December 2021 update

Complete with hard-to-see honest progress bookmark

Well - it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? In the second half of 2021 a few things happened personally, professionally, and in the world at large. My postdoc contract ended in June and I took a new job in rover operations at ASU. While I was pretty excited about the opportunity, it also meant that I was working full time on campus for basically the first time ever. I also was joining a Mars mission early on enough that operations were still happening seven days a week and at craaaaazy early start times. In the meantime everyone seems to have decided that the pandemic is over and we can all go about our business (despite Delta, and now, Omicron). While I’m still being cautious I have definitely had more pressure to meet with people in person, entertain out of town guests, etc. that has been radically different from the way we lived for over a year.

The result of all this was I didn’t have a lot of time/energy to read in the latter half of 2021, much less blog about it. I feel a bit guilty about that, given how much I enjoyed reading in 2020 and early 2021, but it is what it is. Given that operations schedules have mostly calmed down, I hope to get back to it more in 2022. But who knows.

Here’s a short tour of the rest of the books I read in 2021:

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu (2016), short stories/science fiction

Oof. I was really hoping to like this one. A few of the stories are quite good! The title one especially. But on the whole, no, this did not do it for me at all. You 100% lost me at “fragments that had broken off the [asteroid headed for Earth] were headed for Mars and the moon”. No. Just no. I can suspend disbelief to a point but if you’re going to write science fiction at least pretend to understand orbital dynamics. Also, ending the collection with ‘The Man Who Ended History’? I mean I guess where else could you plausibly put it, but also, yikes? Going out on a torture note made me enjoy this book even less.

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927), literary/historical fiction

This is some goddamned good writing. It’s difficult, for sure - the sudden shifts in point of view, the asides, the period references. I didn’t originally intend to order the annotated version and yet I ended up glad that I did - the introduction gave a lot of context that was actually important, and the references were insightful. Truly, not much really happens in this book except some of the characters (spoiler alert) die off stage and yet.. and yet. It’s a lovely set of meditations on families, femininity, humanity, etc, and I’m better for having encountered it. The dinner scene is wonderful. That said, it was a read that required some dedicated time set aside to process. I read the bulk of it on my birthday vacation/retreat in July and the rest not until Thanksgiving gave me a few days off.

(close) Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson (1996), science fiction

Meh. To be completely fair, I am still ~150 pages from completing this, so I can’t rule out the possibility that it suddenly gets amazing. After Red Mars I have really struggled with Green Mars and this. I’ve had a really hard time accepting that the original characters are a bajillion years old, and somehow the later generations are just not as interesting. This book in particular gets so far from first book’s premise of settling on Mars and lets its artificially ancient characters flit about the solar system. I literally have been abandoning and returning to this book for a year and hope to finally finish it soon. (See sad progress book mark above). But I spent enough time with it this year that I feel justified in including it.

The Liar’s Dictionary - Eley Williams (2020), contemporary/historical fiction

This was fun, but to be honest, not as fun as I’d hoped. It suffers mainly from a lack of side characters and plot. There are two alternating protagonists, but all that’s going on is their existential crises. Neither one has any friends?! Mallory has a girlfriend and her boss but seemingly no parents or friends. Peter only has only his random crush and his co-workers. I liked the two poor insecure protagonists but they live in such a constrained world. Also, there’s a bit about factory explosion that’s really unclear that it’s not a train crash and doesn’t do anything for the plot?! Maybe I just missed the mark on this one. The invented words are fun! I just wish it had gone somewhere.

Gilead

Guess what the background is

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Publication: 2004

Genre: Historical fiction

Oof. Nope. Nope nope nope. This has been on my periphery for years and it’s difficult to tell if I would have disliked it at any time or it just hit wrong in early 2021. A disorganized collection of ramblings from an old-timey minister waiting to die was not, not, NOT good pandemic reading.

This was such a slim book I was initially convinced I was going to barrel through it in short order, but….nope. I really struggled to make any progress with it. Eventually I accepted that I was going to read it in 10-20 page increments and just let it take however long I needed.

