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Oops!
Instead, I am going to talk about how my kobo has made me better at using the library, because it has good Libby integration, and the primary upshot of this so far has been for me to DNF several books.
Historically, I don’t even start reading library books, really, before they are due back. I just check them out, the spirit fails to move me to start reading them, I read some other book instead, and then return the book unread to the library. (The beginning of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, where Calvino describes all the piles of books including the ones judging you for not getting around to reading them, really speaks to me!)
Anyway I searched for recommendations of books like Piranesi, or A Deadly Education, or Ancillary Justice, or Tombs of Atuan, or Constellation Games, or The Locked Tomb or Count of Monte Cristo, and got a bunch of recommendations.
So far the best of those was the Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang. A messily plotted novel that works despite a lot of narrative jumping around, partially because the world building is clearly fully developed but not over exposited on the page. I was left wanting more, some threads didn’t go anywhere, or felt like rug pulls, but sometimes a messy interesting thing is better than a neat boring thing. (Usually. Always? Definitely usually.)
The worst, for me, for sure, was The Memory Police, which had a super compelling premise (an authoritarian island culture where the government disappears things physically and from people’s memories). The premise was hampered by completely incoherent logistics/worldbuilding. The narrator, for example, does remember things that have been disappeared, and tells us about them. But the narrator is explicitly not immune to the memory erasing powers of the authorities. So how can the narrator remember birds, the ferry, etc.? Good question! Distracting question! I read some reviews where I learned that the opening scene where the narrator finds out about perfume (which just seems like water to the narrator, having been influenced by the disappearance of the category “prank gifts” I guess?
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