Book Log 2025

1. Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac by Mark Blake (started 12/26; finished 1/19): B Boy, is this book a mixed bag. I have only read two other memoirs about Fleetwood Mac—both written by drummer/bandleader Mick Fleetwood, the first of them referred to in this book by Lindsey Buckingham as "trash," and the second one was fine, but a bit of a rehash. Will we never get the great book about Fleetwood Mac? Dreams reveals that several have actually been published, though most of them focus on either a single album or on a single author who was not in in the band but had a peripheral tenure with them in one form or another. I had high hopes for Dreams, but the genuinely great parts only serve as rewards for the lot of stuff you have to slog through. I am a true fan of the entire history of Fleetwood Mac, having long owned their albums dating back to the late-sixties, Peter Green British-blues era when they started. Still, there is no getting around the fact that things only get truly interesting once Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band, and this book does not get to that until page 145. To be fair, a ton of stuff happened with this band, not least of which was quite the revolving door of personnel changes, over the eight years that preceded Buckingham and Nicks. It just doesn't have the flair, the romance, the thrill of reading that came with the "classic lineup" that began in 1975—with a massive turning point coming with the "white Fleetwood Mac album" becoming their first-ever multi-platinum seller—only for it to be dwarfed two years later by Rumours selling more copies than any other had up to that point. These huge turns of events render their history prior not entirely irrelevant, but close to it. But author Mark Blake devotes chapters to every single member of Fleetwood Mac there ever was—no fewer than 18 of them, with 10+ pages devoted each to the "classic lineup" (Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks), and all of the others given fairly equal but far less time of just a few pages each. There are also chapters dedicated to every single album; key singles from most albums; many of the revolving romantic partners of band members; and key producers of their work. It's all presented in a very chronological way, which is why for nearly 150 pages I was interested but not fully locked in; and from the point Nicks and Buckingham appear and through to the end, I absolutely devoured this book. Still, this organizational style brings with it a kind of "empty calories" feel, covering anything and everything in the band's history and therefore by definition never getting into very much depth on anything or anyone. What's more, in the later chapters of the book, detailing the last 25 years or so of their history, Blake seems to lose a bit of his dedication to things like, well, fact-checking. In the chapter on the 1997 live album and tour The Dance, Blake simply lists every single song in the setlist on the concert special that aired that year, editorializing with dubious authority, and making at least two glaring errors (the blurb that is clearly about "Over My Head" is inaccurately labeled "Over and Over," a song from two albums later; "Say You Love Me" is referred to as a "1977 hit" but was released in 1976 from the white Fleetwood Mac album, whereas 1977 was when Rumours was released). It feels like an increasing lack of attention to detail as the book nears its end, which only makes me wonder what else in the book that I took at face value was actually incorrect. Honestly, a better idea might be five separate biographies of the same length, dedicated to each of the "classic lineup" members. This would provide an opportunity for much more compelling contextualization of the early years, for instance, with Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. I'd be all over that shit, especially up-to-date biographies on Stevie Nicks and, in particular, the true glue that cemented the band's vocal chemistry: Christine McVie. Given that she passed away in 2022, finally cementing the end of Fleetwood Mac once and for all, it's fitting that Blake ends Dreams with the chapter dedicated to her. It's all of twelve pages, though, beginning with her birth and ending with her death. And as with every other chapter in this book, how can that possibly do the subject justice?


2. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (started 1/19; finished 1/22): B Here is one of those rare cases where seeing the film adaptation does the source material no favors. I did enjoy this book, but to say it's for "young readers" is very true: its pretty simple language makes it feel aimed at even younger readers than the early Harry Potter books. I do appreciate this book's subtle nods to the harshness of life for wild animals as well as the ultimate impact of climate change, but I was much more charmed by how these things were handled with greater sophistication in the film. Maybe I'd love the book more had I read it as a child, but the film has greater success at reaching both children and adults at their own levels simultaneously. To be fair, the book still works very well on its own terms, and it's an breezy, fun read.  


3. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert (started 1/22; finished 2/27): B+ While I was still Children of Dune, I concluded somewhat prematurely that I liked it better than Dune Messiah. I might still stand by the idea that I enjoyed Children of Dune more than Dune Messiah, but is it a better novel? Having gotten to the end, I have become more ambivalent about the idea, especially with the utterly bizarre wildness of Leto II Atreides's fate. After the onset of his (literal!) metamorphosis, Leto demonstrates his superhuman strength in ways that effectively turn him into a cartoon. I suppose I shouldn't complain, given the presence of gas-floating fish-men in the previous novel. But, much as I loved Children of Dune, I must confess the feeling of something missing that had been far more present in the previous two novels, a density of themes and philosophy that this novel does not quite engage with to the same degree, in favor of a much more straightforward narrative thrust of story. I actually deeply appreciate this and found this novel eminently readable; as always, I long to return to the Dune universe any time I leave it. That said, this book ends with its very own universe upended, with far less to compel me to stay and find out where it goes from there. Which is to say, I really loved this book and yet am ambivalent about how it ends. To be fair, none of these books end with the greatest outlook for the future it presents, something I really respect. Still, with each successive novel in this series, I begin to feel the very slightest hint of diminishing returns. Prone to giving this series of novels the benefit of the doubt, I am still poised to read God Emperor of Dune next, with expectations tempered by knowledge of the massive time jump and very different narrative style. It remains to Frank Herbert's credit that it doesn't seem to matter how bonkers things get, I am still interested. 


4. God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert (started 2/27; finished 4/2): A- Here is the eternal question, the one for the ages: is humanity worth saving, if the cost is 3500 years of universal tyranny? If we know from the beginning of that period that this is the cost, is it a cost we would, or should, accept? Does it really matter to us, if the turning point humanity needs in order to keep going does not come for another three and a half millennia? This, for me, was maybe the most compelling question, but one among many, elicited by the fantastic God Emperor of Dune, instantly my second-favorite of the first four in the Dune series of novels. I went in feeling wary, because of very slight but still present diminishing returns from the previous two books, and found this one significantly exceeded my expectations. Admittedly, those expectations are tempered when you find out the setting is 3500 years later than Children of Dune; the "God Emperor" of the title is now a hybrid sandworm-man; and he spends a ton of the time having conversations with people that run the gamut from narcissistic to bewildering—yet, they are consistently sprinkled very provocative and fascinating philosophical ideas, if not always fitting neatly into "right" or "wrong." My contempt for Leto Atreides II only grew consistently as the story went on, which I can only presume was by design. And, as with all of these books, no other character quite qualifies as a "hero," and they are only people who play their part in the course of history by virtue of the very human and fallible decisions they make. These are the kinds of nuances that make great novels.If I had any complaint about this installment, it would be a couple passages of deep homophobia clearly borne of Herbert's era (not excusable, but understandable), and a percolating illustration that Herbert had very reductive concepts of gender roles, even as his earlier novels come across as progressive on that front, on their surface. These novels were written long before there was any real cultural understanding of nonbinary gender or even the degree to which gender is a social construct, and while Herbert is intentionally playing with these ideas, they still come from a fundamentally conservative foundation. And yet: I manage to look past these details because the story is otherwise so spectacular.


5. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (started 4/2; finished 4/14): A- If science fiction is not so much about the future than it is about the present, it should be noted that The Left Hand of Darkness is much more about the time in which it was first published (1969) than it is at all about today, as I write this mini review. As a longstanding gender-nonconformist (possibly I would identify as "nonbinary," if I were younger; I'm just too old and tired of the prospect of blowback to deal with it—I went through enough just coming out as gay 25 years ago), it comes as no surprise that this novel speaks to me on a deep level. This is about an intergalactic Envoy named Genly Ai, visiting the planet Gethen, known by those on other worlds as "Winter" due to it being in the middle of an ice age—and all the humans populated thereon are ambisexual, and thus with no concept of separate genders. Le Guin is ingenious in her narrative approach, never making the story overtly about challenging gender normals and assumed characteristics based on sex, but the challenge is there all the same, just by this book existing. Genly must face many of his own prejudices as he navigates this world as an alien, called a "pervert" by the inhabitants who cannot understand a body that stays in a fixed state of sexuality. The world presented here is rendered with vivid completeness and detail, much of which subtly informs the cultures that are often incomprehensible to Genly. I might come close to calling this novel a literary work of perfection, if not for just one nagging detail: Genly's insistence on using he/him pronouns for all Gethenians. Not only does this challenge the very purpose of presenting an agendered world by mere implication of vocabulary, but it would be wrong to assume it's an innocent byproduct of "a different time" when, say, English rules of language dictated that male pronouns are to be used when speaking generally of all sexes or genders. Le Guin was criticized for this choice even at the time the book was published. What workable answer there may have been, aside from switching to "she/her" as a pointed challenge to patriarchy, we cannot know: gender neutral pronouns were nowhere near as common or understood then as they are now—although reportedly "they/them" was still an understood case usage, which, according to the Afterword in this 50th anniversary edition written by trans author Charlie Jane Anders (who, while still expressing deep affection for the novel, was overly critical of it in my opinion), Le Guin felt was too confusing. It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider how The Left Hand of Darkness might have been written were it done in 2025, but, the 1969 version is all we have. I got past the pronouns quickly enough, and locked into the idea of a version of humanity with no fixed sex. (They only even become sexual for a few days per month of a lunar cycle, the process explained very well in the novel, which has no sex scenes to speak of, but touches effectively on how sexuality can affect interpersonal relationships, particularly during these few days.) Genly has an arc over the course of the entire novel with an evolving relationship of trust to distrust and back to trust again, with one local named Estraven who does all they ("he" in the book) can to help Genly succeed in his mission, which is to persuade the nations of Gethen to come together as a planetary entity and join a confederation of planets called The Ekumen. Together, they travel across two neighboring and rivalrous nations on the planet's one "great continent," an experience with a dash of adventure but mostly fraught with peril—nearly the entire second half of the book is dedicated to just the two of them traveling from one nation to the other across glaciers. In the end, though, especially for a book all of about 300 pages long, the story is as deeply fulfilling as it is provocative.


6. The Talent by Daniel D'Addario (started 4/16; finished 5/29): C+ I haven't rated a book this poorly in 17 years. It makes sense, because as a rule, if a book fails to keep my attention, I just don't bother to finish it. But, I had such high hopes for this novel, about the five-way race between fictional Best Actress contenders. It makes sense in retrospect, but I didn't think about how the book would have to avoid using copyrighted terms like "Oscar" or "Academy Award," or even "Golden Globe," so D'Addario has to spend all his time making vague references to these awards, like "the big prize" or "second-most important" or whatever. That's the least of this novel's problems, though, which I thought promised a deeply inside look at how campaigning for Academy Awards works, for good or for ill. There's a bit of that, and it kicks up a notch in the final stretch of chapters, but I quickly grew tired of these alternating chapters offering portraits of these women's public and private insecurities, about themselves and in relation to each other, and little else. Furthermore, I could never keep all the characters, or the fictional movies they were getting nominations for, straight. It made it very difficult for me to lock into any one of them as characters. By the end, I got fairly close with . . . maybe two of them. I stuck it out to the end because I love the Academy Awards, and movies in general, so much. But this novel, in the end, was short on insight and long on trivialities. 


7. Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert (started 5/29; finished 9/5): B+ Well, this is by some distance the longest it's taken me to finish a DUNE book—but that doesn't mean I'm not still locked in! This is just a matter of everything else going on in my life, and reading it over the summer months when I'm biking to work rather than bussing or walking when I could otherwise be reading. That said, this novel is not nearly as packed with provocative ideas as was God Emperor of Dune, and returns to a kind of action narrative, albeit a riveting one, that also very much characterized Children of Dune. I did find some of it kind of difficult to follow, as this novel is as dense with information as ever, which also reminded me of my experience with Dune Messiah. In short, by DUNE standards, I hesitate to call Heretics of Dune a standout, although it certainly stands out compared to most other science fiction. This one's more for the DUNE die-hards, a group I can think I can count myself among. I do love that this one focuses on so many women as its main characters, way more than in previous novels—but then, what Herbert is doing with his exploration of sex as a weapon here feels a little elusive, maybe even dubious.  No matter what though, as always, I just love spending time in the DUNE universe. I have not locked into a series of novels like this in twenty years, and I very much look forward to reading the next (sixth) in the series. It's both fascinating and incredibly impressive how successfully Herbert keeps our attention even when setting the fourth novel 3,500 years after the third; and then this fifth novel 1,500 years after the fourth. Even though we took Paul Atreides's journey with him in his own time, by the time we get to Sheanna and Lucilla and Odrade and Taraza and Teg (and the latest in a countless line of Duncan Idaho gholas) five thousand years after Paul's time, there's a deep feeling of authenticity to these characters' references to what by then have become ancient, holy texts. Even with all the unreal things that happen in this universe, DUNE as a series very effectively demonstrates how history becomes mythology over thousands of years. 


