The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I had heard of this book through many channels. The one that got me to pick it up was a review by Ian Mond in Locus magazine. There he described it as “the sort of novel you fall into, only to come up for breath to eat and sleep.” It has an element of time travel and the exploration of how people from the past might deal with the shock of coming to the future. Sounded like a great book for me.

In a near future UK, the government has discovered time travel. Unsure as to what might happen to time travelers, they have brought forward from the past five people who history shows as either dead or missing. Each of these people is assigned to a “bridge” who helps them adjust to the dramatic change in their lives. The main characters are one of these people from the past and his bridge. As the story progresses, some things begin to appear to not be what they are at first glance and the time travelers and their bridges start to band together to figure things out.

Unfortunately, this book did not live up to the billing. I found it rather easy to put down. In fact, I almost stopped reading it halfway through. The metaphors feel forced. I found the writing clumsy and stilted with only a rare moment or two where it shined and pulled me in, enveloping me in a feeling and communicating something deeply. And there were numerous references to things in the UK that someone not immersed in that culture would not understand. Worst of all, the conclusion fell flat. The author seems to think she has said something profound in this story that just wasn’t there for me. I should have listened to my instinct and left this one unfinished.

My rating: 2/5

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

This one has been on my list to read for almost a year. What put it there was an incredible review by Cory Doctorow. I finally pulled it from my pile when my book club selected it to read in November, our indigenous fiction month.

It is set in an alternate 1920s where much of the western US was never completely subsumed by the United States. The central action takes place in the state of Cahokia covering parts of modern day Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The capital is also called Cahokia. The protagonist is an orphan giant of a man whose heritage is part black, part indigenous. He is a murder detective for the Cahokia Police Department. As the book opens, he and his partner have been called to the scene of a grizzly murder at the top of a skyscraper. The body has been mutilated in the style of an Aztec sacrifice. In a racially divided city, this sets the city on edge and puts pressure on the mayor and the police to solve the crime fast.

This novel has everything—politics, history, racial tension and conflict, mystery, plot twists, romance. I kind of feel like the grandfather in The Princess Bride. Seriously, this is one of my favorite books I’ve read. I most appreciate books that explore deep issues of what it means to be human, and I found it in this book at every turn. It deals with but gives no easy answers for questions like these:

What do I do when there seem to be no good choices to make?
Where is the boundary friendship and doing the right thing?
Where do I belong? Who am I?
Is it okay to break the law in service to a higher sense of law?

To top it off, the writing is evocative. I felt immersed in the noir detective world of prohibition politics in a Midwestern state governed by natives who never gave up governing their own land. This book has it all. Truly a masterwork.

My rating: 5/5

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

After finishing my previous audiobook, I looked for another Hugo award-winning novel that was available to borrow without a wait. I ended up borrowing this one. It was published on the tenth anniversary of the original. The text of this audiobook is that favored by the author. It is somewhat longer than the original with some minor changes, as the author explains in his “Note on the Text” in the front of the book.

Shadow, a man just getting out of prison, is approached and offered a job working for a man named Wednesday. He is to be his driver and errand boy. At first he declines. After a tragedy in his life, with nothing else going on, he agrees. The book is largely the story of their relationship. As you can probably guess from the book’s title, Wednesday is a god. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which one. The story follows the two as a war brews between the old gods and the new gods.

I really enjoyed the storytelling in this book. The audiobook is a full cast production and really brings the story to life. Shadow struggles with meaning in his life and his relationships. I really appreciate stories that explore aspects of the human condition. Interestingly, even the gods seem to struggle with that. The writing isn’t in any sense what I would call literary. That said, it does get out of the way and let the story sing.

My rating: 4/5

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon

I recently started listening to audiobooks while working on projects around the house. My first one was finishing a book I started listening to on a recent trip. Then I went looking for something new to listen to. At the beginning of this year I had briefly toyed with the idea of reading Hugo Award winning novels this year, so I searched for one of the those. This book was the first I came across that was immediately available to borrow from my library.

It is not science fiction in the traditional sense. There are no aliens or spaceships. It does not take place in the far future or on another planet. It is more of a detective story that takes place in a speculative alternate history. In this version of history, Israel was destroyed shortly after its founding and Jews found a temporary “home” in a district in Alaska that the US carved out from among Indian land in Alaska. Sixty years later, this district in Sitka is still intact but was never made permanent. Now it is looking like there will be a reversion back to the natives, leaving the Jews there with no place to go.

That’s the background. The story itself revolves around a murder (naturally) that takes place in the same fleabag hotel where the main character lives. He is a detective for the Sitka police, and he is a complete mess. He is divorced with no kids and no self-respect. His partner is his half-Indian, half-Jewish cousin who was more or less raised as his brother. Together they investigate this murder even after they are told to leave it alone. Of course, they begin to uncover things that others in powerful places want left alone.

The writing is absolutely brilliant. It is filled with down-to-earth but often odd metaphors that evoke feelings and imagery that could be achieved in no other way. The audiobook reader is incredible with the voices and accents, really bringing the story to life. There are subplots that touch on different aspects of the human condition and how everyday people struggle with them. It is an amazing work of fiction that deserves all the awards it received.

