alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 41: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Goodreads’ incredibly short synopsis says: “In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.”

Fellow Pajibans recommended this to me during the last Cannonball, when I related my disappointment with The Flame Alphabet (tie-in: language epidemics.) It was very interesting to read this book so shortly after Ready Player One, because both deal with immersion in virtual realities. I enjoyed having Cline’s version  in recent memory as I read Snow Crash, which, as a predecessor to Ready Player One and a sci-fi/cyberpunk classic in its own right, almost certainly had a huge influence on Cline’s work.

I really enjoyed Snow Crash. There is a lot about it that is kind of silly and fantastical, even for sci-fi, including a basically made-up version of neurolinguistics and quite a bit of would-be futuristic jargon. It’s a tough line to toe, when you’re writing near-future sci-fi, that you run the risk of dating yourself when you invent new terminology and describe specifics about plausible but not currently existing technologies. How much of what you describe actually comes to pass or still ring true? Tech and gadgetry are so ubiquitous that nearly every reader of a book like this will have some kind of experience with it; compare that to other popular sci-fi themes like bioengineering or space travel, where there are a lot fewer ‘experts’ that can critique the realism of the book. All of that is to say that one of the cyberpunk genre’s main themes focuses on common technologies and what possibilities can be extrapolated from that tech in the future, and because so many of us are familiar with that technology, it makes it very easy to nitpick areas where books like Snow Crash diverge from either current or probable reality.

If you’re not especially concerned with your sci-fi being at least somewhat grounded in science and fact, then those types of incongruities will matter very little. For its part, I think Snow Crash constructed a pretty believable virtual reality in the Metaverse, but I found the tie-ins with Sumerian myth to be a little fantastical and ambitious, particularly given the somewhat haphazard explanation of neurolinguistics that bears only a passing resemblance to the actual academic field. That aside, I really enjoyed the scope and execution of the story. The pacing was a little frenetic, but I wasn’t too bothered by it as it heightened the tension and served to underline the hectic nature of life and society itself in the world of the book. The protagonists were not much more developed than avatars in a video game, but particularly given the emphasis on virtual reality, it almost seems appropriate that the reader does experience the book in that video game sense. It’s probably not a book for everyone, but as an overall fan of sci-fi (with piqued interest in cyberpunk as of late) I liked it a lot.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 40: Bonk by Mary Roach

Goodreads: “The study of sexual physiology – what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better – has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey’s attic.

Mary Roach, “the funniest science writer in the country” (Burkhard Bilger of ‘The New Yorker’), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn’t Viagra help women or, for that matter, pandas?

In ‘Bonk’, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm, two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth, can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place.”

It’s hard for me to critique nonfiction in all of my usual ways, so I’ll just say firstly that I immediately took to Roach’s writing style here, which is humorous and engaging. I think she does a great job of interpreting the data and results and translating them to a less scientific audience, and I was amused by her anecdotes of how she had to participate in some studies in order to get any kind of access to the equipment that was used.

There are some cringey passages, which aren’t Roach’s fault so much as she’s just dutifully reporting some rather cringey experiments (both official and not.) I’d absolutely recommend this book to anyone who has curiosity on the subject, with the caveat that there will probably be at least one or two things she discusses that will squick you out. Otherwise, I definitely learned a few things and enjoyed Roach’s presentation.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 39: Paper Towns by John Green

Goodreads says: “Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life – dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge – he follows.

After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues – and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer Q gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.”

I really enjoyed this one. It surprised me; it started out as what seemed to be a pretty standard tale of a guy obsessed with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and that she is the key to enlivening his existence. But then Paper Towns turned that whole trope on its head and became a complete deconstruction of it. What started as Quentin worshipping a romanticized ideal of Margo Roth Spiegelman became Quentin realizing he doesn’t know her at all and trying to, first by reading into clues she left behind and then by finally understanding that the whole of who a person is can’t be deduced just by pieces left behind.

Philosophical meanderings aside, the novel also had a ton of great smaller moments between friends in their final weeks of high school, a satisfying (if unrealistic) storyline of high school jerks getting their come-uppance, and some hilariously cartoonish parents. Seriously: the three sets of parents we hear the most about are prototypically mean and neglectful (Margo’s), blissfully clueless (Quentin’s), or delightfully wacky to the extent of trying to collect every Black Santa ever produced in tangible form (Radar’s).

