of pages depicting relevant material like signs and and lists and pamphlets, which are always nicely laid out. Unfortunately, though, a lot of them are... not actually particularly funny? And the stories themselves range from mildly diverting to pretty meh. It's not that it doesn't capture the feel of the show, really. It just that the show was pretty variable in quality, and it's not exactly capturing it at its best.

Rating: 3/5

52. The Book of Pslams: 97 Divine Diatribes on Humanity's Total Failure by God, with Jesus and the Holy Ghost, as dictated to David Javerbaum



This is David Javerbaum's 2021 follow-up to his The Last Testament, which purported to be the memoir of God Himself. In this one, God rants about humanity being The Worst, Jesus passive-aggressively criticizes his hypocritical followers, and the Holy Ghost pens a bunch of parodies of songs and poems.

Being someone who's usually up for a bit of satirically blasphemous humor, I enjoyed the previous volume, which made me laugh quite a bit. This one, though... This one was not so funny. It did have its moments of wittiness or entertainingly phrased insight, but more often then not it just blows right past satire into bleak, despair-filled yelling about the state of the world. Which I can understand. Boy, can I understand it. But it's much less fun and clever and much more just a hit of pure depression about the state of humanity and I hate to say it, but I'm more than capable of generating that all by myself and didn't need the help.

Rating: 3/5, although if I'm honest, I think half a star of that just comes from me wanting to express sad agreement with the writer's views, rather than it being a measure of how much I got out of the book.

53. Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny



A short science fiction -- or perhaps science fantasy -- novel from 1969. This is one of those SF novels that sort of drops you in with very little idea of exactly where you are and what's going on. Who is this POV character? How did he end up so far in the future, if he's from the 20th century? What's this weird relationship he has with the planet he lives on? Etc., etc. Personally, I always find that sort of thing interesting, even if it does demand a bit of patience. We do eventually find out all the answers, though, more or less, and after that the story itself, which involves various people trying to get revenge on the main character (oh, and also the fact that he might be connected to an alien god), didn't excite me all that much. But it is beautifully written, as much of Zelazny's work is, in a philosophically poetic style

Rating: It's hard to know how to rate this. A just-OK story but terrific prose, what does that work out to? I'm going to call it 3.5/5, but I feel a bit bad about that, somehow.

>23 bragan: Intriguing. This sounds a lot like the beginning of Nine Princes in Amber. Did you read that? I loved it. In that case it’s the main character himself who has no idea who he is and why he’s there.

I looked on Kobo and apparently all of Zelazny’s works are now available as ebooks. I do hope they are better done than the paper copy I had of the Amber series, which was riddled with typos. I added Isle of the Dead to my Kobo Plus books, and bought The Best of Roger Zelazny.

P.S. Your touchstone for Isle of the Dead is wrong, and I’ll never understand the logic of how LT determines touchstones.

>24 FlorenceArt: I did read all of the Amber books, but it was ages ago. In this case, the character knows everything perfectly well, it just takes him a while to get around to telling us.

Thanks for the heads-up on the touchstone. When I stop to check, it's fine. When I forget, it's always wrong! Fixing it.

>23 bragan: This was one of my favorite Zelazny books; read it soon after it appeared. Inter alia, I liked the bit about the protagonist being the 46th-richest human in the galaxy, and dining with the 30th-richest (not sure about the numbers).

>26 dukedom_enough: Not one of my own favorites, I'd say -- although my favorites are probably more his short stories -- but I sure did appreciate the writing. Especially the repeated metaphor of life as being like Tokyo Bay. He did some very interesting things with that.

54. Gratitude by Oliver Sacks



Four very short essays by neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. The first of these was written on the occasion of his 80th birthday, before he received a terminal cancer diagnosis. The other three were written after, and involve him calmly contemplating his life and approaching death in various ways. The writing is very simple, very undramatic, but effective enough, I think, at communicating the things he wanted to communicate in his last days, especially his gratitude for the experiences and people he'd known, and the comfort he took in the enduring nature of the physical world. I suppose there are places where I feel he relies a bit too much on quoting other people over putting things in his own way, but I can hardly hold that against him. I imagine in his place, I'd probably be doing the same thing, thinking back on all the words of others on the subjects of life and death that were most resonating with me. Indeed, when my time comes, I can easily see myself wanting to quote Sacks himself: "Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

Rating: 4/5

55. Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson



I really enjoyed Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring when I read it a few years ago and had always meant to check out more of her stuff. So when I saw an advance copy of her new novel Blackheart Man was available through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers, I jumped at the chance to snag a copy. Unfortunately, though, this one didn't really compare to that earlier book for me.