John Ames, the aforementioned minister and pastor of a church in Gilead, Iowa, is writing a letter to his son to read after his death. Ames is dying of an unspecified heart ailment, and as the unnamed son was born late in his life, he won’t have many memories of his father. The narrative then proceeds to traipse about through contemporary happenings, Ames’s own adult life, his father and grandfather’s life, and a whole bunch of drama with his friend and fellow minister’s family. He talks about God a lot and it’s sweet but ultimately rather boring. (If you are Christian you might enjoy this more, perhaps.) Abolition and interracial marriage are in there too, but in a rather unsatisfying white-perspective-focused manner. A lot of the rest of it was awfully melancholy, which was one hundred percent not what I needed in a reading experience right now.

It was also really unclear at times who was doing what, because Ames refuses to name half his characters when he writes about them. His father and grandfather get no names, his son doesn’t get a name, and his wife only gets a name through a different character’s dialogue towards the end of the book. His wife comes nowhere near being fully realized as a character, presenting as something of a shy lost soul that he rescued from sin. ‘Kay. I have to wonder how much of this is intentional – Robinson deliberately showing the weaknesses of one elderly person’s perspective. I’m not sure. I do know that I would have rather heard more from the other characters in the mix – but not so much that I’m going to pick up Robinson’s other novels to look for them.

One bit of text I did appreciate and set aside (paraphrased here): The inadequacy of your concepts has nothing to do with the reality of the situation. May we all remember that.

Old Man's War

I refuse to go back and try to figure out which alien race the flying things are supposed to be

Author: John Scalzi

Publication: 2005

Genre: Science Fiction

Once again, something recommended to me by a friend some time ago. What a romp. Old Man’s War is a good old-fashioned space adventure slash worldbuilding exercise obviously setting up for a series. It borrows heavily from (and dutifully acknowledges) Heinlein with appropriate modern twists.

The narrator, also named John, has reached age 75, at which point he’s contracted to join the interplanetary army. Nobody on Earth really knows what that entails, they just assume it’s better than dying of old age. John’s wife has already died, so he overly calmly severs the remainder of his earthly connections and launches to space. Without getting overly spoiler-y, the space army equips him to be a good soldier and then flings him around the galaxy for the rest of the book.

Even at 15 years old, the text rings mildly sexist. Even when some of the troops are women, they’re all “men”. The leadership skews male. The narrator’s male gaze is obvious. Race or nationality doesn’t enter in any meaningful fashion, other than some backhanded swipes at overpopulation consequences in Asian countries (yikes). It’s implied that the soldiers are mainly white and American.

The narrator is a relatable everyman (at least if you’re a white dude). He has no real personality other than 1) infallible natural aptitude for war games and 2) being the only old person still in love with his spouse. My copy had a few noticeable typos. It’s a first novel, and I understand that it was serially self-published at first, but it could have used stronger editing in places. Scalzi tends to repeat words in close proximity to one another, which is jarring in otherwise pleasantly well-written verbiage.

All these caveats aside, it’s a fun read. It goes down easy with a heathy dose of snark. The story has just enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. I enjoyed it; probably even enough to pick up some of the sequels.

Enter the Aardvark

Well hello there

Author: Jessica Anthony

Publication: 2020

Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Satire

Where to begin. In parallel storylines, a British naturalist in 1875 “discovers” the aardvark in Namibia and ships a specimen to his secret gay lover back in England to be taxidermied. Meanwhile, in 2019 (?) Washington D.C., someone clandestinely FedExs aforementioned taxidermied aardvark to a closeted Republican congressman. Hijinks ensue.

I am officially giving up numerical ratings for these reviews, and this book is the reason. I struggled mightily with the rating for this one. I really did. My instinct was honestly 9/10. But did I want to rate Aardvark the same as a beautifully constructed novel like Rules of Civility or a the last hurrah for a beloved Terry Pratchett character? This is 180 pages about repressed gay love and taxidermy that, more than flirting with the absurd, wholeheartedly embraces it.

