Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Normally when I see a book that Audible cites as "Audiobook of the Year," my first instinct is to avoid it at all costs.

I'm glad I eventually changed my mind here. I can see why this book won an award just on the basis of the audiobook alone: it's entertaining and actually quite funny. The reader does a great job with different voices and a lot of the narrator's monologue plays out like a slapstick Abbott and Costello routine against himself (and others referenced in flashback/etc).

What strikes me about Weir's work the most-- speaking of his other work The Martian which I only saw the film adaptation of-- is its optimism in the face of hopeless odds. This is what sci-fi looks like at its most inspirational and least noir/cyberpunk (as much as I love the doom of the latter). I don't always want to be uplifted this much quite frankly, but if I had to be cheered up I don't think I'd look much further than this.

Review: Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Feels as if Ernest Hemingway downed 10 shots of tequila and then tried to write Casablanca from the mind of a white alcoholic trying to escape Mexico. Needs multiple re-readings to recover from the hangover.

(seriously though some chapters are stream-of-consciousness because lol drunk person and I'm out of practice)

Review: The Wandering Earth

The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Personal Highlights: "The Wandering Earth", "Sun of China", "For the Benefit of Mankind", "Curse 5.0", "Cannonball" (last one requires reading "With Her Eyes" in this collection first)

Honorable Mention: "Taking Care of God" for the premise's comedic potential.

Overall more of the same if you've read The Three Body Problem trilogy (see previous thoughts), only a bit more uneven in quality this time around. Characters are caricatures of people serving mainly as vehicles to exposit astrophysics-based literally out of this world sci-fi concepts.

Would love to see adaptations of a few of these although I've heard the Wandering Earth films have very little to do with the original story here.

Review: Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a work of magical realism, which I've sometimes found so magical to the point of being a chore to make sense of (looking at you Hundred Years of Solitude), this book feels more grounded in reality (perhaps too grounded at times... could've used more episodes of the Midnight Children). But the fantastical elements still play a significant role here.

I wish I had more background on India-Pakistan history to pick up on all of the references and historical tie-ins in this book, as I feel it would've shed light on a lot of the underlying meanings and clearly symbolic imagery. I had a passing familiarity with the story of the Nehru-Gandhi family (Indira Gandhi in particular features heavily in the background of the last 3rd of the book) which helped, and this book really puts into light some of downsides of their government as seen from the perspective of the lowest echelons of society.

It takes a while for things to really pick up, as Saleem the narrator gradually introduces you to a wide array of characters that become difficult to keep track of (3+ of them change names partway through and he makes it a point to remind you of their name fluidity while sometimes still referring to them by their old monikers) and episodes that make you wonder, huh, what is this all for anyway? The backseat driving commentary from Saleem's partner reinforcing this point is hilarious though.

One other online commenter I found mentioned that reading Rushdie "feels like having a stroke," and I'm not gonna lie, between this and the surrealist nightmare that is The Satanic Verses I'm inclined to agree with them. (But of course Rushdie doesn't deserve the hate he's gotten cause of that book.)

But then there are moments where everything comes together. All of the buildup; the esoteric familial connections; the characters you stopped caring about because they faded into the background except not fully cause of an offhand maybe-foreshadowing comment from 200 pages ago; the apologies from a narrator who you can't trust because every other chapter he admits he intentionally misled you for reasons; the fantastical bits that don't stay for too long because you forget these kids are only 11 and susceptible to 11-year-old mishaps in a country too starved for imagination to realize their potential; and then the wars happen and you get a glimpse of the bigger picture just when all of the punctuation disappears and it's run-on after run-on after run-on and oh my god what just the **** just happened.

This book is equal parts family saga, birth of a nation, tragicomedy, fantastical nonsense, and those one-off, indescribable moments that I live for in literary fiction and I am for all of it. Highly recommended if you have the patience for it.

Review: Babel

Babel by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is not subtle about its themes: colonial/postcolonialism within the context of the British empire of the 1800s and the ways in which language and translation factor into it, using silver as the historical fantasy "MacGuffin" if you will.

