The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

read by Paul Boehmer

So humanity has found a way to time travel, and to edit history (and therefore the future) for the good of humanity. But it’s run by a cadre of chest-thumping nerd boys who live together with next to no female companionship (and no female colleagues at all) outside of time, in a no-place called Eternity. 

Eternity is meant to be a safe bubble of idealism and intellectual stimulation, free from distractions and the sorts of personal prejudices that would lead to bad decisions… but which, in reality, is a seething cauldron of bitter competition, thwarted desire, unexamined privilege, and unchecked neurosis. 

Basically, if you put a bunch of Silicon Valley bros in charge of all of time, it would look something like this.

I spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth at the obvious error of putting a bunch of putatively meritocratous hormone-soaked monks in charge of humanity’s destiny, and trying to tell myself that Asimov grew up when and where he grew up and so had some serious but understandable blind spots when writing this. And then, when the main character (duh) becomes willing to mess up all of history and therefore the entire future of everyone purely because he wants to get laid, I gnashed my teeth even harder.

But I kept reading… because it was a classic that I’d never gotten around to, and it’s not that long, and I figured what the heck.

And then it turns out that Asimov was taking all of this into account… but if I tell you how, I’ll spoil the book for you.

Verdict: read it. But only if you can stand to grit your teeth for the first 90% of the book. In my opinion, it was worth it.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

read by Elisabeth Rodgers

Rachel Azaria can’t die. Two thousand years ago, she and Elazar sacrificed their own deaths so that their son might survive a terrible illness—and for two thousand years, Rachel has lived life after life and raised family after family, loving them all, changing very little.

She moves from place to place as her apparent immortality became a danger to her loved ones because of the beliefs of the society around them, or as she is killed in a fire and finds herself renewed, a physically young woman again, somewhere in the world far from where she has “died.” The first time this happened was when she was burned to death at the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it’s happened enough times since for her to have lost any fear of it.

What she does fear is that her life will never end. After this many centuries and this many lives, living has lost its meaning. It has also, in this age of social media and biometrics, become much harder to properly disappear and start a new life. And Elazar—who sacrificed his death alongside her, who has followed her and who has become a mysterious presence in the lives of her offspring—Elazar is stalking her, convinced that they are meant to be lovers throughout eternity.

Then her favorite granddaughter starts studying longevity, and Rachel begins to hope, for the first time in many, many lifetimes, that she can die after all. Maybe she can strike a bargain with this granddaughter.

This book is beautifully written—you really get the sense of what somebody born two millennia ago would feel and think if they were still alive today. You understand both the joy and the despair of unending life, the mystery of a terrible oath resulting in a miracle so huge that there’s no knowing whether it’s a blessing or a curse. Highly recommend.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

read by Davina Porter

It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined. Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no idea how and nobody to help her.

She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers leave her perplexed at best.

Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really needs to find sources of strength.

This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, Book 2) by Seanan McGuire

Note: though this book *could* stand alone, it’s not really meant to; it’s a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, which is fantastic and should be read first. It’s the story of a very special school: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. It’s for children who, like Alice Liddell and Coraline Jones and the Pevensies kids and so on, went through some kind of magical doorway to an improbable realm whose rules (of manners, logic, and even physics) were not our own—and then returned to the real world.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the backstory of two of those students, Jack and Jill (or as their extremely rigid parents insist that they be called at all times, Jacqueline and Jillian) Wolcott. They’re twins, born to an emotionally-stunted couple with extremely firm and inflexible views about how children in general and each of their daughters specifically should behave.

Roles are assigned—Jacqueline is the “girly” one, always dressed in frilly dresses and terrorized into keeping them perfectly clean (and into a shyness and timidity that isn’t really natural to her). Jillian, who seems the more physically active of the two, is designated the "tomboy," encouraged to go outside and get muddy and given appropriate clothes for that, whether she likes it or not. Each resents her own role and her twin’s occupation of the role she thinks she’d prefer, and over the years they grow to dislike one another.

