Wow, it's been a while, let's do a bookpost

[roadrunnertwice]

Happy new year, by the way!

Martha Wells — The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy

Oct 11

A solid ending for this story!

One thing I don't think I've mentioned here is how I really appreciate GrayCris's approach to villainy — to wit, never use less than overkill. They really don't fuck around! I feel like I don't see that kind of absolute disregard for boundaries or norms nearly often enough in a villain, and it makes their eventual defeat very satisfying.

I know I said before that I was going to try and spot the "episode breaks" in this volume, but... I forgot to. Sorry!

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy (re-reads)

Oct 2, Oct 4, Oct 6

Still so good!!! Ruth re-read these recently and it got me fired up to read them again. And we had a plane ride and a vacation, so I pretty much just blazed right through 'em.

Do I have anything to add this time around? Mostly I’m just even more impressed at how the whole thing fits together. In particular, Breq has a lot of hidden and unconscious motivations that she never really acknowledges to herself or to others, and you don’t really have to pick up on those to enjoy the hell out of the books, but it all slots perfectly into the structure in a really satisfying way. (Like, after the end of book one when she has to decide what she’s doing for the rest of her life, she kind of starts modeling herself directly after Lieutenant Awn. And over the course of books two and three, she acts a lot like she’s running an annexation inside the Radch, but it’s an annexation run on Awn's terms.)

Bonus Level: Oneshot

Dec 22

A short and satisfying little walk-and-talk/puzzle game (no combat), about a young cat-boy carrying a lightbulb across a ruined world where the sun has gone out.

This had some clever and creepy uses of the UI and runtime in service of the story. Some of the earlier ones are atmospheric but not particularly groundbreaking in a post-Undertale context, but I DID totally lose it over the bit about "expose this film to the void" and the bit about activating the tower. And the weird overlay app you have to use once things go all the way off the rails was REALLY impressive.

The story is one I've seen plenty of before (the "my virtual world is crumbling" plot), but I think it's a well-executed and affecting version of it.

Helen Macdonald — H is for Hawk

Sep 1

This was a little outside my normal hunting grounds, but Chris Baldwin quoted a tiny passage in one of his journal comics and I was instantly hypnotized by the language of it.

This is one of those memoirs where ostensibly it’s about something quite focused (the year the author spent training a goshawk after her father’s sudden death) but really it’s about everything (the history and meaning of human contact with nonhuman animals, the shape and nature of grief, and also a really unexpected amount about T.H. White). It was quite gripping, even when dealing with subjects I didn’t really have an independent interest in (honestly I could not care less about falconry), and the prose remained a delight.

Jen Wang — The Prince and the Dressmaker (comics)

Oct 12

I liked this a lot. It’s a well-told story about characters that I cared about, and I think the character design and cartooning and staging and timing are just a delight. It reminded me a lot of a Ghibli film, actually — it’s really that polished.

This seems to be getting a lot of buzz (both when it came out and on the year-end lists), and I’m glad, IMO it deserves it.