Chad > Recent Status Updates

I had to restart this book because my initial listen to the audiobook was interrupted from getting Covid. I’m happy that this ended up happening because doubling back with a better sense of the mind bleepery contained within left me better equipped to take note of important details. I’m enjoying it much more the second gone around.

So close to finishing this and finally we have some substantive progression of the plot. And unrelated but clearly I need to disconnect my kindle from my goodreads account. This is the third time it auto-updated me as finishing the book when I clearly have not.

As an experiment I skipped an entire chapter. I can’t honestly say that It’s even making a difference. Not a great sign.

I’m not quite at the halfway point and I feel like my progress bar should be closer to 80%. There has to be some kind of movement with this story because I’m running low on stamina. The two cultures don’t understand each other easily. I get it.

This is getting seriously painful. I feel like I’m reading the same chapter over and over again. We get -at best- a paragraph or two showing McCoy working at trying to beat this disease and then we plunge right back into this endless sleepover that the rest of the crew is having on the other planet.

Also if my f*cking kindle would stop auto-updating when I don’t want it to maybe my reading activity wouldn’t show that I’ve finished the book three or four times this week.

This book is in serious need of an edit. Way too long. Pretty much any sense of narrative pacing has been completely lost at this point and I’m kind of wondering why we need that plague event as a part of the story at all. There are barely even any scenes sowing McCoy trying to deal with the disease.

I appreciate the anthropological detail and credibility that this story brings to bear but I feel like it’s overly long. All these long-winded passages about the construction of their names kind of kills the tension we are supposed to be feeling related to a devastating plague event on the planet we started this book on.

My hope is that we get some forward progress in the story because the last few chapters have begun to feel a little tedious and my enthusiasm for the book is waning a bit.

While I appreciate the notion of these two cultures meeting and exploring each other and the process of trying to talk one planet’s population into helping to deal with a plague on another, the massive number of characters involved make that aspect of the story feel overly dense and I have been tuning it out at times.

I’m kind of mixed on the first contact aspects of the story. I’ll admit that it’s interesting but it’s also a bit tedious at the same time.

The author has chosen some of the most irritating names I’ve ever seen. First a planet named Eeiauo? A character named Snnanagfashtalli? I’m all for being creative but it’s like someone spilled the contents of a Scrabble box into my kindle.

I’ve never seen this done before and it’s kind of annoying - a Captains Log entry immediately followed by a Captain’s Personal Log entry. Just seems not really necessary.

I like books that explore Uhura and Spock’s relationship - not in a romantic sense - but I have always felt that of all the crew Uhura is the one who seemed to best understand Spock’s point of view and I think the two characters generally seem to play well off of each other.

Will this planet end up sealing their own fate because they are unwilling to be open and honest about their own past? So far we feel like this is the direction we are headed in.

The premise of the book is really well done. Not just the old trope of a disease gone rampant on a planet but also the mystery of where this society might come from. While they claim to be indigent, Uhura is quite clever in using forbidden songs from the cultures background as presenting potential clues to the fact that they indeed originated as refugees. So far I like that we have some focus outside the main three

I jumped ahead slightly in the sequence to read this in recognition of the passing of the legendary Nichelle Nichols. I am more than grateful for having the honor of seeing her perform and for everything she has done as an iconic cultural figure.

There’s some fantastic writing laying out the notion of older generations trying as much as possible to hang on to their humanity and optimism. But also the bitterness you would expect from the younger generation, unable to find a point of existence in a society that is likely hurtling towards extinction.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie but I was really struck by how much the book establishes the existential bleak nature of this universe, surrounding this event in which reproduction simply stopped being possible.

I wasn’t sure what to expect after being somewhat disappointed by Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. I was pleased to find this book really enjoyable with an entertaining and fast moving plot. I appreciated how sympathetic the “villains” of the story become.