8. Bosco Verticale: Morphology of a Vertical Forest edited by Stefano Boeri Architetti (started 9/6; finished 9/19): B This one is very much for a niche audience, particularly those with an architectural or horticultural backgound—and especially those who are both. I have neither, but I have had a broad fascination with skyscrapers since the age of 14, so when Barbara messaged me a link to a BBC article about "high-rise forests," a unique type of skyscraper I had never heard of, it extensively referenced this book about the 10th anniversary of the first such skyscraper ever to be built: the "Boscoe Verticale" (literally "Vertical Forest"). Built in Milan in 2014, it consists of two towers, one 381 ft and 27 stories tall; and one 276 ft and 19 stories tall. This book, on the other hand, is 12½ inches tall and 9¾ inches wide—still much larger than your average novel, and a bit awkward carrying it to work and back and especially hiking it up to the public terrace in my office building for lunch breaks. It's really more of a coffee table book, though, with many pages dedicated only to glossy photographs of these towers from every conceivable angle. There's still plenty of text to read, though, and in a style pretty conducive to those sorts of fits and starts, but this is why it only took me about two weeks to finish, rather than the months it usually takes me to finish a book (particularly long books, like the Dune novels). I did find this book quite fascinating though, including the detail that the project was built adjacent to the roughly 23-acre Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano ("Library of Trees" in Milan—also know as BAM), which itself opened in 2018. Much like the massive amount of parkland surrounding the Adelaide CBD in Australia, I am always fascinated by urban planning that integrates nature in some way. Of course, Bosco Verticale: Morphology of a Vertical Forest is nothing but celebratory, with only a couple of vague references to criticisms, and says nothing about the inherent carbon footprint of built skyscrapers no matter how many trees and plants they stick all over the facade. (Anything about about five stories makes a building very difficult to become carbon neutral.) I think about this a lot, even as my love of skyscrapers continues unabated—and, I suppose, buildings like the Bosco Verticale has plenty going for it in terms of offsets, especially as most skyscrapers are actually far taller than these ones. Presumably that was a factor in determining the height of these towers, which I will certainly go out of my way to get a look at if for whatever reason I ever find myself in Milan. I probably won't, but there are other "Vertical Forests" in other cities around the world, including a few I do plan to visit, so those are now on my lists as points of interest as well.


9. Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert (started 9/19; finished 12/2): B Much like Dune Messiah felt like an extended epilogue to the first Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune felt to me like an extended epilogue to the entire, six-novel Dune Saga. I enjoyed being in the Dune universe, as always, but this book seemed to lack a the specific hook that made all the other novels uniquely compelling. In Dune, it was the novelty and the universe itself, with deeply layered cultural textures and inqualities of power structures. In Dune Messiah, there was the haunting, yet almost addictive, quality of Duncan Idaho first appearing as a ghola, with his emotionless, metal eyeballs (a detail curiously never mentioned again in later books). In Children of Dune, we follow the very young twin offspring of Paul Atreides, born with prescience. God Emperor of Dune is the most bonkers and yet my second-favorite book in the series, with Leto II metamorphosed into a worm-god, surviving 3,500 years. Even in Heretics of Dune, set yet another 1,500 years later, we get the mysterious Sheanna, shockingly able to control sandworms. But: Why? Merely being an Atreides descendant of Siona doesn't feel like enough of an explanation to me, but whatever. This is my hangup with the last two Dune novels, which introduce more mysterious elements than they ever explain, and I want answers! Chapterhouse: Dune leans the most heavily into "Honored Matres," the lethal adversary society to the Bene Geserit, and "Futars," the sub-intelligent feline humanoid creatures both controlled by and (weirdest of all) sexually imprinted to Honored Matres. Sheanna still figures relatively prominently, this book being set only two years after the last, but—spoiler alert!—we still never find out exactly how Sheanna can control sandworms, only that she is revered because of it, as transorted sandworms from the destroyed Dune planet develop on the Chapterhouse planet, in so doing also quickly turning the entire planet into a new desert. I never felt like I got a clear picture of where the Honored Matres are coming from, how they became the violent conquerers they are, or the existential threat it's eventually revealed, without any detail, they are running from. (Apparently later books written by Frank Herbert's son, Brian, offer explanations, but I don't care; I've read enough to know only Herbert's original books are worth my time.) I can only say that although I could never fully grasp exactly what the hell was going on, Chapterhouse: Dune kept me turning the pages—the one thing fully consistent across all six novels. That said, even Chapterhouse: Dune is only easily recommended to Frank Herbert-Dune completists, and it ultimately finishes as my least favorite of the original six. It's still worth noting that the original Dune, something I now regard as one of the greatest novels ever written, sets an extraordinarily high bar, so even other Herbert novels in the same universe that don't quite stack up to it still remain great. I have no doubt whatseover that I will eventually read this entire six-book series again.

