sting me with the theremin loudly

lonesome dove: similar to the plot of the book, the act of completing this one felt like a grim exercise in what might alternately be described as duty, habit, and masochistic solitude. i did eventually like some later parts and characters but they didn't outweigh the flat crushing weight of the rest of it. hundreds of pages where nothing happens and when something Does happen it's usually the weather or those sicko indians (dangerous in the same way the other environmental hazards are dangerous, something that occasionally rolls over the group without logic and leaves characters dead or permanently traumatized. the only one of them that gets a name is of course 1000% pure evil). occasionally the descriptions were transporting or the characters funny but i don't have much love for westerns and this one was stereotypical in the worst way. as far as the supposedly masterful characterization goes, for every clara there were 4-5 guys that did not do or say anything meaningful in the entire fucking trip across the country and were all named things like soupy jones. i would also complain about the ending more if i hadn't been so relieved to get to it. i resolve to read as many books as possible in july to make up for this

the bee sting: honestly this one got me pretty obsessed. now This guy knows how to write a character. like unpeeling a horrible rotting onion a single papery layer at a time but in a fascinating way. basically a book about how through the accumulation of stupid choices you didn't realize were important and random happenstance or perhaps Fate you can somehow end up in a life you hate as a person you hate surrounded by people who don't understand you, as told by an extremely dysfunctional irish family in the midst of an economic collapse. but again perhaps more riveting than i'm making it sound. the only part that really made me roll my eyes was when pj was almost abducted by a caricature of an internet pedophile but at least that plotline didn't last very long. otherwise emotionally and thematically it was firing on all cylinders. read it but only if you want an experience of mounting dread that seems like it lasts multiple lifetimes. my best of july

strong female character: zipped through this in one day but not because i liked it so much. idk maybe i should stop expecting myself to get anything out of Autism Memoirs when i am usually not a memoir person and spend most of the reading time in my own head hating every aspect of my personality rather than dissolving into the words. even if i see an intensely relatable sentence like "by the end of this one workday i was trying to punch myself in the head discreetly while my coworkers politely pretended they didn't notice" i feel like i'm hitting myself with a hammer more than, idk, learning coping strategies or even just reading it like any other book. i just end up feeling more self-loathing and hopeless about everything and don't laugh a single time even though this was written by a comedian that i've seen before and liked. sorry fern brady it's literally not you it's me

lone women: this one never ended up hitting for me, imo it had a kind of sparse surface-levelness that reminded me of what i dislike about most short stories even though it was novel length (though apparently it did start its life as a short story by the same author, so go me, ig). flat characters, weird pacing, all its themes screaming in your face like some sort of creature that represents family shame. an actual 2-starrer perhaps

our wives under the sea: also wanted to like it, also felt mostly adrift and feeling at the walls while reading. despite the absurdly close focus (the vast majority of the book is just the two protagonists drifting like jellyfish around their apartment or flashbacks to a submarine where not much new is discovered and they barely even have space to drift either) i never felt like i understood or had a good picture of either of them, even in the portions before leah's transformation--she spends her time in the submarine nearly inert beside her two coworkers, but not even an interesting characterful kind of inert, just a nothing presence, just like she'll be later. if you're gonna just trade POVs back and forth they have to be a little more distinct especially when their plots essentially just repeat each other (bad thing is happening and all i can do is sit there for weeks and months while it does). i don't mind a slow meditative character study but the history of their relationship really just felt like lists of disconnected facts and i'm already forgetting these women's names. definitely a style-over-substance-ass book but i still feel okay giving it 3 stars

far from the light of heaven: boy this month is disappointing. interesting premise and occasionally aesthetics (the lagos system being explicitly Afrofuturist was fun) but just ended up like an armful of disparate unwoven elements being chucked at the wall. the 'locked room mystery' that even the author seems to think is the real plot Really Isn't (we know the killer has to be one of the passengers on the spaceship, but that's basically ALL we know-- and it turns out they are, plus a rogue evil ai living in their head, which is fully explained in one long flashback chapter like 3/4 of the way through after the protag literally runs into them). most of it is Space Action or occasionally Space Bureaucracy or Something Weird Is Here, Whatever (the lambers, the wolf on the cover whose only contribution to anything was Showing Up, the politics of lagos station, experimental critters and carnivorous moss running around that are just there to be inconvenient, etc) rather than useful clues. the moment to moment writing also just feels sparse and awkward, the characters thin enough that in every dialogue exchange i was losing track of who was speaking when (except joké but only because her ummms made her annoying) and the descriptions very bare-bones, which is especially disappointing in a space story. this author is known mostly for other stuff so maybe i'll try that before giving up on him but i'm not optimistic. 2 star

stars in my pocket like grains of sand: very bizarre but in a way that makes this the most engaging older sci-fi i've read lately. possibly goes harder than any fictional property i've ever seen in refuting that "this planet has this 1 biome and this 1 species and this 1 culture" trope. would have read a few more hundred pages just describing weird alien history and weird alien art and weird alien dinner parties and weird alien sex, but alas...that ending (not that it was Bad just that it emotionally got me in a way that matches the themes). iirc this book is most notable for "predicting the internet" (called General Information, a repository of info about thousands of inhabited worlds) but that's not even in the top 10 of things i find most interesting about it. would recommend, feels like it has expanded me somehow