They do have a loving grandmother who cares for them and encourages them to love each other and to be exactly who they are, rather than who their parents want them to be. But she’s banished from their lives on their 5th birthday, never to be seen again. The girls are encouraged to think their beloved grandmother didn't love them enough to stay, and they grow up living with that terrible "knowledge."

Once the story gets properly going, the girls find a magic staircase in what should have been an old trunk full of dress-up clothes. Of course they go down it—hundreds, or maybe thousands, of steps down into the earth. At the bottom they find a door labeled “Be sure.” One twin is definitely more sure than the other—but nevertheless they open it and step through, and find themselves on a dark, rolling moor. They pick a direction and start walking--and anything more than that would be a spoiler.

Let’s just say the world they find themselves in is deeply creepy.

I loved lots of things about this book. The world building is definitely its strength, the language is drily quirky, and you can’t help but empathize with these poor kids. However, it’s too slender a book. And it gets that way by skimping on what would, to me, have been the most interesting part: the process by which each girl learns and grows into her new role in their new reality.

If it had been up to me, the book would have been twice as long and included a chapter apiece, for each twin, on each of the five years spent in The Moors that are covered in this book. The twins are such interesting characters, and the Moors are such a fascinating place, that it’s a real disappointment not being able to spend sufficient time with either.

Lacking that, though, it’s still a beautifully-written little story, with numerous archly humorous lines that had me laughing out loud. If you’re a fan of Every Heart a Doorway, you’ll definitely want to read this.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

read by Lin-Manuel Miranda

It’s 1987 and 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza has a whole summer ahead of him, with all the freedom and potential for adventure and boredom that that implies. He needs to get away from the house one fateful, stifling day, so he heads for the public swimming pool. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he can still splash around and cool off. As it turns out, there’s another bored 15-year-old there—his name is Dante, and he offers to teach Ari to swim. Ari’s not sure why he takes Dante up on this odd offer, but he does.

Aside from bonding over their similarly odd names, the two couldn’t be more different. Ari is a working-class kid, the youngest of four, though his oldest brother went to prison when Ari was only 4 years old and both of his sisters grew up and left the house years ago. His Vietnam-veteran dad is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and his mom pushes him to succeed. In response to all this, Ari has developed an uncaring, tough-guy exterior and is completely out of touch with his own tremendous store of pent-up anger and sadness.

Dante, on the other hand, wears his enthusiasms and admittedly odd thoughts and points of view on his sleeve. The only child of affectionate, well-to-do parents, he’s somewhere between happy-go-lucky and neurotic. He’s also as close to openly gay as a teenager can be in El Paso, Texas in 1987.

The two accept and even enjoy each other’s differences, and they make each other laugh. Soon they develop a friendship that can survive anything… even Ari saving Dante’s life. But sooner or later Ari is going to have to figure out who he is and who he wants to be, and what that means for him and Dante.

If you can possibly get your hands on a copy of the audiobook version of this, do (pro tip: you can probably download it from your library for free). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lively and nuanced reading makes an already-fantastic story spring to life.

Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

read by Dan Bittner

Sort of a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, set in Mexico City, with mismatched teen protagonists (one mortal and one vampire) thrown together in an improbable buddy story where the buddies’ lives are in constant peril, this book should have been tremendous fun. And it really was pretty good… but that was it.

I think the main problem was that I listened to the audiobook instead of reading the print version. Dan Bittner has a fine reading voice and all that, but he doesn’t know how to pronounce Spanish. Which, since the characters are all meant to be Spanish-speakers living in a Spanish-speaking country, is very distracting. There is no need for the narrator to fall into the trope of speaking English with a Spanish accent as a way of letting the listener know that the characters are actually meant to be speaking Spanish, but he ought to at least be able to pronounce proper nouns properly.

