Review: How to Not Always Be Working

Title: How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care

Author: Marlee Grace

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Divorce (mention)

Back Cover:

Part workbook, part advice manual, part love letter, How to Not Always Be Working gently ventures into the liminal space where phone meets life, helping readers to define their work (aka what they do out of a sense of purpose), their job (aka what they do to make money), and their breaks (what they do to recharge, to keep sacred, to feel connected to themselves). The book delves into the discussion of what happens when your work and your job are connected or the same, and how to figure out how much is to much, and get the best use of your time.

For the corporate lawyer who is always on email as well as the bread-baker trying to something that’s just for themselves, How to Not Always Be Working includes practical suggestions such as getting a phone box and sleeping with your phone in a different room, and more philosophical prompts that invite readers to ask how they burn themselves out and why they’re doing it. A creative manifesto, this book is above all inclusive – insisting that deep breathing and yoga aren’t just for the 1 percent, and inviting any and everyone to create a scared space in their lives.

Review:

I don’t think the title of this book could have called to me any more if it was titled “Jay Needs To Read This Book.” I am generally always working. Most people assume it’s because I have three jobs. But though I do actually need two jobs to pay the bills, the third one is optional and voluntary. I have the time to not be working if I actually knew how to not always be working. I just have some sort of compulsion towards always doing something, and that something is almost always some variety of work.

I was so excited about the premise of this book that I actually paused when I got to the first exercise to do the exercise (which I’ve only ever done for one other book – generally I read books all the way through and then come back to any exercises). But that actually became the problem here. The first exercise was to write out a list of things that are your work. My list included items like “mending clothing,” “social media” (because, as one of my jobs is digital marketing, I’m hardly ever on social media if I’m not getting paid for it), and “most activities that happen in the kitchen.” Then I looked at the sample list Marlee provided, which included items like “balancing the books,” “posting on Instagram about a new product,” and “uploading a new podcast episode.” And realized that I had fundamentally misunderstood who this book is actually targeted at.

This book was not really written for people like me, who take extra jobs even though we don’t need them and who are always working because we have an undefinable, insatiable, irrational drive to always be “productive.” It’s targeted towards people who are self-employed in creative or hobby businesses or influencer-type gigs and who have a hard time drawing the lines between “I’m doing this for work because X is my job” and “I’m doing this for me because I enjoy X.” It is, fundamentally, about figuring out how and where to draw boundaries when your life and your hobbies are your work. (This is, obviously, not my situation. Besides reading, I don’t really have any hobbies. I was hoping this book would teach me how to change that.)

I’m sure this book would be valuable for people in that particular situation. I did finish it, and though it’s definitely influenced strongly by Marlee’s New Age-style witchy spirituality, a lot of the advice is very good and the exercises are practical. Honestly, I would probably find some of the exercises helpful anyway. But I haven’t done any besides the first one yet because I’m just so disillusioned with this book. I really love the principle and the idea and the concept and the call towards not always working. But I didn’t expect such a narrow focus on specific types of work. I probably will take the time to go back through the exercises and see what ideas I can extract and re-shape to fit my life. But sometimes you just don’t want to have to do that work, you know?

Review Shorts: April 2024

Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework, edited by Pamela Gemin

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

I have not read much poetry, and it’s not usually what I gravitate towards. But I was drawn to the topic of this book because I actually appreciate housework. (It’s a great combination of physicality and solitude – nobody’s bothering me while I’m scrubbing splattered spaghetti sauce off the stove.) So I was excited to see both the good (aforementioned physicality and solitude; the pleasure of a well-cared-for home and of having a home at all) and the bad (it never ends; the persistent gender dynamics of who does it) of housework explored in poetry. And like any collection of anything, there were some I liked more than others. “Perhaps the World Ends Here” snagged my brain and pulled me up hard. “A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs” used housekeeping as a metaphor and I didn’t love it. “Upper Peninsula Landscape with Aunts” didn’t do it for me from a poetry angle, but I found the subject itself engaging and true-to-life. But I did devour this book in a single evening, found a lot to appreciate it, and spent the rest of the night imagining how my own housework experiences (getting meat out to thaw for tomorrow’s dinner, putting away clean dishes, putting away the miscellaneous things that didn’t end up where they belonged throughout the day) could be made into a poem. I even considered writing this review as a poem, but I am not good at poetry and it didn’t work. So I’d say on the whole it’s a solid collection and a good read.