Book Log 2024

1. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (started 12/7; finished 1/18): B This is a book clearly written by authors who bore Marvel Studios no ill will, and I wouldn't necessarily want them to, except that it might otherwise have included a lot more juicy content than what actually made it to print. Mind you, it has plenty of content representing criticism of Marvel and some specific executives among certain sectors, but it still plays out in a pretty warmed-over way. In short, although this book got much more interesting to me the more recent its coverage got (specific chapters dedicated to Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: No Way Home are especially good reads), this book just overall wasn't that exciting to me.Mind you, that's more of a "me problem," because, probably unlike most readers of this book, I approached it as someone with a love of cinema and the film industry overall, rather than someone with any direct love of Marvel movies, which I have long felt have, with a few notable exceptions, become rote, carbon plot-copies of countless superhero movies that came before them. I'm just generally bored of them—but, I can also acknowledge the unprecedented achievement of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," connecting a couple dozen separate movies over the course of fifteen years. The book barely touches on how this very same approach is now becoming a liability, and even the most ardent fans of yesterday aren't as interested anymore (thank god).Still, the book is extremely well-researched and a generally fun read, if a bit long, with 432 pages before nearly 50 pages of endnotes. Speaking of which, if you do read this, don't miss the clever "mid-credits sequence" of a couple of pages they insert into the middle of those notes.


2. America the Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled by Blythe Roberson (started 1/18; finished 2/5): B A curious experience with this book: I found it flawed, and I really enjoyed reading it. Blythe Roberson regularly makes me laugh out loud, while I also found her tendency to wear her white-liberal guilt on her sleeve to be a little insufferable. She writes a lot about the environmental impact of driving a car literally all over the country to visit land meant to be protected (specifically, national parks), as though to shield herself from readers criticizing her for that very thing. I can't say she's super successful there. This book sure taught me about a bunch of national parks I'd love to visit, though. Maybe I can get a book deal out of my own multi-month road trip! This book is overall fine, but I feel confident that my own book about the same thing would have been better.


3. Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work by Jesse David Fox (started 2/6; finished 2/20): B This is a sort of curious book, esoteric in a way: I really devoured it, just because I love standup comedy, and comedy in general, and most "inside baseball" type conversations about the industry of comedy. Fox is the host of a podcast I have listened to intermittently, called Good One, in which he interviews comedians abou the construction of specific jokes—and then he was a guest on the podcast I have listened to the longest, WTF with Marc Maron, to promote this very book, that being how I learned about it. But, here are two pertinent questions: 1) did I really learn anything useful from this book that I didn't already know? and 2) would I recommend this book to anyone, unless I knew them to be as into comedy as I am? I must admit that ultimately the answers are no, and no. I sure enjoyed it though! Even though I do have one major complaint, which is actually about the book cover design, with the phrase "Comedy Book" printed several times in different fonts, all of which give the misleading impression that it's a silly book rather than the deeply academic exercise it actually is. But, inside the cover, it really worked for me, at least.


4. A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by Neil Bradbury, Ph.D. (started 2/21; finished 3/12): B+ In spite of it being written in a sometimes distractingly, incongruously wholesome literary voice, this is a really fun, fascinating read. It's a little like reading true crime as reported by Pollyanna, but the great amount of specific and sometimes unsettling detail makes that easy to look past—I'm not sure I'll ever look at hospital visits the same way again. (A stunning number of murders and attempted murders recounted in the book were carried out by health care professionals.) The stories in this book run the gamut, from the aforementioned hospital workers to disgruntled Victorian-era spouses to 20th-century international espionage. This is a great book for the person with equal amounts of educational and morbid interests.