The setting, a magic-infused fantasy-world island inspired and informed by Carribean culture, was interesting and cool, even if I found some of the details of life on the island a little hard to believe in. And I did like the rather nuanced way the novel reflects on real-world prejudices. But the story itself just failed to engage me at all. A lot of stuff that should be really exciting happens. (A threatened invasion! Missing children!) But none of it stirred very much interest in me, I think probably in large part due to the fact that the POV character seldom seems to treat any of it with any sense of urgency. And the ending involves several revelations that kind of come out of nowhere, as well as a major threat that's resolved off-screen while the main character is unconscious, none of which was all that satisfying.

Rating: 3/5, but those three stars are all for the setting, really, not the story.

56. A Nice Class of Corpse by Simon Brett



Mysteries aren't necessarily my genre, but I did enjoy this one. It's set in a residence hotel populated by uppercrusty older folks, run by a woman who is very concerned with keeping everything classy and decorous and constrained by neat little rules. The latest resident, though -- a Mrs. Pargeter -- is a bit more unconventional and unconstrained than expected. And when not one, but two residents suddenly die in supposed accidents, she takes it on herself to investigate, with a little help from skills and contacts cultivated in her surprisingly colorful past.

The plot isn't, I suppose, anything particularly amazing, but it's written in a way that plays around entertainingly with the reader's expectations by making you suspect pretty much everybody, one by one. It's also got a very dry, very English sense of humor, which I enjoyed. And Milena Pergeter is a fun character, too.

Rating: 4/5

57. Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell



Shaun Bythell, who runs the largest secondhand bookshop in Scotland, shares his thoughts on the various kinds of customers he sees in his store. Mostly the annoying ones. It's mildly amusing, if you're good with snarky Scottish humor (and, I suppose, aren't among the categories of people he really seems to dislike, such as conspiracy theorists and people who force their political opinions on everyone in earshot). I didn't find it nearly as charming as his The Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller, though, and if you've already read those, this one may feel a little redundant.

Rating: 3.5/5

>7 bragan: This is a book I mean to read someday, primarily because Moses played a great role in the life of one of my favorite authors, Jane Jacobs. Jacobs was part of the grass roots effort to save Greenwich Village from Moses' wrecking balls, and wrote a favorite book of mine, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Thanks for the thorough review of Caro's book.

>32 janoorani24: I've certainly heard of Jacobs, and although I haven't actually read anything by her, I can absolutely see how they would have clashed.

Anyway, I hope when you do get around this this one, you get as much out of it as I did! I strongly suspect you will.

58. The Book of Bill by Bill Cipher (or Alex Hirsch, if you must insist on caring about boring old reality)



Not long ago, I binge-watched the cartoon series Gravity Falls, after having heard for years that it was really great and I absolutely needed to watch it. I confess, for most of the series those recommendations had me more than a little befuddled. I felt like, OK, this is perfectly good kids' fare, it's likeable enough, I probably would have really loved it when I was eight, but it's nothing particularly special and I don't really see the appeal to adults. Then I got to the final run of episodes, and was like, OH, WOW, OK, NOW I GET IT! THAT WAS EPIC! (Yes, just like that. In all caps.)

Much of what made it so epic was the bad guy, Bill Cipher, an evil triangular chaos demon, and if you haven't seen the show, trust me, whatever you're imagining the real thing was far, far weirder. And then right after I finished watching, a decade after the show originally aired, it was announced that a book supposedly authored by the triangle himself was coming out soon. Well, how could I resist snapping that up?

