CBR16 Book 64: "Obsidio" by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Page count: 615 pages

Audio book length: 13 hrs 1 min

Rating: 5 stars

CBR16 Sweet Books: Binge

CBR16 Bingo: Celestial (set in space. I'm sure the characters observe lots of stars on their epic journeys through space)

Spoiler warning: this is the third and final book in the Illuminae Files. A lot of stuff happened in the previous two novels, and it will be impossible to review this book without referring to some significant plot points. Additionally, I don't see how this book would be a satisfying reading experience taken out of context. So if you aren't up to date, and have finished Illuminae and Gemina, skip this review until you can return unspoiled. Or you know, read it and get minor plot spoilers. It's your life, you do you.

'

Previously in these books. The evil BeiTech corporation attacked an illegal mining colony on a small ice planet called Kerenza. They also deployed some scary biological weapons with disastrous results. Only very few of the refugees who originally escaped Kerenza in various rescue ships are still alive, now doing their best to stay alive on the Hypatia. They were trying to get to the wormhole at Heimdall station, but BeiTech's evil goons arrived before them and did their best to wipe out everyone there as well, trying to cover the tracks of their evil actions. Now the Heimdall space station is no more, the wormhole is useless and the survivors from Heimdall station need to join forces to survive. Luckily, the leader of the BeiTech assassination squad had a pretty cool spaceship that they now have access to, but it wasn't really designed to hold and transport several thousand passengers.

'

Our intrepid YA heroes include Kady, Ezra, Hanna, and Nik, not to mention Nik's genius cousin Ella. Despite all the amazing feats these young people have managed to perform, a lot of the older crew members now distrust and underestimate them, which leads to conflict and frustration. They discover that there are still people alive on Kerenza and that BeiTech hasn't been able to mine enough fuel to leave the place yet, but the clock is ticking, and despite the reluctant mining crew's many attempts at sabotage and delay, soon the evil corporate overlords will have what they need to leave for good, and whatever survivors are still on Kerenza will be disposed of.

On Kerenza, we are introduced to two new young rebels to cheer for, even though Rhys is working as an engineer for BeiTech and is now forced to work with the mercenary soldiers on the planet itself. He is shocked to reunite with his old girlfriend, Asha, who also happens to be Kady Grant's cousin. After a very passionate love affair a few years back, where both of them made some questionable decisions and got involved with some unsavoury people, Asha and Rhys were forced apart. Rhys was enrolled in a military academy, and Asha was sent to live with her relatives on Kerenza. While actually a pharmacy trainee, she now works as a nurse and pathologist at the only med centre left on Kerenza, and she is also a member of the resistance trying to sabotage BeiTech's remaining operations as much as possible. She can't believe that the man she loved is now part of the evil organization who is oppressing her friends and neighbours, but obviously, there is more to the story that she knows - and it will surprise no one that Rhys isn't actually a villain.

So we have the desperate people trying to stay alive on Kerenza, and the harried survivors returning through space from Heimdall station, on a ship that may not have enough resources to get everyone safely there in time. It's clear that these brave young people have to outsmart BeiTech once and for all, and to do that, they also need to make sure that all the atrocities are documented. So in this book, we finally find out how a lot of the material we've been reading for the past two books was assembled, and we discover the identity of the snarky young tech who has been narrating all of the video files throughout.

This is the first of the books I read partially in audiobook, after recommendations from among others, my friend cheerbrarian (she also has a podcast). I don't know if I would have liked the audiobooks from the start, knowing how many different types of text are collected in the novels, but having read the other two in paperback, having this as an audiobook for when I was out and about was great. I have also gotten the audios of the previous two and can see myself using them when I want to reread in the future.

This YA series is unlike anything I've ever read before and it made me feel pretty much all the feels at some point or another. I've been scared, grossed out, I have laughed and cried. Despite all of these events clearly being told after the fact at a tribunal for the head of BeiTech industries, so it's obvious that our band of heroes will be OK in the end, I was still on the edge of my seat and scared that one or more of them wouldn't make it. It's also important to note that while our protagonists survive, these books have death counts in the multiple thousands. So many innocent (and not so innocent) people die, in all sorts of horrible and/or tragic ways, and yet you feel elated and happy at the conclusion of the trilogy, because a little core of found family is safe and well, despite everything. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR12 Book 82: "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" by Max Brooks

Page count: 352 pages

Audio book length: 12 hrs 9 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

Official book description:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the audiobook captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the listener, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

As it's getting harder for me to find the motivation and time to read (and review) coupled with the fact that I'm getting older and more set in my ways, I have a tendency to pick up only books I'm pretty sure I'm going to like, and rarely move out of my comfort zone. I've also gotten better about just giving up on books that just aren't working for me. This year, that was The Three-Body Problem, seriously, after a third of the book, I gave up, read the Wikipedia summary, which was just as boring and confusing to me as the book had been, and concluded that I'm just never going to read that book. One consequence of only picking books in my "safe zone" is that it gets harder for me to pick my worst of the year, as I rarely finish and review books I truly loathe anymore. Another consequence, of course, is that I rarely get properly surprised. 