5. The Future by Naomi Alderman (started 3/12; finished 3/24): B+ "On the day the world ended," these are the opening six words to The Future, with several more references to the world ending in the early pages of this book. If I had any actual complaint about this book, it would be that it's nearly three quarters of the way through before we get even a hint as to exactly how the world ended. On the other hand, I have to hand it to author Naomi Alderman: it sure is an effective way to keep you turning the pages. Soon enough we are introduced to the CEOs of three megacorporations: one a social network; one focused on e-commerce and delivery; one a computer company. Gee, I wonder what the real-world analogs are here? They all have bunkers and they have a coordinated plan for how to get to them in case of the world ending—and in my view having them all wind up on the same escape plane stretches plausibility, but whatever. This book covers a lot about tech and the environmental crises and how the two can either be at odds or work to mutual benefit, contextualized with a kind of intrigue that made it hard for me to put it down. Everything ties up in the end perhaps a bit too neatly—but also, somehow, very satisfyingly. If you liked Alderman's previous novel The Power you'll definitely like this one—which isn't quite as good, but it's close. 


6. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson (started 3/24; finished 5/7): A- With this wonderful fantasy novel, about a simple, cup-loving young woman leaving her island home to sail across the dangerous "spore seas" of her planet with a band of pirates on a quest to confront the sorceress who kidnapped the man she loves, the best point of comparison is The Princess Bride (more so the spectacular 1973 William Goldman novel than the 1987 film)—a comparison so obvious, in fact, that Brandon Sanderson makes it directly explicit as an intentional inspiration in his postscript. It's difficult to summarize this novel's story in a way that does justice to what a great read it is, largely because of its narrator, who is mentally compromised due to a curse from the aforementioned sorceress. I suppose there is a distinction to be made, because The Princess Bride, particularly the novel, goes to some surprisingly dark places that Tress of the Emerald Sea does not quite sail into. And yet, the characters and the world, where air-churned spores that fall from several moons in stationary orbit are what make up its seas, are both vividly realized, making this a world that is a delight to inhabit, and sprinkled with whimiscally offbeat, laugh-out-loud humor. As of reading this novel, it was easily the best I have read this year, and I would easily recommend it to readers of all ages. 


7. Dune by Frank Herbert (started 5/12; finished 7/12): A This is the most monumental, enduring, spectacular novel I have read in a very, very long time. A great many years, it could be argued. I know I have recency bias going on here, but I'm feeling confident about my opinions if for no other reason than my enduring love of the Denis Villeneuve film adaptations, which have been out a while now, I have watched several times, and I never tire of. I can count on one hand the number of novels I have re-read, and I can easily see myself re-reading this one day. For now, I must share this excerpt from Frank Herbert's son Brian's Afterward in the 2005 edition of the novel that I had checked out of the library: Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. This passage really stands out to me as I come away from finishing the novel for the first time. I have noted how I long felt an aversion to even trying to read this novel, mostly because I heard that for decades it was regarded as "unadaptable" and I was put under the impression that it had this impenetrable narrative. Between that and how long I also knew the novel to be, it sounded like a chore to read that I doubted was worth the effort. Much to my surprise and delight, once I finally picked it up, Dune became one of the very few novels that truly hooked me with its narrative literally on page 1. What I discovered was that, yes, the narrative is incredibly dense—but, to Brian's point, that is only one layer, and this book can be read easily as simply gripping science fiction entertainment without having to drill too far into its density. Just as already happened to me with the Villeneuve films, I know that I can return to it and glean more from it that I did not the first time around. The detail of this universe, as fully realized, is astonishing, and I am in awe of it. It took me a solid two months to read this book from start to finish, and I'd have been happy for it to take longer: I loved just picking it up and spending time simmering in its world. There is another incredibly useful factor in how the story is set 20,000 in the future: it hardly matters that the novel was first published in 1965, 59 years ago as I write this—in the lore of the novel, humanity has long ago destroyed machines as we currently think of them. Given the rise and fear of AI today, this is more prescient and relevant than ever. In any case, the novel is set so wildly far into the future that almost nothing about it feels implausible or dated, regardless of how long ago it was written, and in all likelihood it never will in any of our lifetimes. To call this novel "ageless" is an understatement—and, given that this is one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, I realize I'm coming rather late to this party. But, that's the beauty of this novel: it is never too late, nor can it ever be. I absolutely adored this book—and I say this even with the caveat of its subtly homophobic depiction of the Baron Harkonnen (maybe the one thing in it that could objectively qualify as dated)—and I would recommend it to any and everyone.