Unlike the show, which was supposedly suitable for little kids -- although, frankly, there's stuff in there I strongly suspect would have given me nightmares if I had somehow watched it when I was eight -- this one explicitly states that it's aimed at an older audience, probably because it features not just weird horror stuff and references likely to go way over kids' heads, but also really terrible advice for things no one should try at home, some hints of not-entirely-fantastical-feeling violence, and a mildly suggestive "your mom" joke or two. Also some really disturbing pictures of teeth.

In the book's pages, Bill plans and schemes, cheerfully breaks the fourth wall, and shares stories about his past. Want to know what he's been doing on Earth throughout all of human history? How he responded to Ford Pines breaking up with him ceasing to be a usable tool for world domination? How about the origins of the Time Baby? And, of course, the answer to the ever-pressing question of whether Bill is actually dead? Well, it's all in here!

And, OK... Usually this sort of TV tie-in material is mildly entertaining at best, and appealing largely in how it plays on your nostalgia for the thing it's based on. Not this one, though! Frankly, I'm astonished by how much I enjoyed this one. The artistic layout is great, the combination of humor and horror is pitch-perfect, and it adds to the characterization and the lore of the show in ways that work very well. And then, the ending gave me exactly the same incredibly warm and satisfied feeling the ending of the show's final episode gave me, all over again.

I find that when I review stuff like this, the vast majority of the time I end by noting that I don't consider whatever-it-is a "must read" for fans of the source material. Not this time! If you're a fan of Gravity Falls, or even just someone who really enjoyed the heck out of Bill as a character, you definitely want to read this one.

Rating: I cannot -- cannot -- believe that I am giving this thing 4.5/5. But I am. That's how much I enjoyed it. And what else am I supposed to do with a book that left me with such a giant smile on my face afterward?

>34 bragan: I have never heard of Gravity Falls or Bill the chaos demon, but your review was so much fun to read. It's great when a book moves one to gush. You left me with a smile too.

>35 labfs39: Glad to be spreading some smiles! :)

59. Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison



I feel like this novel kind of wants you to go in without too much idea of what the plot is -- even the dust jacket very carefully avoids spoilers, and you know how those can be! -- so I'll try to honor its wishes and not talk too much about the details that get revealed as we go along, even if some of it was pretty obvious to me quite a ways in advance. Instead, I'll say that the story focuses on Vesper, a young woman who grew up in a very insular religious community, one that insists it's not a cult but which certainly feels like one, especially given the way they completely cut off anyone who leaves the faith. Vesper has left, but then one day, to her surprise, she gets invited back for the wedding of her former best friend and former boyfriend and finds herself unable to resist attending, even if she is partly motivated by spite. But it turns out there's some weird stuff going in this cult, including stuff Vesper didn't know about, and it might not be that easy for her to stay distanced from it.

The whole point here, really, is to blend some very familiar, mundane elements about estranged family and the experience of leaving the religious community of one's birth with some much less mundane horror elements. Which is interesting to me in theory, but I do think this one leaned a little too hard into the mundane, and not in a way that managed to draw me in much, emotionally or otherwise. The religious community just feels very generic, and the main character not a whole lot less so. It's all perfectly okay, perfectly readable. The climax is at least kind of interesting. But I spent way too much of the book -- which is to say, almost all of the book -- just sort of patiently waiting for things to get going. Which I didn't hate or anything, but... Well, it seems like everything else I have to say about this novel falls squarely in the category of damning with faint praise, and I should probably stop before I start saying things like "it was a mostly unobjectionable reading experience." Even, though, really, that's what this was for me. A mostly unobjectionable reading experience. Yep.

Rating: I'm going to give this one 3.5/5. Which feels bit generous to me, but, y'know. It was very, very sort of mostly pretty okay!

>37 bragan: Kudos for managing to write a great review for a mostly unobjectionable book! It made me laugh.

>38 FlorenceArt: Thanks. It can be hard to know what to say about something you had that kind of reaction to!

>37 bragan: Your description made it sound right up my alley, but mundane and bland are not. Thanks for an entertaining review!

>40 RidgewayGirl: It's always possible you might like it better than I did, but it sounded a lot more interesting to me than it was in practice, anyway.

60. Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe by Alan Hirshfeld



This is a history of the evolution of astronomical observation through the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th, taking us through three main important developments: the invention of photography, the invention of spectroscopy, and the building of increasingly large telescopes and how they began to be situated on mountains for better seeing.

I have to admit that, despite my own interest in astronomy and the fact that the author actually does a good job of livening things up with stories about the lives of various astronomers, I found this one pretty slow going. Radio astronomy is more personally relevant to me than optical, and I've always been much more interested in the scientific results than in the equipment that enables those results. So, while I appreciated the point the book as a whole is focused on, that technological innovation leads to scientific discovery, and I appreciated being led to reflect on such things as how profoundly the invention of photography has changed not just the field of astronomy but human life in general, well, there still does come a point where discussions about trial-and-error attempts to improve photographic plates start to make my eyes glaze over a bit. Meaning that, in the end, this turns out to be one of those books I'm glad to have read, but also rather glad to be done reading.

Rating: I have to rate this one from my own perspective, I guess, so I'm going to give it a 3.5/5, but for someone whose interest more exactly coincides with the subject matter, I can certainly see it rating much higher.

61. The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories by Terry Pratchett



A collection of humorous kids' stories written by Pratchett quite early in his career, although some of them were lightly edited by him later. Mostly they're fantasy stories featuring various kinds of magic and adventures (including an early version of what would later become the novel Truckers), but there's also a series of Wild West parodies set in rural Wales. They all feel a lot more uncomplicatedly silly than Pratchett's later stuff, including his later stuff for young readers, but I'm sure I would have found them enchanting as a kid, and as an adult I found them cute. The black and white illustrations are also pleasant, but I could have done without the weird typography. Pretty much every page has something like the word "up" raised higher than the rest of the text, or the word "big" in an extra-big font, or if a character is described as murmuring something, the word "murmured" is in extra-light text, that sort of thing. I'm sure the intention was to be clever and whimsical, and if you're just looking at the page rather than trying to read it, it seems fun, but it's done without much actual regard to the flow of the narrative, and it's really kind of distracting.

Rating: My inner child gives this a 4/5, typography notwithstanding.

Just catching up on your thread, and there are so many excellent reviews here. I especially noted the Oliver Sacks book, which I think I will read.

>44 rv1988: Thanks! The Oliver Sacks one is very short, but definitely worth a look, I think, if that sounds like something that might appeal to you.

62. The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson



There are many parallel worlds, and it is possible to travel to the ones that are sufficiently similar to one's own... but there's one hitch. You can only survive traveling to worlds where the version of you that belongs there is already dead. Which suddenly makes people who grew up in conditions of poverty and violence much more valuable, as far fewer of their alternate selves have survived.

It's a fantastic premise, one with lots of potential for interesting science fictional ideas, a complex plot, and some strong social commentary. And the novel is well-written, with a few interesting twists as it goes along. But I have to say, I had trouble feeling really engaged with it. This is something I seem to be saying a lot lately, so it's entirely possible it has more to do with me and whatever lingering mood I might be in than with the book itself. But maybe not entirely? Because it also has some less interesting twists, and a very unconvincing and unsatisfying romance, and a lot of exploration of a setting that feels not particularly fresh or well-realized, and a rather claustrophobic sense that the entire multiverse contains only different versions of the same eight or so people.

So, the result for me here was very mixed. I appreciate a lot of what the novel was doing, but it just never entirely worked for me quite the way I was hoping it would.

Rating: I'm going to give it 3.5/5. I can't decide if that's overly generous or not.

63. Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris



David Sedaris's most recent collection features, among other things, stories about his experience in the pandemic and about the (non-covid-related) death of his father.

You know, Sedaris is generally thought of as a "humorist," and some of his previous works have, in fact, made me laugh out loud, but it strikes me that by the point he is (and perhaps has been for a while) generally writing fairly serious stuff about his life with at most a bit of a wry touch, rather than doing anything actually comedic. Which is fine, actually. Well, mostly. Some of the pieces in here are poignant, thoughtful, and moving, especially in the places where you can see him wrestling with the question of how you respond to the death of a parent who was actually pretty terrible when he was alive. Elsewhere, though, he does comes across more as just some old guy with enough money to make him hard to relate to being cranky and judgmental and generally doing things that make me kind of want to roll my eyes at him. So, kind of a mixed bag, but the best parts really elevate the collection as a whole.