Aside from that… the protagonist is clearly meant to be sympathetic, and he is, more or less. But he’s a callow youth, scrappy and perfectly gallant, but not very interesting. The fledgling vampire he’s thrown together with is a much more interesting character, but we don’t get much time with her point of view. Oh, and there’s a lady cop who is stuck doing shady stuff because she’s a single mom and needs the money. A stock character and definitely uninteresting.

What’s interesting about this book is the world it’s set in. There are numerous species of vampire, which all have different appearances, abilities, and vulnerabilities—which explains why, although vampire legends exist throughout the world, they vary tremendously in their details. Each government has responded differently to the existence of these beings, which makes sense too. This is, potentially, a very rich setting for further stories, as this writer’s skill develops.

I’m treating this as the book version of the first X-Men movie—not that great on its own, but setting the stage for future good stuff. And who knows, maybe someone will take this raw material and make a great TV series or movie based on it.

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

read by Jennifer Ehle

Here’s another book review that has to start with a confession: I was never especially fond of A Wrinkle In Time. It was a good book, in my opinion, just scary enough and with some interesting science-fictiony concepts and scenes in it. I get why people love it so much. But it never really did it for me. I only ever read it once, until I had a kid of my own and read it to them. And I only read it even that one time, as a kid, because it was by the same author as A Wind in the Door.

I *loved* A Wind in the Door. I lived it, over and over and over again. I absorbed it. It became part of me in a way that books just don’t do anymore once you’re past your formative years. Reading it again, now, for the first time in decades, I was struck by how certain scenes and even certain phrases, though I didn’t consciously remember them, struck such a chord of familiarity and happiness that it was almost like reuniting with a long-lost and much beloved grandparent. The characters felt like long-lost family. Rereading this book was an intensely emotional experience—surprisingly so.

Meg Murry is our protagonist; she’s a bright, argumentative, and complaint-prone high-schooler who lacks confidence in her looks and is intensely loyal to friends and family (though she constantly questions everything they say). She’s the oldest Murry child; the middle kids are a pair of socially well-adapted twins, Sandy and Dennys, who play fairly minor roles in this book, and her baby brother, Charles Wallace, around whom the plot revolves.

Charles Wallace is a genius, the brightest of a very bright family. At age 6, he has a better vocabulary than most adults. He gets beaten up regularly at school because he’s so different—and it turns out he’s also seriously ill, with a disease that, coincidentally, his microbiologist mother happens to be studying.

Proginoskes is a singular cherubim, a creature not of this plane who materializes, when he does, as a great ball of hundreds of wings with winking eyes set amongst them, emitting the occasional spurt of flame or puff of smoke. He's haughty and pedantic—but so would you be, probably, if it were  your job to know the name of every star in the universe. His unbelievable appearance on the Murry property (they seem to live on a tremendous plot of rural land, though in other parts of the country their acreage is probably pretty standard) is what sets events in motion.

Meg, Charles Wallace, Proginoskes, and Meg’s personable and protective friend, Calvin O’Keefe, are soon united as students of a Teacher, an enormous and all-knowing humanoid being named Blajeny. For me, the biggest surprise of this reading was that I’d completely forgotten about Blajeny, as he directs the kids and sets them their tests and basically moves them all like somewhat-willful chess pieces. He’s hugely important to the plot—and yet he’d gone completely out of my mind.

My theory is that this is because he isn’t really a character—he’s more of a god-like force. He doesn’t seem to have much personality, other than an idealized-but-dim fatherliness. He matters tremendously, but he doesn't really feel real.

In any case, our intrepid protagonists discover the nature of Charles Wallace’s illness, and that it threatens not only him but, somehow, the entire universe. So of course they set out to save the world. Hijinks ensue.

I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the plot for you. I will say that this is metaphysical fiction on par, for its intended audience of tweens, with the Narnia books and with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The nature of free will, the meaning and importance of love, the unimportance of time and distance—all that is discussed, at length, in terms any 5th-grader could understand. There’s a lot more religious content here than I realized when I was the target audience, but it’s thoughtful and life-affirming.

