Becky Chambers has a wonderful ability to
write books that are larger than they appear, and which leave the reader feeling
good about themselves and humanity at large. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a
short novel, about 160 pages. Nothing much happens in it, yet it sets out to tackle
the question about the purpose of life.
Sibling Dex is a monk who one day realises
that life in the city doesn’t satisfy them anymore, so they change their
vocation and begin to tour the countryside with a bicycle drawn trailer, to
offer tea and sympathy for those who need it. After a rocky start, they become
great at it. Yet they’re still not satisfied.
On a whim, they head to the wilderness that
humans aren’t supposed to enter. There they encounter Mosscap, a humanoid robot
who has been sent to find out if humans need them. Robots have become
self-aware about two centuries ago, when humans were facing an ecological disaster.
A pact between robots and humans has kept the two apart ever since.
Now the world has healed and the robots maybe
want to join humans again. But they’re not the original robots anymore. They’ve
rebuilt themselves from the parts of the old robots, and in the process have gained an
outlook on life that rests on its finite nature.
Dex and Mosscap become friends over philosophical
and religious conversations, both learning from the other. I liked them both
very much, though Mosscap with its infinite curiosity and old wisdom was maybe
my favourite. The book ends with the two deciding to head back to civilisation
together. Since this is the first book in Monk & Robot series, the rest of
their adventures will happen later.
This was perhaps the most hopeful of
Chambers’ books I’ve read. The world—a habitable moon—is lush and green and
full of happy people in harmony with nature. There’s no talk about space travel,
though the people must have come there somehow. All the technology is fairly
lowkey, even Mosscap. Like in all Chambers’ books, being genderless is a valid way
of life. I especially liked Sibling as an option for Brother and Sister of other
monks. And I liked that there was no drama. The book left me feeling rested and
comfortable. A wonderful respite.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in
exchange for an honest review.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth (and last?)
book in Becky Chambers’ wonderful Wayfarers series. Each book has been set in a
different location in her vast and imaginative galaxy, featuring different
people, and has tackled different aspects of (human) experience from AIs right
to a self, to finding a place to belong. The latest isn’t an exception.
The book is set on a small rock of a planet that has no life
of its own, but—as Tupo, one of the characters says—even life that is
introduced on a planet is life. Gora is a hub of space travel between several
wormhole jump points, a place to rest and refuel for a day or two while waiting
for a place in the jump queue. Life is contained under large domes, and the
only thing connecting the domes is the power grid.
One of the domes is Five-Hop One-Stop, a rest-stop
run by Ouloo and Tupo, her child. They are Laru, a species that resemble
long-legged and necked dogs or maybe Alpacas; they’re furry and four-legged,
with front paws acting as hands. It’s a matter of pride for Ouloo to make each
and every traveller feel like home when they visit, whether it’s offering them particular
food, accommodating different bathing habits, or finding a suddenly fertile
Aeluon the closest place to procreate.
On this occasion, she’s visited by Pei, a female Aeluon, a mostly
humanoid species who communicate with colours on their skin; Roveg, a Quelin
male who are basically large insects with exoskeletons and multiple legs; and
Speaker, a female Akarak, a small species who cannot use oxygen and therefore only
exit their ship inside a mechanical armour. Accommodating such different guests
isn’t easy, but Ouloo does her best. And then a disaster strikes, stranding
them into her dome for days with no way of communicating outside.
Like all the books in the series, this is very much character
driven. We follow each character as they try to adjust to a change in their
plans, their worries for what they might miss or what awaits them once they
reach their destination. Each character has their own story and reason to travel.
And for the first time for most of them, it’s a chance to get to know species they
find alien. They do this in a respectful manner and with minimal strife, which
has become the hallmark of these books. While nothing much happens externally,
each character changes through these interactions and by the time they are able
to leave, they have made new friends. The epilogue sees everyone to their happy
places, the private conflicts solved.
This was a wonderful, happy book that left me warm and fuzzy
inside. If this truly is the last one, it’s a great ending, but I wish the
series would continue. It’s been imaginative and positive, with great
detail and thought put to the biological and cultural differences of the various
species, and I’m sure there would be dozens of stories to tell. I for one could
read many more Wayfarer books.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an
honest review.
It’s a new year and that means a new Goodreads Reading
Challenge. I’ve set myself a reading goal there several years in a row, and I find
it a fun way to keep track of what I’ve read and maybe challenge myself a
little too. Last year I made a personal reading record of ninety-five books (or
eighty-five, if you only count those I finished). This year I pledged to read
eighty books, though that may change later.
