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Author: Reid

Exhalation–Ted Chiang

This is a collection of short stories. Some of them really stuck with me, some of them dragged on far too long and I wouldn’t have kept listening had I not been on an airplane. I enjoyed the author commentary after each story. Two stories really stuck with me. The first, Exhalation, is about some robots who begin to learn who exactly they are and how their universe was created, due to the fact that…

A Psalm for the Wild-Built–Becky Chambers

I listened to this relatively short novella on a long plane flight. I have liked previous books by Chambers and had seen this one around so I thought I would give it a try. This is the first in a series of ‘Monk and Robot’ stories. In a far future, humans live on a distant planet, and have reverted to simpler lives after their robots gained sentience and the two races parted ways. Our main…

End of year update

It has been a challenging year personally and professionally, and I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped or planned. I started the year with some goals to revise and submit short fiction, participate in the “write-a-story-a-week” challenge with someone on a writing Discord (he succeeded), and edit my novel. I did very little of this. I ended up going the whole year without submitting anything, but at least I didn’t get any…

The Beauty–Aliya Whiteley

I found out about this author last month from a promotional post on Bluesky for her latest book (Presumably The Misheard World, though I can’t find the post) and now I’ve read two of her books. I am not generally a horror fan, but I think it is more gore and graphic violence, and this book, while not without violence and gore, didn’t read as horror to me. I guess I need to keep expanding…

Record of a Spaceborn Few–Becky Chambers

I started this book about a month ago, and just couldn’t get into it. After a few weeks, and starting and finishing my previous book, I decided to try again. This time, for whatever reason, I was able to get into the characters and the world and I finished it in about 5 days. I read “A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” several years ago and I knew that this book was set…

Skyward Inn — Aliya Whiteley

I am still trying to process this read. Due to some personal things, I have not been able to read or write in about 2 months. I tried to read and listen to several books, and just couldn’t get anywhere. I saw a post about this author on Bluesky, and her writing was described as literary, surreal, and unexpected, but also this novel was fairly short, so I decided to give it a try. Apparently…

Broken Earth Trilogy (DNF) — N.K. Jemisin

I really wanted to like this trilogy, but it took me months to listen to the first book (had to renew my library book for The Fifth Season three times, and The Obelisk Gate twice) and I just couldn’t get through the second book. I know that not every book is for everyone, but all three books won the Hugo and I felt like I should read them. In the end, they are too much…

The Forever War–Joe Haldeman

There isn’t a lot I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. I saw (did not meet) Joe Haldeman at the Nebula’s last year, but this book has been recommended to me so many times for so many years. I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s a war novel, and due to time dilation with relativistic travel, while only a few years pass in the experience of the protagonist, hundreds…

The Handmaid’s Tale–Margaret Atwood

At this point in the theocracy/dictatorship/oligarchy that is brewing in the US, I figured it was well past time for me to read this book. It’s been on my TBR pile for a while and with a 4 day trip without internet, and with lots of down time, it was a good opportunity for me to finally make it happen. This is an important book and everyone should read it. I’m classifying it as hard…

108700

After an ultra-marathon day of editing (6-8 hours in the chair) I finished the first round of structural and grammatical edits for my novel “The Survivors” just now. I actually don’t remember when it was I printed it out and made in-line comments by hand, but I think it was last summer. It has been very slow going, but I am so happy with how it turned out. Most importantly, I had stalled on editing…