Trigger Warnings: Poetic mentions of: Misogyny, sexism, cancer, terminal illness, medical content, sex, parent death, child death, grief, abusive relationships, miscarriage

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Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

This book definitely had an old-timey feel, what with all the flowery language, characters as drivers of plot as opposed to a person you’re supposed to connect with, and the whole optimism about the future thing. The way everything shook out was extremely unsettling with strong cosmic horror vibes, made all the more horrifying by the fact that pretty much everyone in the book viewed it as an inevitability at worst, and at best the extremely positive ultimate achievement of the human race. It also left me with a nagging feeling that it didn’t quite finish wrapping up. Sure, that’s the end of the story, but I still have many questions. And it also feels like there’s some sort of message or theme or moral or reflection on the nature or purpose of humanity that I haven’t fully grasped but I’m not sure I particularly like. Perhaps the point is to make you think about the ideas rather than provide answers or express opinions about them, and admittedly some of the questions it raises are interesting. Mixed feelings overall towards this weird little book.

Trigger Warnings: Death, animal death, cosmic horror, is mental body horror a thing?, child loss (not death, just taken away in a sense), apocalypse, suicide, alcohol use, drug use (mentions)

Review: The Blade Itself

Title: The Blade Itself

Series: The First Law Trilogy #1

Author: Joe Abercrombie

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (severe), blood (severe), violence (severe), gore (severe), injury (severe), animal death, child death, animal injury, murder, war, body horror (mild), slavery (mentions), excrement (mentions), ableism, sexism, physical abuse (one scene, plus mentions of it happening in the past), torture, cannibalism (mentions), rape (mentions), unreality, colonization (mentions), xenophobia (mentions), vomit, classism, fire/fire injury, alcohol use

Back Cover:

The first novel in the First Law Trilogy and debut fantasy novel from New York Times bestseller, Joe Abercrombie.

Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught in one feud too many, he’s on the verge of becoming a dead barbarian — leaving nothing behind him but bad songs, dead friends, and a lot of happy enemies.

Nobleman, dashing officer, and paragon of selfishness, Captain Jezal dan Luthar has nothing more dangerous in mind than fleecing his friends at cards and dreaming of glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules.

Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer, would like nothing better than to see Jezal come home in a box. But then Glokta hates everyone: cutting treason out of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendship. His latest trail of corpses may lead him right to the rotten heart of government, if he can stay alive long enough to follow it.

Enter the wizard, Bayaz. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he’s about to make the lives of Logen, Jezal, and Glokta a whole lot more difficult.

Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.

Unpredictable, compelling, wickedly funny, and packed with unforgettable characters, The Blade Itself is noir fantasy with a real cutting edge.

Review:

I didn’t pick this book up entirely by choice. For Valentine’s Day, my local library did a “blind date with a book” promotion where they wrapped the books up in paper and just put a few facts about them on the front. I love the concept (I appreciate anything that gets me to try new things), so I knew I had to try one. Eventually I picked this one, and here’s all I knew about it until I got home from the library and opened the wrapping:

This is where the blind date with a book concept really comes in handy, because I had actually looked at this book on the shelf previously and decided it didn’t look interesting. The back cover introduced way too many characters and not enough plot, and it seemed like it was going to be very unclear what was actually going on and maybe a little dull. But since I had been convinced to check it out, I figured I might as well read it.

First of all, Joe Abercrombie is clearly a very good writer. This book was extremely well-written, and despite how many things are going on, it’s balanced well, and though the place is slow, it never gets dull. I did not find myself eager and enthusiastic about reading this story as fast as possible, but I also never considered putting it down. It seems strange to call a book full of as much death, violence, and bloodshed a pleasant reading experience, but it was – not slow or dense enough to lose interest, not enthralling enough to get me truly invested in anything that happened or anyone involved, no protagonists I disliked but also none I really loved. (Actually, while they were perfectly fine to read about, every protagonist was a terrible person in their own way.) I had quite a good time reading but didn’t get emotionally involved. It was the violent fantasy version of casual reading.

But then I finished it. And my husband asked if I liked it. And I realized how difficult of a question that actually was to answer. Because, as previously mentioned, I did have a good time reading it. And there were lots of really interesting aspects. Glokta’s experience of existing in a disabled person in a world that’s built for able-bodied people was intense and quite well-done. Bayaz’s wizardly shenanigans were entertaining and I liked that the history of the magic system was part of the story. And though it was violent, the violence never felt excessive or overdone, except in a way that made it clear that violence is always a tragedy, despite how the people who benefit from it may try to reframe it. So for that, it was good.

But then we come to the struggle that I really have no idea what was going on, plot-wise. There are a lot of point-of-view characters. There’s Logen, Jezal, and Glokta, as mentioned on the back cover. Despite being on the back cover, Bayaz isn’t a point of view character. There’s also the Dogman, a member of Logen’s old warrior band. And there’s Farro, who doesn’t get introduced until a third of the way throught the book, and who is 98% rage by volume, mostly feral, and whose primary goal in life is to commit as much murder as possible, with or without provocation. So there’s a lot of people running around doing things. But none of those things really coalesce into a plot. Glokta is doing his job; Jezal is shirking swordsmanship training and falling in love; Logen is tagging along after Bayaz, who definitely has plans but isn’t sharing them; the Dogman is traveling with the warrior band; and Farro is trying her best to commit a lot of murder, but is mostly being guided to somewhere by a magical old guy who also has plans but isn’t sharing them. There’s also two brewing wars, some internal politics driven by people who definitely have goals (but again, no indication as to what those are beyond “I want power”), a subplot with a swordsmanship contest that didn’t seem to have a point, and mostly just a lot of little things happening with no overarching plot or even protagonist goals. Farro’s story didn’t even meet up with any of the other characters until the last few chapters. And almost everybody felt like they were wandering through the story with no real goals or interest in doing much beyond live their lives. The only primary character who seems to have any sort of motivation or goal that could drive a plot is Bayaz – and as I said, he’s not telling.

