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The Golden Enclaves - Naomi Novik | Book Review

12/24/2022

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          WOW. I knew it was going to be amazing, because every book in this series has been utterly astounding, but even with that high bar of expectation I was impressed.
            It perfectly continues the attack on the concept of an innately or naturally 'fair' society, aggressively transposing it's arguments of a rigged system from Education to the wider concept of governing Institutions as a whole. The whole notion of governance as as system existing in any state of beneficence at all is eloquently and poignantly ripped to shreds. As soon as Active Consensus becomes Systematized Bureaucracy, things start to tip away from any chance of being equitable, and while that's awful, you can't just blame the oppressors as straightforwardly selfish/evil. It's only rational to do what you can to keep your own as safe and comfortable as possible, even at the expense of others (especially if you don't have to personally witness, let alone execute, the cost).
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       This novel is delightfully straightforward in its criticisms of society, and is also a perfectly wonderful story in its own right, one that simply hits harder for its critical poignancy. It's shorter than I wanted it to be, and a little to simplified to hone its point into something all but the most determinedly ignorant readers have to acknowledge as valid. 
            There's no one Big Bad, because the real world isn't that simple. The truly big bad in all of this is the concept that knowingly doing Evil is EVER justifiable, particularly when you have power. Ophelia is vile. But she wanted to do something good. The Chinese Dominus is also vile, also out of a desire to do good. The list goes on.
       Sex is a thing. That's just there. It happens. Repeatedly. And it MEANS SOMETHING DIFFERENT every time it does. El LOVES Orion, end of story. Whom she choses to have sex with in the chaos of grief and a frantic ping-ponging flight from one emergency to the next doesn't affect that at all. And he wouldn't care one whit. He wants to be permitted to be in her life however she will allow him to be there. It's not his place in anyway to judge her for her actions with other people if they haven't discussed it in any way, so he never does.
           It's not proactively focused on as a thematic point, but it's there, and I feel like I have to address it because it's the singular out-of-context detail that seems to be attracting the most hate from readers who refuse to engage with it critically.

            Also, El goes God-Mode! She has all the power in the universe and NONE OF IT MATTERS. Power isn't the answer. Power doesn't fix things. Power doesn't make things easier or better or safer or Good. All having power does is give you a legitimate choice. Because being a little bit Evil to protect your children by being complicit in a greater Evil isn't really a choice. Some people can break through that kind of thought, but a lot of people can't. There were plenty of normal people who joined the Nazi's because it was safer than fighting them. There are plenty of people who don't speak up to support gay rights because they have young children in school and if their kids's schoolmates get spoonfed hate for gay rights and their family is seen as gay sympathizers, their child will be bullied. There are plenty of kids who are bullied because their parents are vocal activists and to make it stop they adopt an aggressive anti-whatever attitude and themselves become aggressors. People can be awful, and the worst thing in the world is that they're usually at their worst for what they perceive as good reasons.
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          Power doesn't solve problems. But it lets you have a legitimate choice in what you do about the issues you face.

​          The only thing that solves problems is the decision to be Good, no matter what. No compromise, no accepting the lesser Evil; it's not practical and it's not easy and it doesn't do much if you do it alone, but you can join the Nazis or join the French Resistance.

          All the little threads from across the series get tied up beautifully, and the story develops naturally with compelling twists and turns that make complete sense retroactively but are realizations that remain cleverly just out of reach until exactly the right moment -- when you realize that yeah, you kinda DID guess that, but had mostly dismissed it until it was confirmed.
        All the the characters grow and develop in a true-to-life manner, priorities change, motivations shift, good ideas lead to horrible outcomes and awful ones work out annoyingly well for terrible people, and grief hits everyone differently and deserves respect however it lands (even when it manifests in meanness or zombification).
   All in all, it's a glorious triumph of story that matters and it's probably the best example I've ever seen in modern times of adult fiction to explain why a story can't just be a story. I used to be firmly in the camp of 'why does it have to mean something to be good?', as many a snot-nosed teenager is when faced with a CritLit assignment... and as many adults default to as Capitalist Exhaustion makes comfort and ease more meaningfully significant than any awakening to consciousness ever could be, in a practical sense. This series is an excellent means by which to demonstrate why it's fundamentally untrue that a good story can ever just be a good story.
      One thing to be aware of is that is is NOT YA Fantasy, it is Adult Fantasy that is appropriate for YA readers. It might seem like splitting hairs, but there is a difference of both form and function between the two.
        There is no real romance in this. Orion's absent most of the time and there's two throw-away-ish sex scenes that only exist because El is an intensely inward-looking character that needs to be brought out of her head and into an awareness of her body. She's also impatient and always looking for cheat-codes. Sex is grounding. She could use drugs, meditation, music, or even an animal-friend (which is one thing she 
does do, but her animal isn't very effective because it's not very needy and only a few inches tall). The sex isn't meaningless, but it's also not romantically meaningful.

