I recently finished the Mass Effect trilogy of games, and wanted to read some light space opera in a similar vein. This hit the spot! Very quick read too.

This book was a little too fast-paced for me. We only follow two perspectives, ping-ponging between them quite rapidly with each chapter informing the next. This makes for a very fast read, but it also makes the narrative feel linear and the world feel small—despite a threat against the entire solar system. But I had enough fun to jump right to the second book, so I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this one! It portrays the coming-of-age of a gay second-generation Chinese-American immigrant in McCarthyist US, and I think it did a good job of painting a picture of the period—but at the same time the book didn’t do that much for me. It was fine! I’m no expert on the period but it seems fairly accurate, the character writing is believable and empathetic, but it is also quite slow and the central romance is a bit plain. (Though I do appreciate the portrayal of a baby butch!) This is the sort of book where nothing much happens until 3/4 of the way through, and I often felt like the book could use some more momentum; this momentum is especially lacking because the book included a flashback at the end of every part to one of the protagonist’s family members, and while these flashbacks are good on their own and serve their purpose, they take an already slow book and make it even slower. This is also firmly in the YA camp, but I mostly found myself caring more about the adults than the children really.

I liked it overall, but I don’t think it will stick with me.

“Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them.”

“Sometimes I think that Mom is like a character from a fairy tale: engrossing until I outgrew that kind of story. Now I want to read other things.”

Candy House by Jennifer Egan is a kaleidoscopic book, somewhere between a short story collection and a novel. It moves between perspectives, times, forms and genres, the stories loosely connected by (often blurry and seemingly insignificant) connections between characters. Yet calling it a short story collection would be wrong, because they do build to something greater, there are shared themes with each story adding some additional layer of nuance and complexity to the whole (much like her book A Visit from the Goon Squad).

Reading the blurb, you’d think it’s about how the advent of a new technology under capitalism and how it fundamentally changes everything: one that allows you to externalise all your memories, thoughts, etc, called Own Your Unconscious™, and allows access to others’ memories and experiences in exchange for giving access likewise. This is, in some sense, the premise of the book, it’s where it begins, and yet the technology itself is barely present for most of it; if you go in expecting something in the register of sci-fi it will be disappointing. At the same time, this is possibly the best way to actually depict the impact of technology: even in the stories that don’t even mention Own Your Unconscious—or the ones featuring characters that refuse to use it—it is still there, off-page, impacting everything. Often when its ramifications are fully on-page it seems absurd (intentionally so, I think).

Some people will shake their heads at literary fiction “pretending at” being sci-fi, but I wonder if it’s the only way to write something that feels real in this space. The technology at the center of the book isn’t real, obviously, but that’s besides the point: we are always at the advent of a new technology that threatens to change everything, and yet at the same time it feels like nothing really changes. We’re always living both in the present and the future we’re collectively imagining, and the imagined future is also shaping our present. (This book was published in 2022, right as AI hype was beginning to take off—I don’t think this should be read as a response to AI, but it feels like one all the same.)

A Visit from the Goon Squad shares a similar structure to this book, but I think, while Goon Squad was great, it really works here. The stories are all connected by distant connections across space and time, much like people are able to make sense of the past and find new connections when sifting through the memories of others uploaded to the cloud. The form of the book mirrors the impact Own Your Unconscious is having. Each chapter plays with form, and my favourite instance of this was a story set in the past, with a present-tense omniscient narrator. What you learn, eventually, is that this is not an omniscient narrator, nor is it in the past: it is a cobbled together narrative of what happened to a woman’s father, based on the memories she can find in the cloud (and just as much the memories she can’t find).

There is a character speculated to be trans in the penultimate chapter, and I strongly disliked her pixie girl-ish characterisation. I think I do see what it’s going for at least: the book has an overarching theme of authenticity (which sounds more trite said out loud than I found it while reading). I think she is intended as someone in (desperate) search of it, and I think abandoning your name and its place in the symbolic order to search for something new and real and true is perhaps the most “authentic” thing one can do. It is also impossible to fully escape this alienation and the book implies as much! In this way I think it “works”, yet I still find it could have been written from a place of real empathy (to treat someone as a Real Person) rather than one trying to make a literary point.

Not every story in this book is made equal, but all of them are at least good, clever, and none of them waste your time. If you liked A Visit from the Goon Squad you’ll almost definitely like this; if you want something that spends a lot of time with the sci-fi-ish premise you won’t like this. Sometimes screaming is the only real thing you can do.

I read this book for two reasons: (1) my partner told me to read Lacan, and I quickly discovered that reading Lacan’s own words right off the bat was a bad idea, and (2) Žižek is a weird and funny Type of Guy.

