Well well well. I do love a good premise and The Power has that in spades. Imagine if women evolved to have electrical power that made them physically stronger than men. How would society look? This book turns on its head the notion that women are more compassionate and thoughtful leaders because of our nature. How about instead, because we have an intimate knowledge of fear caused by intimidation and oppression, we are more inclined to show compassion. Once that fear is gone, well... maybe we'd just be like every other dictator hell bent on power.And really, is The Power a nod to the actual power of electricity experienced by the women in the book, or the overall balance of power that shifts once women are able to physically overpower men. It's clever. Very clever.The book is full of men railing against the injustice of women who are able to physically dominate them, as they begin to travel in groups or take precautions against sexual assault. It's so unfair they decry. And it is. Because sexual assault is terrible and awful, but does it drive home for men what maybe the experience of a woman has been like all these years?The female news anchor now has a knowing look when her older male colleague makes a snide offensive remark. Is it really not surprising when he's exchanged with a younger male host who's good looks and talent are relegated to the cooking and soft segments of the morning news. The people want to hear the hard news from the stronger anchor.Clever again. I mean, the most clever part of the book is taking a concept which I would typically support, the strengthening of women to the point where they could no longer be victimized and makes it so very unappealing as women begin to commit the very atrocities that are so reprehensible today.A well done look at a very fascinating premise.
4/5 Stars.
After almost a month, I finally finished The Circle. I didn't love it. Let me be clear. I get it. Its Orwellian nature, its cautionary tale of the erosion of privacy rights. It's all there. It all works. But it also tries to be cute. This is possibly a problem with the narration - for starters the male narrator has to work mostly in the voice of the female main character. Sometimes this isn't a problem, but the female characters came off as flippant or whiny. The male characters as stoned or whiny. But I found the dialogue strained and at attempting humor. It's not clear if Eggers wants us to be truly terrified, as in 1984, or if he merely wants us to be entertained. Or perhaps he wants us to laugh all the way to our destruction? Either way it sets the mood of the novel off kilter and it never recovers. So in a nutshell, the main character, Mae, gets hired at The Circle (think Google has a baby with Apple, Amazon, and Facebook). The Circle, in instituting an online profile that insists on transparency called TrueYou has eliminated trolling online as no one can hide behind anonymity. The Circle campus, made up mostly of millennial staffers is a haven for sand volleyball and outdoor barbecues, even going so far as to offer on campus temporary housing to Circlers who prefer to spend the night on campus after a campus event. Mae has a semi-rough transition into the Circle, trying to meet it's every growing demands. She's called into her boss' office when she fails to attend a party she didn't know she was invited to, an invitation she received because of a far past post on her social media profile. She is asked to participate in a survey at work wherein she's expected to answer up to 500 questions a day. In the beginning Mae spends time off campus with her parents and out kayaking alone by herself. These activities turn out to be disappointing to the Circle which insists on knowing, well basically everything. So she tries harder and becomes a model employee. Meanwhile she's introduced to a real drip of a guy, Frances, who she decides she does not want to become involved with romantically after he films their first sexual encounter without her knowledge. Instead she becomes attracted to an enigmatic gray haired fellow, Calden, who she meets TWICE. The third time he asks her to meet him in the bathroom (because cameras have now proliferated the campus) and they have sex in a bathroom stall, not saying more than two or three words to each other before he disappears again. In the meantime, Mae becomes more entrenched at the Circle, going "Transparent" meaning she wears a camera on her person at all times. She comes up with some slogans Eggers tries real hard to make sure we know are Orwellian, "sharing is caring" "privacy is theft" that are presented to an ever enthusiastic crowd of Circlers. People follow Mae around all day and insist on her engagement in their lives and minor questions.So then there is this complete stretch of credibility at the end by a character that I won't bother putting down because of spoilers, but if you've read this you get it. And the end is very very predictable. So I'm not sure if I'm late to the party on this one or not, but it tries so hard to be 1984 wrapped in a Silicon skin it just fell pretty flat for me even if that whole idea should theoretically work.
3/5 Stars.
Back in 2017 when I read Kraken (that review here) and had a mixed review, other reviewers who felt the same as me said something along the lines of, "good, but not as good as Railsea." So Railsea has been on my to-read list since and I have to agree, it is a much better book than Kraken. Sham am Soorap is a doctor's apprentice on the mole train Medes. Hopelessly hopeless, Sham seems to not be very good at much of anything. But he's a likeable sort and somehow the train crew grows fond of him. In the world of Railsea, train tracks criss-cross the land for as far as anyone knows and in between the land lives subterranean animals of horrifying size and appearance, the largest of which are the Great Southern Moldywarpes. The mole train's purpose is to hunt down, slaughter, and sell the moldywarpes for meat and fur. The captain of the Medes, Captain Naphi, has taken on the hunt for a pale gigantic moldywarpe (her "philosophy" in Railsea speak) and she hunts him from end to end of the Railsea.But you see, there is no end the Railsea. It's unthinkable. That is until the Medes comes upon a wrecked train and Sham finds inside a disk containing photographs of a single line leading into nothing. On the disk are also pictures of children and a home. Sham, an orphan himself, believes those children are owed and explanation of what happened to their parents. The rest of the book takes Sham and his train crew on an exploration of the end of the Railsea, of what the railfolk refer to as "heaven" and the forwards and backwards of history. The language of Railsea, the unapologetic drop into its world and its history without a guide are captivating stuff. The cadence and rhythm were made all the better by narrator Jonathan Cowley who does a spectacular job with all the varied and various characters in this creative re-imagination of Moby Dick.