Rating: In fact, the best parts elevate the whole far enough that, with only a little reservation, I'm going to give this a 4/5.

64. The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch



Book number six in the Rivers of London series, which combines urban fantasy and police procedural. I like a lot of things about these books, certainly enough to have kept me reading this long, but I have to admit that I never find them quite as engaging as I really want them to be, I think mostly because I tend to have a surprising amount of trouble keeping track of the plots. This one's no exception on that score, featuring what initially looks to be a simple case of a rich teenager accidentally overdosing at a party and then spiraling rapidly out into major developments in the series' overarching plot, and leaving me feeling a bit dazed by it all in the process. Not that it isn't interesting. It's just a bit disconcerting to always be staggering along a few steps behind. Maybe because it is so heavy on the police procedural stuff, and that's really not my genre. That having been said, there were certainly things to enjoy here. If nothing else, I always appreciate the wryly amusing and deeply nerdy narration by the main character, Peter Grant, and the ending of this one did leave me interested to see where things might go from here, both in the series' arc and in Peter's personal life.

Rating: a slightly stingy 3.5/5

65. Adventure Time Vol 9 by Christopher Hastings



This ninth collection of Adventure Time comics, as usual, features a short one-shot story followed by a longer multi-part one. The one-shot features Magic Man, owlbears, some extremely fragile egg people, and a rather large breach in the fourth wall, while the longer story sees Finn and Jake going on a spy mission for Peppermint Butler. It's maybe not quite as good the stuff we got during Ryan North's time writing the comic, but it's certainly entertaining enough, and gave me at least a few chuckle-out-loud moments.

Rating: I'm going to give this a 4/5. Which might be generous, and I thought about rating it a bit lower, but, no, it deserves at least half a star extra for Peppermint Butler. I love Peppermint Butler. And am mildly terrified of him.

66. New Mexico: A Photographic Tribute by John Annerino



A collection of photographs from various places in New Mexico, mostly featuring natural land formations or Native American ruins. There's a short introduction, mostly about Chaco Canyon, and the photographs are captioned with the place they were taken and accompanied by historical quotes of varying relevance and poetry, but there is no other text. It's not a particularly large or lavishly produced volume, but some of the images here can definitely stir the soul a little.

Rating: 4/5

67. Annie Bot by Sierra Greer



Annie is an artificial intelligence with a partially organic body, a being whose entire existence is designed to please her owner, to provide with him housekeeping and companionship and sex, and to be precisely what he wants her to be. But she's also been given an ability to grow and learn, and her own developing desires are beginning to cause conflicts she doesn't understand.

I was really impressed by this one. It's very much a story about abusive and controlling relationships, about what men want and what women need, and about the difficulty and overwhelming importance of self-determination. But it doesn't preach to us about these things. It doesn't simplify them or present the man in question as a one-dimensional inhuman monster. Instead, it trusts the reader, utterly, to see in these characters the things that they are incapable of seeing in themselves: his fragile, damaged, all-demanding ego, and her value, not to his ego or his sex drive or the state of his carpets, but to herself. The result, thanks to writing that is simple but extremely self-assured, feels deeply and disturbingly real.

Rating: 4.5/5

>51 bragan: Sounds interesting!

>51 bragan: I agree with Florence. Intriguing review.

>52 FlorenceArt:, >53 labfs39: Thanks! I certainly did... Well, to say I did "enjoy" it isn't quite right, given the subject matter, but I did find it both very readable and very worth reading.

68. Gravity Falls: Journal 3 by Alex Hirsch



So, after recently watching through Gravity Falls and then reading the conveniently just-published and unexpectedly delightful tie-in The Book of Bill, I had to go back and read this earlier volume, too. This one is perhaps slightly less bizarre, slightly less creepy, and slightly more kid-oriented than The Book of Bill, but it's still great. It's a published version of the journal seen in the show, complete with previously missing pages and a few annotations from various characters. (And also some secret codes that I was too lazy to decode but was able to look up online instead. If you're reading it, I absolutely recommend doing one or the other!)