Which is to say that quite frankly, how believable is your fantasy world if not much materially is different between the real world and the fantasy one? Half of the premise of this book comes off as saying, colonial nations still gonna colonize, only maybe worse if they'd had access to magical silver as presented here with Oxford's Babel as the centerpiece of the British Empire's strength.

But silver is used to explain things like how steam engines took off and... why China got pulled into the Opium Wars, which makes it feels as if really silver isn't the point given history hasn't materially changed that much... aside from some racial minority characters being "woke" at Oxford nearly 2 centuries ahead of that term (yes I mean that in the actual definition of that term).

All that to say, I agree with the general ideas in this book in principle even though I wish they'd been delivered more subtly and believably. If you can tolerate all of that, the actual setting of Oxford is fun in itself, the treatises around translation and etymology are fascinating, and there is no shortage of shocking plot twists and page-turning developments. I enjoyed the ride this book took me on at the end of the day even though I had to suspend disbelief at times to fully get into it.

Review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
My rating: X of 5 stars

This book was made for that subset of the college university educated population who double-majored in history and physical sciences because it sometimes feels like it's having an identity crisis in whether it's a history or science textbook. (History of science text for sure though.)

The scientific explanations in particular were technical enough to the point where a layman who didn't study Physics in college would probably struggle a bit to keep up-- I certainly struggled even after studying it for an engineering degree. And at the same time, it's just dryly written enough in its citation of historical events that you know it was written by an academic historian.

So why did I subject myself to this nearly 1000-page behemoth for the better part of this year? Surely not because "oh Oppenheimer is coming out this year," because I only made it to the film release with half of the book done and not the half that actually mattered for the movie given Oppenheimer hadn't been introduced yet (Niels Bohr though *heart*).

Yet it felt apt to be able to put names and sometimes faces to all of the individuals who were involved in making the atomic bomb happen, and there are A LOT of them. Too many names to keep track of even within a single chapter to be honest. But unlike Oppenheimer to some extent, it does give appropriate heft and weight in terms of the combined human efforts needed, and just how monumental an undertaking it was to make the bomb happen in as short of a time it did, with just enough WWII history sprinkled in there to give you a sense of the urgency and constraints the scientists were working with.

But does all of that justify what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

I don't know if there will ever be a truly satisfying answer to that question, and not here of all places. When you consider things within the wider context of humanity's propensity for killing its own kind across history... it is shocking the technical extent to which we will go when given the right combination of timing of discoveries and opportunity. This book's length alone speaks to that technical extent.

You do get both the background for the official wartime justification (with interesting insight into the European front, comparison with Dresden, etc) and the actual on-the-ground impact on Japanese civilians-- having just visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum this year, I won't say it's as complete in picture as that, but it's significant enough to convey some of the human cost.

Yet at the end of the day, I think another book would be better served to examine the philosophical, moral side of this, while also weighing the historical context and the fact that we live in a very different time today that learned heavy lessons from the wars. The ultimate hope is that we never again approach a point where such destruction feels... necessary... or that our governments at least never feel the way that the US did in the 1940's.

But that assumes that the people leading the charge of our future have also learned from this history.

I can only hope (and vote) that they do.

Review: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My therapist recommended I read this book, and so naturally my first instinct was to avoid it as much as possible because I figured I'd probably hate it as much as the time I tried reading Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy and had to resist throwing my Kindle against the wall during the first chapter.

This book wound up not being as bad as that. While some aspects definitely upset me about as much as I expected them to, they are not the author's fault considering the subject matter and she does a good job of consolidating the historical context behind how American Evangelical Christianity came to become the cultural behemoth that it is especially within politics today.

If you grew up in evangelical American Christian culture, a lot of the names and movements described here will sound very familiar. You may not have realized the ways in which the individuals and media and ideas were all interconnected to the extent that connections are often made within political and ideological movements. In that respect this book can be eye-opening.

