My first CBR last year was eye-opening, to say the least. I paid more attention to my reading than I have since college, and I also paid fresh attention to my book choices after being confronted by the ugly truth of my blindspot for women authors. And though not every book was a winner, I did fall in love with a number of books and authors new to me, including Becky Chambers and her delightful The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, one of […]
“The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.”
Neal Stephenson’s writing process must be insane. This is my third book of his and I am continually astounded by the level of obsessive technical detail present for whichever field happens to be the critical science du jour in each book. Snow Crash took great liberties with neurolinguistics, but it was still clear that Stephenson had done his homework and there was a foundation of knowledge there. Jumping straight to his most recent novel, I found Seveneves stunning, not just because of, again, the amount […]
A truly stunning sci-fi book for the ages
Wow, this book. There are a few technical elements that initially justified me wanting to leave off the fifth star, but the sheer audacity of the story and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about it a month later make Seveneves one of my favorite books of the year, and certainly the most thought-provoking. Effortlessly checking off a list of “stuff I want in a sci-fi novel,” Seveneves is technical and speculative, extrapolating from cutting-edge current science to detail seemingly inevitable future technology. Equally […]
MacGyver goes to space
Goodreads summary: “Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first man to die there. It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him, and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he’s stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive–and even if he could […]