This whole book really felt more like the setup than a story in and of itself – which is a very strange choice, considering that this book is over 500 pages long and there’s only two more books in the trilogy. (Although there are a bunch of standalone books, a second trilogy, and some short stories in the same world, so who knows what the thought process was here.) At the very end, something happened that felt like the inciting incident of an actual plot. So perhaps things will actually happen in the next book. I’m on the fence about reading it, though. On one hand, The Blade Itself was a perfectly fine read. On the other, it wasn’t any better than “perfectly fine”, and if the next book is anywhere close to this length, that’s an awful lot of pages to commit to when the story doesn’t even have an identifiable plot yet. I don’t regret the time reading this one, if for nothing else than exposure to something I wouldn’t have voluntarily picked up otherwise. But I don’t think I’ll be voluntarily seeking out book two, either.

The First Law World:

The First Law Trilogy:

1. The Blade Itself
2. Before They Are Hanged
3. Last Argument of Kings

The First Law standalone books:

1. Best Served Cold
2. The Heroes
3. Red Country

The Age of Madness Trilogy:

1. A Little Hatred
2. The Trouble With Peace
3. The Wisdom of Crowds

The First Law short story collections:

1. Sharp Ends
2. The Great Change (And Other Lies)

Review: Hellbent

Title: Hellbent

Series: Cheshire Red Reports #2

Author: Cherie Priest

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, injury, murder, mental illness, confinement, ableism, blood drinking, parent death (mentions), severe weather, excrement (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the previous book, Bloodshot.

Back Cover:

Vampire thief Raylene Pendle doesn’t need more complications in her life. Her Seattle home is already overrun by a band of misfits, including Ian Stott, a blind vampire, and Adrian deJesus, an ex-Navy SEAL/drag queen. But Raylene still can’t resist an old pal’s request: seek out and steal a bizarre set of artifacts. Also on the hunt is a brilliant but certifiably crazy sorceress determined to stomp anyone who gets in her way. But Raylene’s biggest problem is that the death of Ian’s vaunted patriarch appears to have made him the next target of some blood-sucking sociopaths. Now Raylene must snatch up the potent relics, solve a murder, and keep Ian safe – all while fending off a psychotic sorceress. But at least she won’t be alone. A girl could do a lot worse for a partner than an ass-kicking drag queen – right?

Review:

For as lackluster as this back cover is, I enjoyed Bloodshot enough to be excited about reading this book. I’m not generally an urban fantasy fan, but I found Raylene a well-done snarky protagonist and surprisingly well-rounded for a badass vampire thief, and the whole book to be more action thriller than urban fantasy mystery. It’s like urban fantasy lite, and I enjoyed it.

This book, though, leans heavier into the urban fantasy elements of the series. Raylene interacts with multiple vampire Houses, she’s hunting down some magical artifacts, and of course there’s the whole sorceress thing. But despite that, it didn’t really have an urban fantasy feel to me. I think that’s because every other urban fantasy I’ve read has had some variety of romance (often a somewhat unhealthy romance), and even though the back cover tries to imply that Raylene and Adrian are going to get together, they are most definitely not. And I think having the first book be so light on the urban fantasy elements helped ease me in, as well.

It’s a general tendency of sequels to be just not quite as good as the first book. That’s not really the case here. Bloodshot and Hellbent are both well-written, well-plotted, interesting, and enjoyable to read. Raylene herself is still great. She is, as I’ve said, remarkably more full and well-written than I anticipated. Her snark works, she’s experiencing some growth, and I love her dynamic with the unique cast of characters she’s surrounded with. She’s dynamic and quite fun to read about, and she’s a large part of the reason why I’ve enjoyed this series.

Plot-wise, there’s a lot happening, but it’s balanced very well and all of it is enjoyable. In many ways, it exactly the same plot as last book – someone wants Raylene to obtain something, but someone else wants that to not happen. Last time, Ian wanted her to get some records and the government didn’t want her to do that. This time, she gets a job to steal some magical bones, and the sorceress who also wants them doesn’t want her to do that. But this one manages to make itself unique in a few ways: First, a single slightly-crazy sorceress uses much different Raylene prevention methods than the federal government. And second, this book leans harder into the urban fantasy aspects of the story. It becomes clear that there’s other supernatural creatures than vampires in this world (although none of them actually show up on-page, they’re mentioned). Raylene interacts with people from three different vampire Houses, and actually visits one House’s house. And there’s a sort-of subplot that’s a little bit trying to figure out who murdered a particular guy (although figuring out the answer requires less “figuring out who did it” and more “walking into the correct room while doing something else,” so it doesn’t really count as a mystery in my mind).

