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.