As noted previously, we went to California for the kids’ school break, to visit my sister in Modesto and do a little touristy stuff in the Bay Area, which meant many hours on airplanes on the way there and back. Which, in turn, meant I had enough dead time to read three whole books:
The Chosen Twelve by James Breakwell:
I know Breakwell as the guy behind the @XplodingUnicorn Twitter feed, a weekly newsletter about his kids, and the book How to Be a Man (Whatever That Means): Lessons in Masculinity from a Questionable Source which I was asked to blurb because he and I share a publisher. That is to say, he’s a guy who writes funny stuff. Which made it seem a bit odd when he started promoting a sci-fi novel described in part as “Lord of the Flies meets Phillip K. Dick,” about a group of 22 human children who are the last remnant of the species and have to fight for 12 seats on a lander to start a colony on a hostile planet. That premise doesn’t seem especially light-hearted…
But, you know, I enjoy his work generally, and was happy to throw him a few bucks, and the opening paragraph reassured me that this was, in fact, going to work:
God lived in the coffee maker on deck four. Only Gamma knew. But Gamma didn’t make it out that way very often because it was a long journey through the outer halls and he always had schoolwork and also the door wanted to kill him.
Gamma and his Greek-alphabet-named classmates (minus the two who already died) are the last humans left on an orbiting station around a failed colony planet. They’re being raised by robots who are ostensibly training “the organics” to go down to the planet and re-establish a colony that will rebuild civilization to the point where new machines can be built and spread to the rest of the galaxy. Except the robots who care for the children are… not all that bright, and many of the rest of the machine intelligences in the decaying station have gone insane and are prone to trying to kill any human they run across.
This ends up striking a nice balance between the weighty premise and lightly satirical humor that sometimes borders on slapstick. I started it before we left, and was maybe halfway through when we boarded our first plane, then powered through it on the flight. I have one very minor nagging question about the ending, which I’ll bury in a cryptic footnote: 1, but other than that, it was good fun, and I recommend it to anyone who likes funny SF.
Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch:
This is the ninth book in the Rivers of London urban-fantasy series, starring and narrated by London cop Peter Grant, now the second-in-command of the Falcon branch of the police, which deals with mystical incursions into the mundane world. Nearly all of the magic-users in Britain were wiped out in WWII, save Peter’s boss, Thomas Nightingale, but over the course of the series, magical happenings are becoming more common and dramatic, and they’re slowly trying to figure out why.
This one opens with the discovery of a rather dramatic murder in the London Silver Vaults, involving the violent removal of a good chunk of the victim’s chest accompanied by a blinding flash of light. It expands to involve similar events all over England that turn out to have deep roots in magical history, and Peter and colleagues have to scramble around to figure out what’s going on. Meanwhile, Peter’s wife, the river goddess Beverly Brook, is expecting twins any day now, so the clock is ticking…
This is, as I said, the ninth book in an ongoing series (not counting a few novellas along the way), and as such is not a good entry point. If you’ve been reading along, though, it’s a pretty solid entry, with Peter’s narrative voice in fine form, alternating between surprisingly perceptive and a bit thick. If you haven’t read these before, start at the beginning, because there’s a lot to like.
(I read this as an e-book, all in one shot on the plane from Chicago to Sacramento, so it’s represented in the above photo by my e-ink reader; I couldn’t be bothered to pull up the cover graphic.)
Die Trying by Lee Child:
I enoyed the Reacher tv series, so figured I would give the books a shot, but didn’t want to start with the first one, that the show was based on. This is, I believe, the second Jack Reacher novel, and it is absolutely preposterous in the best possible way.
As this starts out, Reacher is walking down the street when he collides with a young woman with a bum knee coming out of a dry-cleaner. Being a chivalrous guy, he offers her help, and then both of them are snatched off the street by men with guns. She turns out to be Holly Johnson, an FBI agent with some important family connections that make her a key pawn in the rather baroque plans of a violent separatist group. The plot follows two parallel tracks: Reacher and Holly trying to figure out what’s going on and get ahead of their kidnappers, and an array of government agents trying to find them.
There’s a lot of utter nonsense in this— both the militia group and the government alternate between hyper-competent and cartoonishly dumb as needed to keep the plot rolling— but it’s fun nonsense. It’s the kind of military thriller that lovingly described the chemistry and physics of shooting someone with a high-powered sniper rifle. I read the bulk of this in one go on the flight from Sacramento back to Chicago, and it was a nearly perfect diversion for that context.
There are, of course, a whole huge pile of these— the paperback I bought has sample chapters from two different books in the series at the end— but I doubt I could read too many of them consecutively without the ridiculousness really taking over. In a single installment, though, this was fun, and I will likely check out another at some point when I find myself with several hours to kill on a plane or train.
So, that’s a quick round-up of recent reading. The e-ink reader was a good investment, I think, in that it’s got the capacity to store a vast number of books, but can’t readily be used for doomscrolling. There remains something kind of nice about reading actual paper books again, though. Anyway, here’s a button:
And if you want to suggest other books or series to check out, the comments will be open:
It was not clear to me whether we were supposed to know “who” Spenser was, and why he was able to accomplish what he did at the very end. If it was set up by any earlier scene, though, it was too subtle for me.