Holiday Review of Reviews 2025

 

Dear reader, I haven't been posting book reviews here on the blog as much as I would like the last few months. I've still been writing some reviews over on Goodreads, but I haven't even been keeping up over there. It has been a busy few months, and the energy for blogging has often been elusive.

I could keep castigating myself, or I could just post the reviews! 

After I post this, I have two more reviews to finish of Death's End by Cixin Liu and Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. I may also return to a holiday tradition from my past: reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! I may even read A Christmas Carol, which I've been thinking about the last few years in line with my tradition of watching holiday horror movies.

Anyway, here are my reviews of The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Fall of Gilead (graphic novel inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower), and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

Happy Holidays to you and all sentient beings! May all beings be jolly!

Review of Reviews, May 2025: Andor, Sinners, and Books by Okorafor, Maas, King, Harvey, Hannah-Jones, Pargin, and Stanley

 

I have gotten behind on posting book reviews lately (I did get one last month), so I thought I should get around to that now that the spring semester is over and grades are entered.

And today just happens to be May the 4th, aka Star Wars Day (as observed recently based on the pun on the date), so I figured I would add a little bit about the latest season of the Star Wars show, Andor. Also, like many other people, I saw and had a lot of thoughts about Ryan Coogler's Sinners.

Books reviewed here: She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, The Waste Lands by Stephen King, The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannh-Jones, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, John Dies at The End by Jason Pargin, and How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.

There is also a super secret Star Wars day review hidden in here...

Let the reviews commence!

Cosmic Hope or Lack Thereof: The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (Translated by Joel Martinson)

 

I read (and loved!) Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem back in 2016. I vowed to read the sequels soon... and then I ... didn't. I'm honestly not sure why (maybe: aliens?), but I watched and mostly liked the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, which reminded me that I really should pick up the sequel (there are actually a few things from the second book in the series as well, so that was fun).

I'm glad I finally read The Dark Forest! This feels like a different kind of book to me (maybe due to being a second book in a series, or leisurely in a more focused way, or maybe I'm a different reader now?). Still, I enjoyed it almost as much as the first one.

Two Steps on my Stephen King Path: Joyland and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

 

At some point in the last few years, I made a low-key plan to someday read all of Stephen King's books. I don't have a specific timeline, but it's an ambitious goal as King has published over 70 books, counting his novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works. And the list keeps growing with a new Stephen King book coming in a couple weeks.

But to paraphrase the Daodejing, the journey of a thousand miles (or 70+ books) begins with a single step. So I recently decided to take two short steps with Joyland and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. With these two complete, I'm about 80% of the way toward my goal (at least if this fun spreadsheet from one of my favorite podcasts, Dark Tower Palaver, is accurate). Someday I may post the end of this journey (bittersweet though that will be), but for now, here are two short steps on my Stephen King path.

Favorite Utopias New and Old: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers and The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

 

I was recently in the mood for some unabashed utopian science fiction. I had been saving the second volume of Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot series for the right moment. And I've been meaning to reread all of Iain M. Banks's Culture series ever since I frequently gushed about it so much on this very blog back in the mid-2010's.

I need some time to mull it over, but I think Chambers's Monk and Robot series may be one of my all-time favorites. I’d say I want to give it a million stars if that sort of hyperbole didn’t feel contrary to its entire ethos.

I loved it so much that I couldn't think of how to review it properly. So instead I wrote this weird... review? Or whatever this is...

Hugo Ballot 2023: Short Stories and Novelettes!

 

It's Hugo reading season! The voting deadline is coming up on Sept. 30! There was a bit of a delay in releasing the list of nominees and the Hugo packet, and then summer travels and the beginning of the fall semester happened to me ... so, how am I doing?

I'm almost done with the novels. I may or may not get to all the novellas (sad, I know!). But I have now finished the novelettes and short stories.  Maybe because this year's Worldcon will be taking place in Chengdu, China, there are more finalists from China than usual! Unfortunately I won't get to China this year, but Worldcon will be in Glasgow, Scotland next year, and I'm hoping to attend in person as part of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society (stay tuned for details).

Anyway, overall I thought there were some great novelettes and short stories this year. The novelettes in particular were really difficult to rank (reading the Hugo nominees in the last several years has taught me that I seem to enjoy the novelette-length short fiction best: enough space to dig in, but it's still not too long). Here are my rankings and what I thought about this year's short stories and novelettes!

Review of Reviews: June 2023 (The Regulators, Schrödinger's City, and The Eye in the Pyramid)

 

It's time for another review of reviews! I'm still eagerly awaiting the announcement of this year's Hugo finalists so I can start this year's Hugo reading (although I'm taking a gamble by starting R. F. Kuang's Nebula-winning Babel, which is fantastic even if we improbably live in a universe where it won't be a Hugo finalist). While I'm waiting, I'm reading other books that are on my ever-increasing to-read list: The Regulators by Richard Bachman (aka, Stephen King), Schrödinger's City by Matthew Buscemi, and The Eye in the Pyramid by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I guess the through-line here is that all three of these novels are pretty weird--and delightfully so. Just to mix it up, let's start with the one I finished last: The Eye in the Pyramid!

