Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Looks like I made about 66 books last year. The number is a bit fungible as that includes manga collections, Hugo reads - what's the difference between novellas and novelettes, etc, and some other things that just make my head hurt. I temporarily set aside some stuff due to events in December and switched to comfort reads, i.e. Terry Pratchett, and seem to be continuing in on that for the foreseeable future until something else distracts me.

The list is inverted so I don't have to scroll through it when I finish a new book. Much easier to update that way!

The year began with continuing Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series re-read and continued from there. I'm not going to talk about things in detail, but will discuss anything if people want to talk about something in comments. A few notable things, though....

01/29 The Last Nine Days of The Bismarck, CS Forester (HB,NF). This is one that came across my desk at work as an interlibrary loan. First, the author. Forester of the Hornblower series. It's a short book, you can probably polish it off, uninterrupted, in three or four hours. VERY interesting read! Obviously C.S. is a master of naval writing, and this book is a good example. The British were desperate to not let the Bismarck get out into the Atlantic where it could wreak havoc on all Allied shipping, they dedicated pretty much everything they had to finding and sinking that ship. And while they did succeed, it was quite the fight. And quite the read.

02/18 Tokyo Vice, Jake Addelstein (nf). This book is an autobiographical book about Jake's career as a crime beat reporter in Tokyo, mainly reporting about yakuza activity in Tokyo and Japan. It took me a while to compose that sentence, because it's a complicated book. I like books about Japan, I like Japanese culture. And this book is real. In places, it can be rather disturbing as it is honestly written. There is violence and murder in it, it spans years. Will I re-read it? No. It expanded my view of Japan and was interesting, not that I needed any additional prompting to know not to get involved with the yakuza.

02/26 Adios Muchachos, Daniel Chavarria. This is an amusing read, and a one-shot book, though Chavarria has written many books. It's about a Havana prostitute with an amazing butt and a rigged bicycle that she can make fall apart on command. She uses it to 'have an accident' in front of a mark to seduce them and get them into a longish-term relationship. She has a whole script she works on her marks, a program of seduction to make it long-term to make it very profitable, and it works quite well for her and her mother, but with the current mark it gets complicated when someone, a non-Cuban, accidentally dies, and she and the mark have to figure out how to deal with the body in a way to avoid police involvement. As layers get peeled back things become increasingly complicated and amusing for the reader.

02/28 The Shambling Guide to New York City, Mur Lafferty. Also The Shambling Guide to New Orleans. Young woman needs a job, replies to an advert seeking a writer for a traveler's guide for NYC. The office tries to put her off, saying they're really not what they're looking for, but she's insistent as rent is coming due and she is desperate for the job. Finally they hire her on a provisional basis. Turns out they are publishing a 'differently animated' guide for undead, werewolves, vampires, etc.: i.e. a world that she didn't really know existed. VERY entertaining! Mur is an excellent writer, I highly recommend her! Shambling Guide continues the series, and I think she intended the series to go on - and it may yet - but it ends at two books.

Andy Weir's Artemis and Project Hail Mary. I read these two books back-to-back. I read The Martian when it came out and really enjoyed it, loved the movie. But these books? I have to say that I'm feeling that Andy is, to me, coming off as a one trick pony and feels too much to be writing different versions of the same character of the same astronaut from Martian. Only this time it's a black girl on the Moon. And now it's a white teacher who's now Earth's last hope. Competence porn. I have no problem with a NASA astronaut going to the Moon or Mars being hyper-competent. Their life and the lives of everyone else on the mission depends on their knowing everything about pretty much every aspect of all of their equipment depends on that competency. But a teen girl born on the moon? Yes, she'd be taught from an early age about emergency drills and such, but she wouldn't have an intimate knowledge about a lot of that stuff. And the guy in Hail Mary? Yes, he has a laptop of everything ever digitized on Earth. Good luck searching it! Ask any librarian how much fun they have searching for information. Sorry, those two books rate as weak sauce for me and aren't going to rate very high as likely re-reads.


The rest of the books:
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