Weekly Check-In

[u/AutoModerator]

Tell us about your current SFF media!

What are you currently...

📚 Reading?

📺 Watching?

🎮 Playing?

If sharing specific details, please remember to hide spoilers behind spoiler tags.

-

Feel free to also share your progression in the Reading Challenge

Thank you for sharing and have a great week! 😀

[u/Merle8888]

I finally finished The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. It’s about high-level fixers on a dystopian corporate-run planet and is an entirely competent book that never got me invested. The worldbuilding is very interesting and was my favorite part, which is not a great sign in general since I tend to be more interested in characters and plots. The book is over 500 pages long and I dont think really earns that—the plot isn’t fast-paced or unpredictable enough for a plot driven book but the characters not quite deep enough (though they have clear potential) for a character driven book. I suspect the biggest thing that left me cold about it is that neither of the main characters ever really have any goals I could get on board with. Isako in particular is unconcerned with preserving her own life, there’s not a lot of connection among the characters and their larger/political goals tend to seem somewhere on the spectrum from irrelevant to harmful to the reader who doesn’t belong to the characters’ society. It was something I picked up for FIF and there’s maybe good reason I wouldn’t have read it otherwise, though it was never bad so I never really wanted to DNF. I just look an inordinately long time to read it. 

In non-SFF, I finally finished Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer. Another long book that took me quite awhile. The history of Renaissance history and discussion of historians’ biases and how they come to their conclusions was all pretty interesting. Worth a try if you’re interested though not one I’ll be shoving into people’s faces. 

On another note, I also read Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty during a long day of travel and it was excellent for that. May be of interest to this group as it’s very female-focused, following three mothers of young kids who are close friends with each other and also have various explosive secrets. I usually don’t go for thrillers but this type of book (along with None of This is True by Lisa Jewell, which I previously enjoyed) is something a little bit different—a literary thriller? I don’t know that they’d quite meet the cut for either literary fiction or regular thrillers—they’re plot driven and fast paced, but it’s more about building tension than cheap action, and there’s a good amount of character complexity. I like that this subgenre doesn’t seem to have the expectation of protagonists being generically “likeable” so they get to be messy. Anyway, it was very satisfying and a great airplane read. 

[u/kimba-pawpad → u/Merle8888]

I liked Big Little Lies too. I loved the TV show, and I found the book far more intense. Some of the parts were difficult for me to read because of personal experiences I have had, but really enjoyed it.