works of wanderlust

Ugh. I didn’t read as much as I should have through the winter, and yet now, maybe only because I’m still riding the high of enjoying my new ebook reader, I have been power walking through a whole collection of books.

That said, very little planning has gone into my May reads. I have very much been waltzing through the whims of whatever the universe throws at me, in the first case revisiting a book in print that I’d previously listened to, then stumbling into an unlikely girly memoire, and finally elevating a sequel I was pretty sure I was going to put off until autumn.

But read what you want to read. Read what you feel like reading. Just read.

And recently I read:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

This was a tough read, but for a strange reason: my first encounter with this book was when I listened to the audiobook version a couple years ago, and the narration and voice acting in that version is beyond top notch, bringing the whole story to life. Reading it as a novel this time through I could still hear the voices and cadedence of Porter’s acting chops. Beyond that, this is a delightfully nerdy romp through a first contact type story and a utopian perspective on why nerds should be in charge of everything. If you enjoyed The Martian, this is a completely different spin on the puzzling out life or death engineering problems in space by the same author, but with a pleasant stylistic overlap that bridges any of the plot differences. I have been making an effort these past couple weeks to avoid checking the star ratings on things (post upcoming in a couple more weeks) but I suspect that if you checked the reviews on this title you’d find no shortage of raves.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Um, so yeah. What the heck am I doing reading a twenty year old quasi-spiritual memoire of a divorced woman traveling and meditating in the quest to clear her soul? I will admit, when The Algorithm recommended this to me, the low friction, low stakes, no cost value proposition of having the library on my ebook reader left me simply figuring that I would read the first chapter or two to quench my decades-long sidelong curiosity about this book which rode the bestseller list for like three years… and then move along. I read the whole damn thing. Maybe it’s a middle age quirk. Maybe I really have honed some previously emotional derelict part of my own soul these past couple years. Maybe there is a kinship between folks farted out the baskside of prim society and left to recreate themselves that bridges space, time, and gender. Who knows for sure. But putting aside my idle skepticism about the author’s spiritual awakenings and the manifesting of prayer and all that drivel, there was a relatable struggle to be found in these pages that has not uniquely been discussed in such books, but was certainly a perspective that I didn’t mind adding to my pondered-upon list.  

Shift by Hugh Howey

I lied in my last post. I surmised I might wait a month or six before jumping into the second instalment of Howey’s Silo trilogy. Instead, I had barely let the first volume cool off and I was onto the second. Sequels are always tough, I find. Part twos in a trilogy can be amazing tales of raised stakes (think Empire Strikes Back) or disappointing romps deeper into a story that can’t resolve until the final book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story. Instead what is here is a lot of backstory. Where in book one the mystery is the silo itself, what unravels in book two is a step back to nearly the present day (relatively speaking, at least) and we are introduced to the people and the politics that created the world in which book one exists, the histories of the world outside the silos themselves and the histories of the people who are stuck inside, too. I don’t just want to give a recap, however. Once again Howey is twisting dozens of very human stories together around this dystopic concept. Everyone is a complicated actor, both hero and villain, both struggling for their own survival and yet questioning their own mortality and morality. It is a romp through the psyche of post-apocalyptic humanity that is worth the trip.