On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with any of those things, it can be harder to follow. The author has a tendency to toss around names and terms that come second-nature to an evangelical immersed in that culture, with the critical eye of someone either estranged or wrestling with that culture, while at the same time I feel not really setting aside ample enough space to fundamentally define what each of these things are for people who've never had to directly deal with them firsthand.

And after reading this book, I don't know why anyone would want to anyway.

More conservative-leaning readers will probably be alienated by the frequent use of terms like toxic masculinity, misogyny, etc. that likewise feel taken face-value as problematic without fully justifying to the reader how/why they are so. If anything that just limits the scope of this book's target audience to a narrow subset of the US population (that... unfortunately includes people like me) and not necessarily the people I wish it could be serving, the ones actually still living and breathing Evangelical culture today.

One can only hope that someday we learn how to communicate face to face with the same language and common vocabulary, and not just know how to talk about each other as if we really think that's sufficient for understanding the other side. Decent first step here, but I'm looking for something more still.

Review: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think my biggest takeaway from this book is how difficult it is to stop the machinery and industry of human exploitation and genocide once it's taken off.

This guy only lived a century before us and his legacy continues to haunt the Congo to the present day, and he never even set foot in it ONCE. F*** King Leopold (and everyone who enabled him).

Review: The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My inspiration for reading this came from 7 years ago when I was reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and realized I was having trouble following a lot of the names and historical references due to not knowing much about the history of the Dominican Republic, particularly on the reign of Rafael Trujillo (and I swear all magical realist books need a historical context disclaimer).

But rather than looking up a dry nonfiction book by an academic historian like I normally would, this book caught my eye. The Feast of the Goat blurs the line between history and fiction (technically historical fiction) but it does a great job in using its fictional side to really make you "relive" the experiences of the real historical figures involved in Trujillo's assassination with all of the anxiety and trauma involved. I can only imagine what other historical coup d'etats were like (and realizing how often this happened during the turbulent 60's).

Granted, I'll admit Vargas Llosa's present-day fictional insert storyline around Urania Cabral didn't captivate me as much as the flashbacks it served to frame. This is not to undercut the tragedy of Urania's backstory... it's just that the legacy of the real life historical individuals who figure throughout the 1960's storylines largely overshadow her (I kept trying to look up many of them only to realize many only turn up in older Spanish-speaking news articles... speaking of how much of the world I don't know). It ultimately made me wonder how necessary it was to write her into this, short of perhaps finding a different real-life victim of Trujillo... assuming one would be willing to be memorialized in this manner.

My other big discovery here is the author himself. Mario Vargas Llosa feels like one of those authors I've just been sleeping on due to lack of exposure; he has a prolific catalog of works dating back to the 60's, but most of them were published in Spanish first before being translated to English, and he actually even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 for them. Definitely want to check out more of his works in the future now.

Review: The Sparrow

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I imagine some hard sci-fi enthusiasts will gawk at some of the blunders committed by the crew during the plot (we’ve seen enough First Contact stories to know better by now even in a non-scientific context) but if you read this as thought exercise on more anthropological/spiritual themes than just pure science fiction, I think the story carries its weight well (stay away if you have trouble suspending disbelief though lol).

I wish some of the ideas expounded on in the last 100 pages of this book had been built up in more detail over the first 2/3rds (definitely hinted at early on but some things are effectively name dropped in execution just to expedite the climax). I would put this at 5* just for the ending alone otherwise.

Review: Making Sense

Making Sense by Sam Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Transcripts of selected episodes from Sam Harris's podcast.

I've not read any of his actual books, but of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," Harris is probably the main one who's stood out to me more for his interest in neuroscience/artificial intelligence and the kind of discourse he has with other thinkers on his podcast.

That said, of the episodes presented in this book, I tended to side more with the guests on the podcast more than Harris himself whenever they did get into debates. Something about the way Harris presents his thoughts tends to irk me, similar to how the New Atheists sometimes irk me with the kinds of declarations they make that I don't always agree with.

But ultimately I'm still impressed at the level of intellectual discourse Harris is able to maintain with each of his guests; you can tell he's clearly studied their works.