June 5, 2020

May Reading Recap

I have not been doing enough on most fronts, other than reading:

FIEBRE TROPICAL by Juliana Delgado Lopera: Fifteen-year-old Francisca has just moved with her family from Bogotá to Miami, and she is not impressed. She's especially uninterested in having anything to do with the evangelical church her mother's life now revolves around, but participation is not optional. Francisca is forced into distributing church flyers with the annoyingly pious Carmen, but the more time the two girls spend together, the more Francisca feels her heart opening to Jesus, or perhaps more accurately to Carmen.

What makes this queer coming-of-age story so great is the narrative voice that thrums with personality and attitude. As Francisca pours out her teenage opinions and emotions, she slips between humor and torment, English and Spanish, but always maintains a vivid rhythm: "Outside, the sky in all its fury released buckets of water that swayed with the palm trees. El cielo gris, oscuro. Talk about goth."

There's not much plot to the novel, but I didn't mind because the voice and characters are so strong. In the middle of her own story, Francisca pauses to expand on the lives of her mother and grandmother by relating their teen exploits in Colombia of the 1970s and 1950s, and those chapters provide a good contrast to the main storyline. I'm so glad I attended an online event that introduced me to Delgado Lopera, and I look forward to more of their work.

GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH by Kelly Robson takes place in a far future, after humanity has been driven underground by climate disaster and then learned to rehabilitate the environment and build cities at the surface again. Minh has spent her career restoring rivers. Her ecological remediation firm once did well at securing contracts and funding, but banks have had little interest in investing since time travel became the hot new technology. When the firm's young admin, Kiki, suggests they bid on a project to travel back to ancient Mesopotamia and study the Tigris and Euphrates, Minh is intrigued. But winning the contract won't be easy, especially since it will involve close collaboration with Kiki, who is unwaveringly eager and just may be as stubborn as Minh.

There is a lot packed into this short book. The world is impressively complex, the characters are nuanced and wonderful, and there are many fun science and project management details to geek over. When I read novellas, I'm often disappointed that they end so quickly, but this story had enough character and plot development to satisfy me, and it reaches a strong conclusion despite not tying up every thread. I recommend this to science fiction readers, and I'll be excited to read more from Robson (including, apparently, an eventual sequel to this book).

ALL SYSTEMS RED by Martha Wells: Murderbot is a Security Unit working for a group of humans performing a planetary survey that's just become dangerous. Because Murderbot has hacked its own governor module, it operates with a lot more freedom and interest in watching TV than other killing machines, but that doesn't make it any less awkward around human clients. After Murderbot saves some lives in the course of just doing its job, it's surprised and initially displeased that this weird group of humans starts treating it like a person. As Murderbot tries to cope with this new dynamic, the survey team discovers the situation on the planet is far more dire than they all thought.

I have been hearing praise for a while about the Murderbot Diaries novella series, and with the first full-length novel just released, it seemed time to finally check it out. I was immediately delighted by Murderbot's narration, and I greatly enjoyed this exciting first installment. The story moves quickly through a brief but satisfying episode that sets Murderbot on the path for future adventures. I'll be happily reading on.

THE PARIS HOURS by Alex George: In 1927 Paris, four characters struggle with secrets and losses as their lives brush up against the city's famous artists. A puppeteer who survived the Armenian genocide can't escape his grief, but he's soothed by the music of Maurice Ravel playing in the apartment downstairs. A painter hopes the patronage of Gertrude Stein will save him from debt-collecting thugs and keep him near the woman he watches. A journalist interviews Americans like Josephine Baker and longs to travel to their country, but a search binds him to Paris. The housekeeper and friend of the late Marcel Proust mourns her employer and the betrayals between them. Over the course of a single day, their four stories and backstories unfold and entwine.

I enjoyed the range of historical events and figures this novel encompasses. George writes strong sentences and descriptions, and the story moves along at a quick pace as it rotates between characters. It's not a light read, however, as the characters are all coping with pain in their pasts and presents. Unfortunately, I often had trouble connecting with their emotional reactions, so I found some of the plot developments melodramatic. Other readers have been more drawn in by the story than I was, so consider this book if you're a fan of historical fiction or curious about the era.

BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE by Anne Lamott: This book about writing is famous for discussing the importance of "shitty first drafts," which must be produced before revising one's way to a better draft. I'd probably read that chapter before, and reading this book all the way through for the first time, I was expecting many more useful instructions. The concept of breaking work into "short assignments" was a good reminder to focus on the next sentence or paragraph or detail rather than the intimidating entire story ahead. And there were a few other insightful ideas and sections.

Overall, though, I didn't get a lot out of this book. A large portion of the advice is geared toward mining experiences from one's own life, and that's not what I'm looking for guidance on. Lamott rambles and tells anecdotes that often rubbed me the wrong way, and her sense of humor didn't click with me at all. I am clearly in the minority, as BIRD BY BIRD is beloved by many writers, so your mileage may vary.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Bethany C. Morrow writes at Tor.com about America's differing responses to fictional and real resistance: "It had been nine months since Catching Fire came out, but as the second film in a series, its popularity had persisted, as had its publicity. Surely, that same overflow of support and recognition was going to rise up, I thought. Surely people were going to raise their hands in solidarity, and disallow history to repeat itself. It wasn't going to be mostly Black Americans decrying this most recent slaying by a police officer."

→ NPR's Code Switch interviews Alex S. Vitale, the author of THE END OF POLICING, about how much we need police: "What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them. Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working."

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