One exception to this comes from my book club selections. There's obviously the Cannonball Read book club, and also my fantasy/sci-fi club, which meets the first Wednesday of every month (sadly only on-screen now, with corona restrictions). Not all of the books of the month are books I would have picked up on my own (this is also why I've read part of, but not finished the aforementioned The Three-Body Problem). Our book pick for October (to be discussed in November) was this, World War Z. The book is not exactly new,  so I'd heard about it, but never read it - because I really am not a big fan of zombies. The fact that the movie adaptation was supposed to be dire didn't exactly make me more excited about it.

Still, I try to show up prepared and like to have read at least part of the books in question. Another member recommended the all-cast audiobook (telling me to make sure I got the full text, not the abridged version), so I got it on Audible. Within only a few chapters, I was utterly engrossed and found myself listening to the book every chance I got. This book was such a wonderful surprise because I'd thought I would suffer through it, getting squicked out by horror and gore, and instead found myself fascinated by the way the story is told and the way Max Brooks (who I also had no idea was the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft until I read up a bit about him) structures his narrative. I will be very surprised if this book isn't on my top 10 of the year - something I wouldn't have believed before I picked it up. 

I have a Masters Degree in history, and for much of my university courses, I specialised in medieval history and particularly social history at that. I really am not all that bothered about battles, politics, various heads of state, and the like, give me the nitty-gritty of how people lived and all of these big events impacted on regular people, and I will eat it up. So a book chronicling the aftermath of what is known as the zombie wars, where we hear from ex-soldiers, scientists, politicians, regular people and so forth all over the world, which in itself was very refreshing. There is no singular focus on America and Americans here, but "witness accounts" from every part of the globe, even Antarctica, and even features interviews with ex-astronauts. The book covers part of the actual war, but also a lot of the aftermath, and the changes the zombie outbreak caused to society, including social, political, religious, environmental, and financial developments. 

As with Station Eleven, which was certainly a strange book to reread during a global pandemic, a book where the various government powers are criticised for their shortsightedness and how ill-prepared they are to handle a global crisis also took on unexpected additional relevancy now - with the death toll from Covid-19 still rising steadily, especially in the USA. The book was picked for our book club long before we knew what this year was going to look like, so as with Station Eleven, it was just one of those strange coincidences.

I'm really glad that I turned out to be wrong about this book, and my fellow book club member who recommended the full cast version was not wrong. It's an excellent way to listen to the book, and it makes the fates of the various people we meet seem all the more realistic, as you hear them not through the voice of one narrator, but as if you were listening to actual interview recordings. The voice cast is very star studded (go to Wikipedia to see the full list) and I had fun trying to identify some of the actors taking part.

This book should stand as a reminder to me that it's important that I still read outside of my comfort zone occasionally and that I try genres and books that I think are going to be difficult to read or that might make me uncomfortable because occasionally I discover a new favourite - and that's never a bad thing. 

Judging a book by its cover: I've got to admit, the rather plain and unremarkable cover of this book is one of the reasons I've never really bothered to give the book much of a second look. It's not exactly inviting, in shades of muddy brown, with only the plain title on the cover. Doesn't look too riveting, does it?

Crossposted by Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Books 65-67: "The Sandman, part 1" by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

Page count: 632 (covers the collected volumes of Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country)

Audiobook length: 10 hrs 54 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

#CBR12 Bingo: Happy (I never thought that Sandman could be adapted into an audio story, so this made me very happy indeed)

Official book description:

When The Sandman, also known as Lord Morpheus - the immortal king of dreams, stories and the imagination - is pulled from his realm and imprisoned on Earth by a nefarious cult, he languishes for decades before finally escaping. Once free, he must retrieve the three “tools” that will restore his power and help him to rebuild his dominion, which has deteriorated in his absence. As the multi-threaded story unspools, The Sandman descends into Hell to confront Lucifer, chases rogue nightmares who have escaped his realm, and crosses paths with an array of characters from DC comic books, ancient myths, and real-world history, including: Inmates of Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, Doctor Destiny, the muse Calliope, the three Fates, William Shakespeare , and many more. 

In July 1998, my life changed forever. In those days, I still lived in a suburb of Oslo and didn't necessarily visit the centre of the city all that often. When I did, I always took a trip to Avalon, the dedicated fantasy/sci-fi/all things nerd book shop there (the book shop sadly closed long ago now). On a display table near the front of the shop was Fables and Reflections, by no means the first volume in the long-running Sandman series, but an excellent introduction. I think Neil Gaiman had recently visited Oslo for the first time, and the shop was promoting his most famous work. I had never read any graphic novels before but was drawn by the description of the series. I bought the book, started reading it on the bus on the way home, and my mind was blown. I had never read anything like it before, and I was utterly hooked on the stories of dreams and nightmares, the family dramas with references to all manner of mythology, classical literature, comic books, and the like. 