     Also, Orion as Manic-Pixie Dream Boy gets disintegrated. He's not a Hero worthy of swooning admiration. NO ONE IS. That's the point. Yeah, it reduces the YA sweeping romance adventure of it, but it's an important comment on how this world creates circumstances of inescapable pressures. You are born into circumstances, instilled with values, given particular skills and tools and experiences that shape your whole existence in ways that render your agency and personality nearly irrelevant. At best, your choices are the result of an attempt to be better than the worst you've seen and your ability to decide who you are isn't much more than cherry picking your favorite aspects of people/characters you've seen until around age 30, and even then it's iffy, you've just finally seen enough (generally) to start noticing broad patterns.
        Orion isn't a shining hero because he's heroic, he's heroic because that's what role he was molded to fill. BUT that doesn't not invalidate his personality, his humble humility is worthy of admiration, his desire to do right not just well is a laudable deviation from his Origin Matrix Ideology, and his relationship with El is a constant decision to revel in her existence that is the truest mark of Love I know. He is human and has choices but they only carry things so far, he's a hero because he tries to be and he's heroic because we want him to be.
       If you feel like this book is different than the other two in the trilogy, you weren't paying attention to the right things. This book is so consistent with the other two it's almost annoying... Until right up at the end when the Fantasy Happy Ending sweeps in to validate the theory of effort based solely on hope. There's no sweep-away story to get lost in here, and there's fewer fantastical distractions to marvel at, there's just a consistent and relentless deconstruction of societal preconceptions.
 
    There are a few things I would have liked more of, however:

           CHLOE. She deserved more attention, more of a substantive role. She could've played far more into this, and allowed for one more false-start investigation to pad out the narrative (it's not even 300 pages and I'm sad there's not enough to really dig my teeth into... it only took me a day to read, not even...). And it would've made Ophelia's villain-reveal have a little more weight. Ophelia's always been a villain, as a mom who clearly did Orion dirty in a number of usual shitty-childhood ways, but the transition from meh-mum to active antagonist could've been better. And we never get to see Chloe react / adjust to the reveal, which I think is a shame... it makes sense in context of El's focus and the plot direction, but I would have liked more.
      Less Repetition. It hits its point home hard. As a conclusion to a series, as the shift between specific circumstances and broad argument, and as a call to action that apparent futility is an insufficient reason not to try, I can see why Novik felt the need to be clear and insistent. But the book is hella short as it is and the repetition made it feel all the shorter.
         Actual Feelings. Yes. El is grieving. And Yes. El is awful at feelings to start with. And so is Liesel. (Hence the moderately unhealthy shortcut of sex). But I would have preferred she have someone with her to force her to stop and talk and FEEL. Chloe, again, could've been useful for this.

Overall? WONDERFUL.
           I am so unbearably pleased with it, that I've bumped this review to the top of my priority list, pushed it to the top of the publishing queue, and spent the last 2 hours actively commenting / critiquing the review of people who missed the point on Goodreads. I'll honestly have like 20 more pages of things to say about this book if I sit with it another week, and I will absolutely be bringing it up in every single class I have for the rest of my life probably (certainly for the foreseeable future), and it is 100% going into the curriculum I'm building (well, technically, only the first one, but this series...).
          If you have any interest in being a human being on any functional level beyond merely existing on the planet for a short while, you absolutely have to read this!
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A History of the World in Six Glasses - Tom Standage | Book Review

11/15/2022

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                This was an excellent example of what we call 'Historical Lensing', the process of intentionally and proactively reading History from a particular and unique angle.
           The way that Standage explores the development of the Western World from the roots of civilization all the way to our current Capitalist hellscape is elegant and fascinating. It uncovers the unique ways in which what we drink truly does have an affect on Society and therefore on History. His accounting is detailed and well-researched and eloquent enough to open plenty of minds to the way in which seemingly little things often have some of the largest impacts.
                 It does have its problems, however. While this book intentionally lenses through specific drink histories, it is also (seemingly unintentionally) lenses all of world history through the West's rise to domination. It briefly comments on how non-western cultures affected the rise of each drink, and then comments again even more briefly on how the West aggressively screwed over the rest of the world repeatedly in various ways.
         I will say that it doesn't flinch away from saying that the outright Imperialist activities of America in the 1940's~80's are objectively Imperialist, but it does brush over the horrors of those consequences in a similar way to how it brushes over the fact that Britain is basically the Evil Empire.

         ​I do highly recommend this book for anyone at all curious about History, even the layest of lay-persons could find it entertaining and informative.
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Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao | Book Review

