Rated The Robots of Dawn 8/10
book
Rated A Desolation Called Peace 10/10
A tense, clever, and thoughtful political thriller in space, almost as great as the first book in the series. I really like all the thought and care that gets put into the world and the way different characters have varying perspectives on it.
Rated The Butcher of the Forest 8/10
really good - a concise and contained story (rare for the genre!) that suggests a rich larger world without burdening the tight little narrative with a ton of exposition or explanation. more like this please!
Wants to read The Gay Place
Wants to read Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
Rated Digging Stars 8/10
not a knockout like HOUSE OF STONE, maybe feels a little loose, but a compelling and interesting read - especially how it puts you inside the perspective of a Zimbabwean for whom American political/racial dynamics are somewhat opaque.
Rated Velvet Was the Night 8/10
A clever and compelling thriller set against the backdrop of political repression in 1970s Mexico.
Rated A Natural History of Dragons 6/10
I would have loooooved this when I was a kid. As a (married, child-having) adult it's hard to get past the way the protagonist handles the events of the last couple chapters of the book.
Rated A Tale for the Time Being 10/10
A tender, strange and intellectually restless novel about time, memory, loneliness and the fragile ways people become connected through words. It moves between intimate teenage despair and much larger questions about history, technology, nature and whether reading someone’s story can become a form of responsibility.
Some of its philosophical detours occasionally slow the emotional momentum, but they also give the book its unusual depth. What stayed with me most was its refusal to treat suffering as something neat or easily resolved. It allows uncertainty to remain uncertainty.
Quietly devastating, formally playful and much warmer than its darkest moments initially suggest. A book about finding another person’s voice and realizing that simply paying attention may already change both of you.
Wants to read Rainbows End
Wants to read The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI
Wants to read Wizard of the Crow
Rated Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream 10/10
Exceptional - well researched and reported, eye-opening, infuriating. As mad as you think you are at private equity, you can always be madder
Rated Devil House 8/10
a little bit less than the sum of its parts, but compelling and well-written
Wants to read Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
Wants to read Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War
Rated How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World 10/10
love this. very thoughtfully done and lays out a theory of infrastructure as both care and freedom. Practical and informative, but with ideas, too.
Rated I Who Have Never Known Men 10/10
This book is fairly misrepresented in the blurb and people's descriptions, IMO, I don't think it's about female friendship and intimacy basically at all, and it's only barely science fiction. It's one of the most existentially horrifying novels I have ever read, though. It's about the death of an entire society and is clearly informed by the Holocaust.