And now that I’ve finished expressing that I found this book quite good and an enjoyable read, I want to comment on the unusual aspect of it – which is that it doesn’t at all continue the plot from Bloodshot. At the end of that book, the main plot points were resolved, but there was still one antagonist on the loose who needed to be hunted down and dealt with. The implication was that this was the setup for the rest of the series, and Raylene and company would be working on tracking down and doing something (possibly murder) to the rest of the people involved in Project Bloodshot. But besides a mention at the beginning of this book that the events of the last book happened and there was at least one guy still out there, nothing in this book had anything to do with any of that.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more books. But there are only two Cheshire Red Reports books, and this one is over a decade old. Cherie Priest has said on her website that she may in the future write a third book in the series, but at this point there’s just the two. Which leaves the whole thing feeling incomplete. Sure, this book wrapped up really well, even resolved a few sub-plots from book one, and left the characters in an overall good place to end a series. But that one major thread left over from book one – that the guy behind Project Bloodshot is still on the loose and Raylene and company intend to hunt him down – is really bothering me. Even just one more book to resolve that would make this feel more complete as a series. Or it’s possible that I’m the only one bent out of shape by that one unresolved thing and everybody else is fine with the way it ended. Who knows.

This complaint really has nothing to do with this book, which I very much enjoyed. This series just feels incomplete with that one major thread left hanging, and I would love to see a third book come out at some point to resolve it. And if Cherie Priest ever decides to take up this series again and write more than one additional book, that works for me, too – I enjoy this series and would be happy to spend a few more books in it.

The Cheshire Red Reports:

1. Bloodshot
2. Hellbent

Review Shorts: March 2024

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

I keep forgetting that Jenny Odell writes works of philosophy, not how-to books – although to be fair, her titles are incredibly misleading on that point. I read and enjoyed her book How to Do Nothing, but was mildly disappointed to find that it wasn’t actually about “how to” anything. I don’t know why I expected anything different from her second book, but I did in fact have the ridiculous expectation that this book might tell me something about discovering a life beyond the clock. Instead, just like with How to Do Nothing, I got only philosophy, in this case philosophy of time. Admittedly, quite a bit of it was interesting. The section discussing how our modern concept of time came to be what it is was quite fascinating. But much of it is about how other cultures conceptualize time differently, how nature’s time scales are different than the ones we humans created during the Industrial Revolution, and mostly about how much climate change is destroying everything. It was something I noticed in How to Do Nothing too, but it’s much stronger here. I hesitate to call it “climate despair,” but Jenny’s writing is clearly and overwhelmingly influenced by fear and grief over the climate crisis. This in itself isn’t necessarily bad. What I struggled with most was actually connecting anything this book said to, well, anything. It could very well be nothing to do with the book and just be about me, but so much of this felt difficult to grasp, and whatever I did grasp felt abstract. There was a lot of information here, but it didn’t feel like a coherent narrative so much as an acquaintance handing me a box full of papers, each one containing a variety of facts and opinions about time. My reaction to that scenario would probably be the same as my reaction to this book: “Great, thanks! But what am I supposed to do with this?” And that’s a question that Saving Time never really answers.

Tags: Biracial/Multiracial Author

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), grief (mentions), pandemic (mentions), animal death (mentions), colonization, ableism, racism, classism, panic attack (one mention)

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Neferura: The Pharaoh’s Daughter by Malayna Evans

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: DNF at page 86

My first DNF book of 2024, and it has nothing to do with the book’s subject. I’m a huge Ancient Egypt fan and I loved the idea of a story focused on women’s power and featuring the daughter of one of the very few female pharaohs. But it really failed in execution. Malayna has clearly done her research and knows a lot about the history and the time period. But it feels anachronistic in a way that’s really hard to place. I think it has something to do with the characters, who feel like a variety of modern people who just happen to live in a world that looks like Ancient Egypt. Modern values and opinions seem plastered over the trappings of the time period. Though it’s definitely not a YA book, stylistically it seems closer to something written for the younger teens. It also feels unpolished, like either the writer is either fairly young or this is one of their earliest forays into fiction. The characters are unremarkable and don’t seem to have any real goals or desires. Supposedly they have relationships to each other, but there’s never a sense that our titular protagonist actually cares about any of them. I think Neferura’s emotions were the most confusing thing about her, because they never seemed to fit what a normal person would feel. Simple, inane things leave her struggling not to cry from sheer frustration; her mother’s casual cruelty doesn’t seem to even register. I feel like a real pharaoh’s daughter would not make it to adulthood being as naïve and gullible as she is – she’d either get wise or be chewed up by the allegedly-ruthless court. And don’t even get me started on the body-shaming and fat-shaming in this book. The very first line is Neferura getting body-shamed by her mother. In the first twenty-four pages, she is fat-shamed by her mother twice, by her own narration three or four times, and she fat-shames her mother once. It’s excessive and entirely unnecessary to anything in the story. So on the whole, while I think the concept is interesting and I would definitely be open to a book exploring Ancient Egypt with Nefertiti’s daughter, this book does not do that idea justice.