7/17/2022

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                This novel was billed as "Pacific Rim" meets "Handmaid's Tale" in Ancient China and ooh, boy did it deliver! 
            All the best pieces of the Kaiju / Jaeger / Drift concepts have been elegantly reworked to suit a modified Ancient China setting. At first glance, a big piece of the setting's establishing circumstances seem chaotic and unexplained, and the impetus of the conflict isn't explained until literally the last chapter, but oh is it an exceptional shift of the working paradigm. The lack of clarity on the conflict is mildly irksome as your read, but it's pretty straightforwardly forgivable as the main character is repeatedly confronted by the ways in which her limited access has bred an oblivious ignorance that is so pervasive, her failure to connect the dots often shocks even her.
             The whole misogyny thing is a bit overly-in-your-face, honestly, but, again, with the context of that massive, last-few-chapters reveal that reframes why the whole conflict is happening it gets presented as a plausible and terrifying escalation of the current world's trending misogyny, rather than a depiction of abuses towards females that Society has purportedly grown beyond
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     Wu Zeitan is utterly ruthless and patently unconcerned by pretty much anything, including modesty, body-counts, collateral-damage (historically, par for the course, given her real-world namesake). It's all framed as a hyperbolic reaction to grief and the fury at having that grief ignored and dismissed. It's a great depiction of how the "edgy, angry" girl isn't just emo and cool, but is straightforwardly suicidal, but in a "if I'm gonna die, I'm taking the whole world with me" kinda way. She is deranged and delusional and while that often gives her the power to leverage herself into a position of relative power, it just as often goes badly for her. She's not simply depicted as the 'break the world to make it better' kind of revolutionary, she's given lines that indicate that she's self-deluding to make herself believe that she's going to be the savior or woman-kind, and make things better, but there are obvious arcs that show how she is truly after personal power. Not to mention that it's shown that simply reversing the system so men are subjugated through the very same pathways of inequality as women used to be is simply replacing misogyny with misandry and it fails to actually fix anything or save anyone. 
       She has moments of lightness, forgiveness, and acknowledgement of the desire to love/be-loved, and for the most part she finds herself disappointed by any and all avenues she has to explore that concept (and by those people who encourage it).
                This means, in a partly unfortunately exertion of balance, that the big selling point of the Poly-ship is actually a little downgraded in my opinion. It's fairly well constructed in terms of establishing both emotional attachment and physical attraction between the trio, but I still read it much more as a falling-together of desperate hearts rather than a true-love romance with 3 participants instead of the usual 2.
            That said, however, successful marriages, and what I consider to be genuine love, is not comprised of the fairytale, shippy, true-love magic that most YA romances peddle. The way healthy love works is that individuals proactively decide to love each other and continuously chose to make it work. Active discussions, healthy communication of wants and needs, self-reliance despite dyad (or triad, quad, etc) integration (which applies to non-romantic bonds, such and Family and Friend sets and is also known as "we thinking", ie, 'we're going to the beach this summer')... all of that is present in this novel and necessary to a truly viable healthy relationship. And yet, the whole 'we are literally the only people in the entire world who treat each other like humans' thing is NOT a healthy motivation nor is it a convincingly romantic motivation for a love match pairing...
              I'm curious to see how it all works out in the sequel, particularly as... well... Spoilers.
           Overall, this is a brutal, but gloriously well-depicted world with characters in varied states of mental collapse that reflect genuine psychology in both range and severity. The body-count is high, the brutality is significant, the presence of consent is glaringly absent in a number of circumstances, and the positive influences are non-existent, but there's not explicit sex, no drugs, alcohol abuse depicted as a disease, and the non-con elements are never excused or apologized for. It's not a book for every 13-year-old, but honestly I think it suits a vast majority of them.
           Parental discretion IS advised, but I strongly recommend that this novel be seriously considered as a viable  option for any teen reader!
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BEHAVE: the Biology of Humans at our Best & Worst - Robery Sapolsky

4/21/2022

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Every so often a book comes along that genuinely makes a viable case for a complete paradigm shift. This book is certainly one of them!
          Reading this is certainly a monumental undertaking, being that it's nearly 800 pages of intensely detailed scientific rigor, but the result is entirely worth the effort! I will say that some parts of it, particularly a few of the early chapters, are a slog for anyone who is not familiar and keening interested in the finer point of microbiology, cellular neurology, or endocrinology. Sapolsky's writing is exceptionally clear and his points in these early chapters are well laid out, but, even so, the material is simply dense.
             While I wholly understand the reason that these chapters are placed early in the sequence of the thesis (being that the book scales outward, starting with the literal smallest piece of potentially relevant biological influence and incrementally moving out to the macro-scale evolution of globalized, cooperative culture), it's a shame that the intensity and niche specificity of the early chapters come before the parts that a layperson could more easily connect with... I'm sure plenty of readers who would have delighted in the second half of this work were unable to make it past the first half.
             Still, I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in the mess that is the modern human, go for the audio book and just let the words wash over you (possibly skipping many of the early chapters).
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​          The most important piece of this, in my realm of study, is actually the introduction. This is the first book in the realm of so-called 'hard science' in which the reality of Academia is called out and appropriately decimated. The divisions between subjects taught and studied in schools are arbitrary and nonsensical. They are useful boxes to make people feel like they have a safe and comfy niche to work in and use to declare their own identities via pre-defined shortcuts. But if you're truly in a venue to 
learn you absolutely must approach a subject with interdisciplinary awareness. In learning sciences, we call this mixing of disciplines interleaving and I mentioned it a while ago in my review of How We Learn by Benedict Carey.
         Sapolsky is the first truly respectable hard science guru I've found to laboriously press home the point at this arbitrariness being useful only in the sense of easing personal identity definitions and creating a sense of in-group cohesion. (There is also an argument for varied disciplines that raises its head in terms of budgetary concerns for academic institution, which is an avenue to explore another day and is itself an argument in favor of how considering something through multiple lenses is the only way to truly understand it).

