Tonya's Book Blog: January 2023: Happy New Year and New Books!

Hi friends!

January was cold and snowy, but bad weather for playing outside is good weather for staying inside and reading. I had a few great fantasy reads this month and a few interesting nonfiction ones as well. Let me know what you think about these books and what suggestions you have for future reading.

Cheers,

Tonya

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, for fantasy fans everywhere

Review: This was the first of Sanderson’s “Secret Projects” that he wrote in the time he spent not traveling during the pandemic. He had the biggest Kickstarter in history last spring to announce the release of this and 3 other secret novels all coming out this year. Since I’m a fan, I backed the Kickstarter and basically purchased four novels without knowing anything about them, trusting that I would like them. After reading Tress, I can gladly say that my trust was not misplaced. This was a great way to start the “Year of Sanderson,” and one of my favorite Sanderson books yet. Sanderson drew his inspiration for this story from the movie The Princess Bride, an early 1990s cult classic that my family loved watching growing up. The similarities are very apparent as Sanderson tells the story in the voice of Hoid, one of the cosmere’s premier worldhoppers and story-tellers. At the beginning of the book, I wondered if the affectation would get annoying over the course of an entire novel, but it didn’t. Sanderson stroke the right amount of whimsy, meta, and self-awareness with his selection of narrators, and Hoid’s voice added a lot to the story. I’m beginning to thing that Sanderson has a thing for pirates as this is the second novel that we get a pirate variation. In Cytonic we got space pirates, and in this one, we get pirates who sail on fluidized oceans of dangerously, deadly, magical spores. So much fun. Sanderson does a great job creating a colorful set of characters that I fell in love with, from Tress who immediately captures your heart as she sets out on her journey to rescue her true love whose been captured by pirates, to the ragtag pirate crew who become a found family. The stakes in this one are not world or universe-ending, and I’ve heard it called “slice of life” or “casual” fantasy. Even with the lower stakes, this book delivers on action scenes, and cool magic/science that Tress has to figure out to accomplish her rescue mission. The only criticism I had was some minor pacing issues in the first third or so of the book, but I can also appreciate that Sanderson took the time to let us get to know our characters and build his new world. Highly recommend for anyone who loves fantasy.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the World Around Us by Ed Yong

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I really enjoyed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes, in which he explores the microbial world that we inhabit and inhabits us, so when I heard he had a new release, I had to check it out. I wasn’t disappointed as this book was just as mind-opening and enjoyable. Yong introduces us to the concept of umwelt, or how a being experiences the world. He tries to take us into the umwelts of a variety of animals and insects by describing how they use their senses, some familiar like sight, sound, and touch, and some completely unfamiliar like electric fields and magnetism. Yong invites us to imagine what it would be like to experience the world through a completely different array of senses as he talks about echolocation in dolphins, bats and humans; the ability to sense and create electric fields in knifefish and eels; and magnetism in birds and sea turtles that they use to navigate globally, among many others. In addition to being fantastically well-researched this book is also very well written. I love Yong’s prose and his ability to not just lecture about sensors and receptors but to tell a story and encourage the imagination. This is probably the best popular science book I have read in over a year, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the world around us.

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot Diaries #6) by Martha Wells

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, for Murderbot fans everywhere

Review: In this installment featuring everyone’s favorite socially anxious, hacked SecUnit gone rogue, Murderbot gets to solve a mystery! That’s right. Murderbot puts on their figurative detective hat, trench coat, and pipe to go all Sherlock Holmes on the mystery of who left a dead body on Preservation station. In addition to combating prejudice and having to deal with stupid humans, Murderbot has to unravel a surprising web of lies and deceit to protect their home and found family. I loved watching Murderbot become a detective, but I do wish that we would have had more follow-up on the events of the 5th book that left a few unanswered questions. Still, I enjoyed this little jaunt and hope that we’ll get more follow-up in a seventh, yet-to-be released volume.

