David Holmes > Recent Status Updates

Major themes of the first two chapters so far:

1. The goal of the US deportation system is to remove immigrants primarily through voluntary departure and self-deportation, by terrorizing and immiserating them, and the formal deportation process is too expensive to use except as a threat driving the other two processes.
2. Nothing about what the administration is doing now is new. It's an old, old playbook.

This is pure Scalzi silliness, something I generally appreciate to a degree, but I'm not sure I care for the format at all. It's an attempt to tell a story by stringing together one different viewpoint after another, so each chapter is a different person, but I need characters who I can connect with, not characters discarded after 20 pages.

Alien Animal Encounters: ★★☆☆☆

I might have been in the wrong mood, but the humor in this one somehow escaped me.

I already like this more than the last three Scalzi books I read.

The last quarter of the book is so much more compelling than the first half was.

It finally grabbed me and stuff's starting to happen. I'm reminded of both what made Children of Time great, and also some of Tchaikovsky's weaknesses as a writer, but it's still great.

This has the potential to be interesting, but it's off to a really slow start. Most of the first 50 pages were painting a picture of its setting and building some groundwork without anything actually happening.

The first chapter is mostly about Trump family history and Dr. Trump's analysis of its dysfunction, from Donald's grandparents to the early lives of Donald and his siblings, all with her analysis of their dysfunctional family environment and interpretation of its effect on their psyches. She also takes jabs at some of the injustice of how Fred became wealthy and the hypocrisy of Trumpism in context of their history.

Mary Trump is a good writer.

I've been pretty inactive here over the past couple of years, mostly due to a lack of motivation or mental energy to read, because reasons. But I saw my friends here reading this and for some reason the premise really intrigued me, so I thought I'd give it a try. So far I'm liking it a lot.

There's a map at the beginning which totally contradicts my headcanon of this world's geography. If this goes like other times when this has happened, I'm now going to have two different contradicting headcanons which apply at different points in the series :|

It's been a while since I read anything by Scalzi... I used to read all his stuff, but I think Lock In was my last. Not sure why. This one seems... like Scalzi, alright!

"Our reputation for fiscal conservatism has always had a whiff of bullshit about it."

This plot is almost like a Miles Vorkosigan book, only with less lying and sweet-talking.

This is the best Expanse book yet.

This is yet another re-read for a book club that I first read long ago. Actually I read this book when I was 14, which is probably too young for a book like this. I don't remember anything except the basic premise.

I first read this book almost 15 years ago, when I had just started college. Reading it again, I'm surprised at how much of the computer science stuff went over my head the first time, and also surprised that I liked it so much in spite of missing so many little things.

I had forgotten that this book is sometimes funny, too.

I already read this book a very long time ago (and loved it). I'm skimming it again for a book club read, and so far, I still love it. My favorite Stephenson.

Genly really dislikes Estraven. Since Genly is the main POV character, am I supposed to dislike Estraven too? Even from the beginning, I've liked Estraven more than Genly.

It's interesting to me how most modern sci-fi takes for granted near-total equality of men and women, but in this book from 1969, Le Guin treats different roles and freedoms as a biological inevitability. Even in a super-advanced far-future society. In this chapter she's suggesting that the only society in which people are truly equal is one without sex. I wonder if she would write such a thing today.

Another local book club read. I haven't read any Ursula K. Le Guin since A Wizard of Earthsea when I was a teenager, and this book has sat on my shelf unread for about that long. Even though I enjoyed Earthsea, for some reason Le Guin has intimidated me a bit.

Comfort food.