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          Beyond the critically important thesis presented in the Introduction, there are a good dozen chapters within which material that is exceedingly valuable to the everyday person's interaction with the world around them.
            The adolescence chapter (chapter 6) is one I highly recommend, as it both shows how unfortunate it truly is to exist as a teenager and proves beyond any entitled, obnoxious parental whinging that grown ups do NOT remember what it was like to be a teenager. You absolutely cannot recall with any degree of accuracy, while utilizing your currently operational frontal cortex to draw on the memories, what it was like to experience life when half of your adult brain was essentially offline. (I have a soap box for this. And I scream from it on an almost daily basis. A solid half the reason I hate most parent is that most parents are the primary reason their teenagers hate life.)
               Furthermore, this book has 2 additional pieces that I adore.
             Chapters 10 through 15 are the core of the reason I find this book valuable to the lay-person. They examine the circumstances of behavior through lenses that the average human can negotiate and with a congenial frankness that invites readers to consider their own circumstances, as well as those of others they encounter, on a continuous and casual level of expanded comprehension. It's not necessarily the kind of eye-opining that  forces people to rethink their entire existence, per se, (though it certainly has that potential for some readers), but it does a thorough job of helping an already open-minded person clean off their windshield from the inside where you can't even tell there's a layer of grime until you've wiped it off.
              And then Chapter 16 pops up. 16 is the most controversial chapter of this book, being that it discusses the concept of abolishing, not just the police, but the entire modern criminal justice system as a whole. It also delves into the concepts of free-will (and the Hobbes / Locke / Rousseau argument, though it does fail, somewhat, to fully explain what that argument entails or who stood for which side of it...), which actually ties well into the arguments of Time Progression in physics and the Causational theory of History. It gets WILD. But it manages to make a solid, logical case for a rehashing of the considerations of what Justice truly means and how Punishment needs to be understood to be utilized effectively in a modern world.
               All in all, it's quite amazing. And the congenial, down-to-earth delivery is delightful. The narrative voice is one of inviting friendliness and pervasively judgement-free guided exploration. Rather than a didactic lecture with pejorative weight behind it, reading this book feels like playing a teaching-game with a beloved grandfather.

              That said, it's not 100% perfect, obviously.

              It's LONG. And while I loved every second of my reading of it, I'm sure I'm the outlier. This is NOT, on its own, a layperson book. Unless you're willing to skip chapters or deep dive into nearly incomprehensible strings of abbreviations, a normal, casual reader will not make it through this beast.
            Secondly, while it does call out other respected scientists for cherry-picking data (like Steven Pinker, whom I bear a particularly spikey and resolutely low threshold for bullshit), Sapolsky fails, himself, to discuss the on-going issues of replication being grappled with regarding some of the studies he references. Now this IS a new enough book that some of that failure can be forgiven as optimism that in the near future other labs will be able to replicate the findings of certain circumstances, but it still ought to be addressed (particularly as some of the studies are a great deal older than the book presently reporting on them).
         There is clear personal stake in these matters, too, which makes sense as it's not a cut-and-dry piece of research publication and is instead a personal entreaty to consider the broader view from the perspective of someone infinitely too privileged to respect beyond the safe boundaries of Stanford's sunny promenades. Like seriously, if I took this guy on a foot tour of Queens, I'm like 80% sure we'd both just drop dead. If not, I'd probably kill him myself when he quibbles over the price of a banana (often a whooping full dollar per pound with tax, these days).
            Honestly, if we got stuck in an elevator together and he were even a smidgeon less fascinating than he is, he'd be walking out of there with a black eye.
          In the same way as he elucidates that a grown-up cannot recall being a teenager, he fails to truly recognize how unbelievably wealthy he is to the point of inevitably causing a painful degree of friction. He even acknowledges his privilege, and that of the reader, but he fails to connect that privilege to the particular rosiness of his glasses. It's a fact that makes chapter 16 more amusing than truly compelling, and it threatens a lot of his credibility in that, when combined with his congenial tone, can potentially make a lot of this come off as condescending. I think he manages to avoid that, for the most part, but that's coming from a place of being, myself, atrociously over-educated, painfully under-stimulated, and deeply indulgent toward my own aggressive curiosity.
        All that said, however, this is easily my favorite Hard Science book from the last 5 years. It's the first book I've actually purchased in 2022.
         Again, though you might have to skim or skip a few chapters, I HIGHLY recommend it!
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SIX the Musical | Stage Drama Review

