Book Review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Book #94 of 2017:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

This book about dead human bodies – what happens to them biologically and what cultural practices have developed regarding their disposal – was educational but tough to read. It literally made my stomach churn, and I frequently had to put the book down and focus on something else for a while. (I also thought that the author’s quirky asides sometimes verged on disrespectful, although they did make the text more readable.) In the end I think I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t recommend the book to anyone remotely squeamish.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Bosch, season 3

TV #14 of 2017:

Bosch, season 3

Bosch is one of those weird middle-of-the-road crime shows where it’s nowhere near as popular (or as bad) as something like Law and Order, but it’s also nowhere near as critically-adored (or as good) as something like The Wire. A good comparison might be The Good Wife, I guess, but with an even smaller audience. Anyway, this season was pretty solid, and the ending is promising for what it sets up next. I might even have to read some of the books this show is based on at some point.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Book #93 of 2017:

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Gillian Flynn’s first novel Sharp Objects is more plausible than Gone Girl or Dark Places, but it’s also a much more difficult read due to its themes of child abuse and self-harm. Flynn’s customary knack for flawed female characters is on full display here, from the cub reporter fresh out of recovery for cutting and back in her hometown to cover a child murder to the town residents she wishes could have stayed in her past for longer. The plot itself is pretty straightforward for Flynn, and the ending is a bit rushed, but all in all it’s a wickedly sharp novel from a writer still honing her craft.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Book #92 of 2017:

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A powerful novel of grief and guilt, where a boy struggling to come to terms with his mother’s cancer must also face down the primeval creature that has crawled out of his dreams with harsh truths of its own. There’s a reading of this story in which there is no monster, just a scared thirteen-year-old scrambling to process something that no one in a fair world should ever have to. But there’s also a reading where there are eldritch forces in the world that come to us when we need their strength, even if that strength is raw and awful and alienating. Under either interpretation, A Monster Calls is a masterful work that speaks achingly to anyone who has ever suffered through a loss and not known how to go on. It made me cry and it made me gasp, and I think I’ll be leaning on it in the future when my own monster calls again.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Book #91 of 2017:

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Individual passages of this book are gorgeously written, but the plot of a group of hostages gradually becoming friends (and in one case, lovers) with the gun-wielding terrorists keeping them prisoner made me supremely uncomfortable. It would be one thing if the story were intended as a chilling look at Stockholm syndrome a la Stephen King’s Rage, but here it reads more as author Ann Patchett just not caring about the power dynamics inherent to a hostage situation.

Patchett also doesn’t care to name the country where the story takes place – calling it only by such cutesy descriptions as “that godforsaken land” that suggest South America is one squalid monolith – despite the fact that she clearly based the novel on a real-life incident in Peru. Add to that a manic pixie opera singer that literally every male character instantly falls in love with, and you just have a whole mess of a novel on your hands.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick

Book #90 of 2017:

The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick

I mostly liked this story of an elderly widower who breaks out of the solitary routine he’s been in since his wife’s death, rediscovering his own love for life as he tries to learn more about her life before she met him. There are some really beautiful moments, especially in the new friendships Arthur forms along his journey through his wife’s past.

I just had a hard time with his occasional feelings of jealousy and betrayal that surface throughout that process, as well as with the general idea of a spouse who kept so much of herself a secret over forty years of marriage. Neither Miriam’s hidden past nor Arthur’s resentment towards her old friends and lovers is at all healthy, and for me those issues really detracted from what was otherwise a quite lovely book.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius Gopez

Book #89 of 2017:

White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius Gopez (White Sand #1)

White Sand is an unpublished manuscript by author Brandon Sanderson, and this graphic novel is an adaptation of the first part of that unreleased novel, with two more planned volumes to follow. I had hoped that by authorizing this production Sanderson would have overhauled the text, but the whole thing comes off feeling rather half-baked despite the usual fun cosmere worldbuilding.

Having not read the source material I can’t say for certain how much of this is adapter Rik Hoskin’s fault, but the characters, plot, and setting all lag far behind a typical Sanderson production. And although Julius Gopez’s art is great for showcasing the diversity of the story’s cast, it struggles to bring the magic to life – as is quite clear by comparing the opening chapter to the written version of the same material in Sanderson’s short story collection Arcanum Unbounded. Unless you’re a total cosmere completionist, I’d recommend just waiting until the full novel is hopefully someday released in prose.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Book #88 of 2017:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

A dry but interesting account of world history through the lens of cultural materialism, an anthropological theory holding that differences in environment can explain much of the variation that exists across cultures. For historian Jared Diamond, this approach essentially boils down to explaining the trajectory of historical encounters and conquests as a matter largely to do with the plants and animals that were available in certain regions for human domestication. (Because domestication leads to farming and thus to population growth, and larger populations give rise to diseases and their immunities as well as complex statehood and technological development.)

Diamond has been criticized for oversimplifying the historical facts, and it’s hard to avoid feeling like his hammer of cultural materialism has made him see a history comprised solely of nails. But it’s an interesting framework nonetheless, and a welcome answer to the widespread beliefs in manifest destiny and ethnocultural supremacy that Diamond was writing against.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott Tipton and David Tipton

Book #87 of 2017: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by Scott Tipton and David Tipton

Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time was a 12-issue comic book series written for the show’s 50th anniversary in 2013, telling the story of a mysterious enemy kidnapping the Doctor’s companions across all of the Time Lord’s incarnations thus far. It’s pretty episodic in its first half, but as the story goes along, each Doctor’s adventure becomes less self-contained until finally all eleven versions are teaming up to rescue their friends. (That team-up, and more generally the narrative build over the series, makes this venture far more satisfying than the audio series Destiny of the Doctor, another 50th anniversary production that simply has the Eleventh Doctor popping into each installment to procure the latest maguffin from an earlier self.)

Prisoners of Time is packed full of Doctor Who references from Zarbi to Judoon, and while most of the spotlight goes to the regular TV companions and their Doctors, there’s a special focus on shapeshifting penguin Frobisher from the Doctor Who comics and Big Finish audios and on short-lived companion Adam Mitchell from the first season of the 2005 television revival. It’s as gloriously mad as the best of Who, but there’s some real pathos as it resolves a lingering storyline that the TV show had seemingly dropped. Definitely a worthy celebration of the first half-century of this delightful universe of fiction.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Book #86 of 2017:

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

The Historian is a fascinating book that manages to be both a haunting vampire story and an ode to the alternating joys and terrors of scholarly research. Dracula exists in this novel not only as a character, but also as a metaphor for any such beguiling research topic that beckons us out into the darkness, off the known map, and into a world where we must fumble our own way towards knowledge in the absence of explicit guideposts. This is, essentially, a vampire story about graduate school.

(It’s also an epistolary novel with multiple nesting narratives spanning half a century, and I quite recommend the unabridged audiobook, whose talented readers always made it quite clear through their delivery which storyline we were following at which moment – something that other reviewers have indicated can be difficult in the written text.)

★★★★☆

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