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Recommendation: for those who like suspenseful horror/thrillers

Review: I read this book as part of a book club that I’m kind of participating in, in that, I read the books but don’t attend the meetings, which I think is the opposite of how most people do book clubs. I probably would not have read and definitely wouldn’t have finished this book otherwise. While the book is well-written with excellent prose, engaging characters, and amazingly atmospheric, I just don’t care for the suspense/horror genre. I can understand why people like it though. Even though I wasn’t enjoying the experience, I felt compelled to finish reading because I just had to know what happened. Maitland’s strength in this book is the setting: 1342 England. The plague has just hopped the Chanel from France and a changing climate has led to literally months of rain without end. One-third of England’s entire population passed away in this two-year period from either plague or starvation as the unlikely combination of these two things literally brought society to a stop, and made “every man a priest,” as Maitland describes in the book. Maitland doesn’t have to take any authorial liberties to make the setting any more depressing and horrifying than history tells us it was, as the combined forces of plague and weather create an unlikely traveling company that is fleeing the relentless march of the sickness and their own dark secrets. While I can respect that Maitland definitely accomplished what she set out to achieve, I just didn’t like it. She focuses a lot on the theme of truth trumping hope and lies, at the expense of the lives of the deceitful, and I just don’t agree. If you like thrillers and horror stories though, this would be the book for you.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, for those interested in science and biology

Review: Mukherjee lays out the basics of cellular function and medicine clearly and understandably. For someone like myself who hasn’t taken biology in over a decade, this was a great refresher and was fortunately mostly familiar. Mukherjee’s real skill though is his ability to mate the detailed fact-giving exposition with interesting and personable stories from the history of cellular medicine and his own experience as an oncologist. Many of the medical treatments he explains are still being developed including therapies that manipulate immune cells to fight cancer, but some of them are very familiar including reproductive therapies like in vitro fertilization. I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about how our bodies work and upcoming advances in medicine that could change all our lives.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: sure

Review: This novel showed up on several “Best Reads of 2022” lists from people that I follow on social media, so I decided to give it a try. The book spans 30 years and follows childhood friends who share a love of video games and go on to own a game developing business. The story focuses on their evolving relationship and took several unexpected turns that I didn’t see coming. Many of the themes that Zevin explores in this book resonated with me, and for what may come off as a light book about gaming actually had a lot to say about pain, grief, mental health, and class differences. I always admire an author who can elicit a strong emotional reaction while I’m reading, and Zevin did this to me on several occasions with both positive and negative emotions. Having never really played video games, I couldn’t relate much to that aspect of the story, but there’s plenty of other engaging content here to sink your teeth into.

The Girl in the Tower (Winternight Trilogy #2) by Katerine Arden

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, for those who liked the first

Review: Having read the first installment in this series, The Bear and the Nightingale, and enjoyed it, I decided to give this one a try. I’m glad I did because I liked it even more than the first. The two books are very different however. The first one was much slower and more atmospheric, while this one focused more on politics and had more action sequences. Arden does a good job of not sugar coating life in medieval Russia, and a good amount of the conflict in the plot revolves around our main heroine, Vasya’s, inability to conform to a women’s role in this society, leading to her being branded a “witch.” Vasya’s character is juxtaposed with her older sister, Olga, who we get to see more of in this book after some unresolved set-up in the first. While Olga sometimes chafes at the repressive life a high-class Russian noble woman must live, she also finds joy in her position and family and has learned how to achieve here ends within the system. I thought that presenting both characters was a good choice as it showed that Arden wasn’t completely condemning those women who embraced the lifestyle of the times. Vasya is also a great heroine, and it’s fun to watch her grow and see her character develop as she finds her courage and overcomes a myriad of challenges. I really liked her relationship with her magical horse in particular. Always love a good animal companion.

The Winter of the Witch (Winternight Trilogy #3) by Katherine Arden

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: A great end to the trilogy

Review: I really enjoyed the first two books in this series, and this one picks up where the second one ends, literally just hours later. As all of the secrets and lies that she told in the second book have been exposed, our heroine Vasya finds herself on the run and in need of some magical aid. There’s a big emotional surprise in the first few pages that almost made me stop reading, but I picked it up again because I was still attached to Vasya and wanted to know what happens. Vasya’s path takes her into the magical world that we’ve only received hints of before in the series, and I loved exploring that world and learning more of the intricacies of the soft magic system that Arden has developed. Another highlight from this book is watching Vasya’s and Morozko’s relationship develop, which I always wanted more of in the first two. The last act of the book was kind of surprising to me in that the main conflict wraps up about halfway through the book, at which point, another conflict becomes more apparent and Vasya’s character changes even more as she confronts the darkness within herself and has to decide how far she’ll go to achieve her aims. I really liked this unexpected turn and appreciate Arden’s character work in creating a “strong female character” that makes mistakes, suffers the consequences, and learns from them. Highly recommend this whole series for fans of historical fiction and fantasy.

Mommy Corner