3/25/2022

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            First presented in the UK in 2017, the OST hit YouTube in early 2020. As a MASSIVE fan of History and also a fan of musicals, the fact that I missed this one's appearance must be chalked up to the fact that I was deeply distracted by the whole 'the world is kind of ending' hubbub from that particular Spring...
        Anywho. When I was first introduced to it, conceptually, I was deeply skeptical. It seemed like a wannabe Hamilton at best, and a garish, misinterpretation of history at worst (and most plausible). It seemed like a tragedy waiting to happen.
           But I quickly warmed up to it. The songs are hella catchy. And it's SUPER punny, in the best and worst ways.
So, I took a closer look.
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        While it is certainly Plot Lite-tm, and there are aspects were the interpretations of the Wives' characters misses the mark but a fair bit, I think it does something uniquely fascinating in terms of remixing History to be seen through modern lenses -- more than seen, it spins the bones of the Wives' stories into something that young, modern audience can viscerally feel.
         It takes the most core aspects, and the vague sense, of the Wives and threads it through a 2010's candy pop revolution. Each wife is essentially a mash-up of her own self with a hyper-famous popstar of the modern era, with both their songs and costumes making direct reference to both the Wives' original contexts and to the popstars' revised history.
            It takes the pieces of what hurt for the women of the ~16th Century and makes a vicious, biting, soul-deep echo of pain hit modern audiences for how little progress has truly been made in regards to certain issues. Essentially, it reframes the Court of Henry VIII as a High School Drama style, angst-aggressive Soap Opera, translated from the highest stakes of Court into a social smack-down that Gen Z can fully comprehend.
        It takes the stalwart dignity of Catherine of Aragon and makes it into Beyoncé's steadfast, self-assured bulldozing. It takes Anne Boleyn's brash aggression and translates it to the bratty, self-centered inconsiderateness of Avril Lavigne's F!ck the Rules dramatics. Anne of Cleaves's glorious wit and self-possession is spun through Nicki Minaj's hyper-brash independence and assertiveness. And the tragedy of Katherine Howard's confused innocence in playing the games of grown ups gets filtered through the biting, pervasive, inconsolably vile parallel of Brittany Spears's hellish strife...
           The characters are not historically accurate to their contexts, but, for the most part, I feel that the contexts of their struggles are historically accurate to the 2010's. It takes the particularly firmly-rooted context of the characters and transposes them into an equally solid and temporally rooted context. It's not accurate to the facts, but I feel that it's someone even more true to the spirit of the struggles because of that inaccuracy.
          My mum doesn't agree. At all. She adores the Wives' (and is a staunch believer in the concept of context IS character) ((and she's utterly baffled by the concept of a 'modern AU' as being an accepted trope of modern literature))... So she started out excited at the concept and ended up utterly pissed at the flippancy.
           Mum does have some very valid criticisms.
        Even I can admit that calling it Plot Lite-tm is actually a deeply over-generous assessment of the plot's non-existence. And I definitely dislike how Jane Seymour isn't shown as an active schemer (she was aggressively attempting to sway Henry from Anne, after all, she wasn't just a shrinking violet with genuine love for Henry). And Catherine Parr was also scheming, and very effectively so as she served more as Henry's hospice nurse than as his wife (rather than how SIX portrays her as feeling any kind of genuine affection for Henry).
          But still, I feel like my favorites were done well, with their base personalities given room to bubble up with Gen Z humor and heavily staged TikTok vibes.
        (Well, Anne of Cleaves became his Sister, she didn't get divorced, and it was an absolutely brilliant move that she managed to pull off under her own power, which wasn't really presented at all... And the reason Henry didn't like wasn't due to her looks, but because she didn't understand the game of Courtly courting (he snuck into her room, disguised, and she didn't let him kiss her 'because she could see though the disguise and knew her true love', which pissed Henry off like someone showing up to a freshman frat party with a cop as their +1) but still, Anna's track is hella catchy and it did show off her self-possession and utter competence, so I'm mostly okay with it.)
       It does the opposite of Hamilton, rather than attempting to cover a factually true-to-life History in its full context with a modern lens to view it under, Six takes snippets of well-understood, deeply personal modern stories, and slips them backward in time to re-frame an audience's interpretation of the dramatics of History.

In short I LOVED it.

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(If the embed doesn't work, here's the LINK !)
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House of Sky & Breath - Sarah J Maas | Book review

3/6/2022

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Not great, but it's still an improvement over the last few releases...

            Whelp... I'm not mad at it. I set the bar really low going into this one and I'm pleased to say that it has managed to surpass those wary expectations. I'm not actively offended to the point of having to write an angry letter to her publishers / editors / agents...
         Which, despite being the lowest bar ever set, still makes this the best thing SJM has released in years. Seriously, the last time I wasn't actively disappointed by an SJM release since 216 with A Court of Wings & Ruin, way back in 2016.... And even then, I wasn't angry at it, but I also wasn't terribly pleased with it.
House of Sky & Breath is very much a relief, because I'm not actively angry, but it's also still kind of disappointing because even though I'm not offended there's not a lot to like.

