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chan_fry's reviews
164 reviews
4.0
I’m glad I re-read this on the heels of The Songs Of Distant Earth, with which I wasn’t impressed. Childhood’s End is far superior in terms of plot and character development, yet it also keeps in play the Big Ideas including the ultimate fate of humanity.
I think my only real complaint here was Clarke’s persistently oblique style of prose. I didn’t take off points for the dated-ness of the book, which is something a reader should expect from 1953. I do give him props for the women in speaking roles and for having an interracial (mixed) couple featured prominently — as well as a black man taking a primary role in the latter half of the book.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
4.0
This fascinating novel was both fun and thought-provoking (and shouldn’t good novels be both?) It’s difficult to say much about the plot without giving away spoilers, but basically the low-level crewpersons on a starship begin to wonder about how expendable they are, and how some of the science of the universe doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What they discover leads them to hatch a wild scheme to fix it all.
I hesitantly took off a full star due to the sharp and disturbing lack of any physical character descriptions, which makes it fairly difficult to separate them in my mind while reading — especially if there are half a dozen characters in any given scene and they seem to have identical personalities and language patterns.
(I have written a longer review on my website, but be warned: there ARE spoilers in that one.)
3.0
Borrowing parts of the title from Black Like Me, Wise here dishes out a slew of anecdotes from his personal life, the experiences that awakened him to his white privilege, spurred him to become an anti-racist activist, and give him particular insight into the struggle for racial equality in the U.S.
Mostly, I enjoyed reading it — the stories are entertaining — but I couldn’t help but wonder who is the intended audience? I’m already convinced of what he attempts to convince the reader, and I’m fairly certain that if I wasn’t already convinced, then these anecdotes wouldn’t convince me. (“[Story of a white guy who got away with something, but] imagine if it had been a black guy? That’s white privilege!”)
One personal note: So many writings on the topic of racism ignore the many mixed families in the country; I often feel adrift during the discussions of all-white families versus families who are entirely people of color.
(I have written a longer review on my website.)
4.0
It's brief, fun, and insightful in places. Most of all, of course, I enjoyed the internal monologues (or is it soliloquies?) by Murderbot, who seems to have my exact personality. I can’t name any specific reason I left off the fifth star, other than I usually require a specific reason to add the fifth star, and I just couldn’t find quite enough here to award it.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
4.0
My "4" should probably be a 4.4 or something. This is an enjoyable romp, with prose that reminds me strongly of Douglas Adams — but with more pizazz and (much) longer sentences.
Valente describes her extraterrestrials in ways that are oddly revolting and endearing at the same time. Social commentary is lightly sprinkled throughout, but in ways that aren't tiring — most are exactly the things one might expect a sentient ET to say to humans.
And learning that the novel was apparently inspired by a spontaneous joke during a Twitter session only added icing to the cake.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
3.0
If you enjoy novels set in the Star Wars universe you’ll like this one. If Star Wars isn’t for you, I assume neither is this novel. Simple as that.
Taking place somewhere between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, quite some tension is taken out of the novel because you already know which of the main characters will survive, no matter how narrow their escape — because they’re in the movie that follows. That being said, this story is full of tension, narrow escapes, explosions, space battles, crazed killer droids, shooting, intrigue, and so on — basically nonstop action. More so than a typical Star Wars novel — a lot of them seem to take a while to build up; this one hits the ground running and never lets up.
Martha Wells was a brilliant choice of author; her prose flows easily and makes reading quick and enjoyable.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
3.0
In spite of the slew of 10-dollar words (like “detumescence”, “nonessentialized”, and “vinculum”), often mashed into 100-word sentences, I was able to slog my way through this highly academic and dense collection of 23 essays. A few were more poignant, more lay-accessible, than others.
Whether it’s a good representation of second-wave feminist writing, I don’t know; during those years I was either a child or securely tucked away in the right-wing cult that raised me. But I do think I learned some things from this book, or at least acquired some more solid foundations for things I already knew.
My wish (if anyone wants to make recommendations) is for an in-between book on feminism. My experience so far has either been this (solidly academic, but also well-researched) or its opposite (anecdotal, lightweight pieces that might be fun to write but don’t bear much weight). Surely there is a market for a feminism book that’s both well-referenced and thoughtful, yet easily readable by a non-professor.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
4.0
I only became aware of this novelette because I was perusing last night’s Hugo winner list and saw Kowal’s name, after which I came here to Goodreads to see a list of her works, at which point I discovered that *this* novelette was available online, to read for free, and that it had won a Hugo in 2014.
I enjoyed it for several reasons, not the least of which were the unusual (in sci-fi, anyway) choices of having a 63-year-old woman as the main character and prominently featuring a terminal illness in the narrative. This brief story was instructive in several ways, and also poignant and evocative. (My only real — but minor — complaint is some confusion in the opening paragraphs, during which I thought it was a third-person story about “Dorothy” and had to re-read the opening several times to be clear that it wasn’t.)
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
4.0
I’m glad I read this; it was nice to — for once — read a history book that chose “the people” as the protagonist and tried to tell the stories of the rest of us, the ones usually only mentioned in histories as nameless, faceless background characters (“the townspeople”, “some protesters”, or “workers”).
I found only minor irritations to complain about: (1) Zinn often skips around within a certain time period instead of moving chronologically forward with each narrative; it sometimes gives the impression that a later event led up to an earlier one. (2) I was distracted by his regular use of “colored” and “Negro”, which I think should have been used only in quotations of historical material. These two were minor enough to leave my appreciation intact for the overall work.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)
4.0
This was a powerful story of Onyesonwu’s magical journey to find her sorcerer father. It’s both a coming-of-age story and a quest/adventure story. Plus: magic, wizards, and more. Tremendous fun, well-paced, poignant.
I think I was picking up what Okorafor was laying down, until the very end. I don’t even know how to explain this, but I was fine with the end. And then the Epilogue that followed was good too. Then (and this is the spoiler), there was another ending. Almost like an “alternate ending” on a Bluray disc, but without the foreknowledge that I’m about to read a different ending. And the second ending, I had trouble understanding.
If I pretend the book ended at the end of the Epilogue, I’m willing to give it five stars; otherwise it’s four-something.
(I have published a longer review on my website.)