Tags: Protagonist of Color, Nonwestern Setting

Trigger Warnings: Fat-shaming/body shaming (so much), incest (mentions), parent death (mentions), emotional abuse from parent (although not noticed by the protagonist)

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Sun of Blood and Ruin (Sun of Blood and Ruin #1) by Mariely Lares

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: DNF on page 31

Second book in a row with a fantastic historical setting but the writing just didn’t do it justice. (I keep wanting to give historical books a chance, but they’re sure not making it easy.) I’m not against a good in media res, but this story throws our protagonist into “hero of the people” scenarios without ever establishing that the people care about her, or even know about her. The writing was simplistic, the characters were bland and felt more like cutouts wafting through an admittedly interesting plot than real people with emotions and desires and flaws. For a supposedly anti-colonialism story, the protagonist has a lot of positive words for her colonial-ruler father and so far nothing but criticism for the Indigenous resistance movement. She seems to be doing Zorro-style, Mesoamerican-superhero kind of things without any real motivation to do so – it’s cool, to be sure, but I never get the sense that she has any reason beyond “plot says so”. And it seems an awful lot of harm to put oneself in the way of without having some very clear reason, either emotional or moral, to go to all the trouble. Which is disappointing because the world is interesting and South/Central America is woefully underutilized as a fantasy setting, especially when history provides so many rich opportunities for mythologies and/or historical events to integrate into the narrative. Unfortunately, it ends up being very much like Neferura – a great idea with mediocre execution.

Tags: Nonwestern Setting, Protagonist of Color, Author of Color, #ownvoices Hispanic/Latino

Trigger Warnings: Colonization, blood, guns, injury, death, execution, parent death (mentions), arranged marriage

Review: Breaktime

Title: Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World

Author: Bernard Lefkowitz

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), mental illness (mentions), illness (mentions)

Back Cover:

A revolution against conventional work and career is spreading across America. It’s a quiet movement, but sooner or later it may affect you. This dramatic revolt against against the work ethic has led many Americans to break with their careers and to restructure their lives around their personal design.

In the past ten years, many Americans have dropped out of the job market in significant numbers, choosing not to work. These people are rethinking their priorities and are rejecting the pressures that come with climbing the success ladder. These are not the idle rich or the romantic young, but ordinary middle-class citizens who want to make the most of themselves, to live for the present rather than for the future. A social security pension at sixty-five is no longer their goal in life – these men and women will not allow the nine-to-fine routine to interfere with their desires for personal satisfaction.

Bernard Lefkowitz who has talked and lived with people of all ages, income levels, and life-styles, offers a fascinating portrait of the nonworking life. Why have these people stopped working? How do they pay the rent? What do they do with all their time? What options are available to those of us who might also choose to retire early – as early as twenty-five? More than one hundred people have confronted these and other vital issues in interviews with Lefkowitz.

Among the subjects presented in Breaktime are a couple who sublet their apartment and house-sit for others; a loan collector who found that he was more interested in people than in chasing debtors; an ex-TV anchorman who’d had it with corporate journalism; and a former Xerox executive who plotted and planned for his ten years with the company to leave at thirty-two and do nothing for the rest of his life. These and many others have quit early and are enjoying life on their own terms. Breaktime is a revelation and an incentive to find a better way.

Review:

I spent a remarkable amount of time trying to track down this book considering I didn’t know very much about it. I knew the title, and there was a photograph of the paperback cover available on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. (It’s actually the cover image I used on this post, since the copy I finally got my hands on was a hardcover without the dust jacket and therefore was just plain pressboard.) I couldn’t find a description or anything regarding what it was about, and I couldn’t track down any reviews. It probably has something to do with the book being a not-particularly-noteworthy longform journalism piece published in 1979, but even the few places on the internet that acknowledged the book’s existence didn’t seem to care to do more than that.

I eventually located in my local library’s storage archives and had to go request a librarian go into the archives and grab it for me. But in the end, I did get my hands on it. (And I added the back cover information to The StoryGraph, because the part from the dust cover was pasted inside the book itself and I don’t think it’s actually online anywhere else.) Which seems like a lot of effort for something that, again, I knew next to nothing about. But the title caught my interest, and even though I knew I was unlikely to find anything particularly actionable in a book about people opting out of work in the 1970s, I still wanted to read it.