This was a time when Norwegian libraries were not particularly well-stocked with fantasy of any kind, and certainly not English-language comic books and graphic novels (I'm happy to say that that's changed massively over the last 20 years - one of the public library branches in Oslo is now dedicated entirely to comics and graphic novels in different languages. Hence, I had to buy each volume before I could read the full story. My records show that it took me about a year to get all ten volumes of trade paperbacks, some of which I've now had signed by Neil Gaiman himself. 

Funny story, one of them isn't actually signed to Malin, because my dear friend Ben was a bit of an idiot back when he took my copy of Preludes and Nocturnes to a signing in Newcastle. This was back before I really knew him, and he was still just my then-boyfriend, now-husband Mark's school friend. See, Ben and another of Mark's school friends, Ruth, had initially joked that his Norwegian girlfriend's name was Helga. By the time Ben was taking one of my precious trade paperbacks to Newcastle to get it signed as a favour, he'd met me several times, and knew my name was Malin. But when he got to the front of the signing line, and Mr. Gaiman asked him who to sign the book to, Ben (lovable moron) blurted out Helga, and only after he'd left the shop remembered that it was not, in fact, my actual name. This is also why I have a signed copy of Anansi Boys, where Neil Gaiman apologizes to me for getting my name wrong. 

 

Anyway, the long and rambling introduction to this review is included to show just how long Sandman has been part of my life, and how much it means to me. It was my introduction to graphic novels and the writings of Neil Gaiman. It showed me a whole new way of storytelling. I never thought it could be adapted well in a million years (I'm still skeptical about the Netflix series). I've rarely been so happy to tell you I was wrong. This was an excellent adaptation, and I think I liked parts of it a lot more than the actual original comics issues (while a lot of the artists and artwork used in the series was state of the art back in the 1990s, it's sometimes a bit "grimy-looking" now - unless you have the stunning Absolute Sandman volumes, that cost a small fortune). 

So how do you successfully adapt what is both a written and a visual medium, you ask? You hire an excellent ensemble cast, so that all of the various characters we meet in the pages of the first three volumes of the graphic novel opus are voiced by different and distinct voices (there's a huge ensemble of people who do multiple voices over the course of the audio drama, but never in the same scenes, making it much easier to keep track of who's speaking at any given time). You also get someone to narrate and describe the various scenes and characters in them (or occasionally add descriptions of the setting and characters to the inner monologues of one or several of the people in a scene), so the listener is told what they would have seen on the page if they were reading the comic. That the narrator here is Neil Gaiman himself (whose voice I find very soothing) just seems extra fitting.

I read several reviews of this audio drama that complained that with very few exceptions, everything is kept exactly as it was in the original 90s comics, with no attempts to adapt or bring it more up to date. This was mentioned as a criticism, I didn't think it was a problem. I also know the source material being adapted exceptionally well, having read the comics multiple times. Even so, as I kept listening, I actually pulled my trade paperbacks off the shelf to halfway follow along. To someone who's never read the original graphic novels, it may be harder to follow the plot, even though the team who adapted did a very good job in filling in with background sounds to give you an idea of action and plot.

Each issue of the comic is one approximately 30-minute long episode, with little audio credits and everything. It felt like I was listening to an old-fashioned radio play, and I loved it. How well the adaptation works for you may also depend on how you feel about James McAvoy. I love him and his voice, and think he did a splendid job voicing Lord Morpheus. Kat Dennings worked surprisingly well as Death. The only one I wasn't entirely happy with was the guy playing Desire, whose voice just didn't "fit" with my mental image of what it should be. 

A brief trigger warning towards the end. In both Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House and Dream Country, there are elements of horror. The issue 24 Hours, for instance, where a number of people are kept trapped in a diner by an escaped Arkham Asylum inmate in control of Dream's ancient ruby and are slowly driven increasingly more insane over the course of the story was even more horrifying than it is on the page because all the various people got their own voices and felt more real than they do when you just read them. It was harder to stay detached. There are also stories of serial killers, and child abuse and women being raped and beaten - so be aware of that. 

Now I'm left impatiently waiting and hoping that this becomes enough of a success for Audible that they'll choose to adapt the rest of the series as well. Recording audio dramas must be something that should be perfectly doable even now, with production halted on so many things due to Covid-19.

While I'm choosing to use this for my "Happy" square for this year's bingo, it could just as easily have fit with "Nostalgia", since this was such an important part both of my adolescence and so ground-breaking for comics in general during the 1990s. 

Judging a book by its cover: I have tried to track down the name of the cover artist for the dark, broody image of Dream, without any luck. It's a good depiction of Lord Morpheus, and I like that it looks like he himself is made up of sand or dust and kind of blurring at the edges a bit. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.