A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

I am fascinated by storytelling. It is a large part of why I read so much. I also love to learn about the art of storytelling and writing. So much so that I listen to a podcast called Writing Excuses. What is it? In their words, “Writing Excuses is a fast-paced, educational podcast for writers, by writers. Our goal is to help our listeners become better at their craft. Whether they write for fun or for profit, whether they’re new to the domain or old hands, Writing Excuses has something to offer. We love to write, and our listeners do, too.” In their latest season they have been talking about “world building” and using the Hugo-award-winning novel A Memory of Empire by Arkady Martine as their text.

I had thought about reading this book many times but always decided to pass. On the cover is a prominent quote that, in part, refers to it as “space opera“, not one of my favorite types of science fiction. I didn’t really relish reading about war in space. But as I listened to this season of the podcast, I discovered that this novel is less about space war and more about culture, language, diplomacy, colonization, and empire. I became very interested in reading this book and finally picked it up.

The story centers on a young woman named Mahit who grew up on a small space station on the edge of the empire. When suddenly the empire requests a new ambassador from the station, Mahit is sent. She has studied the empire and its language and culture almost her entire life. She is fascinated by it as well as troubled by its power and threat to her home station. When she arrives, she learns that the former ambassador is dead, possibly murdered. With little knowledge of what happened to him and almost no one to help her, she sets out to discover what happened to him and protect and represent her home.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved that it delves into the culture of the empire and how it both fascinates and troubles Mahit. One of the episodes in the podcast is an interview with the author. In it I learned that she combines aspects of the Byzantium and Aztec empires to develop the empire in the book. The world building happens in the context of telling the story so there is little exposition about the empire or the world. It all happens organically in an intriguing story that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and takes you along for the ride with Mahit as she struggles to navigate this new world that she loves and fears and has for so long wanted to be a part of. But as the story unfolds she starts to wonder if that will ever be possible. A unique look as colonization and it effects on the colonizers in the shape of a compelling story that is hard to put down.

My rating: 4.5/5

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

I’ve had this book on my To Be Read pile for almost three years. Last week it caught my attention when I was considering what to read next. I finished in less than a week.

The story takes place on a future Earth where a way has been discovered to travel to alternate universes. This allows Earth Zero (the one that discovered and developed the technology) to begin a brisk trade with alternate Earths. The challenge of traversing, as its called, to these other worlds is that you can only do so to worlds where the alternate version of you is no longer alive. The main character is valuable to the company employing those who traverse because she is dead in more alternate worlds than anyone else. But what happens when she is sent to a world where her alternate self isn’t actually dead? That happens, kicking off a fantastic thriller of a novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has everything. A likable but mysterious protagonist. A driven plot with multiple twists that are hard or impossible to see coming. Character development that happens in line with the plot and provokes considered thought about the human condition. And a love story that feels as genuine as possible in a complex and dangerous world. I found this book un-put-down-able.

My rating: 4.5/5

Hum by Helen Phillips

I learned about this book from the Summer Reading Guide on the What Should I Read Next? podcast. It won’t be published until August 6. I was able to read it early by getting an advance reader copy from Netgalley in exchange for this honest review.

The story is about a mother in a near future where AI robots called “hums” and public surveillance are everywhere. The first part of the book is a depressing litany of the living poor in a high tech world succumbing to climate change and slowly losing jobs to automation. After being let go, the mom gets paid to have a procedure to make her face unrecognizable to facial recognition. She uses the windfall to pay back rent and for a vacation at the Botanical Gardens with her husband and two children. While there, a crisis with her children is the event that sets off the main conflict of the novel.

This tale is well-told and realistically evokes the everyday struggles of the working poor trying to raise a family in a world that seems to keep them down at every turn. Additionally, it explores the struggle of parents to raise their kids to be well-rounded adults with all the distractions that technology affords. Unfortunately, I found the balance of the story to be off a bit too much for me. The bleakness heavily outweighs the message. It reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix. It gives me that same vague horror of something that could really happen but never should without the same storytelling punch that series delivers.

My rating 3.5/5

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

With the recent release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I decided to read the book that started the movie franchise that now includes a total of ten movies. The original novel was published in 1963 in French by Pierre Boulle with the English of Planet of the Apes.