Is this book a good introduction to Lacan? Not really! Or maybe! I definitely got the sense that Žižek is not really interested in teaching the basics of Lacan as such and is more interested in using Lacan to analyse movies and politics. In the process of doing that he does introduce some of Lacan’s basic concepts, but I think the book does a pretty poor job of situating them in a bigger picture, and it often goes for long periods of time without really touching on Lacan’s thought at all because Žižek is deep in some other argument he wants to make. An example of this is that the second chapter (out of seven!) is largely focused on interpassivity: some quick googling made me realise that while Lacan does briefly touch on this phenomenon he didn’t even give it its name, and the development of the term and its theory really has more to do with Žižek than with Lacan. It’s a strange choice. There’s a chapter on Alien that’s quite fun, but once again the passage he chooses to use to illuminate seems less like one chosen because it’s useful and more because it’s easy to connect to Alien (the “lamella” as a facehugger, haha).

I think there are probably better books to read to figure out what Lacan was on about. This one isn’t very dense, however, so it’s at least an easy read, and it does play around with some fun concepts. Generally speaking I wish Žižek was better at actually sticking to the subject he is ostensibly talking about, but anyone who’s watched a Žižek clip won’t be surprised to know he writes Like That so you’ll at least be prepared for it.

Also, psychoanalysis is always at its most insufferable whenever talking about sex & gender, and that’s no exception here. I should read Judith Butler this year!

The more I think about this one the more I’m convinced that this book is amazing.

This book has been labelled dystopian, and although that is true on the surface, this book is less interested in exploring and warning of a potential future and more interested in the construction of identity. The premise is that forty people wake up in a cage with no memory as to how that came to be: specifically, thirty-nine women and one child. No one knows the child’s parents; no one knows her name; she is only the Child, and she has no memory of the previous world: she only knows the cage, the thirty-nine women, and the (male) guards that watch over them but never speak. Those in the cage have no purpose, there is nothing to do, and their survival is guaranteed: when sick they are handed pills, when hungry they are given food. The novel begins as the Child begins to think, and is presented as her memoir. From the very beginning the Child understands herself as fundamentally different from every other human she can see: she is not like the other women in the cage, and she is not like the guards. The central question the novel is asking, then, isn’t “how did this situation occur?”—the book tells you right off the bat that there will be no easy answers—it’s “how does a person develop into a subject with no name, no gender, no mirror, no room for human activity, and no purpose?”

If that question sounds interesting to you I think this is absolutely worth a read. If you go in just based on the sci-fi premise however I think it’ll be disappointing. But it’s a short book, and after sitting on it for a few days I’m convinced I need to reread it. The author was a psychoanalyst and it shows, so I’m curious how much more I’d get out of this after deep-diving into psychoanalysis some more.

This series fell off a cliff! Every issue I had with ARC 1 was ratcheted up to 11.

ARC 1 ends on a cliffhanger. I had some problems with that ending—it was quite abrupt and underwritten—but it at least did a good job setting up higher stakes for the next volume, right? Not if the main character decides “well that seems scary” and completely abandons every single story thread from the previous book in favour of wandering the countryside. I think there are two reasons this happened. (1) In the afterword the author says this was mostly a worldbuilding exercise for him, and from that perspective this makes sense. We get to see more of the world! Unfortunately the rest of the world is utterly lifeless and boring, just Generic Medieval Village #327 followed by Generic Medieval Village #328. And (2) I’m making an assumption, but I do not think the author knew where the plot was going at this point. He’d written himself into a corner and, unfortunately, as it was a web serial it still had to get updates.

Here’s what an average chapter of Mother of Learning ARC 2 feels like:

I decided to visit the Sneezing Tiger web. We spent three weeks negotiating, but eventually they gave me a list of other webs that could be interested: The Fluffed Pillows, the Tasty Snacks, the Spears of Destiny, and the Dingleberry Dunces. I had some time to kill in the meantime, so I just kinda wandered around and explored the dungeon.

It’s all written in a summary style: it’s all tell no show, with a lot of long lists.

A new villain gets introduced in this volume, to replace the one that had been set up and then completely ignored from ARC 1. (Maybe you could say he “haunts the narrative”; I think that’s giving too much credit.) When I say introduced I mean he finally gets a speaking role about 70% of the way in, and he talks like an anime villain. And then he goes magic berserk mode, at which point he talks like even more of an anime villain. This is not a believable person; this is a collection of tropes. This series has some of the most uninspired villains I have ever read.

When we hit the last two chapters, the plot chases after the main character and demands that something interesting happens, so we get an extremely abrupt lead-up to an ending cliffhanger. The last two chapters did not need the 26 preceding chapters to happen—sure, there is some cause and effect, but it’s deeply inelegant and inefficient. This reveal/cliffhanger should have happened halfway through the book, if not earlier: the only things stopping it from happening were the vague power level of the protagonist, and whether the protagonist would stop being an idiot. (In the end he is forced to stop being an idiot.)

It’s deeply unfortunate that this series managed to set up so many plot threads—to build some momentum to carry the reader forward!—only to totally abandon them in favour of exploring a totally different area of the world that feels lifeless. When we finally get to see some familiar environs, the plot still does not move, remaining in its summary style: this restart I’m learning X; now I’m learning Y; why? There is no plan; there is no momentum. There is no real plot here: things are just happening. This really could have been good—all the pieces were there—if only it had actually been edited for publication, so that a red pen could have cut 80% of this.

To get the premise out of the way, a student at a magic school ends up in a time loop, and has to work to improve his skills to survive while also uncovering the secret behind what caused it to begin with.