8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (started 7/13; finished 8/8): A+ What better book to follow up Dune than with what remains both my favorite science fiction novel and my favorite novel overall? I'm not sure how often these two novels are mentioned in the same conversations, but for me they both have lasting and deep cultural impact with a lot of overlap, and it's quite possible that if I had to rank all of my favorite novels, I could put Dune at #2—and Brave New World still at #1. This was the fifth time I have read Brave New World and I posted to social media only minutes after finishing it: The 20 years since I last read it was enough time for the entire world to change and thus alter the lens through which it is perceived. And although I have since read other spectacular books that could have challenged its standing in my mind (DUNE came *very* close), I must say the depth of how impressed I am by this vision of the future from 92 years ago goes on unabated. What a truly spectacular book this is, so dense with provocative meaning and implication, more and more prescient with each passing decade. I just love this book so much, I am certain I will read it yet again one day—the only book I have read nearly so many times, a stellar intellectual exercise that challenges and stretches far beyond what its deceptively short length might suggest. The key difference from Dune is that novel's evergreen effect due to its vision of a future tens of thousands of years from now. Brave New World is set in what would to us be the year 2540—all of about 3% of the time from now as Dune—and yet is astonishingly prescient, depicting elements of a world we live in currently that fit right into our current realities (society run by deluded amusements; social conditioning; rampant cloning). There's something deeply unsettling about the feeling of a current society visibly moving in this direction as opposed to the wild conjecture it no doubt seemed to be upon first publication in 1932, presumably deeply scandalizing readers. There's some real irony in the foreward Huxley wrote for the 1946 edition of the novel that I tend to read, in that he laments the story's lack of any reference to nuclear warfare; naturally anyone in the 1940s would assume nuclear conflict would play a big part in our future, but—so far at least—his original, unspoiled vision from before the atom bomb is proving to be far more accurate than he ever could have imagined. As such, there is a kind of deep, dark magic to the time traveling element to reading this novel, and I just love it.


9. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (started 8/11; finished 8/26): B I was really wanting to read the second in the Dune series, Dune Prophesy, but predictably I had many other holds at the library to wait through. When I checked this book out, Seattle Public Library had only just been able to start accepting book returns, literally months after a malware attack that completely crippled their systems. Once I could return Dune, I went to the library with the vain hope that I could just find Dune Prophesy on the shelf, which of course I did not find. I was still very much in a science-fiction mood, though—I had just re-read Brave New World—so that's what I went in search of, among the books already on the shelf. Then I remembered the CEO at work at recommended Sea of Tranquility many months ago, and I had put it on my list. I found it on the shelf, and was pleased to learn it was by the same author as Station Eleven, which I still have not read but really loved the HBO limited series adapted from it. All of these elements set up pretty high expectations for this novel . . . which honestly did not meet them. This book is fine. I just wanted something better. I was fascinated by the premise, with time settings jumping from 1912 to 2020 to 2203 to 2401. But, maybe halfway through, a key character starts theorizing about whether we are all living in a simulation, and then it becomes clear that all of these time periods are connected by time travel. And I was just like: oh. That's what this is? Been there, done that. I'd have loved for there to be some other reason for these time jumps in narrative, some actually original idea that never quite materializes. The author weaves in themes of loneliness and learning how to step away from the hustle and bustle of life by connecting all the time periods as either very near or during global pandemics. And to her credit, the writing is quite vivid for how relatively simple it is, which alone made it difficult for me to put the book down. The writing is excellent. The story didn't much do it for me.


10. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 8/26; finished 9/23): B I know for certain that I read this novel at least once before—in 2006. I thought I read both this and Armistead Maupin's two follow-up books earlier than that, but my annual book logs I keep only go back to 2003, so I can't remember for sure. This is a light, breezy, fun read, and I kept wondering what it must have been like when initially serialized weekly in San Francisco newspapers in 1974. And that's kind of just the thing: I gave this a B+ in 2006, but can't help but downgrade it to a solid B from the vantage point of 2024, when the way we look at things like race, gender and sexuality are (hopefully) a bit more sophisticated. None of the themes in this novel are tackled awfully, but it's still very much a product of its time, and some of what Maupin explores is done, let's say, slightly inelegantly. It's subtle, but there is a bit of cringe there that may not have been detected in less enlightened years passed. Nevertheless, I intend to move forward in the series, whose very existence serves as a kind of historical record. It will be interesting to see how Maupin's characters eventually navigate a world with HIV, legalized same-sex marriage, intersectionality, or the mainstreaming of the fight for queer and trans rights—all within the specific setting of San Francisco, which itself is now an entire world apart from the city it was in the seventies, the eighties, or even the ninetes.