This is a charming and thoughtful YA book that was a quick and satisfying read. It was my first John Green book, and I have others coming through the library hold pipeline that I’m excited about.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 34-38: The Demonica Series by Larissa Ione

The covers (and titles, and character names) for this series are patently ridiculous (perhaps not moreso than usual for paranormal romance aka PNR, but that’s a rather low bar) so instead, to give you a brief idea of what the ‘tone’ of these books is, have this GIF of Blanche:

I can’t confidently assure anyone who isn’t already a fan of this genre that this series will convert them, but among the PNR I’ve read, I really enjoyed this series. The standard formula is there. You have your alpha male heroes — here, they are demons (in particular, sex demons… spicy!) — and heroines who are THE ONLY WOMAN for the hero. The women across the series are varied in background, and while each of them can be described in some manner as “kick-ass” — as is par for the course in this genre, lately, since PNR readers seem to like their leading women to want it rough, if you know what I mean — their strength comes from different wells of experiences.

My two favorites in the series were Pleasure Unbound (Tayla and Eidolon) and Sin Undone (Sin and Conall), and my least favorite was Desire Unchained (Runa and Shade.) Really, the differences between all of them are slight; it comes down to how much you like the coupling. One thing that I liked about this series in general was that there were several plot arcs that spanned across several of the books at a time, which tied them together nicely and prevented them from seeming completely interchangeable and redundant. Even though you could read any one as a standalone, they were actually more rewarding read together as a series, which for me is in stark contrast to a lot of PNR, where over the course of the series I think to myself, “Okay, I get it, I don’t need to go any further.”

A few more fun points: the author has created a whole phylogenetic/biological classification for the demons in the books, which is pretty precious. Also, did you know that the semen of certain classes of incubi is an aphrodisiac? Now you do! And if you’re looking for ThunderSex (h/t Mrs. Julien) you’ll get plenty of it, with blood-bonding and all kinds of other great things that preternaturally strong beings can do to each other in bed.

In sum total: for PNR fans, highly recommended. For fans of exclusively highbrow literature, well, you probably didn’t even start this review, much less finish it. For those willing to dabble, this entire series will probably take you about a week or less, so it won’t be a huge imposition on your time if you didn’t find it as fun and/or steamy as I did. Allow me to re-iterate: FUN! and STEAMY! So yes, enjoy yourselves; this shit is fucking silly. If nothing else, the covers will make you giggle.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 33: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Goodreads says: “A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation—the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.”

There was a lot to unfold in this book, with its successive stories each moving forward in time, interrupting each other, addressing each other, and then concluding sequentially. Having read it, I think I can especially understand the more at-odds than usual mixed reviews of the movie, since adapting this for film seems an unusually tasking endeavor.

Mitchell has accomplished an impressive technical feat here, which is to leap between stylistic genres believably. Some (possibly those with a higher literary IQ than I) have also alleged that the “stacked” nature of this book is itself an accomplishment; for me it seemed a little gimmicky. A vague thread of existentialism ran through each of the stories, which were more explicitly tied together with notes like the narrator of one story reading the journal of the prior narrator’s story, or multiple narrators mentioning having the same birthmark (this seemingly random connection was lampshaded later when one narrator, an editor, scoffed at the random inclusion of two other nested characters having the same birthmark.) Each of these stories also borrow heavily from other works of art (literature, film, music/music history), as acknowledged by Mitchell himself, so in a way, as the stories string themselves together, they are also tied to our living reality. It is very clever, all of these tenuous threads, but at the end of the day your enjoyment of the book as a whole probably rests mostly on how you respond to each of the different stories. I read someone else’s review recently (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember whose!) that addressed the idea that sometimes appreciating what the author has done is different from enjoying it, and that’s basically what I experienced here.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy any of Cloud Atlas. I just didn’t enjoy all of it. My personal favorite stories included “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, which was the sci-fi Blade Runner-esque account of a replicant type who became sentient. It’s presented as an interview with her as she waits on what is essentially death row. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek with its inclusion of many of our favorite sci-fi tropes in such a short story, and as a fan of the genre I appreciated the wink and nod. I also liked the story that comprised of letters from 1930’s composer Robert Frobisher to one Rufus Sixsmith, and the delightfully cheesy noir mystery of Luisa Rey. Conversely, I didn’t like “Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After” (I think I could the apostrophes correct!) much at all — the forced pidgin was an absolute chore to read and I gave up on it entirely, other than to scan through and find the connection, which was that Sonmi~451’s story had survived and elevated her to God-like status among some.

