lightreads

Where Love Grows by Jay Northcote

M/M contemporary about a former gardener recovering from serious illness and a software guy recovering from addiction and mental illness. This had a lot of surface things I ought to like, but fell into that horrible romance trap where the author just shoves the two protagonists together in a house for romance reasons and that’s it, that’s the book. They each have a token friend whose only function, at least by the point I stopped, was to comment on the protagonist’s life. I genuinely like slow, deeply internal books, but you’ve gotta be a lot better at writing interesting people for this to work.

Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter

Picked up because it’s about a space expedition to examine a mystery big dumb space object, bonus clones, and I was in the mood for scifi explorations with generations stuff after some Adrian Tchaikovsky. I could barely choke down 7% of this. It probably suffered mightily by coming right after Tchaikovsky, who is generally great. Maybe I would have stuck with this at a different time. But as it was I said “uh-oh” out loud when the prose n the first page thudded laboriously along. It’s just not a good sign when the professional audio book performer is killing themselves to sell the dialogue, and it’s still one of those humans don’t talk like that situations.

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

This has been on my TBR, in its various incarnations, for twenty years. It’s a shame that this really is not working for me now, because (1) this is an important artifact of queer culture, (2) it is actually pretty good, and (3) I surely would have been way into this at various points in the past. But now I’m not – my patience for historicals is at an incredible low for reasons I don’t fully understand, and I’m super not in the mood for tragic queers, and there are so so so many more options for queer books now that I know I would like a lot more.

The End of the Day by Claire North

The one about the guy recruited to be an angel of death, and something something the end of the world. I really like North’s stuff, but woof, this one really did not land. It’s an anti-capitalist screed which, yes, sing it, so when I say that it overplays its hand on this, I really mean it. I could not make my brain stick to this fragmentary, frustrating book with a damp dishrag main character.

The Gameshouse by Claire North

3/5. Series of entwined novellas about people engaged with the gameshouse, an organization that exists in many places and many times, where players come to play games with stakes like years of their lives or their love of a particular color or, more broadly, the fate of humanity.

Interesting, but not her best. I've read three of her books and they are all, to some degree, about a person whose power or affliction (generally both) renders them slightly outside of humanity, and the stories North tells are about them reconciling that or coming back into the fold in some way. This book is also on this territory; the characters are either players or pieces (sometimes both) and this leaves them a little disconnected from humanity even as they meddle hugely in the world's political and economic affairs.

This book was at its best in the second novella, which is a tense, grueling game of hide-and-seek across the length of Thailand. The stakes are real and personal – a player has bet his entire memory – and it makes for an interesting and plausible arc for someone who is very old and very tired to come back to a kind of life. But I don't think North ties off these stories in the third novella, which blows out the scale to global unrest and the course of humanity, and yet reduces the showdown to a boring gunfight? Over motivations that, well, put it this way, I kept waiting for the twist that would make them interesting, and it didn't happen.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope

3+/5. A woman has the power/curse that everyone forgets her existence as soon as she is out of sight. She becomes a thief, and then gets tangled up in weird near future stuff involving a lifestyle app and brainwashing.

This is interesting and compulsively readable, with a few minus points for being so obviously pieced together. Like you can still see the chisel marks, if you know what I mean. But the concept is interesting, and the execution travels from fun heist scenarios to desolation, and through to something else. I had my doubts going in because I generally read books for relationships (not necessarily romantic, but emotionally complex or satisfying dynamics). And how do you write about relationships when your first person narrator can't live in anyone else's mind? It turns out you can. It's just that the relationships are unbalanced and complicated and sad and mysterious and hopeful.