4.5/5 Stars.
Philip K. Dick was ahead of his time when he penned A Scanner Darkly. Published in 1977, it is a gritty dystopian story of undercover narcotics informant Bob Arctor who lives in a house with other substance abusers. The world is divided between dopers and straights and never the two intermix. The straights have been taught that the dopers are mindless fiends for the drugs - substance D.When Arctor puts on a "scramble suit" causing him to appear as a faceless nameless blur, he takes on the persona of Fred, a narcotics agent charged, ironically with the surveillance of Bob Arctor, who seems to be making a play to become a heavy drug dealer. Because Arctor must consumer substance D in order to maintain his cover, the damage done to his brain causes him to suffer a rift in his reality, where eventually he no longer recognizes that Fred and Bob Arctor are one in the same. It's brilliantly painful, and slowly wrought as Dick's writing makes smaller and smaller moves to make us aware of the breakdown. At once a condemnation of the damage done by drugs, without condemnation of the users, Dick's story came from a deeply personal place, evident by the epilogue in which he lists the names of several people who died or became disabled due to their drug use. The novel also serves as an early condemnation of the war on drugs, which criminalized small dealers, but created an industry that required the addicts in order to operate. I can only imagine this was difficult to write. There were times when the story moved frustratingly slow, but mostly it was a pleasure to read.
4/5 Stars.
Meticulously researched and well written. Mira Grant's second installment in the Newsflesh Trilogy doesn't disappoint, even if it does feel sometimes like it's the middle book treading water until the ultimate finish. Deadline continues where Feed left off (you can read that review here) - Georgia and Shaun Mason, brother and sister news team followed the presidential campaign of Senator Ryman to the nominating convention, only to have Georgia killed by a vast conspiracy which included Gov. Tate, the other possible candidate. Tate dies at the hands of Shaun without giving up the head of the conspiracy and Shaun vows to track down those responsible for Georgia's death. You see, a freak accident explained in exquisite detail in the first book, caused two viruses to combine to create a super virus that redirects the body'd energy into becoming a shambling infected vessel determined to infect or eat any living thing. Yay. Deadline picks up a year after those events with Shaun as our new narrator. I have to say, I miss Georgia. She was analytical and wry. Shaun's great, but he's no substitute, the fact that Mira Grant has written him to be aware of this drawback is next level aware and I appreciated it. To deal with the trauma of losing his sister, the only person he's ever loved, he latches onto a non-corporeal (not literally) Georgia, who speaks to only him. The rest of the team just rolls with it and it only occasionally becomes a concern. In any case, the conspiracy starts rolling once a CDC doctor winds up at Shaun's Oakland apartment, claiming she has some secret information to deliver. While she is delivering the message, a massive outbreak occurs and the team is running for their lives to evacuate the city before it is "cleansed" in a massive fireball. The information the doctor shares is that individuals with dormant virus conditions are dying at disproportionate rates to the rest of the country. In this world that means these people, like Georgia, are being targeted. In his quest for answers, Shaun unveils even more secrets that dwell right in the heart of the CDC. But a massive outbreak suggests a terrifying evolution in the disease. The action in this book was more subdued than the last time as the characters aren't moving around quite as much and the book lulled in moments where the main focus was setting up events for the conclusion in book three, but the book took the time to lay it all out and I'm sure book three is going to be a great conclusion. It's hard for the second book in a trilogy to outshine it's predecessor and Deadline is no exception. But the cliffhanger ending and the revelations added excitement of their own and made Deadline an enjoyable read. This is a must-read for anyone into the Zombie genre.
4/5 Stars.
It's been two days since I finished Blindness. And I thought two days would be enough time to really process what I thought of this one. But here I sit, two days of thinking of what to say, and I'm still not really sure.
That I even decided to pick up this book and start it is a real accomplishment. I tried so hard to read Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon last year. But once the dog started narrating I was just done. And I couldn't get past Saramago's lack of paragraph breaks for dialogue. I guess the story just wasn't interesting enough for me to do so much work to figure out what was talking.
But in this case, Blindness was interesting enough, and horrifying enough, and realistic enough. (No dogs narrate in this one). The book starts with a man suddenly going blind at an intersection. Despite the honking cars, he's paralyzed by indecision and cannot find a way to get out of his car. He's disoriented. A "good samaritan" helps him home and into his house (and then steals his car -but don't worry that guy goes blind too, so Karma).
The blindness begins to spread. The government, also paralyzed by fear, decides to stick the blind and those they've come in contact with in an unused former mental asylum. They deliver food three times a day. Otherwise the blind are left to fend for themselves. More and more afflicted begin to arrive. The conditions are deplorable. No working toilets, no clean water.
And then, one group of the blind begin to terrorize the others. Until, well, I don't want to give too much away. But it's actually painful to read, but again not totally foreign because sometimes epidemics do not bring out the best in people. And just because people are afflicted does not mean that they are honorable or even worthy of assistance. Being blind brings out the worst in people in some cases.
The interesting parts are how Saramago really nails all those things we rely on sight for. The blind don't even recognize each other. People they've known or been intimate with are strangers. It's altogether pretty fascinating.
Again, I'm not a big fan of how Saramago constructs his dialogue. It's confusing and irritating, but in this case, I didn't mind a little extra work to get it done. So, I can see why he's a nobel laureate, and I kind of forgive him for that Lisbon thing.
4/5 Stars.
