Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

by Rebecca

Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
2021

This book was a lot of fun and I read all 476 pages in three days. I do love a good science montage scene and and this was full of them. It was also extremely similar to Weir’s breakout novel, The Martian, which I had enjoyed very much. This one is obviously less bound by actual science — introducing both aliens and alien technology — but it’s clear that Weir is trying to at least keep some of the math accurate.

The book tells parallel stories of Dr. Ryland Grace waking up alone on a spaceship with no memories and figuring how what he needs to do and then doing it, interspersed with the flashbacks that tell the history that got him to that point as his memories return to him. I would sometimes wince at the choices the main character was making but I appreciated the in-story acknowledgements that his decision making skills were compromised because he’s working under a lot of stress with imperfect knowledge. I did have to suspend disbelief that it worked out for him (and humanity) as well as it did.

There were some points when I had to pretty actively suspend disbelief, less about the science technology and more about the social decisions. Having all the world governments come together to send an incredibly expensive space mission that *might* have results in 26 years seems a lot less likely than most of them deciding that it would be cheaper and quicker to come up with a local solution, but that’s not actually addressed at all: the premise is all the world unites to do this one mission. Talking around spoilers: At another point, there was an argument between two characters where it was pretty obvious that Weir was writing it purely for the drama of a conflict but didn’t actually know what the real counter argument was, so put a pretty dumb strawman argument into our protagonist’s voice. Events could easily have played out the exact same way just more interesting if it had been a real argument between two valid sides.

I enjoyed this book. It was fun and kept my attention. However, the more I think about it, the more the flaws stand out. In some ways it reminds me of Tom Godwin’s short story, The Cold Equations (1954). Both are science fiction stories that deal with the trolley problem and making hard decisions while ignoring how much their premises focuses on physics while ignoring engineering: the math works out, but it’s really bad engineering to create systems that are so inflexible. This particular book also has a meta-layer of unintentional satire provided by the interview in which Weir stated that his writing isn’t political at all, which is so fractally wrong that it’s more mind boggling than any part of the actual book.

So in summary: I enjoyed it, but it feels a lot like some of the classic science fiction stories of generations past with both the pluses and minuses that entails.

How to Love in Sanskrit by Rao & Mahesh

by Rebecca

How to Love in Sanskrit: Poems
edited and translated by Anusha Rao & Suhas Mahesh
2024

This is a delightful little book of poetry, with 218 poems from a variety of authors across millennia, originally written in Sanskrit (more or less), and selected as representations for how love was and is conceived of in that language. An innate part of poetry is that it involves evocative language of metaphors and references and it’s fascinating to see what comparisons are impactful in other cultures. For example: a lot of British poetry will refer to the coldness of a scornful lover or the warmth of a loving relationship; in contrast, a lot of this poetry from India talks about the burning heat of abandonment or the cool soothing presence of a lover.

I’m not much of a poetry reader, but I bought this book specifically for the introduction which discussed the process of translating the poems, and I wish that had been more extensive, or even (oh how I wish!) a matching description of the process for each individual poem. Part of the introduction used a single poem as an example and went through the stages of: 1. what it was in the original (which I couldn’t read at all), 2. what it was in the direct literal translation (which was oddly disjointed as such types of translations always are), 3. what it meant in the conceptual translation (which made more sense), and 4. finally what these translators created as the end result (which was delightful!)

These poems are mostly quite short and often quite funny, and the translators have made them very accessible.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Anna

By Omar El Akkad

I’ve been checking out so many cozy mysteries and fluffy romances in a desperate attempt to drown out the news, but can’t seem to stick with any of them. I finally decided that the cognitive dissonance wasn’t doing me any good, and I should just face reality directly.

This was a painful read, of course, but I felt relief as well to finally read a direct encapsulation of my growing general discomfort and discontent: “One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of politics, opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election cycle, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something great. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow.”

This. This is what I’d been feeling, and then feeling guilty about it, like I was just being fatalistic and giving up, which El Akkad also addresses as a way the status quo tries to harangue people into continuing to toe the general line. This is what I felt working the polls during the 2024 primary, with the justifiably furious voters participating in the uncommitted protest (which is still being ignored and minimalized by the Democratic Party). I tried to explain my sympathy for these voters (and own participation) to more centrist liberal relatives who couldn’t understand why people couldn’t take a ‘rational’ approach of voting for the lesser of two evils, when both parties were literally killing their family members. I only wish I had El Akkad’s eloquence: “What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.”

Though I would hesitate to try to categorize this book, I would guess it falls primarily in a cross-section of politics and ethics. However, El Akkad weaves in his family and his own personal experience with displacement and immigration, providing small, individual snapshots that create a necessary balance and foil for when the sheer scale and scope of the genocide becomes too much to take in cognitively. This blend reminded me strongly of Why Are They Angry With Us?, which also bares some stark similarities between how Israel is treating Palestinians and how the USA treats Black Americans.

Mid-book, I had tickets to see Hamilton (which absolutely lived up to the hype 10 years later!), though I wasn’t at all sure I’d be in the right frame of mind for a rah-rah-founding-fathers show. Luckily, it was way more about how messy and deeply flawed the start of this nation was, with unacceptable compromising being made around slavery by people who should have and did know better, or at least that was my takeaway at this point.

Hamlet

by Anna

by The Royal Exchange Theater (on Kanopy)

I want to expand the scope of reviews on this site for a few reasons: 1) I have cut all my paid streaming subscriptions because fuck them; 2) I currently only stream on Kanopy through my library, which seems relevant to this site; and 3) I just watched the Royal Exchange Theater production of Hamlet starring Maxine Peake, and it is intense!