The story starts out with a couple doing some solar sailing through space when they come across a bottle floating in their trajectory. Upon retrieval, they discover that the bottle has a short manuscript in it. With the exception of the final chapter, the rest of the book is the manuscript of a mission to the Betelgeuse system where the astronauts find a planet called Soros that is populated by sentient apes and savage humans unable to speak.

I liked this book, but I definitely felt its age. The twist is clever and different than that of the movie. That surprised me. But the ending in the book in much more thought provoking. The rise of apes and the fall of man on Soros was due to man numbing himself to his surroundings. In that way it reminds me of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley or The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

My rating: 3.5/5

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishigura

I picked up this book because of its themes. I enjoy speculative fiction that explores the ideas of identity and the human condition in general. I particular enjoy it when these themes are explored without giving straightforward answers. Life is complicated and such simple answers don’t generally exist. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro explores these ideas in a fascinating way as one would expect from a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Unfortunately one aspect of the plot ruined for me what was an otherwise wonderful novel.

The book is the story of Kara, an Artificial Friend, a type of robot companion for children. She waits in a store to be purchased and fulfill her purpose. When she finally gets a home, she is companion to a girl who has been “lifted”, who is genetically modified to be smarter. This process is not always successful, and it is unclear if it will be for this girl. She has a boy as a neighbor who she is very close with. We learn about all this in bits and pieces through Klara who tells the story from her perspective. Klara seeks to help all those connected with the girl. And this is the part that spoiled the book for me.

While in the store, Klara gets the idea the Sun (always capitalized in the book) bestows “his special nourishment” on someone to heal them. At a some level this makes a certain kind of sense. After all, Klara is powered by solar energy. On the other hand, it is completely absurd. A robot built on logic and algorithms that thinks the Sun is some kind of god to be bargained with in exchange for healing? Very human but not very robot-like. It just kept pulling me out of the story and making me shake my head. I couldn’t buy into it. Ultimately, this aspect of the story spoiled for me what was an otherwise excellent book exploring what it means to be human and care for another.

My rating: 3/5

The Postcard by Anne Berest

Once a year our book club reads a book in translation. This year, that book was The Postcard by Anne Berest, translated from the French by Tina Kover published in 2023. It is a semi-biographical novel that tells the history of the author’s family. Her grandmother received the titular postcard in 2003. On it were the names of her mother, father, sister, and brother who were all murdered in the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. The story opens with the author’s mother showing her the postcard and then going on to tell her the history of the people on the postcard until they were deported from France by the Vichy government. The rest of the tale is the author’s journey to discover who sent the postcard and why.

This book was a mixed bag. The writing was vivid, really connecting with lived experience. The translator must be credited with taking the original French and making it feel like it was written in English. A sample: “Her legs feel as if they’re still vibrating from the train, the same way the ground seems to shift and heave after a boat trip.” On the other hand, the characters feel a little too stuck. Or maybe the author just dwells on a particular aspect of a character a bit too long, making it feel like they are a little unreasonable. For instance, despite the growing restrictions on Jews in Vichy France, the father on the postcard insists on doing everything the government asks of him in the hopeless effort to become a French citizen. In the end, he willfully and meekly goes with the police when he is finally arrested and deported. It made me want to scream at the book, “What are you doing!?” I suppose that this sort of thing really did happen, but it just left me empty, sad, and a little angry.

The conclusion of the book comes a bit too quickly for my taste. There is a revelation and then it feels as if the book just ends. It does tell the complete history of a family’s experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and for that is unique and valuable. But overall this book was only okay. I liked it. But I didn’t love it.

My rating: 3/5

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Last weekend, my partner and I drove up to southern Ohio/northern Kentucky to visit friends. As we always do on a long car ride, we downloaded a few audiobooks to listen to. We do that in case the first one we pick isn’t to our liking. Well, we never got passed our first choice, *Killers of a Certain Age* by Deanna Raybourn.

This is the story of four dear friends, all women, who worked together for forty years and are about to retire. What is most unusual about these ladies is that they were all assassins for an extra-governmental agency. As they gather to celebrate their retirement, they discover that they have become targets themselves. The rest of the book explores how they work together to deal with this surprising turn of events, the hunters becoming the hunted.