The 1970s was nearly fifty years ago, so this book felt less like a current events analysis (which I’m sure it was supposed to be) and more of a capture of attitudes of a particular subset of people in a particular time. One of the things I found most fascinating about it, though, was how many beliefs and attitudes were exactly the same as today. Nobody wants to work anymore; people aren’t religious anymore; the government is full of liberals who want to destroy us conservatives; your job is your identity; maybe your job shouldn’t be your identity; these are all familiar ideas expressed at one point or another in this book. Even though economics have changed, societal beliefs about women working have changed, and ideas about the very meaning of work itself have changed, a lot of the attitudes Bernard and his subjects express haven’t.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how un-feasible most of the subjects’ strategies would be in today’s world. One person managed to get unemployment for seven years; several had their formerly stay-at-home wives go to work and support the family on a clerical salary; a remarkable number of them got their employers to say they were laid off so they could get unemployment in the first place. And that’s not counting the ones who were fairly wealthy to begin with and chose to just live on their savings. All of them put a big emphasis on cutting down their expenses, but I can’t help noticing all the ways none of this would work in 2024.

And, interestingly, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t work in the 1970s, either. A majority of the 100 people Bernard talked to for this book ended up going back to work. Many of them talked about the stress of cobbling together money to pay bills. At least one went to eviction court, and several more were close to it when Bernard’s research ended. A few got severely depressed by losing the sense of purpose and accomplishment that working and being the primary breadwinner gave them, and several talked about not really knowing what to do with their time now that it wasn’t going towards work. There’s a strange tension in this book between these people’s desire not to work, to be free from the job and the boss and the alarm clock and spending a bunch of their time doing things they hate or ethically disagree with or just aren’t the things they want to be spending their time on, and the fact that “living without work in a nine to five world” doesn’t seem to be feasible for more than a few years at a time. And the book never actually explores this tension. It covers people who are voluntarily not working with a sense of “I don’t really understand this but it’s the future of work,” but it also never seems to draw the connection that even for these people, it’s not really possible. To be fair, it is possible in some cases – if they already had a ton of savings to live on, if they were close to retirement age and had enough savings to live on until they could start getting social security or their pension, or if they had a spouse who was willing and able to go to work and who could earn enough to support their family. But those are all true today, as well. These people opting out of work hadn’t really found a way to opt out of work entirely. In most cases, it was something more akin to an extended vacation or sabbatical than dropping out of the nine-to-five world. But the book doesn’t acknowledge this. It presents voluntary unemployment and early retirement as the future while never seeming to notice that even most of the people already doing it couldn’t make it permanent.

There’s a point to be made about society’s view on work and how even though technology and automation has brought down the amount we really need to work, societal values have gone the opposite way than what Bernard predicted. Instead of normalizing early retirement and moving towards twenty-hour workweeks, we’ve made working into a moral and ethical good and busyness into a proof of your personal worth. It would be interesting to contrast this movement with today’s FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which has the same goal but aims to do it by becoming independently wealthy instead of by relying on social support systems. I would also be curious to hear from someone who lived through the 1970s about this book and how it matches up with the values, culture, and societal dynamics of the period. I’m especially interested to hear if the idea of living without work was a more mainstream idea at the time or if Bernard was reporting on an obscure hippie-adjacent subculture he was interested in. I can point out a bunch of things that were really interesting about this book and how it contrasts with attitudes about work in 2024, but my lack of context and historical understanding about this era limits what more I can get from it. As I anticipated, it’s most definitely not an instruction manual for how to quit your job and keep living afterwards in the modern day (or even at the time it was written). But despite that, it was extremely interesting, and I’m glad I took the time and effort to hunt it down.

Review: Upgrade

Title: Upgrade

Author: Blake Crouch

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury, gore, guns, parent death, suicide (mentions), pandemic, terminal illness, body horror, body modifications without consent

Back Cover:

Logan Ramsay can feel his brain…changing.

And his body too.

He’s becoming something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

As he sets out to discover who did this to him, and why, his transformation threatens everything—his family, his job, even his freedom.

Because the truth of what’s happened to him is more disturbing than he could possibly imagine. His DNA has been rewritten with a genetic-engineering breakthrough beyond anything the world has seen—one that could change our very definitions of humanity.

And the battle to control this unfathomable power has already begun.

But what if humankind’s only hope for survival lies in embracing this change—whatever the cost?

Which side will Logan take? And by the time it’s over, will he—and the people he loves—even recognize him?

Upgrade is a stunningly inventive, ferociously plotted science-fiction thriller that explores the limits of our humanity—and asks what’s at risk when technology lets us reengineer not just the world around us, but ourselves.

Review:

This book was recommended to me, and I generally attempt to read books recommended to me. This wasn’t my first foray into this author’s work, either. I’d read his book Recursion a while back and found it a sci-fi kind of weird that isn’t necessarily my jam, but that was well-written and had some interesting ideas. So I figured this probably wouldn’t be bad.

