Category: Books

Book
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Synopsis
Red and Blue are elite agents on opposing factions working across the entirety of time and space to shape the multiverse to their own ends. At the end of a particularly epic battle, Red finds an enigmatic message from her adversary. This begins an increasingly elaborate correspondence between the two, with each message taking bizarre forms that require years or even centuries to compose.

Pros

• Imaginative world-building without exposition. Each section describes fantastic futures or complete alternate histories in just a few pages.
• Concepts like “upthread,” “downthread,” and “strands” become clear without ever needing explicit explanation.
• The format is repeated without ever becoming too repetitive; you get the sense of anticipation that each character feels as they wait for the next message.
• Gets the emotional beats right and reminds the reader of the universality of falling in love — the stages of wariness, excitement, infatuation, passion, comfort, and (sometimes) despair.
• Many evocative passages that emphasize feeling more than description; you get a sense of apocalypse, cruelty, peace, nature, and so on without belaboring the scene setting.

Cons

• Often feels over-written and florid, as the language often seems to dance around an idea instead of making it clear. I ended up skimming over much of the book, because the metaphors and abstractions failed to land more often than not.
• The writing was so poetic, while the settings were often so fantastic, that it became impossible to tell what was metaphor and what was literal.
• The attempts at jokes, references, and wordplay felt corny in the way of very, very smart people trying to be funny.
• The characters are practically omnipotent, and the described worlds so fantastic and cataclysmic, that there’s no sense of stakes for the characters or boundaries to their universe. Stuff happens, but we can’t ever anticipate what the implications might be or how dire or permanent the situation is.
• I never got the sense of why or how characters fall in love. The beats of a romantic relationship feel familiar and genuine, and I can see the characters reacting to each stage of the relationship, but they’re moments that feel dictated by the authors instead of motivated by genuine connection.

Synopsis
Overall, this feels like a very well-written and well-thought-out story that just isn’t for me. It’s excellent at establishing mood and conjuring images of fantastic alternate realities. The overall plot uses time travel effectively to give an idea of a romance that is so fundamental and so epic that it is both fated to happen and also threatened at every moment across multiple timelines. But these characters are archetypes more than genuine personalities, so the story on the whole seemed to be aimed at readers who love the idea of an epic, universe-shaking love, romance for romance’s sake, instead of one driven by the characters themselves.

Book
Everyone on This Train is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Synopsis
After the success of his memoir Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, Ernest Cunningham is invited on a book tour with other crime and mystery writers, on board a luxury train traveling from the north end of Australia to the south. While he’s struggling to write a fictional follow-up to his previous book, one of the passengers is murdered, forcing him into another true-crime memoir.

Pros

• Fast-moving and engaging; I hadn’t intended to jump into the sequel immediately, but it was available on Libby and I finished it in just a few sittings.
• A bit more even-handed with the “telling the rules of the story while the story is being told” gimmick
• Commits to the “fair-play murder mystery” rule, with information given out around the same time the narrator figures it out, and never directly contradicted later on.
• Genuinely funny and clever in places.
• I loved the format of the epilogue and how it was delivered.
• Makes good use of the setting and what’s unique about a train journey through Australia.
• Used the title to add a bit of depth to the story, reconsidering his role as the narrator and turning it into something of a love story.
• Introduced the clever idea of the other characters being aware that they’re characters in a murder mystery, and trying to control how their role in the story is presented.

Cons

• The gag that I’d thought was genuinely funny and clever was reused a couple too many times, I said, disappointedly.
• One of the few times I’ve had to say out loud while reading a book, “This is so corny.“
• A couple of what I assumed to be the standout puzzles or clues were insultingly obvious, in my opinion. I tend not to read murder mysteries very closely, but I figured out the solutions (if not the full implication) immediately, and the book kept referring to them over and over as if they were some intriguingly perplexing conundrum.
• Even after I’d figured out the “shape” of the story and its subplots, I still felt that the actual details (and the identity of the guilty parties) required deductive leaps I couldn’t have made on my own.
• Many of the characters are overly broad stereotypes — too cartoonish to seem real, but not funny enough to work as comic relief.

Verdict
One star, ghastly. But seriously, I thought this was better than the first book. I read part of an interview with Stevenson in which he said his goal was to counteract the tendency of crime fiction (especially Australian crime fiction) to be much too dark, and he wanted to bring back some levity and the fun of “golden age” murder mysteries. By that standard, it works: they’re fun, engaging stories to try and solve. But I can’t shake the sense that they’re writing down to the perceived level of the audience, especially since this book so aggressively takes down a literary fiction snob. There are some interesting things going on with a metatextual story in which the characters are aware they’re in a story, but it doesn’t do enough with the idea.

