Len Deighton's classic first novel, whose protagonist is a nameless spy – later christened Harry …
Too hard to follow
2 stars
Harry Palmer is transferred from British military intelligence to another shadowy department. And pretty much everything that happened between then and the big explanation at the end was too confusing.
There's a kidnapping in Lebanon. A visit to an American Pacific island military base. Some running around London. And lots and lots of coffee, tea, and genteel drinks. None of it making any sense at the time.
Mrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves, …
Housekeepers plot revenge
4 stars
Mrs. King works in the household of Mr. de Vries, an Irishman who made a fortune in South African mining (and changed his name). But shortly after his death Mrs. king is dismissed from the staff after being discovered in the men's quarters.
Soon she's plotting revenge along with other dismissed staff and de Vries' unacknowledged sister, Mrs. Bone.
They're going to steal everything in the house. Everything.
The Housekeepers is set in 1905 London. I love the setting and the plotting and the characters. At the end, i even feel a bit sorry for Miss de Vries, who is a thoroughly unlikable character. Her father didn't have her interests in mind.
In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and …
Solid book
4 stars
Content warning
minor spoilers
Some aspects of the word-building feel very thin. While I can easily suspend disbelief on a city-state having a virus the decimates its female population, and the government severely restricting the rights of women as a response, things like quiet acquiescence seem hard to sustain. Particularly, the idea of an underground group of women who are prostitutes who don't have sex seems like a hard thing to sustain. There's so few women that men use prostitution bots as a matter of course, and but there are many rich men who just want women to hold them so much they'll pay for the service doesn't seem tenable. The story itself makes it clear that it isn't tenable. But the sexless brothel is already decades past its founding before sex becomes an issue.
Anyway, after a while I was able to put aside my reservations about the setup and enjoy the story, which centers Sabine as she visits her most devoted Client as well as her relationships with other women of the Panah. However, when something goes wrong, the story starts to get into the minds and motivations of a lot of other characters.
Combining dazzling speculation with a profoundly humanist vision, Kim Stanley Robinson is known as not …
Politically thoughtful, but I couldn't engage with the story
3 stars
This book has three parts: the story "The Lucky Strike", an essay by Kim Stanley Robinson expounding on the themes of the story, and an interview of the author by Terry Bisson.
The Lucky Strike imagines that the crew of the Enola Gay are not the ones to fly Little Boy to Japan. Instead, the bombardier on The Lucky Strike is very torn about killing 100,000 people and imagines himself saying no, leaping out of the airplane, and worse. I think we should examine our motivations for bombing Hiroshima, but I don't know enough to have a moral opinion whether it was correct in the time. Nevertheless I'm deeply uncomfortable with the choice we did make. Maybe that's why all the second-guessing bombardier Frank January does in the story doesn't resonate; it repeats things I've thought about myself. I can't say "don't read this" because my inability to connect with …
This book has three parts: the story "The Lucky Strike", an essay by Kim Stanley Robinson expounding on the themes of the story, and an interview of the author by Terry Bisson.
The Lucky Strike imagines that the crew of the Enola Gay are not the ones to fly Little Boy to Japan. Instead, the bombardier on The Lucky Strike is very torn about killing 100,000 people and imagines himself saying no, leaping out of the airplane, and worse. I think we should examine our motivations for bombing Hiroshima, but I don't know enough to have a moral opinion whether it was correct in the time. Nevertheless I'm deeply uncomfortable with the choice we did make. Maybe that's why all the second-guessing bombardier Frank January does in the story doesn't resonate; it repeats things I've thought about myself. I can't say "don't read this" because my inability to connect with this probably says more about me than it does the story.
However, Robinson's essay on historical theories, whether they are good to apply to the Hiroshima bombing, and what to make of the alternate possibilities is also not something I connected with. I'm not interested in theories of history like the "great man" theory.
And lastly, I did find some interesting tidbits in Bisson's interview of Robinson, but most of the questions are pedestrian. In some cases, Robinson turns them into something interesting. In other cases, particularly on his writing methods, not so interesting. (Maybe writers will get something from those? 🤷)
Ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is called in by James Barr, the man accused of a …
A little far fetched for a premise
3 stars
Content warning
Minor spoilers in the review
Pure thriller bubblegum. First one i recall where Reacher doesn't sleep with a main character.
However well paced, the premise is the worst of the Reachers so far. The idea that a survivor of the Soviet gulags has set up a cement kickback scheme in rural Indiana, and that it's lucrative enough to kill 6 people over, along with an elaborate scheme to involve a soldier, making him repeat a crime he committed 20 years earlier so that he'd be blamed? Not to mention the timelines don't add up. But if you can suspend disbelief, it's a fun ride.
I put this down nearly 2 months ago thinking I'd maaaybe give it another shot, but it turns out no, i don't want to give it another shot. Why are most business books so bad??
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of …
Most excellent book
4 stars
This has a whole bunch of elements that i loved, but mostly a great plot and clear character arc. At the start of the book, Kyr is an about-to-graduate cadet on a asteroid bound space station that houses the last few thousands of humanity after an alien civilization has destroyed Earth.
Things are not as they seem, which Kyr finds out by getting assigned to Nursery to bear children for humanity, despite her top scores, and her brother refusing assignment and deserting.
A word of warning that there's some intense cult-like abuse in the pages.
I read this on the recommendation of @charliejane@wandering.shop in her Washington Post column on SF. You should read her columns too.
Supposedly this is a literary thriller, but there's a lot wrong and dumb about this.
The author really really likes run-on sentences.
This is not how hacking works.
The villain is the worst mustache-twirler.
His plot isn't how ultra rich people plot, with intricate conspiracies that depend on hiding all the facts. Rather, they do it in the open, with plausible deniability.
Twirler has to keep his purchase of a farm secret, when he could just buy it.
He randomly decides to possess a young naive trespassing gardener and fund her gardening collective in some sort of secret challenge grant makes no sense.
He supplies LSD to the collective for no apparent reason.
He does a bunch of these near the site of his nefarious plot for no good reason, endangering his plan.
Twirler changes the gate code for no good reason. The real reason is the author needed the victim to be walking alone at dark.
The kids' motivations feel somewhat authentic, but everything else about this book is irritating.
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldier's son. An elite military cop, he was one of …
A Reacher prequel
3 stars
Content warning
Mild spoiler
The Enemy takes Reacher back to 1990, when he's still in the army, still an MP. Still follows the Reacher formula though: he sleeps with the girl, doesn't seem to get anywhere for a while, then makes a series of leaps but doesn't tell others until he gets his ducks lined up.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are …
A cozy police procedural
4 stars
Still Life combines elements of a cozy (small intimate community, violence occurring off stage) with a police procedural (the detective is a genial detective from out of town). The community secrets are a bit too abstractly complicated for me to really love the mystery, but it's good enough to be interesting.
Chapter 1, Section 1 - Short circuit your reward system
Says that we need short term validation while pursuing long term goals. Gives an example from his company, Behance. Does not give any guidance on how to do this other than "lower the bar for how you define a 'win'."
