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Successful Reading Retreat
Jan. 13th, 2020 04:34 pmI was on reading retreat again this past weekend, and finished four books in four days, which is what I generally aim for - plus I enjoyed all of them!
Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen:
The only reason I selected this book was because Luke and James are planning to do it soon on the Ink to Film podcast. I wasn't expecting to like it because I had it in my head for some reason that it was really sad or had a really tragic ending or something. But I loved it! The framing narrative with Jacob as a 90+ year old in a nursing home is brilliantly conveyed with both humour and pathos, and his voice is so distinctive. Then, the past storyline of his time with the circus in the 1930s is so vividly drawn that I felt like I was really there. The plot and characters are all very involving - there's some tough stuff that happens along the way but overall I found the story really beautiful. There's a great misdirect that leads to a climax that was much more satisfying than I expected, and the very end of Jacob's story is delightful. I'm looking forward now to watching the film version.
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie:
This has been on my list for a while and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. It's about an AI who finds herself restricted to one body after being used to running a starship and having hundreds of 'ancillary' bodies - the narrative is split between the past revelation of how that occurred and her present quest for revenge. It's a harder kind of sci-fi than I usually go for, and there was a lot of tech and world-building and background information to absorb at the start, but I got into it quite quickly and it all came together fine in the end. There's a language thing that didn't really work for me - the protagonist's language doesn't distinguish between genders so she refers to everyone as she/her, even when they've been positively identified as male. I kind of see what the author was going for with this, but I just found it very distracting. However, the character of the protagonist was very compelling, and the scenes where she is in multiple places at once are very cleverly constructed. Her difficulties with the restrictions of her now singular existence are dealt with well (though done better, I think, by Becky Chambers in A Closed and Common Orbit) and I really liked the way the various relationships in the novel were developed over time. There are also interesting questions about AI emotion, freedom of choice, responsibility for actions in the military, and other such complex subjects. Definitely recommended for sci-fi fans.
The End of the Day by Claire North:
This tells the story of Charlie, an ordinary young man who gets a job as the Harbinger of Death. The office in Milton Keynes puts appointments in his calendar and he duly travels the world, taking strange gifts to selected people, who may or may not be about to die. Sometimes he comes as a courtesy and other times as a warning - sometimes he is honouring a life well lived and other times he is marking the passing of an era or an idea. It's a great concept, Charlie is absolutely adorable, and the opening sections of the book have a delightful lightness and whimsicality to them that I loved. But then it takes a major shift in tone to much more serious fare. Charlie suffers a lot of violence and abuse in his travels, he struggles with his role and his purpose, and the story raises a lot of very heavy questions about the state of the world. I think it tries a bit too hard to make its criticisms of society, but the discussions Charlie has about what he's doing are all very interesting and thought-provoking. The book was pretty grim in places, and I felt the ending was left a bit too ambiguous to be truly satisfying. Plus, while I enjoyed it to the end, the abrupt turnabout in tone was very unsettling. So, certainly an interesting read, and one I liked overall, but not without its flaws.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones:
This is a very well constructed novel about complicated personal relationships. Roy is sent to prison for something he didn't do, and his wife, Celestial, has to deal with life carrying on in his absence, while trying to support him and push forwards his appeal. It's a very personal story, focused almost entirely on three characters (with wider family appearing as well). I struggled a bit with the letter correspondence between Roy and Celestial, because there were no dates on the letters, so I had trouble following how much time had passed between missives. And, for some reason, the story didn't really engage my emotions much at all. It was very interesting and very well written, but it felt more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional drama. But maybe that's just me, since Barack Obama apparently described it as 'moving'. Anyway, by the last quarter of the book, I was expecting things to go very badly, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ultimate conclusion. I was evidently invested enough in the characters by then to be affected by what happened to them, and I found the ending very satisfying.
Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen:
The only reason I selected this book was because Luke and James are planning to do it soon on the Ink to Film podcast. I wasn't expecting to like it because I had it in my head for some reason that it was really sad or had a really tragic ending or something. But I loved it! The framing narrative with Jacob as a 90+ year old in a nursing home is brilliantly conveyed with both humour and pathos, and his voice is so distinctive. Then, the past storyline of his time with the circus in the 1930s is so vividly drawn that I felt like I was really there. The plot and characters are all very involving - there's some tough stuff that happens along the way but overall I found the story really beautiful. There's a great misdirect that leads to a climax that was much more satisfying than I expected, and the very end of Jacob's story is delightful. I'm looking forward now to watching the film version.
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie:
This has been on my list for a while and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. It's about an AI who finds herself restricted to one body after being used to running a starship and having hundreds of 'ancillary' bodies - the narrative is split between the past revelation of how that occurred and her present quest for revenge. It's a harder kind of sci-fi than I usually go for, and there was a lot of tech and world-building and background information to absorb at the start, but I got into it quite quickly and it all came together fine in the end. There's a language thing that didn't really work for me - the protagonist's language doesn't distinguish between genders so she refers to everyone as she/her, even when they've been positively identified as male. I kind of see what the author was going for with this, but I just found it very distracting. However, the character of the protagonist was very compelling, and the scenes where she is in multiple places at once are very cleverly constructed. Her difficulties with the restrictions of her now singular existence are dealt with well (though done better, I think, by Becky Chambers in A Closed and Common Orbit) and I really liked the way the various relationships in the novel were developed over time. There are also interesting questions about AI emotion, freedom of choice, responsibility for actions in the military, and other such complex subjects. Definitely recommended for sci-fi fans.
The End of the Day by Claire North:
This tells the story of Charlie, an ordinary young man who gets a job as the Harbinger of Death. The office in Milton Keynes puts appointments in his calendar and he duly travels the world, taking strange gifts to selected people, who may or may not be about to die. Sometimes he comes as a courtesy and other times as a warning - sometimes he is honouring a life well lived and other times he is marking the passing of an era or an idea. It's a great concept, Charlie is absolutely adorable, and the opening sections of the book have a delightful lightness and whimsicality to them that I loved. But then it takes a major shift in tone to much more serious fare. Charlie suffers a lot of violence and abuse in his travels, he struggles with his role and his purpose, and the story raises a lot of very heavy questions about the state of the world. I think it tries a bit too hard to make its criticisms of society, but the discussions Charlie has about what he's doing are all very interesting and thought-provoking. The book was pretty grim in places, and I felt the ending was left a bit too ambiguous to be truly satisfying. Plus, while I enjoyed it to the end, the abrupt turnabout in tone was very unsettling. So, certainly an interesting read, and one I liked overall, but not without its flaws.
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones:
This is a very well constructed novel about complicated personal relationships. Roy is sent to prison for something he didn't do, and his wife, Celestial, has to deal with life carrying on in his absence, while trying to support him and push forwards his appeal. It's a very personal story, focused almost entirely on three characters (with wider family appearing as well). I struggled a bit with the letter correspondence between Roy and Celestial, because there were no dates on the letters, so I had trouble following how much time had passed between missives. And, for some reason, the story didn't really engage my emotions much at all. It was very interesting and very well written, but it felt more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional drama. But maybe that's just me, since Barack Obama apparently described it as 'moving'. Anyway, by the last quarter of the book, I was expecting things to go very badly, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ultimate conclusion. I was evidently invested enough in the characters by then to be affected by what happened to them, and I found the ending very satisfying.