And I was correct. Upgrade wasn’t bad. The protagonist may not have had very many interesting characteristics beyond being the protagonist, but the concept was interesting and Blake Crouch is a competent writer. The action moved along, the story was largely well-paced, and it kept me engaged the whole way through. Nothing spectacular, sure, but perfectly readable.

However. As you might have guessed by the tone here, I do have some criticisms. Again, Blake’s particular brand of sci-fi weird isn’t quite up my alley, so some of this could definitely be me. But some of it is I just take issue with some of the fundamental concepts of the book itself.

Upgrade is ambitious in scope and interesting in concept. In a world where genetic modification is very possible (but also very illegal), an anti-gene-modification enforcement agent finds his genes being modified against his will, making him almost superhuman. Now he has to tackle questions like “why did this happen?” and “would the world be better if it happened to everybody?” But as interesting and potentially thematic as this idea could be, the execution is a little wacky. Some parts are frighteningly realistic, others are laughably not, and the discordant combination made the whole thing feel a bit silly. It would have made a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie, but the attempt at thematic depth just emphasized how ridiculous some parts of it were.

I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on my actual problem with this book. I had notes about how Logan Ramsey has big “r/iamverysmart” vibes, and whether or not killing the same character twice was too much, and how cruel Logan’s mother was and how I couldn’t believe that neither of her children realized how much they were like her. But then I was reminded of the word “eugenics” and realized my issue. Without giving away too many spoilers, the arguable antagonist of the first half of the book thinks climate change would be solved if people were only better in a specific way and wants to accomplish that with mass gene modification. It really feels like what a eugenics movement would look like in a world where you didn’t necessarily have to breed better traits into people because you could just modify people’s genes instead. But our protagonist seemed pretty against that whole idea, so I wasn’t too bothered. Up until the end, when (minor spoiler alert) he decided his problem wasn’t so much the eugenics-style idea, just which traits should be changed. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

It’s very possible that at least some of my complaints are because while I find these kinds of stories fine, they’re not the type of thing I generally really love. And on the whole, Upgrade was fine. I didn’t love it, I think its themes were handled poorly, and I really didn’t love some of the vibes it gives off. But it was readable. I found it interesting enough to finish. If it were made into an action movie, I think it would work pretty well. I just don’t particularly recommend it as it is.

Review: Night Watch

Title: Night Watch

Series: Discworld #29 (City Watch #6)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, murder, injury, war, torture, fire, pregnancy (mentions), animal death (mentions), animal cruelty (brief), police brutality

Spoiler Warning: This book is 29th in the series, but reading beyond this point will expose you to only the mildest spoilers of the previous City Watch books.

Back Cover:

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is back in his own rough, tough past. He must track down a murderer, teach his young self how to be a good cop and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion. There’s a problem: if he wins, he’s got no wife, no child, no future.

Review:

I am not generally into books about time travel shenanigans. Not because I have anything against time travel in particular, but it just seems to be rare to have it done well, or at least in a way that I find enjoyable to read about. But, as usual, Sir Terry pulled it off.

I think a lot of that has to do with the character of Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Due to some unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time magical happenstance, Vimes ends up in his own past – the Ankh-Morpork of many decades ago, when he had just joined the Watch and things were, objectively, much worse than they are now. But one of the things that I appreciate most about Commander Vimes is that he is a relentlessly practical man. I recognize a kindred spirit in that, but it also means that the situation may be weird and fairly unpleasant, but he gets right on with dealing with it, with very little pining or philosophizing and absolutely no dithering or worrying about paradoxes.

That’s not to say that he’s emotionless, though. In fact, what makes Vimes so stellar as a character to me throughout this whole series is that he is competent, practical, and stays focused on the problem(s) in front of him instead of wasting time with excessive introspection or philosophizing, but he also has a strong set of personal values, cares deeply for the people around him, and feels his emotions intensely. He doesn’t do the introspection on the page because he doesn’t need to; he already knows himself thoroughly and is in control. To use the cliché, he is in touch with his feelings, but though they may tempt him to act against his values, they never control him. In so many ways, he is a paragon of positive masculinity – competent, principled, practical, honorable, caring, willing and able to experience great depth of feeling, never letting his feelings overrule him. He’s the rare character who is great to read about as a character, and also someone I think I would like, or at least respect, in real life.

Apparently this is the Sam Vimes Appreciation Review. That does make sense, because he really is the star of this book. Sure, there’s the whole time travel thing. There’s the murderer he’s tracking who also got zapped into the past and has the same future knowledge that Vimes does. There’s the fact that this point in the past is a particularly sticky one for Ankh-Morpork. There’s the sheer delight of a character being spectacularly good at what they do (some of it because Vimes has future knowledge, but much of it because he’s just a really, really good watchman). All of that is quite enjoyable to read. But this is a book that pushes Commander Vimes to his limits, and that means that he, as a character, is really what carries this story.

