I’ve been lax in keeping you all updated on my reading habits. I know it’s top of mind for many of you.
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchiakovsky was very, very good. It’s quite long (600-odd pages) but paced like a thriller so it goes by quickly. As a thriller I found it pretty compelling, trying to figure out who’s behind all the stuff and if they’ll be able to beat the bad guys and so on (with the disclaimer that I’m not really a thriller reader). The sci-fi hook was also very well done, I think, and I now know a bit more about the various epochs of earth’s geological/biological history than I did before, and even better, want to learn more about e.g. the Permian extinction.
The only complaints I have about are minor (the resolution at the end seemed a bit too pat and feel-good-diversity-and-inclusion-is-the-solution) and trivial (the interludes were written by a professor at the “University of California”, which, as anyone who’s been in academia anywhere near the UC system knows, is not how you describe your affiliation, it’s always the “University of California at [blank]”, because there’s a gradation between the campuses and everyone damn well wants you to know it).
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells was also pretty good. You may know Martha Wells from her Murderbot series, and I think her fantasy worldbuilding here is probably just as good as that in the Murderbot stories (though it’s been a while since I read them). The story focuses on avian shapeshifters with a particular social structure, and it uses an outsider as the main character to explain things to the reader (I briefly tried to find the TV Tropes article on this trope but couldn’t think of the name). My complaint is just that the main character suffered a bit from whiny-broody-young-man syndrome (think Harry Potter, Hamlet, etc) which is a pet peeve of mine. Still, I’ll look up the sequel.
Robopocalypse by Daniel Howard Wilson was recommended by @inactive_user, I’m pretty sure, though I scrolled up a while to try to find it but gave up because I’m lazy, and I’m not confident I could use Discourse’s search without jeopardizing all the typing I’ve already done here. It was definitely a fun read, but felt a bit more like someone was writing a book drawn from a game, in a weird way. It seemed like they had thought out the course of this robot uprising and then added characters and scenery as mostly window-dressing to move the plot along. The little summary bits before and after each vignette that tied the events depicted to the overall course of the war really reinforced this idea to me. Nevertheless, it was a fun and quick read, and I appreciate the recommendation. It brings World War Z to mind–I think it’s pretty similar in style, though WWZ was a much better book (though it was a while ago that I read it).
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is undoubtedly the “best” book of the bunch (Booker Prize winner! I didn’t know they gave that to Americans). Reading about it after the fact, everyone seems to have been blown away by how “experimental” it was, but honestly, it wasn’t that weird. It was written kind of like a play, with multiple voices going back and forth, and some of the chapters were the author’s characters, and some of the chapters were excerpts from historical sources laid out as if they were lines in a play. (I think the historical sources were real, in that I recognized some of the books (e.g. A Team of Rivals), but they could have been fictional, too.) Once I paused to work out what was going on (after the first ten pages), it didn’t feel like I was reading an experimental novel, just a good one.
It really made me reflect on life and death, and what regrets we’re carrying with us or leaving behind. It was a tough read–not because of literary obscurity or anything like that, but because there’s a lot of sadness, as it’s focused around the death of a child. Still, I found it hopeful in the end.
I strongly recommend it, especially to anyone who’s big-L Literature Curious, but maybe has been intimidated by (or lacking patience for) the other favorites of the literati. You don’t need an English degree or anything (though I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff I missed), and it’s not too hard to make sense of (on a basic level, at least). I really thought it would be overly pretentious (especially as the author bio lists him as one of Time’s 100 most influential people, ugh), but it absolutely wasn’t. It was just good.