This book is a romp! It is fantastic fun for those of us over fifty and learning all the challenges that go with getting older. These sixty-year-old women discuss everything that aging women go through while trying to stay alive and clear their names. While the dialog is snappy and engaging, the plot is propulsive and clever. My phone automatically restarted the book each time I plugged it into the car as we drove around last weekend. And no matter how short the drive, we couldn’t turn it off.

My rating: 4/5

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

This sequel continues the story from the first book. It’s hard to summarize the plot here without giving away a major plot twist of the first book, so I won’t. The romance between the two main characters continues but becomes ever more problematic while starting to follow what for me are the worst romance tropes. Violet also gets more whiny and starts blaming herself for everything. I found it rather annoying. However, the characters are still interesting and some new and interesting dynamics arise between them. In the end, my curiosity for the story line and interest in the dynamics between the characters outweighed the negative, barely.

My rating: 3/5

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport

As I have progressed in my career, I have become more and more impatient with what I call BIC managers. BIC stands for “butt in chair”. These managers, rather than measure your productivity based on the results you produce, focus instead on your presence in the office where they can see your butt in your chair. Especially for any kind of salaried position, this has always felt absurd to me. These workers aren’t paid for the hours they work. They are paid for their expertise and the results they produce. The challenge of measuring productivity in this context leaves such poor managers scrambling for how to measure it. In his most recent book, Cal Newport explores both the history of why this is so as well as outlines how knowledge workers can create the space for the slow productivity that leads to outsized results.

Slow Productivity starts with a history of measuring productivity. This was easy in the industrial and agricultural ages. You measured output for each unit of input. But knowledge work is more creative and less easily measured. Still needing a way to measure success, managers fell into using what Newport calls pseudo-productivity. This is measuring hours on the job rather than results, which are much harder to quantify and manage (or micro-manage, as the case may be). He then goes on to outline what it means to slow down and focus on outcomes.

The final three chapters outline how to accomplish slow productivity in a world that insists on quarterly results. He does this by focusing on three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. When he suggests doing fewer things, he means to focus on only one project at a time, keeping a ranked list of what comes next. Communication and transparency are key. Working at a natural pace means recognizing the ebb and flow of work and adjusting with it. No one does or can work pedal to the metal every day all year long. And when you relentlessly make sure that your results are high quality, those around you will trust your methods.

The details he covers in each of these final chapters are highly practical suggestions that readers can do right now to move their work out of the crazy making of pseudo-productivity and into the realm of a more peaceful and natural way of working that actually produces better results. This book is beyond the usual productivity business book just trying to help you squeeze more out of already busy days. Instead, it is the antidote to that life outlining how you can be an even more effective contributor. Highly recommended.

My rating: 5/5

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

Speculative fiction is often defined as including the genres science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I am a fan and reader of all three genres. In the past, I have thought of my favorite was science fiction. More recently I’ve come to see that a specific type of speculative fiction is my favorite. Speculative fiction can generally be described as the literature of “What if?” The author extrapolates on that question, puts their characters in that world, and explores answers to the question raised. That is my favorite type of fiction, no matter the genre.

The Measure, the debut novel by Nikki Erlick, is just such a novel. It asks the question, “What if everyone could know exactly how long they would live?” In the book every adult wakes up one morning with a box at their front door. In it is a string. On the box is a message that states, “Inside is the measure of your life”. The length of the string corresponds to the length of your life. This event changes the world forever.

The book explores why people might choose to look or not to look in their box to see the length of their string. It explores how such knowledge affects personal relationships, politics, who has what jobs, and even fundamental questions of identity. Many times while reading it I was reminded of one my favorite movies, Gattaca. In that movie a person’s place in the world is determined by their genetics instead of a string, but many of the same ideas are explored.

Perhaps what I like most about this book is that is doesn’t provide easy answers to such a deep question. Instead, it explores the question in the context of the vastness of the human experience. In today’s world where everyone thinks they have the answers to every question and is willing to argue about them with anyone and tell them they are wrong, it is refreshing to read a story that has no simple answers and instead explores why different, loving, caring, genuine people might make different decisions given the same question. And ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer. Just different ones.

My rating: 5/5