sorry i forgot how to read for a year

[braintransplant]

 

IMPERIAL RADCH TRILOGY by ANN LECKIE

RATING: 5 stars outstanding show-stopping life-changing groundbreaking exquisite and unprecedentedly beautiful

SUMMARY: There are no words.........

COMMENTS: I decided to finally finish this trilogy after being killed in January of 2021 by Ancillary Justice. I started with a complete re-read of Justice to refresh my memory, and it is still as devastating and fun and thoughtful and interesting and intense as ever. Anyways Breq I love you so much forever until the sun explodes and we all die for real. I’ll just paraphrase from my original review of the first book about how Breq’s grief and rage and pain are so huge and REAL…the emotional core of her really drives the whole series to incredible places. Ann Leckie also deserves so much credit (in my opinion) for taking an outrageously difficult POV concept and making it totally coherent, as well as for having 1000 opportunities to make the obvious choice in terms of worldbuilding and just. Not doing that. The cultures and people and species in these books are simultaneously familiar enough to ring true and yet so bizarre as to be off putting. The Presger translators, Sphene, even Seivarden’s outdated Radchaai proclivities…effervescent stuff! I need to get into the short story/novella side of this universe which I only recently found out exists. Anyways. Breq/literally anyone MY SHIP REAL!!!!!!!!

HIGHLIGHTS: “That,” I said, “is why I hate you. / She laughed, as though I had said something moderately witty. “If that’s what you’re willing to do for someone you hate, what would you do for someone you love?”

HIGHLIGHTS: If you lose this gun, I will not live long enough to forgive you.

PAGES: 1,116 

TRANSLATION STATE by ANN LECKIE

RATING: 3.5 stars

SUMMARY: What if you were never what you thought you were?

COMMENTS: Overall this book feels more juvenile than the rest of the Ancillary universe, which I suppose makes sense given the circumstances of Qven (who I feel, despite being 1 of 3 narrators, the novel centers around). This book takes the universe so much farther into the weeds about multiple bodies being one Person. And I like it. I like to think about it. But ultimately this is pretty middling stuff and didn’t stick with me the way Leckie’s other work has! There were a lot of interesting things occurring in the margins and between the lines of this book; Enae’s family’s tea plantation dynamix, Presger translator babby school, weird ethnonationalist societies…but still. This one just doesn’t have the star power. For another author this might be a better book, you know???

HIGHLIGHT: N/A

PAGES: 422 

 

THE COLLECTED SCHIZOPHRENIAS by ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG

RATING: 4 stars

SUMMARY: What if you could never know if it was real?

COMMENTS: This was such an unexpected hit for me. It got recommended to me on Book Depository (RIP) while I was looking for something new to pick up. Wang is an incredibly captivating writer - such a rare treat for nonfiction. This book is about both schizophrenia as an illness/diagnoses/cultural conception as it is about Wang’s own experiences with it. If you enjoy medical anthropology or criticisms of mental healthcare or just want to read something truly interesting, you should pick this up. It gets a bit woo-woo near the end, though the author admits that - and has interesting thoughts about scientific views on woo-wooiness as well. It also introduced me to the world of Chronic Lyme which is a rabbit hole I cannot stop going down. I really enjoyed the clarity and sympathy this author brings to this topic. Definitely a standout read of the year for me!

HIGHLIGHT: I can’t speak to her now, but I do imagine what it was like to be her on the night she killed her brother. When I think about the murder, I think about how excessive thirteen shots is. I also think about how a man who loomed over your bed in the middle of the night, a man who claimed to be sent by God to kill your daughter, might seem like a man possessed by evil, and therefore capable of anything, including surviving multiple gunshot wounds -- even if you loved him once, or still do.

PAGES: 224

DAISY JONES AND THE SIX by TAYLOR JENKINS REID

RATING: 3.5 stars

SUMMARY: IDK what if you were straight and horny and married to someone else

COMMENTS: I read this after I watched the television show - which only got juicy in the very last episode. Basically the whole drive of this book (which is presented as the transcript of interviews with members of a band a decade or two post-disbandment) is a will-they-won’t-they romance between the two lead singers of a band, one of whom is an addict married to his first love, and the other of whom is an addict with self destructive hypersexual tendencies. I mean, I read it very quickly, and I had some fun, but this book is just above average in terms of overall quality. They should have had an affair for real!!!!! Boooo!!!!!!!!!!

