More things I’ve been reading in the last year…
Books
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The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel: these are very interesting and hard-to-describe books. They are more or less set in the same universe, but the latter is not technically a sequel of the former. The Glass Hotel is about a bartender at a fancy hotel in an isolated Canadian island who meets a rich customer who convinces her to pose as his wife and changes her life, in many ways. And Sea of Tranquility is a sci-fi novel set in multiple timelines that are connected in ways that eventually become clear, and that connect back to the bartender from the first book. Emily St. John Mandel is also the writer of Station Eleven, a novel about a deadly pandemic, that was made into a TV series more or less when the Covid-19 pandemic was starting, and some of this comes across in Sea of Tranquility (which was published in 2022).
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Death, Todd May: fans of The Good Place will recognise this book as the one that Chidi recommends after Michael goes through his existential crisis (season 2, episode 4), and they may also recognise Todd May as the philosopher who was a consultant for the TV show and who made a quick appearance in its final episode. Death (the book) is a less gloomy read than one might expect from the title; it is about finding ways to live in peace with the fact that death will come to all of us, and about the many ways philosophy and religion find to deal with that. It is in no way an easy read but it’s an important one.
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A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers: this is the second book in the Monk and Robot series (the first one, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, was mentioned in my previous post). This one has a bit more of a plot than the previous one but really, that doesn’t matter; this is still a story that you read for how it makes you feel more than anything else. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one, but if that wasn’t for you then this one won’t either. For me, I really enjoy her writing style and world-building, and most of all the coziness of her stories.
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Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky: hard sci-fi set in the distant future; humans fail to find life anywhere else in the universe and decide to start propagating it ourselves, by terraforming promising planets and seeding them with life, with specially-programmed viruses nudging the process of evolution in the direction we want it to go and making it faster. Not all humans like the idea, and this disagreement is expressed quite violently, which doesn’t go well for the humans still on Earth. The terraforming does go well for at least one planet, but not quite as expected. Overall, very compelling story and very competent story-telling.