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salt marsh

mouse@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 4 months ago

it's me, I'm the creator and admin of BookWyrm

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salt marsh's books

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reviewed The Witness for the Dead

The Witness for the Dead (2021, Tor Books) 4 stars

A standalone novel in the fantastic world of Katherine Addison's award-winning The Goblin Emperor.

When …

a beautiful world to exist in

4 stars

This was one of those books that when it ended, I missed getting to be in the world. It has a kind of understated, slice-of-life feel, with a lot of detail and reverence paid to the minutia of daily life and community relationships, that felt more prominent to me than the murder mysteries. Addison writes with an immense amout of compassion and tenderness, and for me that is what makes this book, and The Goblin Emperor, transcend what they would be on their face, in terms of plot.

The writing style drops you into the cultural nuances of the society largely without explanation, and you can infer, for example, what different honorifics mean through context. I really really like this and I think overall its very well done, but I think it would be more daunting if I hadn't already read The Goblin Emperor, and there were some …

Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart (2001, University of Texas Press) 2 stars

The earliest known author of written literature was a woman named Enheduanna, who lived in …

Very interesting material, not so interesting book

2 stars

The subject matter of this book is fascinating but I found the book itself disorganized and not terribly well written, and the author seems to be projecting intensely onto Enheduanna from scant evidence.

While I don't know anything about Sumer, I found a lot of her scholarship kinda fishy, and frankly it had a bit of TERF-y smell (although that might just be a second-wave-feminist smell that has developed a bad association for me).

reviewed Docile by K. M. Szpara

Docile (2020, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 1 star

A science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power, a …

nope nope nope

1 star

Content warning racism, sexual violence

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018, Holt & Company, Henry) 2 stars

Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of …

Disappointing and poorly defended

1 star

This was such a frustrating read because I agree with so many of the problems he identifies with social media, but I found his reasoning deeply flawed.

To the extent that this is a diatribe about how unpleasant social media is in his personal experience, I was mostly onboard, but the difference, I think, between a rant and a book is rigor.

His citations were mostly news articles and wikipedia entries, and he relies heavily on a superficial understanding of popular, flawed studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment. He makes bold, sweeping, and imprecise statements about the a number of things, particularly the nature of addiction and how addicts behave, without any backup or indication that he is speaking in any way besides entirely off the cuff.

I was disappointed as well in how stuck his reasoning is within the frame of capitalism and tech solutionism.

Nearly Roadkill (1996, High Risk Books) 5 stars

"A novel written in cyberspace, Nearly Roadkill is an Infobahn erotic thriller without any boundaries …

like Hackers (1995) but with GENDER

5 stars

This book has the energy of Hackers (1995) but with an incredibly interesting and thoughtful exploration of gender, loads of sex, and a prescient read of corporate influence on internet culture.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020, Tor Books) 4 stars

A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget.

France, 1714: in …

I didn't ship it

3 stars

This book was fine, I can see why people really liked it. It's well written and the plot is solid, but I found the picture perfect artsy Brooklyn courtship tedious, I didn't find either of the main characters all that compelling, and the tropes it relies on a little uninteresting. I was disappointed by how lacking in oddness or eccentricity it was, how credible but unremarkable the characters are.