If you’ve never read this book, you should. Either to your kids, if you have them, or to yourself. It’s definitely aimed at a young audience, but it’s magical and scientific and universe-spanning enough to enchant almost anyone. 

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

read by the author

I am not a fan of Sonic Youth. Yes, I admit it: I was in my 20s during the 1990s and yet, although I understand their appeal and I quite like a few of their songs, for the most part I have no particular liking for them. Dissonance has it place, but doesn’t generally do anything for me. On top of that, I’m easily startled by sudden loud or jangly noises. So you can see why they’re not my favorite performers. I do like Kim’s spooky, haunting moan of a voice—what’s not to like?—and those songs of theirs that highlight it and are more melodic. But yeah, I know, faint praise.

My main memory of having gone to see them in concert (I think it was at the Masonic?) sometime around 1992 or ‘93 was of not recognizing any of their songs and being bored. Oh, and their “opening band” was Ciccone Youth, which was an experimental band composed of… the members of Sonic Youth. The friends I attended with thought this was clever and witty of them. I’ll take their word for it.

Fast forward to 2018. Kim Gordon has published her memoir (in 2015), which I’ve bought for my partner; he has read it and enjoyed it very much. But then, he’s a fan of the band; I had no desire to read it myself. Then in early 2018 I learned that Kim Gordon and Chris Kraus (the author of I Love Dick, the book upon which the sadly short-lived TV series was based) were going to be interviewed together at City Arts and Lectures. This was obviously a perfect birthday present for my partner, so I bought the tickets and we went.

And I learned that Kim Gordon is affectless and somewhat inarticulate, especially as compared to Chris Kraus. She also came across as somewhat self-absorbed and self-important. So, okay. Not impressed.

Why did I finally decide to read the book? I think it came down to having attempted and failed to read three fiction books in a row—I didn’t even get through the first chapter of two of them. Having failed to get through a vampire novel and two different sorts of speculative fiction, I decided I needed something based in the real world. Not even realistic fiction, but nonfiction. And I came across Girl in a Band on my Libby app and basically thought, well, what have I got to lose? So I started it.

Right away I was struck, as I had been during the interview, by her affectless, flat voice. But as she talked about her childhood in Southern California and her relationship with her more-than-difficult brother, I began to understand why she talked that way. I won’t spoil it, but there’s a reason for it. She opens up in this book  as she takes you on a journey through her life, and although I still find her self-important, I also see her as strong-willed, creative, independent, and admirable. The kind of self-important she is is the kind she needs to be, as a person and as an artist, and I’m no longer put off by it.

I do wish she had gone into more detail about the earlier, better days of her relationship with Thurston Moore, but I can see why that would have been painful for her. And the audiobook version really missed an opportunity—there’s a long section where Gordon talks about a number of different songs and her memories relating to them, and it would have been great, especially for someone like me who isn’t especially familiar with the band’s oeuvre, to have heard the song in conjunction with the narration.

But overall, the book is well-written in a quirky, somewhat choppy way, and I’m glad I got to know her just a bit. Verdict: if you like memoirs or are a fan of the band, read it. You'll discover a person worth knowing about.

I'm still not a fan of the band, though.

Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite

read by Chris Patton

I so wanted to get into this book. This was my second time through it, my first having been in the early-to-mid Aughts after a friend who is a horror fan (and now a horror writer—hi, Ben!) loaned it to me. Actually, he first loaned me another book of hers, Drawing Blood, and although I’m not generally a tremendous horror fan myself, I loved it. I remember not loving this one quite as much, but still, I got into it. It was a vampire book from, in part, the point of view of the vampires, after all; and it took place, in part, in New Orleans. I’m a complete sucker for all of that.

