There are some books written for autistic people and there are others written about autistic people.
Guess which kind of book this is?
A collection of sad poems filled with gaming terminology and obscure gaming references.
I picked this up because I thought it was a weird premise, it is, but I’m not convinced it’s very good.
What we encounter in the case of correlationism surprise mode is the specter of paranormal action. Distilled into its most basic form, what is haunting communism is the specter of spectrality itself. Why? Because spectrality is the flavor of the symbiotic real, where everything is what it is, yet nothing coincides exactly with itself.
p. 54
heavy sigh
Why are philosophers like this?
One part racist sexist misguided grandpa waxing philosophical about the meaninglessness of life, one part letters responding to Durant’s inflamattory prompt on the meaninglessness of life, one part toothless conclusion. Meh.
Some of the letters were interesting to read but most of the rest of this was not.
Constant “mystery cucking” for 95% of the novel, a super rushed ending and paper-thin antagonists heavily detract from the interesting POV and the “promised land” religious/scientific colonial premise and setting, which is sadly a little underdeveloped.
Meh.
[…] (I rarely make revisions once I have written).
p. 216
No shit girl, we can tell.
This story is about an autistic woman who remembers and describes being born, she goes through some shit (homelessness and stripping, etc.), discovers a passion for gorillas and leverages her understanding of gorillas to help her understand other people.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is three novellas Frankenstein-ed together, it lacks the cohesiveness that Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun has. It feels like a prototype of what Gene Wolfe would go on to write.
A grounded yet fantastical story about a young woman, Sasha, who is selected to attend the Institute of Special Technologies. Sasha attends this mysterious college and is thrust into a world of dark academia with widespread and fantastical implications.
“You can’t beat no orc marines
When we fire our M16s!”
p. 151
Mary Gentle’s Grunts in a nutshell. Grunts is a satire of the schlocky high fantasy Tolkien ripoffs of the 70s and 80s. It pokes fun at the aesthetic of the American military as portrayed in film and literature. It combines Grand Guignol (think slapstick but extra gory and violent) dark comedy with satire on bad fantasy.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is John Scalzi’s attempt at writing a Jurassic Parc-esque light sci-fi romp that pokes fun at billionaires and postures as hard as a heterosexual white man like John Scalzi can about inclusion and diversity.
What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic is more of a personal diary made public rather than a memoir or a primer on Autism and suffers for it. I’m not sure it’s something in-between either, I don’t really know what it is. It’s OK, I guess?
In working through my thoughts after reading this trashfire of a novel, I wrote five first drafts of a review. They’re incomplete but I’m posting them here mostly un-edited (just some typo fixes) for posterity. They’re either too incomplete, too snarky, too snooty or too mean-spirited to post on Goodreads.
A Memory Called Empire has big “Hugo award winner” energy: an interesting premise, consistent and intriguing world building, a promising start and a propulsive ending.
I loved my time with it and very excited to dig into the next book in the series although I suspect that it won’t be as good.
I’m not sure who to blame for how boring most of this book is:
The British for their empire and the consequences of that on the Irish.
The Catholics for influencing the Irish and warping their existing folkloric beliefs.
Lady Wylde herself for presenting these stories in a very blunt and uninteresting way.
All of the above?
Conserve your semen.
Achieve immortality.
Rejoice.
A collection of small one shot tabletop RPGs. Their quality varies and not all of them will be interesting to the people you play with BUT there’s some bangers in here.
Terry Pratchett is an all-timer. The rare case of an author who is immensely popular for the right reasons.
This is a biography about him, and it’s the best one we’re going to get.
Not my cup of tea. Philosophy should be understandable, this text is incomprehensible.
Maybe if was downing absinthe with Sartre and his crew back in the forties when this was written, I would “get” it. As-is though, this is pretty hard to get through.
An astronaut is abandoned on Mars after a dust storm separates him from his crew. Through journal entries, he tells the story of how he tries to survive.