It’s hard to say if this book will, ultimately, ascend to the status of literary classic, or be defamed as hacky and pompous after some time. In the present though, it’s worth reading.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 32: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This one has been reviewed so, so many times already, there isn’t much left to say. Take the following quiz:

• Do 80’s pop culture references moisten your lions?
• Were you waiting for the next great cyberpunk novel?
• Are you a fan of sensitive and varied depictions of different races, genders, and sexual orientations?
• Do treasure hunts still appeal to you on an instinctual level?
• Are you charmed by geeks fighting an Evil Empire?
• Might you be immune to the occasional irritation that could arise from an extended infodump?
• Don’t you think there is something so appealing about a hero rising from inauspicious origins?
• Have you ever dreamed of fashioning yourself a new life in an alternate reality?
• Are old-style arcade games so totally your bag?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any or all of these questions, you really should read Ready Player One if you haven’t already. I’m ashamed it took me so long! But here I am, emerged victorious, to be neither the first nor the last to recommend it to you.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 31: Shadow’s Claim by Kresley Cole

Goodreads: “Shadow’s Claim features Prince Trehan, a ruthless master assassin who will do anything to possess Bettina, his beautiful sorceress mate, even compete for her hand in a blood-sport tournament— to the death.”

This book was fucking silly, guys. I don’t know. It was the May (I think?) selection for the VF Hangout, and I was pretty excited for it, since I tend to enjoy paranormal romance (although I’m starting to wonder how much I really do like it, since most of the ones I’ve reviewed, I’ve panned?) Anyway, so we have Trehan, who is Dacian, which means he’s an Original vampire (stealing from TVD terminology here,) meaning he is of a pure bloodline and wasn’t a “turned” human. The Dacians have all of these strict rules about when and for what purpose they’re allowed to leave Dacia, but one of those times is when they’ve found their permanent mate. And they know they’ve met their mate when they get their first erection. No kidding! Because their hearts don’t beat and they’re not “blooded,” they can’t get a boner until someone makes their heart beat and gets the blood flowing and all that. No mention of how a Lady Dacian would react when blooded, probably because she’s supposed to wait around until a male Dacian points his wood in her direction, but I digress.

So Trehan meets Princess Bettina, and it’s less of a meet-cute than her thinking he’s someone else, which is a trope I would really love to see go away for a multitude of reasons. Anyway, he immediately recognizes her as his mate, and she’s not so convinced because she’s in love with someone else (OR SO SHE THINKS! NOT THAT YOU GET A CHOICE IN THIS, WOMAN!) So he enters a to-the-death contest put on by her guardians, and the prize is the crown, not to mention Bettina’s leash and vagina summoning charm, which is kind of what it sounds like: the winner can summon her at will.

Look: we all know where this is headed. It’s PNR. They’re going to fall in love and have sex, maybe or maybe not in that order, and he’s going to be dark and mysterious and she’s going to be plucky and deceptively smart. Bonus points for her — her hobby is making cool jewelry that doubles up as weaponry, which seems pretty badass and also kind of a handy thing for womenfolk to have. Ultimately this book gets two stars from me for being campy and entertaining, so it was too silly to merit an above-average score from me — even for the genre — but silly enough that it wasn’t dreadful and boring.

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 30: Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

Goodreads summary: “Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle—and people in general—has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence—creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.”

This book has been reviewed about a million times during the Cannonball, and it was, in fact, the numerous glowing reviews that encouraged me to pick it up. Several months on the library’s wait-list later, I was finally able to read the book and I was NOT disappointed!

Bernadette is full of characters, each uniquely realized, that leap off the page. For the most part, even the most flawed characters are amusing and likeable. I loved Bee, who is smart and challenging without being obnoxious or bratty; similarly, Bernadette herself is eccentric, naive to a fault, and occasionally petty, but never to the extent that you don’t sympathize with her.

The well-paced plot unfolded unpredictably, yet believably — though at first someone vanishing into thin air seems far-fetched, Semple keeps her finger well enough on the pulse of reality to offer plausible explanations for every twist and missed connection. The book was also, frankly, hilarious. Full of lighthearted satire that doesn’t veer into mean-spirited jibes, the narrative included laugh-out-loud takedowns of Pacific northwest intellectual bourgeoisie types. I don’t want to go on more than is necessary, since if you’ve been reading Cannonball at all you’ll have read this exact review more times than you need for your health. So I’ll just add my voice to the “highly recommend this” pile and call it a day!

