Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I know I’m late to read this, but in all fairness, it has been sitting on my shelf since publication. I pre-ordered it and just never got around to reading it after it showed up—life is like that sometimes.

Then Geo and I came back from a road trip and decided to catch a movie, knowing nothing about Project Hail Mary in the slightest. We loved it, of course. I dug into the stack of books and pulled my copy out, leaving it well within reach. 

Of course I loved everything about this.

Weir does science fiction supremely well.

What makes science fiction work isn’t the science. All stories, to be successful, have to rely on the universal truth of humanity: love, loss, life, ambition, deception, success, companionship, betrayal. And what science fiction is uniquely suited to is stories of universal truths that are arranged around problem-solving, one of the most fundamental elements of human existence. We’re alive; we solve problems. It’s what we do. For what it’s worth, this is why the  Star Trek series succeeded so well, and why the first Star Trek movie failed so spectacularly. Grand sweeping shots of the outside of the ship, or of technology in general, aren’t a story. 

Anyway, I loved everything about this book, and of course you knew I would. 

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Khaw weaves ancient tales into a beautiful and haunting tapestry of horror, power, domination, and all the ways the world makes monsters of us. And yet we live and love and forge connections, craving, striving, being.

All that is on display, with a prodigious and masterful, lyrical command of language that worms its way in to the darkest corners, unapologetically redecorating as it goes.

I loved this.

But then, I would.

Light Chaser by Peter Hamilton and Gareth Powell

Sometimes I think science fiction is just lost on me. I tend to get a bit glassy-eyed when authors talk about the tech they have envisioned as though I’m going to be as enamored with it as they are, and frequently I’m simply not. Tech itself doesn’t impress me any more than a dial tone in a phone receiver would. The story of how tech is used, though, is compelling. 

Hamilton and Powell almost get it, here, but ultimately fell short for me. 

This is well-enough written, and if you like tech, you’ll like this. It’s a bit of a swashbuckling, rage-against-the-machine by the end of it all, and again, it’s a bit sophomoric for my tastes.

The stories on the various planets are pretty cool, and the underlying premise is solid. 

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

 Turning the last page of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy while sitting under a darkening sky, the waves lapping their way up the abandoned shore on the last night of a week spent on this small patch of sand between islands, was just perfect. 

The second in the Monk and Robot series somehow managed to worm its way into my soul even more so than the first. 

I don’t know how to be, most days, and Chambers manages to weave that up into whole persons with deftness. I really liked this book.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

The Shipping News is delightful. Proulx gives us a protagonist who is down on his luck, down on himself, and adrift at the whims of others—mostly in the form of a mean girl wife. When the wife dies and he loses his on-agin-off-again job, he reclaims the ground he has ceded. A life of sorts becomes available, and he claims it in pieces and parts, with increasing confidence and guided, always, by love and the need to be useful to those he loves. 

I cheered, of course, but also, I fell in love with Proulx’s prose, her wit and wonder, and her beautiful way with words. Bonus for getting to read this while on vacation in a small maritime island town, though not nearly as far north as our protagonist. 

Ragged Alice by Gareth L. Powell

Ragged Alice is one of those rare tales that delivers just enough. Just enough words, just enough character flavor, just enough supernatural. The pacing is spot-on, giving just enough introspection between exactly the right amount of happenings.

The world needs more 100-page mysteries, and this one serves it up with a cracking cup of tea. I love that Powell chose Wales for this tale. 

Don’t Let the Forest In by CG Drews

I have loved horror since I was a teenager, the weirder the better, especially when it allows us to give voice to the ways in which we don’t fit the world, and the ways in which we might. 

This book came into my life when Geo pressed it into my hand and said “I love this book so much; you have to read it,” and so of course I did. 

 

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

 

Brooklyn is the magnificent tale of a woman coming into herself. It’s a journey of discovery, and I love that it begins in a small village with its landscape of familiarity. I hear it’s been made into a movie, but I can’t imagine how it could be possible to translate this novel to the screen. The entirety of the novel in the interior, personal reflections, hopes, and fears in the moment, and the people and events that happen seem removed, as though they are happening to our heroine, and that’s largely the point of the whole novel. 

This is the story of a woman coming into herself, a story of identity, and of how we shift with the landscape of possibilities, community, and our own affections and fears. I really liked this book.

The Westing Game by Ellin Raskin

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

If you liked Project Hail Mary,  this is exactly what you should read next. If you ever felt like a human doing instead of a human being, you should read this next. If you ever found comfort in a cup of tea, you should read this. 