Forget the rating and the comparisons, I loved it. It’s short enough that something’s constantly happening. The second-person narration of the modern story line works. So did the semi-stream-of-consciousness writing and seamless introduction of details unknown to either narrator. It’s over the top. It leans in to the craziness and the excessively paralleled narratives and the caricature of the Republican congressman’s character. There is a major plot point involving transplanted eyeballs.

I can think of 99 reasons why Aardvark isn’t going to work for everyone. Fair enough. But damn, it reeled me in and held me and I don’t remember the last time I read a short book this fast. I’ll fault it a little on the ending, which doesn’t quite hold up, but after the wild ride that was the previous three parts I’ll allow it. Probably a good time to acknowledge that these reviews aren’t really about the literary quality of anything I read. It’s about how much I enjoyed reading whatever it was. And to that end, begone stars.

Homegoing (8/10)

A slim comfortable paperback; not much to say.

Author: Yaa Gyasi

Publication: 2016

Genre: Historical Fiction

I’m getting to the end of my pile of books that I read in 2020 - just two more will take us to the new year. This was a good one (unsurprisingly, given the hype I’d heard about it).

Homegoing tells the story of two families, related through a pair of half-sisters permanently unknown to one another. It begins in late eighteenth century Ghana. Effia is married off to a white slave trader and her descendants become involved in trafficking other humans. Esi is captured in one of their raids and shipped to America to live out her life enslaved. Each sister’s story gets an initial chapter, and then each subsequent chapter alternates between the perspective of one of the sisters’ descendants. The narrative structure of one moment in time gives the novel a quality of being a collection of short stories, all nearly identical in length.

Gyasi writes beautifully and constructs authentic characters. Her prose make sit easier to stay with the characters when their stories are difficult. On both sides of the Atlantic, the stories are heavy on pain, longing, unfulfilled desire, and failed relationships. Everyone in the book is sad. They’re enslaved or they’re incarcerated. They’ve lost their parents or been left by their spouses. They have unfulfilled dreams or unrequited loves. The stories are poignant and sometimes heartbreaking.

 In the final few chapters I found myself fatigued with the “short story” setup – I knew every time a romantic interest was introduced that they were going to break the protagonist’s heart in the next fifteen pages. In tracing the lineage of each character, the narrative sometimes gets very hung up on their sexual pursuits and familial dissatisfactions at the expense of other aspects of their character.

It seemed that each chapter had a historical “subject”, which I have mixed feelings about. In this one we’re doing northern slave catching before the US Civil War, in that one we’re doing Christian missionaries in Ghana, in this other one we’re doing the Great Migration and colorism, and so on. While early on Gyasi makes sure to drop references to the year to anchor the reader, later on she neglects to do so. Meanwhile, she makes some of the characters so old that they begin cropping up in the stories narrated by their much younger descendants. Without some more careful re-reading and math, I’m quite unsure when the last two sections of the book, which ostensibly would bring the story into the late twentieth century, actually occur. The last few chapters feel like a sprint to the finish line, and IMHO there is a missed opportunity to bring the story into the present day.

Still, on the whole, Homegoing is a very interesting premise that was mostly well executed. Definitely recommended.

Immigrant, Montana (7/10)

Bonus background: shawl my friend brought me back from his trip home to India.

Author: Amitava Kumar

Publication: 2018

Genre: Historical Fiction

This book is all over the place, but in a way that for whatever reason I rather enjoyed. I picked up Immigrant on a whim, expecting from the plot description that it would be a straightforward novel of the Indian immigrant experience in America. Instead it weaves the experience of immigrating to America in the 90s to attend grad school with the author’s literary studies and sexual exploits. There is a lot of sex.

AK (who is not necessarily the author although his nickname is the author’s initials) immigrates from India to the USA in the early 90’s. Though it’s never made explicitly clear, he’s attending graduate school at Columbia. He proceeds to try to write a thesis and screw several of his classmates. The protagonist/author clearly has no idea how to deal with women other than as sexual objects, but his ineptitude makes this somewhat sympathetic rather than threatening.

