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Of course my numbers associated with the books don't necessarily relate to when I actually read or listened to them, so this time for the heck of it I will begin with the audio books. I get most of them from the library app on my phone, and that place is kind of the scrubland of books nobody wants, far as I can tell.
30) Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, read by De'le' Ogundiran. A young woman who had birth defects and an accident has had herself highly modified, so she has mechanical legs, one mechanical arm (like the Six Million Dollar man and woman) and some kind of connection in her brain to, like, all the AIs in the world, and they just... like her more than they like anyone else. And it's set in Nigeria, and there's prejudice against partially mechanical people and nomadic herdsmen, and there's a mysterious city that seemingly nobody can find because it resets its time every hour or something... I don't get how this makes it invisible. Sci-fi fantasy.
31) The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey, read by Xe Sands. Literature maskerading as science-fiction, because a whole lot of it did not seem to make any scientific sense. Or even human sense. If you had a job as a lab assistant and wanted to steal equipment from the lab, would you come back in the middle of the night with a ski mask on? Or would you just work late and walk out with the stuff after the boss left? Oh, but the plot of the story depended on the boss coming to the lab in the middle of the night for her own nefarious purposes to find her trusted assistant there wearing a ski mask, so that he can obviously be a thief. And then immediately taking it off so she can see who he is instead of running and trying to hide his identity. He made a mess of the lab that night, but apparently none of the other times he stole equipment. I'm like... one way or the other, you can't really have it both ways! Either you're trying to pretend you're someone else, a random thief, or you don't make a mess and you walk out with stuff all the time, which the history as he reports it is that he's been stealing from her repeatedly for a very long while, like five years or more, so... if he's that good at it that she's never detected anything out of place before, why did he make a mess of the lab this time?
There's some other major issues, like that one clone has to be taught how to read and learns how to be a lab assistant, but then another clone apparently gets a whole lot of knowledge just sort of transferred into his brain and thinks he really is this guy, goes to his job and does his job without training, even though the brain scan they had of the guy is from five years in the past, before he had that job. So... er... what?
32) Ginger Bread, by Helen Oyeyemi, read by the author. Kind of a pointless, random, wandering sort of book where nothing whatsoever gets explained. Magical realism literature. Fun, I guess? Pretty? Well written, probably. But again, not really my thing.
Currently re-listening to
"Good Omens" (Pratchett/Gaimen) the book, but read by the cast of the series (well, they got the major cast members but then had Kobna Holdbrook-Smith read all the smaller parts, apparently)
and
"The Furthest Station" by Ben Aaronovitch read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.
I guess I will do the regular books in a few days when we get back from camp.
30) Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, read by De'le' Ogundiran. A young woman who had birth defects and an accident has had herself highly modified, so she has mechanical legs, one mechanical arm (like the Six Million Dollar man and woman) and some kind of connection in her brain to, like, all the AIs in the world, and they just... like her more than they like anyone else. And it's set in Nigeria, and there's prejudice against partially mechanical people and nomadic herdsmen, and there's a mysterious city that seemingly nobody can find because it resets its time every hour or something... I don't get how this makes it invisible. Sci-fi fantasy.
31) The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey, read by Xe Sands. Literature maskerading as science-fiction, because a whole lot of it did not seem to make any scientific sense. Or even human sense. If you had a job as a lab assistant and wanted to steal equipment from the lab, would you come back in the middle of the night with a ski mask on? Or would you just work late and walk out with the stuff after the boss left? Oh, but the plot of the story depended on the boss coming to the lab in the middle of the night for her own nefarious purposes to find her trusted assistant there wearing a ski mask, so that he can obviously be a thief. And then immediately taking it off so she can see who he is instead of running and trying to hide his identity. He made a mess of the lab that night, but apparently none of the other times he stole equipment. I'm like... one way or the other, you can't really have it both ways! Either you're trying to pretend you're someone else, a random thief, or you don't make a mess and you walk out with stuff all the time, which the history as he reports it is that he's been stealing from her repeatedly for a very long while, like five years or more, so... if he's that good at it that she's never detected anything out of place before, why did he make a mess of the lab this time?
There's some other major issues, like that one clone has to be taught how to read and learns how to be a lab assistant, but then another clone apparently gets a whole lot of knowledge just sort of transferred into his brain and thinks he really is this guy, goes to his job and does his job without training, even though the brain scan they had of the guy is from five years in the past, before he had that job. So... er... what?
32) Ginger Bread, by Helen Oyeyemi, read by the author. Kind of a pointless, random, wandering sort of book where nothing whatsoever gets explained. Magical realism literature. Fun, I guess? Pretty? Well written, probably. But again, not really my thing.
Currently re-listening to
"Good Omens" (Pratchett/Gaimen) the book, but read by the cast of the series (well, they got the major cast members but then had Kobna Holdbrook-Smith read all the smaller parts, apparently)
and
"The Furthest Station" by Ben Aaronovitch read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.
I guess I will do the regular books in a few days when we get back from camp.