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            Now, despite the fact that my over all read is that I didn't like it much at all, there are some good points. The sex wasn't super creepy, for one! (I mean, it was still largely inappropriate and awkwardly squicky, but it wasn't actively glossing over the whole concept of rape... Consent was proactively acquired and reaffirmed throughout). The actual language of the narration was lovely, nothing truly lyrical, but lovely. And the banter was nifty enough to keep the conversations feeling mildly entertaining.
         The most glaring issue with it is that it's too fricken long. It does not need to be 800 pages. Is should not bee 800 pages. First off, the only real reason that it's 800 pages is that there's filler sub-stories about side characters that are followed with absurd detail. And even then, most of those sub-stories shouldn't have even been included in this installment, period. Following Tharion and Ithan and Ruhn, as an interwoven trio of stories, should have been it's own novel, one that might interact with the plot of this one, but can be read separately. In fact, that might actually have made both pieces a lot more interesting and intensely mysterious.
          Instead, we see like 4 or 5 different versions of the same storyline with very limited set-dressing alterations. It's hardly even a 'variation on a theme' kind of thing. There's a whole bunch of angsty, honorable, super-jock, alpha-males facing unwanted / awkward engagements to shy-ish wallflowers with secret bad-assery potential that they've been too sheltered to feel ready to reveal. The stories play out slightly differently, but not with nearly enough unique and significant variation to warrant watching 5 separate iterations.
          Speaking of a lack of variation: there's still ZERO diversity. Like you can call a group of people whatever you want, give them all kinds of different powers and theoretical inter-group rivalries and grudges, but unless you make something about the sects culturally unique, it's not diversity. There's only two body types mentioned for female characters (supermodel / action-hero and pixie-lithe ballerina), and only one for guys (supermodel / action-hero). Nobody's fat. Nobody's short. Nobody's pale enough to have freckles instead of a Cali-perfect suntan, nor dark enough to use any word but 'bronze' to describe their flawless skin tones. Hell, nobody is even the smidge of not utterly pristine biological perfect that is needing glasses with corrective lenses.
             There's a mostly-off-camera solitary gay couple, and a surprise-for-the-shock-value lesbian couple that makes like a 30 second appearance, in flagrante, and there's one mention of a vegetarian being slightly uncomfortable with the vague concept of meat.... and that's it... Seriously, there's not a single, genuine ideological difference between any of the factions that are supposedly diametrically opposed and have been hated enemies for centuries.
           Still on the lack of diversity factor: EVERYBODY'S ROYAL. When ALL your characters are politically significant of more or less equals in technical political standing, basically it means that none of them are facing power-imbalance dynamics that could make being Royal or whatnot interesting. It's special snowflake syndrome, but with political titles.
Also, none of the characters change they take a few, teeny tiny baby steps towards dealing with specific traumas and such, but no one actually changes through the narrative, they reveal that they'd been changed by the magic of insta-love, but none of them actually, visible evolve in any notable manner. And Bryce is an idiot about throwing her royal title around like it's Harley Quinn's hammer and is appalled when no one else is surprised that her continuous stupid choices led to horrible consequences.
           It's just boring.
           And beyond that, the bore-factor is ramped up by the utter lack of stakes. 
         There's a period of interest, when we're caught up in looking for a lost, potentially super-powerful kid. But that plot-line gets buried under the layers of other-people-with-awkward-engagements sandwich and it resolves pretty quickly (all told, that plotline probably takes like 300 pages, max, to run from start to finish). The rest of it is a search for a vague secret, a secret that no one involved even manages to care about without outside agents acting full-on deus ex machina to prompt investigation. There's even a moment with Bryce addresses the lack of Endgame, but it settles with a deeply unsatisfying conclusion of 'search for truth, for sake of truth'. 
          And the secrets that get 'revealed' are painfully dull. I seriously didn't realize that the 'secrets' had been revealed when I read them. I honestly thought it was a bit of framing as a reminder for the current status quo that could he altered in a paradigm shift of wow, that's unexpected and dramatic... and instead we just got, yeah, that's the status quo as it currently exists... No life-altering hidden truth. Just the curtain coming back on the obvious machinations of the current world, most of which could be guessed at by even a half-savvy reader with a few poli-sci or electrical engineering podcasts under their belt. I did like the lure bit of the secret reveal, but it's like showing up to a birthday party for the cake and just being given a particularly neatly shaped bit of a flower made of icing.
      Beyond all that? The whole army from hell thing? And the super-badass female who doesn't want the responsibility of rule but somehow earns the devotions of an abused super-powerful, military famous and respected male? With a cabal of super gorgeous, super powerful, politically significant friends? With a random bad-ass maybe-dragon?
       WE HAVE SEEN THIS STORY BEFORE.... AND I'M GETTING BORED WITH IT.
       Fortunately, there's nothing in this that I'm actively angry about (though, I'll admit, my threshold for what counts as angry is way higher for this author's work than for that of any other, so I probably should be angry about some things, but I'm sticking to my guns and letting it go unless it's actively harmful to real people (like the vile nonsense of A Court of Silver Flames).
      (Okay, that's a lie. I AM actively angry about the way Male and Female are the exclusive references to both gender presentation and biological sex. Like my Trans and Fluid friends are still people, yo.... And no one should simply BE their gender or their biology, personhood is significant without a shred of reproductive potential... But I've decided to pick battles I feel actively endanger safety and while casual erasure is damaging on some level, the mishandling of PTSD in Silver Flames WILL cause some dumbass reader to trigger some unfortunate soul into self-harm, possibly suicide).
        SO.
        I do NOT recommend it. 
        I WILL actively warn my clients against it. 
      And I CANNOT whip up any BS about it as a decent showing that I can ignore while reserving judgement on the whole series. 
       This series is crap. End of story.
       It's sloppy and insulting and pathetic; and it treats the reader like a pitiable, ignorant, idiotic little child.