11. More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 9/24; finished 10/10): B Infidelity. Pregnancy. Secret parentage. Amnesia. If anyone thought the first Tales of the City was like a soap opera, Armistead Maupin sure as shit pumps the accelerator with this follow-up. It still treats both race and gender in a way that makes it feel like an artifact—"It was a different time," you might say—including an older trans character who endures getting deadnamed by an ex. The fascinating element here is how progressive this was in the context of its first publication in 1980, an ensemble cast of characters navigating countless recognizable real-life landmarks in the "modern Sodom" of then-contemporary San Francisco. That city and Tales of the City are synonymous with each other, and its narrative flaws aside, the characters are just impossible not to get attached to.


12. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (started 10/10; finished 11/14): A- I was a bit surprised to discover Dune Messiah is only about half the length of Dune. It makes it feel a little less epic, and a tad more like an extended epilogue to the first novel, set 12 years later. I also had a feeling of even more of this one, also dense with layered meaning and themes, going over my head. And then, somehow, by the time I finished it . . . I found that I still loved it. There's just something about Herbert's Dune universe, I absolutely love spending time in it. And there are unusually vivid elements that I find difficult to shake, super cool narrative threads that continue to make these stories exceptional. There are many in both novels, but my favorite from Dune is the wisened knowledge inside of Alia as a little girl; in Dune Messiah, for me anyway, I fell in love with the character arc of Duncan Idaho as a ghola, particularly with his blank, metal Tleilaxu eyes, a persistently haunting image. There's a ton more of societies, histories and mythologies thrown around in this book that I struggled to wrap my brain around, and in the end I didn't care so much: the Dune universe is something you surrender to, and swim through, like a Guild Navigator in a tank of spice gas.


13. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (started 11/16; finished 12/24): B I enjoyed this book overall, but also have somewhat mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed Tova, the tiny grandma protagonist, and it was nice to spend the majority of the pages with her. My absolute favorite was definitely Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus living in the Puget Sound aquarium where Tova does janitorial work—and, much more specifically, the sporadic chapters that are narrated by him. The thing is, Selby Van Pelt has a particular talent for writing from an anthropomorphic viewpoint, by far the most novel (pardon the pun) part of this book, though she uses admirable restraint in engaging with it, as those chapters are the most infrequent and use up the least number of pages. Honestly, the greatest challenge was with adopting the viewpoint of a straight young man, specifically Cameron, the irresponsible character who loses his job in California and heads to Washington in search of a rich man he assumes is his biological father (and we all know far before Cameron does where that is headed). There's just something about the way Cameron thinks, the things he says, the things he does—there's something about it all that feels like an author trying her best but not truly understanding how typical young straight guys like this are. Granted, this is a far more common effect with male writers creating young women characters, so I suppose turnabout is fair play, but the ultimate effect is still the same. It did get a bit better as the novel went along, but the male characters in this book had a real lack of authenticity to them, and often came across as rather contrived. What's more, I'd say the first third or so of the book was so slow, with so little happening I wondered why I was reading about any of these people's lives, I nearly gave up on the book. I'm still glad I didn't; Van Pelt at the very least has a knack for slow-burn plotting, and by the final chapters I actually couldn't put it down, and was nearly late for an engagement on Christmas Eve. The way the mystery of Tova's long-dead son gets solved in the end is wildly implausible (even outside the involvement of a highly intelligent octopus), but so what? This is the stuff we come to these kinds of books for. One final complaint: Sowel Bay is a fictional town on Washington State's Puget Sound. I'm totally fine with creating fictional towns, but Van Pelt sprinkles in distances and drive times from Sowel Bay to Bellingham to the north and Seattle to the south, none of which come even close to adding up. My best guess was that Sowel Bay would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of Tulalip, but the distances and local geographical references still did not fully match, and every time this came up it took me out of the book. I rather wish she had just found a point on the map, decided that was where Sowel Bay would be, and then took actual measurements for these references. This only matters to Puget Sound locals like myself, though; no one reading this from anywhere else in the world is going to care. For locals, however, it could be a bit of a different story.