The title, for what it’s worth, is a corruption of the town of Emigrant, MT, a location the narrator visits with one of his love interests.

The book reads as part memoir, part novel. It remains unclear how much of each part is present, or which, at any given moment, is driving the train. Kumar juxtaposes history, scholarly musings, and the protagonists own life and throws in a smattering of uncaptioned images. Footnotes and asides abound. But despite the sometimes haphazard consctruction, Immigrant is a slim volume that’s an easy and diverting read.

My Brilliant Friend (6/10)

It is really unclear for most of the book who is getting married here. There were more representative choices for this artwork for sure.

Author: Elena Farrante

Publication: 2012

Genre: Historical Fiction

Let me start off by saying I don’t understand the hype around this novel. It was alright. I enjoyed some parts of it. I admit I’m not that into bildungsroman or adult novels with child narrators. But except for the last third or so, I thought there wasn’t much in the way of plot or interest to this book. That last third somewhat rescued it because there were finally stakes involved, but before that it was a bit of a slog.

I struggled with the Italian names in a way that I haven’t done since my last early Russian novel. Thank goodness for the character list at the beginning. Ferrante switches back and forth between referring to characters by the first names, family names, pet names, pet names that only the narrator uses, etc. It is all fairly confusing.

The plot follows the narrator, Elena (Lenu? Greco?) and her friend Lila (Lina? Rafaella?) who are growing up poor in 1950s Naples. Both girls are smart, although Lila supposedly is more so. When the girls complete their woefully inadequate primary schooling, Elena’s family allows her to continue at middle and high school while Lila’s family sends her to work. Elena proceeds to get her entire identity wrapped up in academic success and being “different” from the rest of her impoverished community. She constantly compares herself to a vision of what Lila would have been like if she had gone on a different path. Lila meanwhile does her own thing.

It’s exhausting to be in Elena’s head. She hates her family, doesn’t really have any friends, and treats boys as useful objects. Her perspective is extremely narrow. Meanwhile, she is consumed with her relationship with Lila throughout, despite how they don’t even seem to like each other half the time.

I don’t know if I’ll continue with the other three books in this cycle. I probably will eventually, as I’m a a bit of a completionist. I’m also genuinely curious whether adult Elena is less annoying than adolescent Elena. But I’m in no rush.

Lincoln in the Bardo (9/10)

The book’s cover gives away absolutely nothing, which adds to the shock value of actually opening it.

Author: George Saunders

Publication: 2017

Genre: Historical Fiction, Fantasy

I was not aware upon ordering this that it was an experimental novel. I was therefore highly confused when I flipped through it for the first time. Lincoln alternates between historical (and pseudo-historical) accounts of Abraham Lincoln around the death of his son Willie, and the narrative of ghosts that Willie finds himself with in a kind of in-between place after death. If that sounds weird, you don’t know the half of it.

The historical fiction parts are shaped around Lincoln’s struggles to effectively lead the country during the Civil War. He’s receiving harsh criticism for his management of the war and the deaths of so many of the nation’s children. At the beginning of the novel, in an obvious metaphor, the Lincolns throw a lavish party at the White House while Willie lies deathly ill upstairs. After he succumbs and is buried, (mild spoiler) Lincoln visits his tomb and holds his body. (The author has said in interviews that this is based on real historical accounts, which, yikes.)

The fantasy parts find spirit Willie in the bardo. The wild and weird residents are in denial about being dead and stubbornly refuse to pass on, despite insistent encouragement from the powers that be. Willie, as a child, faces harsh consequences for lingering, but is held back by the presence of his father.

The residents of the bardo and their backstories are often bawdy and gross. They do, however, effectively immerse the reader in the messiness of life and death. And the moments in between are sweet and sad and ultimately have a beautiful message about living with grief. I was impressed by both by the book’s construction and by its the execution.

In the ‘miscellaneous complaints’ category - I was put off by the author’s failure to distinguish between real and invented historical sources. Some of the “quoted” works sound authentic. Others are clearly fabricated - we don’t have the letters of a woman who happened to spot Lincoln entering the cemetery at 2 am because she lived across the street.

