My #bookreview is brief/won't spoil, to spread good, great, & spectacular #horror#books far & wide.
THE TRUEST SENSE showcases Laura Keating's unique & deftly scary stories: some sneak up quietly- some gleefully go full-throttle into nightmares- but all 15 tales are atmospheric & vivid, with an aura of permeating horror that provides an imaginative, satisfying journey into the Weird.
Why do some people live like there's no tomorrow? Shouldn't you strive to be the kind of ancestor your community will be proud of in 50, 100, or 500 years? Humans clearly have the capacity for long-term thinking, how do we reorient our society for epic planning?
LIFE IS MORE THAN GENDER for Zoë Bossiere, whose tale of a hardscrabble, hard-luck boyhood on the outskirts of Tucson winds through androgyny and young womanhood into a place of self-acceptance as a genderfluid writer and teacher. B PLUS
“But the four men who rode atop the wave of the Gilded Age were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. Their business activities during the final four decades of the nineteenth century drove America’s ascension into the most powerful industrial nation on the planet. And they shaped the rules that governed the US economy for decades to come.”
New review: Fun, fascinating, and always with one eye firmly on the facts, Eat, Poop, Die shows how animals shape ecosystems through their everyday activities.
After being blown away by The Saint of Bright Doors, I'm very very eager to read Vajra Chandrasekera's next book, Rakesfall--and not least because of @chloroform_tea 's very favourable review on Nerds of a Feather!
Highlights were a most unusual read in Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, getting to review Going Zero by Andrew McCarten and starting in on a couple of excellent #AusCrime books - one part of a series, the other a debut.
AN EXTRAVAGANT, SPRAWLING PICARESQUE set in Zaire in the last years of the Mobutu regime is a symphony of voices from every walk of life, from tough street kids to the secret police to high society. Vivid and fascinating. B PLUS
Technology based thriller which worked for this reader (they often don't). Surveillance contest between tech bro and a book reader that goes down the wire with heaps at stake for both parties.
HIGH TECH AND HOODOO and the powers of love, art, and community are mighty weapons in this unique adventure set in a near-future dystopian Massachusetts. Rich with the Afrofuturist spirit of funk and beautiful evocations of nature. B PLUS
New review: Why Sharks Matter is an informed and informative book on shark conservation that tackles misconceptions and explains conflicts between biologists and activists.
I hated the level of writing skill present in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Upsetting because I really loved A Psalm for the Wild-Built, also by Becky Chambers. I ended up finishing TLWtaSAP waiting for it to get better. It did not. My first 2/5 star completed read in a while.
Dialogue was often awkward and unnatural. Transitions between locations and events were absent. A sense of time in the book is almost completely missing - if you aren't paying attention to dates for each chapter (I often flipped back to the prior chapter to get a sense of time), you will have little to no idea how much time is actually passing. This means that within chapters, it feels like a fever dream where time loses all meaning.
I'm sure this is an enjoyable read for people who enjoy the characters who get a lot of page time. I would've enjoyed them more if their reactions to one another and the world around them were more consistent and organic. The dialogue really killed any affection I had for them. It seemed the characters were stereotypical tropes and if you recognized the trope, you'd know everything about the character and what they'd do. But this meant that on the rare occasion where they break out of the trope to monologue - essentially infodumping on the reader and not really communicating with another character - it comes off as really insincere and not true to who they are.