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 29: Poison Princess by Kresley Cole

Goodreads: Sixteen year old Evangeline “Evie” Greene leads a charmed life, until she begins experiencing horrifying hallucinations. When an apocalyptic event decimates her Louisiana hometown, Evie realizes her hallucinations were actually visions of the future—and they’re still happening. Fighting for her life and desperate for answers, she must turn to her wrong-side-of-the-bayou classmate: Jack Deveaux.

With his mile-long rap sheet, wicked grin, and bad attitude, Jack is like no boy Evie has ever known. Even though he once scorned her and everything she represented, he agrees to protect Evie on her quest. She knows she can’t totally depend on Jack. If he ever cast that wicked grin her way, could she possibly resist him?

As Jack and Evie race to find the source of her visions, they meet others who have gotten the same call. An ancient prophesy is being played out, and Evie is not the only one with special powers. A group of twenty-two teens has been chosen to reenact the ultimate battle between good and evil. But it’s not always clear who is on which side…

I’m going to plagiarize myself here, because I left a comment that ended up being a short review over on the Vaginal Fantasy discussion board for this book (yes, this was another VF selection.) So, here is that, slightly expanded:

This book was really problematic for me in a lot of ways. I had a really hard time getting behind the romance: I get it, they were lusty for each other, but otherwise they both treated each other pretty badly and I don’t understand why that’s supposed to be hot. Like, here is an actual quote from the male hero: “Hell, Evie, you’re probably the last girl on earth for me. Would it kill you to put out?”

I mean, *SWOON*, right?

For her part, Evie has a lot of icky class-based issues with regards to Jackson. She doesn’t explicitly express these thoughts to him, other than calling him “Cajun,” but she’s supposed to be one of the wealthier town residents before the apocalypse, and he’s very poor and wrong-side-of-the-bayou and all that, so despite her physical attraction to him, she initially views him as wrong for her just based on the money issue.

I also thought way too much of the book was spent recounting her high school angst in excruciating detail. At least a third of the book was spent in this retrospective, which is, specifically, the week leading up to the apocalypse (here it’s called the Flash.) Cole’s motivations, here, were probably two-fold. First, she needed to set up the relationship with Jackson, and how they were attracted to each other but ultimately “all wrong for each other” in the high school scenario. She also probably wanted to paint a picture of what Evie felt was her declining sanity, but I think all of that could have been done much more concisely. What I felt like we ended up with, as the reader, was a lot of obnoxious brand-name dropping and class-based snobbery to establish Evie’s queen-bee credentials, and a lot of contrived exposition about gothic drawings and Evie trying to re-assure her peers she is totally fine, didn’t just come out from the mental ward, etc.

I was irritated because Cole was working with such a cool idea here — kids/young adults having powers based on the Tarot, leading up to an epic battle — but I felt like she just threw out a bunch of post-apocalytic cliches at us in lieu of actual world-building. All at once, after the apocalypse, we find out that there are zombies for some reason, and that basically all men have gone rotten because there aren’t enough women, and there are cannibals, and we’re all supposed to go “Oh, okay, that sounds about right for the end of the world,” except that none of these things really make sense given the context of what actually happened during the apocalypse (solar flares maybe? parts of the earth scorched, people burned up immediately, no one really knows) and we’re not given any kind of explanation as to why they evolved. All of the time spent in the high school part could have been used toward fleshing out this new world.

I was, fortunately, reeled back in toward the end for spoilery reasons. I’m the kind of person that will put aside a lot of crap I don’t like if the plot is a page-turner, which, frankly, this was. So even considering all of my gripes above, I’d still be interested in picking up the sequel(s) because I’m still interested in how this story resolves itself. I can let go of my world-building issue, but I think that if Cole wants Jackson and Evie’s romance to be a main draw, she needs to put a lot of work into making these people more likeable as a couple, because right now, I have no patience for two people who snipe back and forth at each other so crassly but are supposed to be in love. I happened to catch a sneak peek of the cover for the sequel, and Evie is posing with a different guy (from my understanding, it’s the guy who represents Death in the Tarot.) So, love triangle! I’ve gotta say — the guy hasn’t even really been properly introduced yet, only hinted at, but I’m already kind of rooting for him, because I really don’t like Jackson at all. Anyway, I’d recommend this maybe for people who are like me: you don’t mind spending a few hours reading something that is ultimately fun, despite being pretty problematic.

2.5 stars

alwaysanswerb’s #CBR5 Review 28: Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy

Ugh, I have so much catching up to do! I read this over a month ago, so let’s hope my memory functions well enough to make this coherent. Children of Scarabaeus is a sequel, so the Goodreads summary and my review will be spoiler-heavy. Thus, the rest of this is going under a cut.