Chambers deftly handles themes such as burnout, imposter syndrome, and purposefulness without being sanctimonious or preachy. We love the main character as much for their vulnerabilities and flaws as we do for anything else. The journey is the message, and as I wandered the wild with them, I found myself hurt, and healing, and then, again, whole. 

I really loved this book.

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Paul Harding takes on an exploration of the interior workings life in this short, brilliant novel. Overlaid on the workings of a clock, we see a landscape of gears that create, propel, shudder, chime, and escape. 

The language of Tinkers is brilliant; Harding has paragraph-long sentences that feel like a journey and at the end of the action, I felt as though I should have gotten a stamp for my passport. He deftly handles the musings and broken timelines, returning us to where we left off in just the right moment and with just the right tone. 

As I turned the last page, I felt as though I had been imprinted with mechanisms of George and the various springs that propelled his life.

The Keeper by Tana French

In her third and final installment in the Cal Hooper series, French unspools the ways of being that create community ties, identity threads, and the fabric of life in a place. The result is the antithesis of the oft-overused and too-hip idea of “placemaking;” French shows how the community bends us to it, and all the ways that bending around a community is what makes it real, and how we, in turn, are made real by the effort. This is a picture of co-constructed reality. It’s an anthem against fast-anything, corporate profit-grabbing, and the idea that a place can be for sale. 

I’ll miss Trey and Lena even more than I’ll miss Cal. 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you liked Tartt's The Secret History, you'll love this. It's just as immersive, and as Dickensian, as ever, and Tartt does a masterful job of weaving deatils and cognition into everything. It's a long book, with sentences built on reflections, and some sentences spanning a page or more. I didn't read this book so much as I inhabited it, or, more accurately, let it inhabit me. 

This is another round of David Copperfield, and while the original tale came from England, we in the States seem to eat it up mightily, perhaps becuase twenty-first cetury America is so neat a parallel to nineteenth century England. 

The power of found family, the power of the truth, and the power of being seen ring through with authenticity and brilliance. Ultimately the power of a life of substance holds the key to the whole novel, and Tartt couldn't have chosen a better painting on which to hang her tale.

James by Percival Everett

This retelling of Tom Saywer and Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, who becomes James, is as satisfying as I could have wanted. Definitely recommended.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

The Premise of The Lost Apothecary is lovely. Penner doesn’t realize the potential of the parallels in any spectacular fashion, and the voice work—especially of the modern day narrator—is particularly thin. Nonetheless, it is a serviceable airplane book. 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Despite this being recommended to me in a thousand ways, I avoided reading it until it got the resounding endorsement from a band-family member. 

I was hooked by the end of the first chapter.

This is wonderful. Don't miss out on one of the best books in decades.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

I received The Alice Network as a Valentine's Day gift from Geo, part of a pair of wrapped up Blind Date With A Book selections. I was intrigued by the description of "Queen of Spies" and WWI/WWII, and the first chapter had me hooked.

This is a beautifully rendered novel. The sotry that Quinn overlays onto the history is everything you want in found family and self-discovery. I don't even mind the happy ending. 

The backdrop of WWI and the Alice Network is just riveting.Quinn gives voice and shape to the past in a way that feels true, never schmaltzy or pat. The details of history are revealed with care and precision; I swear I could feel the texture of the prison robes, or smell the coffee wafting up in the cafe.

This novel introduced me to the concept of a morally questionable hat, and now I must own one.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Much has been made of Hamnet, including a movie that is out just now. I haven’t seen the film (yet; I might catch it on streaming eventually), and I purchased an electronic copy after a band-parent friend raved about it (while we watched the football game) in 2022. It languished on my kindle since then, and made for a perfect selection as I work through my e-book backlog.

I don’t think I would rate it as highly as my band-parent friend did—I am certainly not raving about it or anything—but I thoroughly enjoyed O’Farrell’s imaginings. She is excellent at taking a small detail and teasing it out into a process, a whole series of sensations and interwoven events that coalesce into a single moment. 

It’s a good story, well told, and love and loss, family and the ties that bind (and gag) are the core elements, here. It’s a very introspective story and I can’t imagine how the elements that make this novel work so well could possibly translate to the silver screen. I liked this immersion into sixteenth century daily life, and into the very personal and intimate ways in which our characters navigate daily life, love, loss, and being who they are.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life unfolds like origami, shaping and reshaping along unseen lines of small decisions—chasing a dog, talking with a stranger, spending an afternoon in a field—exploring all the many ways that a life is constructed. I loved this, of course. 

In the end, what matters most in being true to ourselves and to the relationships that ground us, hold us, shape who and what we are in the world. Beautifully rendered.