On the whole though this was a moving read. I thoroughly recommend it to adults, in no small part because I’ve never read anything quite like it.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (4/10)

Pretty standard paperback with cover image that suggests way more intrigue than is actually present between the covers.

Author: John Berendt

Publication: 1994

Genre: It’s a little unclear, honestly?

Two in a row as I try to catch up on the backlog! This one’s a doozy.

I cannot understand for the life of my why people love this book. The plot meanders around and goes absolutely nowhere. The characters might have been ~interesting~ when the book was published in 1994 but certainly not in 2020. Why do I need an entire chapter of Emma Kelly galavanting around rural Georgia? Why does Chablis keep getting reintroduced for shock value? (And oof, the 1980s lack of distinction between drag queen and transgender person is cringy.) Why bother with Joe Odom, who is the most boring and possibly least successful conman in literature? Also, please could we have less of Minerva.

The book does its job as a window into Savannah in a particular time and place. I’m unsure whether I would have liked it more if it had stuck with that or dialed back the travelogue content and attempted to construct a compelling narrative in its place. It can’t do both.

I’m particularly offended by the novel’s attempt to frame itself as a “true crime” story. The author has obviously messed with the timeline and characters for dramatic effect, going so far as to act as if he casually wandered down to Savannah out of his own interest rather than explicitly to cover the murder trials.

I’m giving Midnight one or two more stars than it probably deserves on the grounds that I really did enjoy the middle section of it. The early chapters of Part Two are engaging and fooled me in to thinking the plot was finally going somewhere. (Spoiler, no, it was merely going to more sidebar character portraits.) Jim Williams is a character it is awfully difficult to care about, the narrator is an unacknowledged character it is awfully difficult to relate to, and honestly by the end of the whole thing I was just tired.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (9/10)

I don’t have anything witty to say about this one - can you tell I’m running out of new backgrounds?

Author: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Publication: 2019

Genre: Science fiction

Again it’s been awhile! since I finished this one. I’m going to try to catch up on the backlog a bit. There have been some good ones lately, but this might be the best of the bunch. Time War deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it (including, most recently, a Hugo award).

In summary: two time-traveling agents of futuristic powers are locked in battle with each other. Each belong to their own kind of hive mind. Red is the agent of a hive-mind robot (AI?) entity. Blue is the agent of an edenic garden world. They travel through time and possibility, wrecking havoc on the strands of history that will lead to the other side’s future dominance.

In the aftermath of a battle, Blue leaves an encoded “letter” for Red and they begin a correspondence. Throughout the first 2/3 of the text letters fly back and forth between disparate locales in time and space. The format evokes Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the (derivative, imho) Sum by David Eagleman (and probably others) in its short, descriptive hops between settings. Unlike its predecessors, though, in Time War there is a love story brewing. Most of the short sections alternate between letters written by the two protagonists, and scenes in which they place the “letters” in various forms in their surroundings, while being chased by an unexplained figure known only as “the seeker”.

In my reading, at least, the twist became clear somewhat before it was actually put in to play, but it was still brilliant executed.

My only criticism, perhaps, is that the authors spend too much space hinting and describing rather than telling the reader what the hell is going on, necessitating in a very closing (re-) reading of certain passages. Or maybe I’m just slow. On the whole, though, Time War is a delight, and one that I won’t hesitate to revisit.

The Great Gatsby (?/10)

I have my dad’s old copy from 1980 (cover price $4.95!) that I unashamedly totally stole from his collection sometime in high school.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Publication: 1925

Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction

I should not love this book as much as I do. Nothing good happens within its pages, and quite a lot of bad things do. Virtually all of the characters are awful human beings. And yet it’s sad and beautiful and full of lovely language, and I can’t stop returning to it.

I’ve read Gatsby at least three, if not four or five times. I think I read it the first time in high school after stealing my dad’s copy on a whim, but fifteen years later I’m not 100% sure it wasn’t assigned in my junior year English class first. This time I read into it a few things I hadn’t noticed before; I think the fact that this I’m quite close to the age of most of the characters gives me a different perspective than younger me.

