Reading

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. If what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Like. What do I even say. This entire book was wild from start to finish. I kept sending excerpts of it to my friends to go ??? over.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Previous Arthur Miller knowledge: That episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (4x22 Restless) where Willow gets stuck in Death of A Salesman, CTRL-Fing through All My Sons for the Researcher’s First Murder puzzle and....incorrectly thinking Evelyn Miller in Red Dead Redemption 2 was a reference to him until this very moment when I’ve googled and learned that he’s actually a Thoreau reference and yeah, that makes way more sense timeline-wise.

None of that is relevant to this play, which I read the Saturday before I watched John Proctor Is The Villain because I love giving myself homework.

It was enjoyable enough a read, though I felt no great compulsion to watch a production afterwards. The most compelling scenes were where John Proctor and his wife are tricked into condemning each other while trying to protect each other, and that very end of the play where he decides not to lie. Though a part of me still went damn bro just stay alive and provide for your pregnant wife, wtf is she supposed to do now.

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

A weaker read than the original trilogy and the Snow book, but still a fun time. And look, I gotta respect the author for going yes, you will read the entirety of a long-ass Poe poem in my epilogue as we catch up Haymitch all the way through the lonely years ahead of him.

There’s two things that make Haymitch’s tale less appealing to me than Katniss’s or Snow’s. First is the PoV. I like Haymitch. He’s fine. The point of him is that he is a regular teenage dude. But for me the appeal of Katniss and Snow is the specific ways they’re deranged, the ways they feel utterly alien to their societies even as they are stuck being a part of them, and how they are often blind to even their own motivations. Haymitch is...well, I’d have a drink with him over the other two, but I wasn’t as hooked by him.

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Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Reading Update