HIGHLIGHTS: N/A

PAGES: 368 

EARTHLINGS by SAYAKA MURATA

RATING: 2.75

SUMMARY: How far would you go to be who you think you are?

COMMENTS: Mostly this book just made me wonder how I end up reading so many books involving cannibalism without seeking it out specifically. I wanted to enjoy this more but I simply didn’t! It has been a few months since I read this and honestly I don’t remember anything specific about it which is an indictment of its general blandness in my opinion.

HIGHLIGHT: N/A

PAGES: 247

AXIOM’S END by LINDSEY ELLIS

RATING: 2 stars

SUMMARY: What if you were reading a terrible first contact novel.

COMMENTS: Guuuuuys I really hated this one. I wanted to like it! But I just didn’t. The main character is genuinely outrageously boring, bland, and annoying - it was a struggle to get through this story alongside her. The vaguely horny human/alien relationship wasn’t even fun!!! BOOOOOO!!!!!!

HIGHLIGHT: N/A

PAGES: 384

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by MARGARET ATWOOD

RATING: 4 stars

SUMMARY: What if property was all you’ll ever be? What if you had to find happiness, had to make a life, had to stay yourself that way?

COMMENTS: Honestly I have no idea why I’ve never picked this up before - I knew it would be right up my alley; disturbing, gross, dark, religious. The internet tells me that this book invented the subgenre of feminist dystopia the way that Ursula K Le Guin invented anthropological science fiction, which I think is a fair assessment (though I can’t assert if it is actually the truth). The Handmaid’s Tale absolutely is dedicated to examining the contradictory ideological conceptions of women, especially among fundamentalist Christians: mothers, servants, property, virgins, whores. I tore through it in about a day. Margaret Atwood’s sparse, direct, yet oddly beautiful writing was so refreshing after dragging myself through the sludge of Axiom’s End. Offred is an incredibly compelling narrator, weaving the story backwards and forwards along an unknown timeline. She is about as low on the ladder as you can get within Gilead society, obviously barring those who are sent to the Colonies. I found the world of this novel incredibly interesting and disturbing, I was scraping up every minute detail Atwood put on the page. The character of Nick was so intriguing as well; his rare appearances added so much to the story and emotional world of Offred. Nick and Offred’s romance/relationship(?) brings so much heart and depth to both of them as characters…like their ability to (seemingly) truly have this escapist love affair and find relief in one another has heartbreaking sincerity inside a very cruel and unfeeling universe. I was also really into the epilogue of this book, which frames the entire novel as a set of tape recordings discovered many decades in the future, studied by scholars focused on the now-fallen nation of Gilead, being discussed and debated at an academic conference. So cool!!!

HIGHLIGHT: Nobody’s heart is perfect.

HIGHLIGHT: You've killed her, I said. She looked like an angel, solemn, compact, made of air. She was wearing a dress I'd never seen, white and down to the ground.

PAGES: 314

THE TESTAMENTS by MARGARET ATWOOD

RATING: 3 star for Aunt Lydia

SUMMARY: What if you had to destroy the only thing you were allowed to build?

COMMENTS: Margaret Atwood should have dropped the other two POVs and just let this be about Aunt Lydia. Aunt Lydia’s position in Gilead basically affords her the knowledge to tell the story of the other two POVs anyway, and her perspective was by far the most interesting, as well as the only one that felt true to/in communion with The Handmaid’s Tale. I listened to part of this on audiobook, and the narrator for Aunt Lydia’s POV is the actress who plays her in the TV adaptation. Her voice is so fitting (in my opinion) and really added to the experience! The POVs of the other two narrators, both teenage girls, comes off as bizarrely YA in a bad way. I also want to thank this book for introducing me to microdots, the greatest spy technology ever invented. I really loved the look into the administrative side of Gilead and the lives of young girls in Gilead after the mystery left behind in The Handmaid’s Tale. Definitely worth a read if you keep your expectations low for ⅔ of the narrators.

HIGHLIGHT: Love is as strong as death.

PAGES: 432