Not so much this time, though. Drawing Blood stands the test of time by being charmingly time-capsule-like. Lost Souls, though, fails the same test by charmlessly and blatantly pandering to the sensibilities of the horror-goth kids of the 90s, mindlessly repeating Anne Rice-esque tropes while splattering gratuitous gore everywhere. Sad to say, I didn’t even make it all the way through this time around.

It starts sometime in the late 70s or very early 80s. A very old vampire named Christian runs a bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans and notices a young girl spending a lot of time there. She believes there are vampires and is hoping to meet some there, in hopes of becoming one herself—though why she should believe this and why she should suspect they hang out at this bar is never explained. She’s more right than she knows, but our barkeep never reveals himself to her. And she’s wrong about one critical thing: in this reality, vampires are born, not made. So even if she does find the beings she seeks, it won’t do her any good.

In fact she does end up meeting some, and it does her much worse than “not any good.” Three old vampire friends of Christian’s roll into town for a visit and end up partying with the girl and impregnating her before taking off for the next chapter of their monotonously rollicking life on the road. After that Christian takes her in, giving her work at the bar and letting her live with him--but never bothering to explain that all vampire pregnancies end in the death of the mother, as the infant invariably eats its way out.

This takes place, and Christian disposes of the body very dispassionately and then drives up north and leaves the infant on a random doorstep with a note pinned to it. In the note he says that the baby’s name is Nothing and that he’ll bring luck to those who raise him.

So that’s all setup. Nothing grows up to be a teenaged psychopath—actually all the vampires pretty much act like teenaged psychopaths, aside from Christian, who acts like a tired old psychopath—and runs away from home and toward an inevitable encounter with his vampire dad and cohort, and also with the two main human characters.

These are Ghost and Steve. They are two young men from a small rural town called Missing Mile, North Carolina, which is also where much of Drawing Blood takes place. Ghost is a spooky kid who has visions. His best friend, roommate, and bandmate is Steve, a self-absorbed rapist. Both are bisexual—seemingly everyone in this book is bisexual—but they don’t appear to be lovers, just very close friends.  Their band, Lost Souls, gives the book its name and provides the plot device that brings the two of them and all the vampires and Steve’s ex-girlfriend and rape victim, Ann, onto a collision course.

Nothing and his father, Zillah, become lovers and then discover their relationship—which delights them both and cements their union, with Zillah becoming fixatedly possessive and Nothing becoming fixatedly dependent. Zillah impregnates Ann and takes off for New Orleans. Ann becomes fixated on Zillah and decides to follow him there, and Ghost decides to follow her and try to save her. This was the point at which I stopped caring about what happened to any of these crazy and painfully improbably people and stopped reading.

If this is the sort of book you like, you’ll really like this book. A lot of people do.

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

Such a good book. I couldn’t get over how good this book was the whole time I was reading it—and that was after thoroughly enjoying How to Build a Girl. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to think twice about reading it in public. There was one, comparing a man’s parts to a turnstile, that was so good that I had to call my partner and repeat it to him and laugh all over again.

First off: no, you don’t have to have read How to Build a Girl to enjoy this book… but it would probably help. If you haven’t already, I recommend it. It’s a terrific book in itself and I’ve already reviewed it on this blog.

Second: if swearing, casual drug use, excessive drinking, and frank discussions of sex that don’t mince words aren’t your bag, this is not the book for you.

Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you a bit more about this fabulous book. It’s about Johanna Morrigan (AKA Dolly Wilde) again, but now it’s 1994. She’s 19, living in London, and a successful writer. She’s still desperately in love with John Kite, and he still doesn’t return her affections, but never mind: she has a plan. She’s going to write him into being in love with her.

Along the way, she’ll have to somehow get her marijuana-addled dad to move out of her flat, teach John to value his teen girl fans, and—and this is the whopper—decide what to do about being very publicly slut-shamed by the entire London music scene after a disastrous encounter with a Famous.

This is How to Build a Girl for the #metoo era. Tremendous fun. Read it!