My rating: 4.5/5

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

When I reached out to the adult services librarian at my local public library recently, he invited me to join a book club that just had an opening for a new member. This club meets every other month. They each read a different book on a theme and then tell the group about the book at the next meeting. For the meeting I attended, they all read a book published the year they were born. Gretchen, the woman sitting next to me, read this book, originally published in 1935. She spoke so well of it that I immediately picked it up and read it.

The author‘s wife was a newspaper reporter in Munich in 1931 as Hitler was rising polically. She interviewed Hitler and saw him for what he was—a petty, dangerous tyrant. In 1934 after describing him in part as “the very prototype of the little man”, she found the Gestapo politely but insistingly inviting her to leave the Fatherland. Back in the USA, many people told the author and his wife that she was overreacting. At least such things could not happen here the US. The author did not agree and wrote this book as an illustration of that.

The book is the story of an inexperienced politician who rises to power through populist tactics. He gains the Democratic nomination for president in 1936 by promising to make everyone financially secure in the midst of the Great Depression. Naturally, he goes on to win. He immediately becomes a dictator and begins to target his enemies. The main character is a newspaper editor in Vermont who only very slowly comes to see the danger of the candidate and then new president and eventually starts speaking against him. You can guess at what follows.

The plot and the storytelling do not reflect the best of this author. But that isn’t the point. Instead the author seeks to show how easy it could be for Americans to fall for a petty tyrant who is wiling to give us what we think we want. And even the people who know better don’t believe it enough to do something until it is too late. In this he succeeds admirably. Some of the things he writes could be right out of today’s news in our politically divided country. That makes this book particularly haunting and perhaps particularly important to read right now, almost eighty-nine years after it was published.

My rating: 3.5/5

The Extinction Trials by A. G. Riddle

My partner and I had a recent road trip to meet family in Virginia. As we do, we borrowed an audiobook from the library to enjoy on the road. We chose this one as my partner had read some of the author’s other books and liked them. We didn’t finish it on our trip, but when I had some work to do around the house I finally finished listening to it on my own.

It opens with a prologue describing an idea for how to save humanity from itself. As the novel itself starts, things are going very wrong. Eventually, the two main characters end up in some kind of bunker with a bunch of others. They learn that they are a part of the “extinction trials” and begin to try to figure out what to do.

Much of this book feels like an escape room game that you might play on your smartphone. That feels like a criticism to me, but somehow I actually liked it. There is a lot of action and mystery in this one, making it a thriller (that’s part of why my partner chose it). One giant reveal waits at the end after a series of smaller ones unfold. It was pure entertainment with only a little bit of message. Overall I very much enjoyed it.

My rating: 4/5

Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis by Dave Maass and Patrick Lay

My next read was one I found on Cory Doctorow’s blog. It is a graphic novel based on an opera whose authors were first part of a Nazi show piece ghetto in Prague who both later were murdered in a concentration camp. This novel is the expression of people going through the worst a human can experience. It is amazing.

The story takes place in an Atlantis that never sank. In it, Death goes on strike after becoming sick of the violence and hatred among humans at the behest of the emperor. But this means that people can no longer die, leading them to even question why they are fighting. It sounds maudlin as I write that, but the art and dialog really bring it to life.

I had a hard time getting into the book at first. I considered putting it aside a few times early on. It was feeling kind of common and uninteresting to me. But as my curiosity drove me to continue, the story came together in a way that really touched me. It is ultimately a story of the triumph over death and the evil in the world, even when those obstacles seem insurmountable. It is a triumph of the human spirit.

My rating: 4/5

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

I have been a subscriber and reader of Locus Magazine for over a year now. It is the monthly magazine of science fiction, fantasy, and horror and includes numerous book reviews in each issue. The February issue included various reviewers’ best of 2023 books. One such favorite was this book. The book was also longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023. The premise sounded interesting, so I gave it a go.

The review that interested me in this book states in part that “it serves as a technical demonstration of how to continue asking big science-fictional questions while starting from the world as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be.” The book is told in the first person and starts with a rather lengthy description of the main character’s childhood and eventual decision to study marine biology. She eventually gets the opportunity to go on a scientific expedition to a place in the mid-Atlantic where there is a trench much deeper than ever measured in the Atlantic before. Odd things start happening that begin to move the plot forward at a less slow pace.

This book is well-written and filled with thoughtful ideas. At times it reminded me of thoughtful science fiction books like Contact and 2001: A Space Odyssey. And while I enjoined both of those books and movies, I found this book to be way too much prose and not engaging enough with the story. Even the ideas are barely hinted at. I enjoyed the contemplation of the ideas raised in this book, but it was as much an exploration of childhood trauma and its affects on the main character’s future. Sometimes it felt that was the main point of the book rather than exploring the science fictional elements of the story. That may be what others want in their literary science fiction, but not me. Give me Rendezvous with Rama any day over this dry, almost pretentious, over literary book.

My rating: 2.5/5

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

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