I feel like I might appreciate the gimmick more if I’d never read the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, but as it is, the book has the feeling of “We have Anthony Horowitz at home.” (Which seems mean of me to say, but Stevenson is doing very well with the books, by all accounts, and the first is going to be turned into a series. I can’t imagine he’s particularly heartbroken by a stranger on the internet saying it’s “fine but not great.”)

Book
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Synopsis
A writer begrudgingly travels to a ski lodge for a reunion with his estranged family. When the body of an unidentified stranger is discovered on the slopes, seemingly dead of exposure, it starts a process of dredging up decades’ worth of family secrets.

Pros

• The heavily metatextual style of the book — where the narrator acknowledges that he’s writing a detective story in which he plays both Holmes and Dr Watson — gives plenty of opportunities for flashbacks and re-contextualization, with tons of foreshadowing.
• Maintains a light, almost-but-not-quite comedic tone even as it touches on some serious or even horrific subjects.
• Repeatedly insists that it’s “playing fair” as a murder mystery, drawing attention to details that will be important later on.
• The format of the book, along with its chapter breaks and section headings, gives it room to stretch out the intrigue, as you’re subconsciously waiting for the event or revelation that will make the section heading make sense.
• Gave enough information that I was able to figure out the likely suspects, even though I wasn’t reading carefully enough to piece together any of the details.
• It never occurred to me that Australia had areas with high enough elevation for ski lodges, so I learned something.

Cons

• Especially at the beginning of the book, all of the self-awareness comes across as try-hard, with hyperlinks to stuff that happens in later chapters before we’ve fully had a chance to be invested in the story.
• All of the artifice in the style makes the whole thing seem artificial. Revelations of past tragedies end up feeling weightless and too lurid to be believable.
• Apart from the narrator, none of the characters feel like real people with real motivations; they act the way the story needs them to act in the moment. People bounce back from the shocking deaths of loved ones unbelievably quickly.
• The book acknowledges the “people trapped in a remote location with a murderer” cliche as in And Then There Were None, but seems to be so worried about falling into a cliche that it loses everything that makes the format special. In particular, nobody seems to be all that worried by the fact that there’s a killer in their midst.
• For as much as the book signals the details to pay attention to, it still ends up with a lengthy detective-explains-the-entire-mystery chapter that makes all kinds of deductive leaps that feel unearned.
• If you go back through the story and think about the events as they would’ve played out in chronological order, many of the character motivations make no sense.

Verdict
Despite my list of cons, this was a very entertaining crime story. I think its biggest weakness is that the self-awareness overwhelms everything else, coming across as lampshading the weaknesses in the story instead of actually addressing them. But the format is also essential for elevating what is frankly an over-the-top and not-entirely-plausible backstory into something that’s completely engaging moment to moment.

I picked up this whole series again when I discovered Goodreads and its annual reading challenges. But the real goal for me isn’t to hit some number of books read, but a) make more time for reading for pleasure, and b) get better at summarizing my thoughts on a book without its turning into an over-long book report to prove that “I got it.” By that metric, this year’s been a success. More about rediscovering familiar books and writers than taking on anything new, although I managed to do both.

Goal
20 books in 2023

Final
18 read

Favorite Book of Literacy 2023
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. I didn’t expect to enjoy this one as much as I did, but early on it deviated from the format I’d thought it was going to take, and it went off to surprise me over and over again. It’s an infuriating (and I hope exaggerated) account of racism in America perfectly balanced with pulp sci-fi.

MVP of Literacy 2023
Agatha Christie. Last year I started reading or re-reading the mysteries, most of which I hadn’t read since high school, and it was more like discovering a new author than getting re-acquainted with a familiar one. I never appreciated how innovative and experimental Christie could be, or how well some of her books situated themselves in “modern times” as opposed to being quaint relics of the early 20th century.

Runner-Up MVP of Literacy 2023
Mary Roach. I kind of worked my way up to her most well-known books (Stiff and Bonk), which was a great way to get familiar with her style before seeing how good it could be when she’s firing on all cylinders. I’m looking forward to reading more of her books in 2024.

Goal for Literacy 2024
12 Books in 2024. I like having an arbitrary number to encourage myself to keep reading — and I probably would’ve left Shadow of the Sith hanging had I not been driven to finish it before the end of the year — but “a book a month” is a perfectly reasonable goal. I’d rather end the year feeling happy that I exceeded one arbitrary target instead of disappointed that I didn’t hit an equally arbitrary one.