     I will probably read the 3rd one, when it eventually comes out, simply because I can't reasonably hate on a book I haven't read and still look like a genuine authority, but I likely won't make it a priority read.
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the Last Graduate - Naomi Novik | Book Review

3/4/2022

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          A deeply satisfying sequel to a Deadly Education and an absolute Master Class in how to utilize plot bits to effectively ratchet up intimate emotional tensions! I am absolutely delighted by this series, and the second installment is an excellent addition to the over-all enterprise of it!
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         Still exercising the glorious flex of how the first book absolutely eviscerated the foundational concepts of the modern education industry, Book 2 delves into the consequences of system correction efforts (and the potential for over-correction), and how such seemingly benign endeavors, at best, swap the disadvantages of one group with the privileges of another, and at worst, further entrench a brand new sort of inequality that can hardly be accurately identified, let alone emolliated. 
The inevitable conclusion is just so poignantly visceral that it almost belies the genuine reality of the allegory. The system isn't working. And it cannot simply be 'fixed'. It needs to be entirely torn down and created anew.
          This novel also delves into the concept of blame for the entrenchment of inequity. The founders of the system meant it to be far better than they built it to effectively accomplish. Yes, exploitation and inhumanity was present at the conception, but for all their faults they tried to do right by the next generation and it's not fair (let alone productive) to simply castigate them for their failings without both acknowledging their efforts and also doing something to fix what they got wrong. Both within Novik's magical world and within our external reality, the school-system is abysmally flawed and needs to be entirely reimagined if we are to make any more significant strides of advancement as a species. The clear cut allegory of Novik's delightfully satirical explication is GLORIOUS.
          More than that, the story itself is fun, engaging, and masterfully written. The characters are all unique, well-developed, and have arcs of growth that move elegantly through the plot. The story's set-up and pacing are exquisitely handled and managed in such a way so as to entirely prevent the sense that Book 2 is simply a bridge from 1 to 3. It is its own critical piece of the puzzle and a uniquely worthwhile read without reliance on its place within the trilogy.
           I absolutely LOVED this book and HIGHLY RECOMMEND it to anyone over about age 10, though the more frustrated with the education industry you are (ie, high-schoolers, college kids, and their immediately concerned parents), the more viscerally you will react to the commentary presented here. I do however want to smack someone upside the head for allowing that ending to exist prior to the release of Book 3. I anticipate stalking through life like a trapped tiger until September when such misery will be granted absolution.
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From Eternity to Here - Sean Carroll

7/28/2021

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                This is another investigation into the realm of Quantum Mechanics, but unlike the Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, this one requires a bit of familiarity with the topic before a reader can effectively delve into the material's summary / arguments.
Date Read: ​July 5th, 2021
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​Final Score: 7 / 10 !
           Now, I did this one as an Audiobook, and I regret that decision. It's not in any way that Erik Synnestvedt failed to do a good job with reading it, quite the opposite (he was rather remarkably successful). My problem was that there were a great many moments in this where a diagram would've been really nice to look at and we've not yet managed tech were one such image can be beamed into my brain during the smooth narration around when it could be beneficial.
               (Note, since I didn't
read the physical copy, I have no way to guarantee that said diagrams will actually be present, but if they are NOT there, I would have to be very disappointed in Carroll's otherwise very detailed and patiently laborious effort to communicate these tricky concepts.)
              That was the primary drawback I noticed. Otherwise, this was a very well done overview of our current theories about why the 'Arrow of Time' apparently exists when just about everything in classical mechanics says it shouldn't.
                    The bulk of this book is not about time.
                  Because Time is a concept that has proven to be entangled in two dozen other physics debates that are still raging in the Science World. I knew that this would not be
about Time, exactly, but even so I was surprised by how much not-Time stuff needed to be covered to get the reader to a point of understanding what the debates on Time are actually about. While I would've liked a little more of the narrative focused on Time, I perfectly understand WHY so little was devoted to it, and I appreciated the carefully rigorous stage-setting of the background physics discussion.
          (I recall the laws of Thermodynamics, but even with an interest in physics I still get them mixed up rather easily.)
         Thermodynamics, Entropy, and Gravity all get discussed in excellent detail (with both sides of the current relevant debates being given equal examination) and then all related back to our observable conception of Time and the perception of our tangible Universe.
          This narrative doesn't come to any truly solid conclusions about what Time is, exactly, or why it only seems to flow in one direction, but that's largely because Physics CAN'T explain it wholly. And nether Physics nor Neuroscience is quite at the point of being able to work effectively together on a cohesive unified theory to explain it, but that door is starting to more effectively open.
           I definitely enjoyed this one, but it is NOT a starting-point stepping-stone for anyone just getting interested in the governing mechanics of reality.
          Still, I highly recommend it (in physical book form) to anyone who really would like to sit down and investigate one of the biggest mysteries of our day to day lives within this fantastical universe we call home!
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Rage & Ruin - Jennifer Armentrout | Book Review

7/23/2021

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             This is the sequel to Storm & Fury and it's a decidedly well-built follow-up. It didn't quite capture me, but it wasn't difficult reading either, so I managed to get through it nice and quick. There weren't any points that felt like a slog and the romance did get turned up to a nice sizzle. Over all, I was quite pleased.
Date Read: June 28th, 2021
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Final Score: 6 / 10 !