Every year, I make a list too, of books that I want to read. It’s
a guideline more than a mandatory programme; last year I only read ten
books from it. But I’ve noticed that it’s easier to keep up with everything I
want to read if I’ve listed every book I already own and haven’t read yet, the
books on my wish list and the upcoming publications by my favourite authors.
This year’s list contains a whopping hundred and fifty
books, mostly because I did so poorly with it last year that several books moved
over. It has four sections: books from the old list, new books, books from
NetGalley, and books I chance to read outside it—obviously currently empty.
There are fifty-two books from the old list. Some of them
didn’t seem so interesting anymore, so I pruned it down to those I already own
or definitely want to read. That brought it down to twenty books. These include
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang, which was published in November and I got for a
Christmas present and didn’t have time to read last year, and Crush the King by
Jennifer Estep that I reserved from the local library, but haven’t got yet.
The list of new books filled with everything I bought last
year and didn’t have time to read. There are several by Lindsay Buroker, for
example, as many of her boxed sets were free or discounted—and
she’s published a lot. But there are also many upcoming books from my favourite
authors; two from J.R. Ward and three from Nalini Singh. All in all, the list
has seventy-nine books, so if I manage to read them all, that’s my reading
challenge pretty much covered.
And then there’s the NetGalley section. I’ve already been
approved to read twenty-two books, and that’s only until May. A couple of
really interesting books there, like Victories Greater than Death by Charlie
Jane Anders, which will come out in April; A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady
Martine, the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire, which will be published in
March; The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers, coming out in February,
and The Russian Cage by Charlaine Harris that will be published in February
too.
All in all, a full and interesting list. And there’s still
room for surprises, so bring them on. Last year ended with one such surprise,
as I picked Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, a really great fantasy romance,
and instantly proceeded to read her Clockwork Boys, which is the first book I’ve
finished this year. I’ve already started it’s follow up, The Wonder Engine. So
the reading year is on to a good start. Follow this blog to find out how it
proceeds.
I’m over a month behind posting book reviews here on my
reading blog. I spent a better part of February without finishing a single
book I began to read. Partly it was because the books were disappointing and I had
to give them up. Partly it was because I had other commitments that ate into my
reading time. Because of that, the previous post here is from January 21st, and
the first book I finished since that was on February 19th. The gap in posting
is just laziness. I’ve managed to read five books, so here’s a recap.
This is book ten in Chance’s Cassandra Palmer series.
Despite the length of the series, apparently only three months have passed,
which is difficult to believe, considering everything that’s happened. In the
past couple of books there has been a major war brewing, and this one ended
with a big battle, though not the war-ending one. All the books do. Other than
that, it was slightly mismatched. It began with one plot that was made out to
be a big deal, but ended up as something completely different, with the
original plot brought up as an afterthought in the epilogue. Still, it was
better than some of the books in the series—which I love, by the way. It
was evenly paced with slower chapters here and there where the reader can catch
their breath, and there was an exciting development considering the main trio, Cassie, Pritkin and Mircea. And now that Chance is publishing the books herself, we don’t have to wait years until the next one.
Becky Chambers’ books are always
lovely. Nothing dramatic ever happens, there’s no drama between characters and
everyone is always nice. Small frowns are dealt with hugs. There’s very little
plot in them too, but since I know to except that, it doesn’t usually
matter. But this book is basically a report of what four people sent on a
scientific mission to exoplanets did and saw. Nothing else. There’s a small build-up
for drama when the earth stops communicating with them, but it’s soon brushed
over. What disappointed me with this one, however, was the ending. It tries to
be ambivalent, to leave the fate of the characters to the reader’s imagination,
but it comes across as a copout, as if the author hasn’t bothered to take
responsibility for her creation. Other than that, it’s an imaginative,
well-written book like all her books, and kept me entertained up until the
disappointing end.
This was the first book in Jones’s new series toted as women’s
paranormal romance, a crossover between women’s fiction and paranormal romance
where the heroines are over forty. It was a fast-paced and easy to read. The
main characters, Defiance and Annette feel familiar from Jones’s excellent Charlie
Davidson series, with a similar friendship dynamics than Charlie and Cookie and
a habit of drinking all the coffee, so I loved them instantly. And if Defiance
isn’t an ADD personality like Charlie, she isn’t exactly fully focused either.
This isn’t a laugh-out-loud kind of book like the other series, but it has its
funny moments.