Review of Reviews: February 2023

 

Although I still occasionally write a longer review, most of my book reviews have been shorter as of late. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm just appreciating brevity these days, so on that note, on to the reviews of books I've read in the last month or so!

The Slow Pondering of Strange and Beautiful Realities: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

As with all of Le Guin's work, The Telling is profound, thought-provoking, complex, and raises more questions than answers.

The trouble with reviewing a Le Guin book is that anything I could say about it feels inadequate compared to what Le Guin herself has written. But let me give it a shot, anyway.

Random Thoughts, Part 19: Randomize Then, There are Other Thoughts Than These

My long-running random thoughts series continues with Part 19! And since this is Part 19 and I'm a huge fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series (where this number figures heavily, at least in the later books), I figured I would riff on my favorite line from the series (even though this quote randomly comes from the first book well before the 19 stuff took off... but that's more fittingly random, I suppose).

I haven't posted one of these since May, and the random thoughts stop for no blog, so I have even more random thoughts than usual. It looks like I got up to the totally random number of 502 with this post! How random!

And as always: plenty of memes for your random memetic enjoyment! Enjoy!

Wandering Through Another Mid-40's Birthday

 

Here I am continuing to wander through my mid-40's. That's right, it's time for my annual birthday post!

Suffering and Greatness: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

 

At times the intrigue of Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun is a bit tough to follow (I needed a Dramatis Personae), but overall this is a beautifully-written exploration of gender, politics, ambition, and desire in 14th century China with some mild fantasy elements. I think there's even an interesting sort of thought experiment about Buddhist conceptions of desire and suffering to be found.

My Appointment with Destiny (if by "destiny" you mean a tweet with several hundred likes)

 

On Wednesday morning this week, I had a thought that mildly amused me based on another tweet I saw, so I turned it into a tweet. See above. Or see here.

I somehow have a bunch of followers on Twitter (about 1,900), but most of my tweets are lucky to get a handful of likes. I'm actually okay with that. To be honest, I got on Twitter in 2016 unsure of why I was doing so, and I have yet to figure out what I'm doing on Twitter five years later. I don't think at the speed of Twitter, nor have I cracked the code of going viral.

Until now. 

Nondualism and the Pandemic, Part 2

A representation of Indra's Net

Continued from Part 1...

Dualism and Responsibility 

How did the US come to possess such a set of flaws that uniquely predisposed us to react to the pandemic as we have? There are large cultural and political forces that no one of us is uniquely responsible for, but each of us bears some responsibility for. I don’t deign to know your life, dear reader, so let me think through my own example.

Gangster's Fantasy: Jade City by Fonda Lee

 

The setting and the world building of Fonda Lee's Jade City are really, really cool. I'd love to learn more about the world, which is something like an Earth-adjacent version of Taiwan/Hong Kong with gangsters who use jade-based magic. The magic system is cool, although we don't learn a whole lot about it. I really feel like I visited the city of Janloon, and thankfully observed the gangster fights from the sidelines!

Later Explorations of Earthsea: Tehanu and Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

I've been a huge fan of Le Guin's science fiction for about 20 years, but I didn't start reading the Earthsea books until a few years ago. I recently moved these two later books in the series --Tehanu and Tales From Earthsea--to  the top of my list to prepare for an online discussion of the Earthsea books (info here).

Le Guin's Earthsea on Worlds of Speculative Fiction

I'm excited to be a guest for Dr. Greg Sadler's Worlds of Speculative Fiction tomorrow (Sat. Dec. 19, 2020). We'll be discussing Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series.

Here's the Facebook event, video link, and Zoom link. This is free and open to the public, so feel free to attend virtually.

Pandemic Journal, Part 14: Politics, Pandemic, and For the Love of All That You Hold Dear, Vote!

My pandemic journal continues with Part 14! It has been about six months since this all started, or in pandemic time, roughly 25 years. 

As usual, I have spent the last month scouring the internet for the finest memes. You can also read about what I've been doing and thinking. But it's also okay to just browse the memes. Do what you gotta do. It's a pandemic. 

And for the love of all that you hold dear, vote if you are eligible, my fellow Americans! Jesus fucking Christ, just vote. I don't even know what to say to convince you, but if this serves as a reminder, so be it. Just vote.

New Article: "Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fictional Feminist Daoism"

Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm thrilled to announce that my article "Ursula K. Le Guin's Science Fictional Feminist Daoism" is now available in The Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy. You can download it here.

Pandemic Journal, Part 11

My Pandemic Journal continues with Part 11, which covers most of July 2020 until the 25th. You can see Part 10 here. And as has become tradition, there are lots of random memes. I have an even larger than usual store of memes saved for this post. I may have gotten a little carried away. Enjoy!