The Discworld series doesn’t generally shy away from getting dark in places. But this book is probably the darkest that I’ve read so far, and since the City Watch sub-series tends to be less funny in general, it’s not tempered with humor into something darkly funny. It’s just dark. Not at all in a bad way, to be sure. As I said, these events push Vimes to his limit, and it’s hard to do that without delving into some darkness. But even in terms of sheer numbers of deaths and injuries, this has got to be one of the more violent Discworld books. It’s not unnecessary violence when it comes to the plot, but it definitely goes (and takes Commander Vimes to) some very dark places.

I can’t necessarily say that Night Watch has replaced Interesting Times as my favorite Discworld book. The two are so different in mood, tone, theme, and content that it’s hard to do a direct comparison. But I can definitely say that Night Watch is among my favorite Discword books. If you like Commander Vimes as a character, love stories where protagonists are pushed to their limits, or just enjoy the very specific trope where a character is sent back in time and has to relive a difficult part of their life from a new perspective, I think you’ll agree.

The Discworld Series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review Shorts: February 2024

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

Very weird, very short, very disturbing. It had some strong magical realism elements, but since the narrator was the only person to experience anything out of the ordinary, it didn’t feel like magical realism so much as one of those books where you’re not sure if there’s actually something supernatural going on or if it’s all in the protagonist’s head. But the back cover also calls it “deeply rooted in the contemporary Native American experience,” so maybe it’s actually including a particular tribe’s understanding of or mythology around ghosts and I’m just missing the context to understand. This whole novella gives me a feeling that I’m missing something. By itself, it’s a disturbing, incredibly dark horror story that never quite answers the question of whether or not any of this actually happened. But I also get the sense that there’s deeper ideas that I just don’t have the context or the analysis skills to really grasp.

Tags: #ownvoices Native American

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent (major), bullying (major), animal death (graphic), gun violence, ableism, body horror, gore (mild)

How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

A very strange book. It’s basically a series of short stories combined into one volume, but the characters are all connected in some ways and taken together they tell the story of how life on Earth was decimated by a plague and climate change and what people did afterwards. The final connections and the overarching narrative of the story doesn’t become clear until the last chapter/story, which pulls everything together. It’s also an exercise in memory, because the whole thing fits together like an intricate puzzle and if you aren’t able to remember details you’re going to miss a lot of the connections. It’s an emotionally heavy story of an uncomfortably possible apocalypse and it made me tear up quite a few times, but also didn’t quite have the emotional impact I think it could have had because I was so busy trying to keep track of how all the different stories fit together and place them in the timeline and the overarching narrative. However, I have a notably terrible memory, so that may be less of a problem for other people. It’s unusual and clever, an interesting story told in a unique way, and worth the read if you like apocalypses with a sci-fi edge or if you just want a book unlike anything you’ve read before.

Tags: Recommended by Someone, Japanese Protagonist, Japanese-American Author, #ownvoices Japanese

Trigger Warnings: Death (graphic), child death (graphic), parent death, pandemic (major), terminal illness, suicide

Liftoff: Couch to Barbell by Casey Johnston (Unread Shelf 2024)

See it on The StoryGraph here

Status: Completed

This is a rare book that does exactly what it says on the tin – it will take you from couch (don’t know what you’re doing with weights) to barbell (can lift a barbell, have enough knowledge to do so without hurting yourself). It’s straightforward, no frills and no fancy layouts and not even any pictures (though it does come with a spreadsheet full of video links) and has the general vibe of a self-published book in the most positive way possible – it doesn’t have a publisher insisting on a certain page count or a specific narrative voice, so it skips all that and goes straight to providing practical, useful information. It also spends a lot of time on the stuff you do outside of the gym to support your weightlifting journey – mainly eating and resting. I understand the logic with that, though, because for those of us who are aware of modern exercise culture (read: all of us), the idea of resting, not working out all the time, and eating more to fuel growing muscles are the parts we’re probably going to struggle with more than the actual “go to the gym and lift heavy stuff” part. And as someone with a history of disordered eating, I found the whole idea suspiciously easy. You’re telling me I can lift some weights for around half an hour three times a week, eat half again as much as I have been eating, and still see health and strength (if not necessarily weight or size) results? Sounds fake. But also I’m five weeks into this program as of writing this review and it seems to be working so far. Turns out for me, lifting heavy stuff is infinitely more enjoyable than anything cardio-related. And though I’ve been in recovery from my eating disorder since 2017, doing this program has made it feel possible to be recovered. Take that with a grain of salt because it’s just one person’s perspective, but I’ve found it incredible.

Tags: Unread Shelf 2024

Trigger Warnings: Discussions of weight changes, discussion of calories (in a generally healthy/positive way)

Review: Natural Beauty

Title: Natural Beauty

Author: Ling Ling Huang

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality

Back Cover:

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

Review:

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.