Tangled Mind

“That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.”

Gyre lives on Cassandra-5, a planet with immense mineral wealth but little else to commend it. She takes a contract to explore a particular cave system -- dangerous, because the caves are often collapsed by native beasts called Tunnellers -- which will pay enough money for her to get off-world and search for her mother. She's been surgically fitted into a life-support suit, and she expects to find a full team supporting her by comms. Instead, she gets a single person: a woman named Em.

Neither Gyre nor Em has been wholly honest. ( Read more... )

... he will cry out against Frieda if she dances in the wind with her scarf flying above her like a banner. She dances for pure joy, but the war does not recognize that kind of dancing. It knows that she’s twirling her scarf in a prearranged signal to the U-boats lying out offshore, waiting. [p.128]

This was Helen Dunmore's first novel, and some of her tropes and traits are visible: sexual tension within the family, arresting images of the natural world, the inexorable force of gossip and rumour. The setting is Cornwall in 1917, a village near Zennor: D H Lawrence and his German wife Frieda have taken a cottage there, and Lawrence is trying to farm, and to maintain his anti-war stance.

The focal character, though, is Clare Coyne, only daughter of Francis Coyne: she keeps house for her widowed father, paints illustrations for his book on wild flowers, and spends what time she can spare with her friends Hannah and Peggy. As the novel opens, the three girls are eagerly awaiting the return of John William, Hannah's brother and Clare's cousin, who's on leave from the trenches because he's going to be made an officer. ( Read more... )

“Regardless of how we're born, we get to decide who we are and who we want to be.”

Lorel has always wanted to be a witch. Growing up in her small village, and helping her mother run the stables, is not the life she wants. But there's one problem: she was born in a male body, and there are stories of what the witches do to men who try to infiltrate their ranks.

Luckily her friend Lane, promised to the witches from birth, is determined to be a knight instead ( Read more... )

"I met her on the alien spaceship."
"Oh really."
"Don't take that arch tone with me, Volodya. You're dead, remember? You don't get to be arch."
"What, there's a rule? You die, you forfeit your right to rise above a situation?"
..."Hell, I don't know. Be arch. You're Vladimir Nabokov. If you're not arch you're, I don't know, Raymond Carver."
"Anything but that," I say with a histrionic shudder. I've read his work. It feels as if he wrote it with a hammer. [loc. 3018]

A riotous, fast-paced, exuberant metafiction -- or 'sort of a novel', per the subtitle -- set at a (fictional) university in Liberal, Kansas. The story starts with a stage production of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which not only breaks the fourth wall, but features Pushkin himself as a character. Theatre professor Kip Knurl is playing Pushkin, and his immersion in the role threatens his marriage. 

Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Standage explores the histories of six 'period-defining' drinks, from beer in the Neolithic to cola (Coca-Cola vs Pepsi) in the modern era, and explains how each beverage has shaped history.

The drinks in question are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Cola: there's an epilogue focussing on water, contrasting the lack of safe drinking water in parts of the developing world to the modern Western fad for bottled water -- often pretty much the same stuff as comes out of the tap.

I keep looking around the dark corridor for secret drinkers, then understand that the beeriness is the fermenting combination of all the midsummer scents, and it is old and original. A Neanderthal standing on the bank of the river, spear in hand, would have known it. [p.108]

Subtitled 'Walking Britain's Wild Landscapes After Dark', this is a short collection of pieces about Lewis-Stempel's thoughts and experiences of walking at night -- on the Welsh coast, in the Lake District, and on the Thames Path at Hammersmith (adjacent to the London Wetland Centre). He's a farmer, and in some of the essays there is a lovely sense of comfortable familiarity with his land. I realise that I miss having 'my' land, the places I'd walk every day, the places so familiar that I notice any change and every seasonal recurrence.

Lots of fascinating facts and observations here: I learnt that birds flying in a V formation can fly almost twice as far as one bird flying alone; that the word 'delirium' is rooted in the notion of going off track when ploughing; that brent geese are named for their dark colour, 'brent' being a corruption of the old Norse 'brantr', burnt.

I appreciated his unease when in London ('I'm fritted by the city at night') but could not help thinking that I would not be keen on walking alone, at night, along the darkest part of the Thames Path. (Men's fears are different from women's.) Overall, though, I really appreciated his observations and his sheer joy in existing as part of the natural world.

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen beneath the official enquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it'll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice. [loc. 1069]

Third in the trilogy that began with The Searcher and continued with The Hunter. Cal Hooper's life in the small village of Ardnakelty seems settled: he's more or less engaged to Lena, and Trey is finding friends and possibly even romance. Then a young woman -- Rachel, fiancee of local big-shot Tommy Moynihan's son Eugene -- is found dead in the river. ( Read more... )

Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet ...is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet. [introduction]

Audiobook, read (with vigour and enthusiasm) by the author. Doctorow's foundational argument is something most internet users will agree with: that big internet sites, such as Facebook, Amazon, and the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, have become much less usable and user-friendly over recent years. (I would add Del.icio.us, Vinted, Goodreads, LiveJournal...)

The god comes screaming through the trees, shoving them to each side like matchsticks, breaking and burning them as it thrashes its way out of the woods... [opening paragraph]

In the original Chaos Walking trilogy (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men) Todd was thirteen, dealing with life on an alien planet and the constant phenomenon of Noise -- the constant thoughts and feelings of the men (all the women are dead) in the colony -- and the threat of the alien Spackle. Piper at the Gates of Dusk starts a generation later,( Read more... )