Now, I often tend to drop webfic because they are frankly usually poorly written, but here the writing is good enough to the point where I could just let it fly without giving it much thought. It’s actually reminiscent of Brandon Sanderson’s prose in that it focuses on getting out of the way, and it mostly succeeded at this, bar some formatting errors here and there and a couple instances where I think you can tell it’s the author’s second language—but writing in a second language is inherently a cool thing to do, so I’ll cut him some slack.

So the writing was at least passable enough that I didn’t just groan and drop it. That’s obviously not enough to make me like a book, but then the story itself, while not what I’d call deep, was incredibly fun, especially once it got going. This hits a really good spot for progression fantasy where once you let the narrative build some momentum, it feels like a perpetual motion machine: there’s always enough going on that any time a storyline wraps up, there are already five others going on concurrently that you are invested in. As such, despite not being all that fast-paced, it never feels boring. The mystery aspect helps in this, too. The mystery is gradually uncovered in layers, in a way that feels quite satisfying: you do get answers and our protagonist does make progress, so it doesn’t feel like it is stalling even as it throws five new mysteries at you.

The characterisation in this is also fairly weak. There was one bit of characterisation around the half-way point that surprised me, but beyond that most characters feel rather two-dimensional. While our protagonist does actually grow as the story goes on, the way it’s handled is somewhat frustrating, as the book doesn’t trust you to actually see it for yourself and feels it necessary to tell you how he’s changing—this is some sort of literary sin, I think. The villains are also cardboard, regularly dropping into Villainspeak whenever they’re on the page to make it clear that they are The Bad Guys (in case you missed it!). You’re reading this for the plot and the mystery, the characters are a secondary concern.

In short: this is a shounen about a magic student stuck in a time loop, and if that sounds appealing to you, you’ll probably like it. If not, steer away!

This was a fun one! Keeping up the TJR streak of fun enjoyable books for me (we’re ignoring Malibu Rising, which I found quite bad).

This is a book about tennis, but it’s really a book about desire. The premise is that of Carrie Soto as a world-renowned tennis star—the best there ever was—whose status as The Best suddenly becomes threatened, making her return to the sport despite her old age (for tennis… she’s in her late thirties), with her dad as her coach. So in one sense, this is an underdog story: the entire world assumes she can’t come back. In another sense it really isn’t, as Soto’s goal initially isn’t to take back her title, it’s to keep it. This alone makes Carrie an abrasive character: she has already proved herself, and what she’s fighting for isn’t to prove herself, not really, she’s already done that: her impetus to come back is to stop someone else from overshadowing her legacy. More than that, she insists on bluntly stating what she believes (i.e. that she is The Best), and she will use any advantage she can get her hands on to win. This all makes following her comeback a lot of fun! I also never found her unlikable, though a lot of readers seem to.

Although on the surface it shares characteristics with sports anime of all things (and a hint of Marty Supreme, if it was actually about ping pong), it’s really a grounded story. For me, that comes down to her relationship with her dad Javier (who is also her coach), which acts as the gravitational pull of the novel. We get the play-by-play of many tennis matches (and it is exciting! at least if you like tennis), but I think each and every one really characterises and reflects Carrie, Javier, and their relationship. (There is nominally a romance here, too, albeit a boring one.)

I picked this up out of curiosity more than anything, as it was available on Libby and none of my holds had come in yet. I’m not much of a romance reader, and although I knew she had exploded in popularity I only knew Ali Hazelwood as “the Reylo author”. (That turned out to be pretty much an accurate description.) I didn’t really like this, but I didn’t dislike it either: it flew by quickly while I cleaned the apartment, and I can’t say I’ve thought much about it since finishing it. As romances go it’s fine, I guess, if frankly a bit saccharine and dull.

The two gay CEOs with an on-again-off-again relationship were more deserving of a book. Give me more of those guys instead!

I read this as a nostalgia pick to start off the new year: I remember enjoying this book as a kid, but I remembered nothing about it.

This was… okay! It’s firmly middle-grade, which isn’t something I really seek out anymore, but I did have enough fun with it that I ended up reading it in about a day (though it’s not very long). The first half is a bit boring to be honest, not because things aren’t happening – the plot is moving at a rapid pace if anything – but because none of it is all that compelling and the characters are a bit dull. Things do take a bit of a turn around the halfway point (when Steve gets bit): Darren turns out to be a real piece of work and becomes a far more compelling character, the horror elements come into focus, and there is this growing sense that a point of no return has been crossed both psychologically and materially. Darren also has quite a lot of agency, which is refreshing seeing as he’s also a total dunce.

It’s pretty obvious what it’s all leading up to, though, but I am in my late twenties reading a middle-grade book so this seems unfair to hold against it. The book ends in a pretty interesting spot, and for the most part it manages to get there by letting the characters move in ways that feel natural rather than to have them pushed around by the plot. I don’t think I’ll be picking up more of these any time soon, but at the same time I can see myself reading these next time I’m in bed with a fever.

Can a child be ontologically evil? Steve is a dumb name for a vampire hunter.