Anyway, Gatsby is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway, a wealthy midwesterner in his late twenties who moves to Long Island and promptly finds himself enmeshed in a debacle involving his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Adultery, debauchery, and general mayhem follow, with Nick as the somewhat unwilling observer. I’ve always identified with Nick more than a reader is probably supposed to, given that he’s a fairly passive observer for most of the events of the novel. Yet something about his general attitude of “What are you crazy people DOING and why are you dragging me along with you?” has always resonated with me.

I love how sparse it is. Gatsby doesn’t waste any space - each of the nine chapters has a particular purpose in advancing the story. You can imagine a contemporary author making the same plot last three times as long, but it wouldn’t add anything of substance. Every bit is necessary.

I know it’s cliche to like this book. I also know it contains racist language and attitudes about Black and Jewish people that aren’t acceptable in any era, and it can only be read as a product of its time. I recognize that I’m reading a book by a white guy, written largely for white people. It also has spoken to me across fifteen years of growth in a way no other book has. It’s a brief, bittersweet reminder that we can’t live in the past. I’m not going to rate it, and I’m not going to say it’s a great book that everybody should check out. But I did read it again during this quarantine period, and it’s no good to pretend I didn’t.

Snuff (9/10)

This image starts to make sense in the later part of the book, but that's still not quiiiiiite how things went.

Author: Terry Pratchett

Publication: 2011

Genre: Fantasy

To explain why I loved this book I have to go way back to the early 2000s when I first discovered Terry Pratchett. My introduction was Night Watch. It’s not only one of the ‘Watch’ series-within-a-series of Pratchett books, but one intensely focused on Sam Vimes. Hence he’s always been a favorite character of mine. This is the last Watch book and one of the last novels Pratchett published before his death from Alzheimer’s in 2015, so it was a bittersweet read.

Summary: Ankh-Morpork City Watch Commander and reluctant Duke Sam Vimes is forced by his wife take a vacation at her estate in the country. Almost immediately he discovers a murder has occurred. What was that about a vacation, exactly?

My take: I was a bit annoyed on my reread of Night Watch last summer at Vimes’ qualities of smugly knowing what to do and magically always being three steps ahead of his adversary. Vimes hasn’t changed, but those qualities are deployed more satisfyingly here. They make sense for the older character, and Pratchett does a better job exposing Sam’s weaknesses and limitations. The last nearly 200 pages are a really fun ride, and I was sad to turn the last one. I wouldn’t recommend this as an introduction to Terry Pratchett- it’s probably best enjoyed after a few of the earlier Watch books. But as a conclusion (alas) to a long arc, it’s deeply satisfying.

Some miscellaneous complaints: Could Vimes shut up about about Sybil for eight seconds, honestly? The only other thing was that a lot of time is spent introducing the house and its servants at the beginning of the book, but as it never really led to anything later it came off as unneeded.

One final note: I didn’t buy this book back in February expecting for its content to be topical. But coincidentally I’ve seen this quote going around (page 244 of my paperback copy):

“It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.”

Snuff has a lot to say on the appropriate role of law enforcement, including a fair bit on the use of violence. Might be useful reading for some of America’s cops, and perhaps its politicians…

Rules of Civility (9/10)

I never did work out which characters are represented by the cover, if any.

Author: Amor Towles

Publication: 2011

Genre: Historical Fiction

I’ve been meaning to pick up this book ever since I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow two years ago and loved it. It didn’t disappoint.

Summary: Katey Kontent is a twenty-something Russian-American New Yorker working as a typist and living in a boardinghouse with her friend Eve in 1938. On the eve of the new year, Katey and Eve have a chance encounter with wealthy banker Tinker Grey, around whom much of the rest of the novel revolves. The title refers to Tinker’s copy of George Washington’s notes on good character, which serve as a commentary on the nature of polite society throughout the rest of the novel. After an unfortunate accident draws Tinker and Eve together, Katey proceeds to careen around the upper echelons of New York society while a series of colorful characters flit in and out of frame. She steadily climbs through a combination of wit, charm, happenstance, and, crucially, others’ benevolence disguised as happenstance. I realize this is rather similar to the lack of description given on the back cover, but it’s hard to say much more without giving away significant amounts of plot.