“The Raven Tower” is one of the worst books I have ever read. I’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg in this review because reading through this book has left me completely drained of energy. Please don’t read this book, it is beyond trash. If you really want to, I can’t stop you but I really wish I could.
Not my favorite John Scalzi novel but it was fun. I prefer when he doubles down on the absurd and comic modes.
This series is not that, although it does have its funny moments, but it’s an enjoyable romp.
I’m torn on this one. I enjoyed it but it was missing a bit of polish.
I enjoyed the cast of characters being mostly of Canadian Indigenous ancestry (well, except the villain). It’s not something I’ve seen before (which either speaks to my uncultured-ness or the lack of minority voices in the media I’m exposed to… or both).
Joshua Halberstam is the king of strawmanning. Every chapter involves him describing these absurd caricatures of human beings and then using them to try to say to something interesting (keyword: try).
This book is terrible. I read through this whole novel and I don’t have anything to show for it.
I probably should have put the book down and lit it on fire when the gigantic black Rastafarian sumo wrestler in a diaper showed up. I probably should have stopped reading when the profoundly unlikable protagonist turns out to be a pedo. I probably should have stopped reading when I realized that none of the characters were interesting.
I much preferred Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. I’m not an ancient Chinese scholar so I can’t speak to how faithful this translation is compared to the original manuscript.
But I can say that the poetry doesn’t flow well and some translation choices left me scratching my head — wondering if Thomas Cleary understands how the English language works.
This book is a joke and not a very funny one. It fails completely in its stated goal of being funny.
The tonal clash between the comedic intent of the author and the violent story centered around a group of janitors trying to stop a genocide is jarring.
The characters are nothing more than caricatures and this is a trainwreck waiting to happen given the inclusion of a comic relief autistic character.
Felt more like a soap opera than a space opera at times.
There’s a lot of people thinking about, talking about and having sex. There’s a lot of scheming and plotting that sometimes makes sense but often doesn’t.
So I rolled with it, strapped on my suspension of disbelief pants and enjoyed the ride.
To Hold Up the Sky is a collection of short stories from Liu Cixin who’s mostly known for his Three Body Problem trilogy.
This collection is a mixed bag. The stories range from very bad, to middling to great. Two (out of eleven) stories really spoke to me and the rest were mostly meh.
A collection of science fiction short stories that’ll make you go “huh, interesting…” and might encourage you to think about how technology affects your life currently and how it might affect it in the not so distant future.
A cool guy devil and a flamboyantly effeminate angel living on Earth try to stop the end times from happening because they’ve come to enjoy all of Earth’s pleasures (mosly driving fast cars and reading, respectively). Also, there’s the anti-christ, a descendant of a prophet who’s predicted everything, some dude, etc. There’s a lot going on here.
Aliens on Earth in the early/mid 2000s and everything that follows from that. Sequel to Axiom’s End, continues Cora’s story and adds some new fresh characters (alien and otherwise) into the mix.
Set in 2007, the novel is about a U.S. government coverup of contact with extraterrestrial life. You follow the story of Cora, daughter of an exiled whistleblower, who finds herself in the middle of the whole ‘alien’ situation.
An anthology of short stories, comics, and poems from Mexican American authors.
Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art dives deep into these ideas and expands on them.
The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten offers one hundred philosophical thought-experiments. To get the most out of it, you might want to pull it out and discuss a thought-experiment with some friends because the book doesn’t do much more than present the thought-experiments one after the other.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book where author/youtuber John Green reviews a random assortment of things and concepts that you wouldn’t expect to see reviewed. This conceit gives him a lot of room to write about anything he feels like. John Green is an expert at what he does, but I don’t find what he does to be very compelling.
Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology is a retelling of a few stories from Norse mythology (which we don’t know very much about). I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman’s work generally but I found this to be quite boring.
A tabletop roleplaying system where everyone tries to one-up each other with increasingly ridiculous stories about their adventures and exploits in their roles as Georgian/Victorian era noble people.
Makes for a great one-shot with the right group.