            Honestly, there was nothing about it that had any solid development in it for me, other than the Romance and then a small (but admittedly significant plot point). For the most part, this sequel feels like that it is: the middle bit bridging the way between Book 1's intro to the work and Book 3's theoretical conclusion of the story.
          I think (or at least I hope) that a lot of the lack in the world building aspect of this story comes from the fact that from the author's point of view, it's a spin-off series. I'm guessing (again, more hoping) that a lot of the world building was packed into the main-series and simply left out here because it was considered over-kill. I do no ascribe to that sort of school of thought where world-building is concerned, but I know many people (including editors) who do.
      All we learned new about the world in this installment was that some angels are more involved with the evolution of Fate than others. Plot wise, a couple of significant discoveries occurred, but nothing that really should have taken a whole book to cover. The real point of this novel was to increase the pressure on the romantic leads, to bring their developing relationship to a tipping point. It was an alright thing to focus on, but not enough to have caught my attention. 
             Actually, the constant poor-decision making and the abject refusal to sit-down and talk about things like half-way reasonable humans (which, I can admit, is something teenagers really can't be expected to be) got really annoying. I can understand a few badly-chosen comments and decisions to repress rather than examine (even introspectively, without confessing to the partner they're supposed to be valuing), but it got to be WAY to much after like Badly-Handled Conversation #6...
          The inexplicably fierce and fast-rising devotion to each other is explained away by the whole Soul Bond guardian thing, but it's still awkwardly unrealistic in a way I dislike having present in Teen Media. The way these two feel about each other is NOT an example of any sort of half-healthy relationship and that bothers me... But it's not problematic to a truly uncomfortable degree, it was just irksome that this book only focused on the unhealthy relationship without giving me much plot to fixate on while ignoring the over-done romance-y bits.
           All in all, it wasn't a great book, but I'm still likely going to pick up the next one in the series in the near-ish future. It's still definitely worth a quick weekend read.
          (And again, I do still LOVE the whole Gargoyle concept!)
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Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson | Book Review

7/21/2021

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            As one of Time's 'Top 100 Books in English' of all time, this novel genuinely does make some really fascinating comments on the state of the human condition, individual consciousness, and general societal decay. Personally, I wouldn't say it's one of the best books ever written, or anything, but it's definitely significant.
Date Read: ​June 20th, 2021
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​Final Score: 8 / 10 !

​          As a Hyper-Futuristic novel that was originally published in 1992, this definitely has a very Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell kinda vibe-- mainly that Life is still Life despite the calamity of the Technopocalypse, 90's grunge became more than just a fashion statement as the Government basically collapsed, and everything goes more smoothly when we all roll up to every negotiation with a health dose of sarcasm to play ball with.
         I definitely enjoyed the acknowledgement of the fact that people want Life to be a cliche and chipper-yet-dramatic action movie, to the point that people literally shape their lives into fitting the mold they'd envisioned, but I did feel it missed the mark in some places, simply because the narrative's official 'victory' didn't really deal with any part of the real Problem, it just removed the present Threat. There's likely an intentional comment in that, but I feel like it's rendered ineffective because I'm more concerned with how the story feels unresolved in the big-picture view of it than I am with how it shows that leaving problem resolution unfinished is one of the main reasons the world collapsed to begin with...
          The best part of the ending, absolutely, is the bit where when the world-ending threat is dealt with and all that, it's time to call Mom for a ride home (and she shows up to help, no questions asked, happy to not-quite participate and simply support her child).
            I did also like the brief comments on the rest of the world. American dystopia lit is chronically awful at remembering that the rest of the world exists (and that, as a whole, most of it is better suited to adapting to Apocalypse World than the US population).
           The narrative style was dramatic and highly unique. While I didn't enjoy it, per se, I do think it was well-accomplished and that it suited the story it was meant to tell. It DID produce a ton of really great quotable moments, though, which I highly appreciate.
            The characters were great, even though we only got to view them on a fairly surface level (a symptom of it being both an adult novel and being a product of 80's & 90's dystopia narrative convention). More importantly, I really enjoyed how our two main characters were essentially accidental BFFs and the narration never so much as hinted at there being any legitimate romantic potential between them.
             The plot was fun and worked into the grit of complex world building as an intrinsic and inevitable aspect of what a world like this would produce, so while I didn't actually like some of what happened, I DEEPLY enjoyed that the world's mechanics were so closely linked to what occurred within it and vice versa. It also had some really great mythology allusions and well-researched inter-connections between language, psychology, and the structure of reality.
           The best bit over all though were the Nice Doggies. Super Creepy? Check. Effectively utilized as narrative tools? Check. Rendered as both immoral and beneficent in turns? Check. PUPPERS BEING PUPPERS? CHECK PLUS! It's an apocalypse in America story, so obviously, someone shoots a dog. But in this case the dog more or less survives and things work out well enough to make things feel optimistic.
             It's an excellent novel, that feels both dated and hyper-futuristic.
            It misses the point, a bit, on how and why tech develops as rapidly and all-consuming-ly as it does, but it also makes great comments on why gangs develop and will never be eradicated (there's seriously very little way to corral the problem because the 'problem' is that gang-structure is the single-most efficient governing structure that humans have ever devised and the 'solution' being implements to solve it is a mish-mash of overlapping agencies that serve more to prove the gangs' point than anything).

         I highly recommend it as a modern classic, and a necessary read for anyone to consider themselves well-rounded persons, but it's certainly not one that I'd consider a favorite of mine, personally.
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