Tonya's Book Blog: August 2023

Hi friends,

August was a good month for our family. Chloe went back to school and no one got sick. We enjoyed the annual Woodbury family reunion up in the mountains as well.

I also read a few good books including some epic science fiction.

Let me know if you’ve read any of these books and if you have suggestions for future reading.

Cheers,

Tonya

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (The Fractalverse #1) by Christopher Paolini

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes, for die-hard space opera fans

Review: This book is Paolini’s love letter to the epic, scifi, space opera genre. It comes in at nearly 1000 pages, and it uses those pages fairly effectively. It’s a first-contact story that takes place about 300 years into the future when humanity has expanded beyond the solar system and is terraforming new worlds. It follows the story of Kira, a xenobiologist who is working with a crew to scout a new planet for potential settlers. However, things go sideways pretty fast after she discovers a symbiotic alien being that affixes itself to her body in the form of a suit. This discovery sets off a series of events that easily fills the page count. Paolini excels at building a fascinating world, and I enjoyed his focus on the science part of the fiction as he explained his faster-than-light-speed travel and the various technologies that play in the story. I also enjoyed his take on the found-family trope and thought that he did a wonderful job weaving in his themes of fear and discovery into the story. Only read this book if you’re interested in taking the time to process a big story on a grand canvas. I read most novels in about a week, but this one took me much longer than that, and I felt like it was worth the time spent in the end.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I enjoyed Grann’s telling of the story of the HMS Wager, so I thought I’d check out this one too. I enjoy Grann’s storytelling style as his nonfiction reads like a novel. In this one, Grann is able to draw you into the mysterious killings of dozens of Osage nation people in the 1920s in Oklahoma. This becomes more than just a whodunnit though. Grann talks about how many of the Osage killings continued to be unsolved. Grann doesn’t shy away from discussing the racism and white supremacy that the killers used to justify their murders. White neighbors of the Osage nation couldn’t stomach rich Osage that were better off than they were. Interestingly enough, Grann himself becomes part of the story at the end as he relays his own research and experiences with the descendants of the murdered Osage. Highly recommend.

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Kuang’s books always make me think, and this one especially so. It’s a historical fantasy set in the 1830s in an Oxford that is mostly true to history with the exception of the Royal Institute of Translation, a.k.a. Babel, which uses a unique magic system based on the energy that results from the untranslatableness of languages to further the expansion of the British Empire. Robin, our main character, is expected to further this empire despite being half-Cantonese himself. He joins Babel at the behest of his sponsor and is immediately caught up in a personal moral battle about the spread of imperialism in his own homeland, and his duty, if any, to aid it or fight against it. For the first time ever, Robin finds a family at Babel in the three other students in his cohort who have also been displaced from home and family in the pursuit of novel language expertise to fuel the translation-based magic that undermines the empire’s expansion. Robin’s character arc is fascinating and one of the strongest parts of the book. At about the 60% point, the story takes a very unexpected turn that I definitely didn’t see coming, but in retrospect was set up pretty well, and from then on, it’s a sprint to the finish. I really enjoyed Kuang’s writing style, and I hope that she writes more in this world as the ending, while providing good resolution, definitely left plenty of opportunities for more story.

Beyond That, the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This book reminded me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and I think that if you liked that story you’ll like this one too. Both are romances that are set in and around World War II. In this one, the protagonist is a young girl from London who is sent to America during the Blitz and finds another family in the New England family that takes her in. The story takes place over a good 30 years, and we follow these characters through meaningful points in their lives as they come together, drift apart, and come together again through life’s tragedies and coincidences. This is one of those books where most of the conflict could have been resolved much quicker with some emotional maturity and crucial conversations. I tend to find that type of plot pretty slow, but I enjoyed this book as a slower-paced, low stakes story focusing on many different types of love: brotherly love, romantic love, and motherly love to name a few.

The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Recommendation: not really

Review: The thesis of this book can be summed up in a few sentences. MacDonald makes the argument that most space exploration has been funded by wealthy, private individuals, or the foundations that they establish, throughout American history with the publicly-supported advent of NASA in the 1950s and following Apollo program being an outlier. He takes about 200 pages to prove his point, with the first 100 basically being a list of astronomical observatories in the 1800s and the Robber Barons/Captains of Industry that funded them to signal their magnificence and wealth. I feel like this part could have been about 10 pages. The rest of the book was a lot more interesting and focused more on Robert Goddard and the different funding sources that he had for his rocket development efforts. MacDonald points out that the current trend towards more private funding in space exploration is actually more inline with historic trends, including funding from excessively rich men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. It’s an interesting argument and definitely reframed how I think about the commercial space industry, but MacDonald writes like the economist he is and doesn’t make any concessions towards a public audience.

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