RIP to Goals of Past Years
I did try to resume The Starless Sea, as I’d pledged in previous years, but I finally had to abandon it as being just not for me. My biggest complaint was that it was so high on its own supply of magical realism that it felt twee, but I read so many positive reviews that I resolved to try again. And almost immediately, it hit me with a description of a merchant who collected stars and traded them for secrets. I mean come on.

Most Looking Forward To in 2024
The Destroyer of Worlds, the sequel to Lovecraft Country, which I got as a Christmas gift

Call to Action
I’ve still got a long backlog of books, but I’m always looking for new recommendations. If there’s anything you’ve read that made a particular impact on you, feel free to recommend it in the comments or on Mastodon!

Book
The Theory of Everything Else by Dan Schreiber

Synopsis
Schreiber, who’s one of the hosts of the QI-spinoff podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, writes about dozens of accounts of fringe science, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, unexplained coincidences, and other crackpot ideas. He puts particular emphasis on notable or accomplished people who’ve also harbored some beliefs that he affectionately refers to as “batshit.”

Pros

• Light and easy reading that feels humorous without being too try-hard, and earnest without losing a sense of skepticism.
• Emphasizes that weird ideas aren’t exclusively the product of mentally unwell people, but that many of us have some bizarre beliefs to some degree or another.
• Broad and comprehensive; it’s tough to think of a topic that’s not given at least a passing mention.
• Mentions the theory that life on Earth sprang from microbes in visiting aliens’ waste, in a chapter titled “The Origin of Feces.”
• Schreiber presents himself as less gullible than his “character” in the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, but rather someone who knows all of this stuff is bullshit, but on some level wants to believe it.

Cons

• Goes for breadth at the expense of depth. One or two sections go into detail about the subject, but much of the book feels like a lightning round, with some topics only given a paragraph or so each.
• Light on cryptids.
• Some overlap of material with the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, which is probably inevitable.
• Feels a tiny bit commercial, as if the book exists mostly just to launch his recent We Can Be Weirdos podcast.
• Has a chapter that mentions the idea of sending plants instead of humans on long-term space missions, gathering observations from them telepathically. Inexcusably refers to them as “astreenauts.”

Verdict
It’s a fun and often interesting read, with a tongue-in-cheek tone that rarely feels condescending or mocking the source material. It often feels like an episode of No Such Thing as a Fish without the other hosts to steer Dan’s tangents back to topic. I think it’s a no-brainer for fans of the podcast, and is also recommended to anyone who thinks this stuff is fascinating, even if (or especially if) they don’t believe it.

Book
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
When the wealthiest man in a small English village is violently murdered, the local doctor is inadvertently enlisted to help retired detective Hercule Poirot make sense of the various subplots and uncover the identity of the killer.

Spoiler Warning
If you haven’t ever read this book (or, like me, you read it decades ago and forgot the plot), avoid reading anything about it online. I had started reading it because I was listening to an episode of the You’re Dead to Me podcast about Agatha Christie, which was being so circumspect about spoiling it that it spoiled it. Then, while doing a search on Goodreads, I saw a spoiler right in the description for a related book. Plus the Wikipedia entry doesn’t even bother with spoiler warnings. It’s all fair enough, since the book is almost 100 years old at this point, but still requires some caution.

Pros

• The back-and-forth between the narrator Doctor Sheppard and his sister Caroline is extremely charming, perfectly capturing two characters who have great affection for each other while still being extremely irritated with each other.
• As I’ve been reading or re-reading Agatha Christie’s mysteries recently, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by how contemporary they feel, despite being a century old. They’re filled with quaint British mannerisms, and signs of a class hierarchy that probably doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. But otherwise, this book feels as if it could be transported into the 21st century with barely an edit required.
• Kind of like And Then There Were None, it feels as if Agatha Christie constructed the mystery mostly to prove that she could do it.
• Feels more experimental and challenging than many contemporary mysteries, while still being more accessible and charming.

Cons

• Christie “proves her work” at the end of the novel, explaining to the reader exactly how the clues were presented and why they were presented that way. But there are still some deductions that depend on off-screen revelations or deductions that the reader couldn’t possibly have guessed.
• Related to the above: the book gives ample clues that Poirot is off gathering information, but it doesn’t share enough about what he found out. The mystery works best when we have the exact same information as Poirot does, but we’re just not as good at making sense of it.

Verdict
Just remarkable. I’m glad I’m re-reading Agatha Christie’s books now, because I wasn’t able to appreciate just how impressive they were when I was younger and had no frame of reference. The characters are charming and relatable, and the plot is clever, experimental, and constructed in such a way that it feels as if Christie was challenging herself to make something new. This is deservedly a classic, even if you already know the ending.