It's kind of nifty getting to hold a version of an item that was so central to the show, and to see pages that we only got brief glimpses of suddenly spread out for your perusal. The book also adds a lot to the televised stories, though, giving follow-ups to some episodes and filling in some important blanks, most notably the answer to the question of where the journal's original author was and what he'd been doing for the past thirty years. There's a lot of the show's usual kind of humor, and I laughed out loud several times. But there's also some great and often surprisingly poignant character stuff. (That scribbled-out drawing of a sailboat! Oh, my heart.) I could completely hear each entry in my head in the voice of the character who wrote it, too. And, not gonna lie, the final few pages, written after the show's big climax, made me stupidly emotional. Over cartoon characters! Well, if the show could do it...

Anyway. Like The Book of Bill, I definitely recommend this one for fans of the show. And while I was fine doing it the other way round, I do ideally recommend reading this one first, as there's a reference or two in the later book I would have understood better if I had.

Rating: I was going to give this 4/5, but then I got to the end and, to repeat, it made me stupidly emotional about cartoon characters. Again. So, screw it, have a 4.5/5, book.

69. Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America's Most Fearsome Predator by Keven Grange



This book wasn't quite what I was hoping it would be when I picked it up. I was expecting it to focus on scientific knowledge about grizzlies, their biology and behavior and so on. But while there is some of that, and while I did learn a few interesting things from it, it's really a lot more about the relationships between grizzlies and humans. So, more their public lives than their secret ones, really. Which was disappointing to me at first, as that's a subject I'd already read a bit about, and the early chapters covered what was, for me, some mostly familiar ground. Fortunately, it did get a lot more interesting to me as it went on, especially the chapters about indigenous Alaskan peoples' relationships to the bears and about the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, where humans have found ways to coexist remarkably well with the bears.

In addition to being about the interactions between humans and grizzlies, though, this was also to a large extent about the author's attempts to learn more about the bears, and the results from that are kind of mixed. I think there is a particular craft to writing this kind of personal-perspective journalism, and Grange hasn't quite nailed it. The results aren't terrible, but they can be a little awkward.

Still, in the end I did very much appreciate the author's perspective on bears and I think the points he makes about the importance of understanding and respecting these animals are well-taken, as are his musings about exactly what respecting them actually means. So even though it's a bit flawed and not quite what I was hoping it would be, I think I'd still recommend it for those interested in grizzlies in particular, or in wildlife conservation in general.

Rating: 3.5/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewer's book.)

70. To the Land of Long Lost Friends by Alexander McCall Smith



Book number 20 in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. In this one, things are slow at the detective agency, so Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi take it on themselves to pursue some personal investigations out of, respectively, concern for an old friend and plain old curiosity. But if you're reading these books expecting anything more than the barest trace of plot, well... I'd say you're very unlikely to have gotten 20 books deep in the series, actually. As always, it's more about just spending time with these sometimes silly but always lovely people, watching them live their lives while gently philosophizing about kindness, relationships between men and women, and how to harmoniously combine respect for tradition with social progress, in a sweet and humor-laced way. This one maybe gets repetitive on a few of those points, but when it's all this charming and good-hearted, how can one possibly mind?

Rating: 4/5

>51 bragan: This one really does sound intriguing.

>58 BLBera: I imagine it's not one that's for everybody -- there's lots of fairly explicit sex, some difficult subject matter involving abusive relationships, a fairly simple writing style, and not a huge amount of plot -- but it really worked for me, so I do recommend it for those who think all that sounds fine.

Continued in a new thread for the final quarter of the year here.

>43 bragan: I listened to the audio, so avoided the typography issues. I also gave it 4 stars, and described the stories as cute, but not great. It was fun though!

>61 WelshBookworm: Avoiding the typography issues sounds good, although I suppose that also means you avoid the illustrations, so I guess it evens out. :)