My take: This book is a quite a ride. Just when I thought it was going one way fairly reliably, it took an abrupt 90 degree turn. Characters that dominated the scene for sixty pages are suddenly thrown out in the cold, never to reappear. It’s a fun sort of keeping you guessing that makes you want to turn the page. Katey is an easy narrator to get along with. Towles’ writing is a delight, much in the same style as in Moscow. He has a lovely way of describing a setting in just enough detail so you can picture it while not getting bogged down in the fourteen graded hues of the sunset. Towles has a masterful ability to show rather than tell - to the point where I had to read quite carefully in key moments to make sure I got the implications of events correctly.

Some miscellaneous complaints: Nothing major, honestly! Perhaps that it compares unfavorably to Moscow, but that is hardly fair. I found the character of Wallace a bit too apt; he seemed added in after to fill a gap left in Katey’s year. Oddly enough, the trickle of information about Katey’s background early in the novel left me wondering if she had secrets that were crucial to the later plot; that didn’t really turn out to be the case. Red herring, I suppose.

Though the characters are put through their paces, the results are (spoilers) given away by a reference to Agatha Christie’s novels in act three. Her works, as well as this novel, are satisfying because “men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them.” I certainly found it so. I’m glad to have spent some time with this little slice of the past and I hope Towles will pen a few more like it.

Green Mars (7/10)

My copy is a little worse for wear after an airplane beverage incident.

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Publication: 1993

Genre: Science Fiction

Let’s start off. Green Mars is the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I’d never read any of them before last year, despite making a joke with the titles in my winning submission to a Science as Art competition in grad school. I picked up the first book, Red Mars, last year on a whim and rather enjoyed it. It’s been slow going, since all three paperbacks weigh in at 500+ pages. But it’s well worth it.

Summary: The First Hundred Martian colonists are now mostly in hiding after the failed revolution of 2051. They’re ridiculously old as the result of some fancy-dancy anti-aging treatments and have several generations of descendants born on Mars. The planet is in the control of powerful enormous corporations, which are also consolidating power on a struggling Earth. Martian terraforming has accelerated and adapted life forms are spreading. The First Hundred, younger generations born on Mars, and newer immigrants all have different opinions on how (or if) developing the planet should proceed. They have to figure out how to work together to decide what a free Mars would look like and how to achieve it.

My take: This book was some work to get through, in large part because I enjoy some narrators much more than others. I love the sections focused on the workings of people, particularly the ones focused on Nadia. I cannot stand Sax. I took multiple breaks from reading because I got so bogged down in the hundred-page section where he goes on and on about lichen and baby bonsai trees. Spare me.

As a planetary scientist, the geographic content is really interesting to me. Robinson was writing these books in the early 90s before most of the modern orbital cameras had arrived at Mars. Most of the non-human-constructed locations in the book are very large features. Major sections of the book takes place in Isidis, and yet there’s no mention of the yet-to-be-named Jezero Crater! Regardless, I will admit I learned a little geography following along.

Some miscellaneous complaints: These characters were clearly conceived of in a much earlier era. The author isn’t *fantastic* at character development across the board, but he’s way worse at writing believable women. He’s hardened each of the major female characters in the First Hundred into stereotypes, many of them unflattering. In particular, the Maya/Jackie characterization and dynamic is cringey. Tell me again about the beautiful crazy women everyone can’t help falling in love with, yeah, sure. And Robinson could really lay off the overdetailed color descriptions. If I had a penny for every time he took a full paragraph to describe the sky….

However, the world he builds is fascinating enough to put up with all that. It’s fun to think about the ways that we could transform another planet, and what colonizing one would mean for our own. Robinson does a great job linking the each individual character to the overall social and physical issues facing Mars. I see why this is a classic. The last hundred pages were beautiful, and I’m looking forward to seeing where these characters go next.