However, the book feels incomplete. It’s like I was reading
the first third of a longer book, with the characters being introduced and the
basis of the plot set. And then it ended. There are two more books coming and
I’m guessing the main action happens in those, but I can’t judge this book
based on what I don’t have.
I also have a small issue with Defiance’s age. She's
supposed to be forty-four, which is fine (I like reading characters my age). But
she has no past and she behaved like a twenty-something, with no wisdom or
experience gained. If the point of this series is to have middle-aged heroines,
I’d like them to show the life they have lived. They should
feel and act differently from the twenty-year-olds. But I liked Defiance and if
I imagine her to be twenty-something, I can forget all the rest. And since the
book ended with a whopper of a cliff-hanger, I’m definitely going to read the
next book.
This was invigorating like dragon’s
blood. I really like a tough heroine who
goes through a book kicking arse, and getting hers kicked in return. Val is as
tough as they come, but she pays for it too: her stress-levels are so high she
has developed asthma and needs therapy, both of which are well integrated into
the story. She has some other issues as well, mainly that she has had to
abandon everyone she loves, a daughter included, so that they won’t be killed
because of her job as a monster slayer.
The story itself is fairly straightforward. Val needs to
find a cure for her boss who has been poisoned with magic, and clear both of
their names in the process. Her path to it is littered with creatures from other
realms who are bent on killing her. Making matters worse is a dragon who wants
to use her as bait to lure in more creatures who want to kill her. It is action
from the beginning to the end.
As this is the first book in the series, there is some world-building
and character introductions, but everything is done organically along the
story. No backstory is given for why the world is populated with creatures from
other realms; it’s a fact of life for the characters. As a first person
narrative, we get only Val’s thoughts on things, and other characters remain
slightly distant. But they are all interesting. My favourite is Zav, the
arrogant dragon law-enforcer. The book hints that some sort of romantic bond
will form between him and Val, but there was no romance yet. All in all, a
great start for a series and I’ll definitely read the next book too.
Books 4-8 of 60 (I’ve had to lower my reading challenge target from the original 65.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third in Chambers’s sci-fi series set in the
same universe with loosely connected characters but no common plot. And sadly,
it’s the least interesting of them. A huge disappointment even, especially after
the delightful A Closed and Common Orbit, a story of an AI struggling with its
identity.
The book is set on a space fleet of humans who have left the
earth centuries ago and now try to maintain their traditional way of life in a
universe where they’re no longer alone, and where settling on planets is a
viable option. It has five point of view characters, each with their own
chapters. There’s an old archivist entertaining an alien visitor, a harried
mother of two, a teenager rebelling against his environment, a young woman in
charge of the dead, and a young man from outside the fleet. Each character is
perfectly ordinary, living a perfectly ordinary life. And that’s the problem
with this book.
The characters aren’t interesting in any way. They don’t get
a growth arch, or change in any way. They’re static props living their
perfectly normal lives. The chapters are vignettes of their lives in various
points in time, with no continuity between the chapters. There are no
connections between the characters, except a couple of chance encounters that
don’t really have any impact in their lives. So mostly we follow the mother
putting her children to bed, the teenager testing his boundaries, and the
others at their work, chapter after chapter. Nothing happens.
The book has absolutely no plot. I didn’t even know it’s
possible to write a book with no plot. Nothing the characters do has any impact
on the outside world, and no outside force impacts them. They just are. There’s
a major event at the beginning that in normal book would’ve been the mid-point
turn, with the rest of the book dealing with the aftermath. Here, it’s just
another vignette with no impact whatsoever, if you don’t count a child having
nightmares about it; not exactly a plot event.
Here, the mid-point turn was the death of a point of view
character, an underhanded turn that destroyed what little enjoyment I had with
the story, as that character was the most interesting one. And then the death
didn’t affect the plot in any way. It touched the other characters briefly,
they made adjustments accordingly, and went on with their lives. A huge
disappointment.
In a word, the book is boring. If the aim was to show that
humans are humans no matter where they live, the same could’ve been achieved
with fewer chapters—and with a proper plot binding them together. The hugely
original environment, the space fleet, is just a prop and an endless source of
boring lectures. The characters could’ve been set anywhere, and they
would’ve been the same. I don’t know why the author chose to write this book
after the highly imaginative predecessors, which makes it even more
disappointing than it otherwise would’ve been. The book is nominated for a Hugo
Award this year, and I have to assume it’s solely because people liked the
previous books so much. This one has nothing to recommend itself.