First of all, it is over three hours long, so I watched it over a couple of nights. It has a super pared down set, which I imagine was really intimate in person, but I worried the effectiveness was getting a little lost on the small screen. In the end, though, the acting, Peake in particular, is so combustive that it all hits stronger than any I’ve seen before.

Peake’s performance feels like the dark side of Mary Martin’s famous Peter Pan. With her blonde pageboy cut, Peake captures true teenage dirtbag, making her Hamlet an absolute disaster of a person. Most performances of Hamlet elevate it to an artistic but fairly straight-forward tragedy. Peake’s Hamlet is a very young man in a horrifying situation making everything much worse by his poor judgment and resulting terrible behavior.

I really love Shakespeare performances, but it has been too long since I’d seen one that felt like it brought a fresh approach to the text (shout out to Scotland, PA, one of my favorites, Rotten Tomatoes be damned). This one blew my hair back in a way that I expect was similar to the audiences at the Globe seeing Hamlet for the first time. It wasn’t always a fun experience (Hamlet really can be such a brat), but I was enthralled!

Wine for Roses

by Anna

By Emily O’Malley Liu

Our weather in the Midwest has been real wonky the last month – a couple of weeks ago, we had temperatures in the 80s, which made everyone itchy to start planting their (our) gardens. Every professional was warning us to hold our horses, that we are not frost-free until Memorial Day, and sure enough this week we’ve gone down to a freeze, which has made me very cranky.

All this to say, Wine for Roses, a gentle, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast, was not only soothing for my general nerves but for my gardener nerves, too. I can’t plant any of my own seeds yet, but I can read all about Ethan, a gardener hired to restore the rose garden at an estate overseen by a reclusive trustee. Bless Liu, who even filed down some of the rougher edges of the original story. When I told Rebecca about this book, she asked how it deals with the whole kidnapping, and I was like, oh, there is no kidnapping, it’s just straight employment! My poor frayed nerves were starting to twang a bit towards the end, as well, but Liu managed to capture the general feeling of the original without the guilt and dying.

Liu has created a marvelous world of hedge witches and casual magic set in an otherwise very prosaic rural Indiana. This is her first published novel, which shows in some loose details, but I’m very much looking forward to reading more from her, and I hope she continues to play around with this world, as well.

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

by Rebecca

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me
by Ilona Andrews
May 31, 2026

I am obsessed with this book; it scratches right at my id and I adore it! The main character Maggie is a modern woman in our real world who has been obsessed for years with a fantasy novel series that was never completed, something along the lines of Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time, except only two books, but she has read them multiple times, has all the details memorized and cares deeply for the characters who all have complex and often devastating lives. In this book, Maggie wakes up one day in the world of that book series, in the opening chapter with absolutely nothing except for her knowledge of how dangerous this society is and what the future holds. What she learns relatively quickly is that if she is killed, she will return to life. Which is a decidedly mixed blessing in a world where torture is just not that uncommon.

But over the course of this book, Maggie uses her knowledge of the world to A) improve her own situation, going from naked and alone in a ditch, to having many allies and socializing at the highest level, B) saving her favorite characters from their tragic fates and giving the villains their just rewards, while C) stumbling over the fact that knowledge from a book does not always perfectly translate into easily recognized personal experiences.

In a time when anxiety in the real world is high, it was great to read a book where the main character knows what’s happening and works to fix it, innocent people get saved and guilty people face consequences. It’s a hefty 470 pages but reads very quickly. I have, in fact, already read it twice now and I am desperate for the sequel to come out despite this first book having been published only 20 days ago. I am ready to read more!

That said, I do have some caveats: First, sometimes events do tend to work out for Maggie in a variety of ways that just fall nicely into place via authorial intent rather than because it makes sense plot ways. I’m giving that a pass because it’s that kind of book: everything is going to work out, the world is on her side, it’s fine. Second, and more seriously, the narration is somewhat casually pro-war crimes. Like, the bad guys commit atrocities and need to be stopped because of that but the good guys also commit atrocities and get reassured that they only did what was necessary to achieve their goals, so it’s all good. I’m fine with giving that a pass too because this is escapist fiction, but in today’s real world climate it does make me nervous to actually recommend anything promoting that moral stance.

But over all, this book just hits so many right notes, has so many great scenes, and keeps me delighted all the way through.

Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary

by Rebecca

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes
written by Tamim Ansary
read by Tamim Ansary
2009

This is an amazing book and I highly recommend it. I listened to the audiobook version which was read by the author, which I always appreciate. It is also unfortunately timely, what with the current war with Iran. I’ve been sitting on this review for a couple of weeks now because I’ve had trouble figuring out how to describe this book, beyond just saying that everyone should read it.

On the one hand, I want to talk about the things I learned — about the history of the Khalifate, the schism between Shia and Sunni, the Mongol holocaust, the various reform movements, and all of the fascinating stories that kept me variously enthralled and horrified, and surprised in how it all fit together. But if I start, I’ll just want to quote the entire book. Ansary has a conversational way of writing about history, both discussing broad themes and recounting specific events, peppered through with humor. With that in mind, this book is a delightful read.

On the other hand, I want to point out how these stories are the background by which whole populations see the world and make decisions based on the patterns in history that they know. Being in the US, protestant Christianity is pervasive and history is told with the US as the focal point, to the extent that it can be a struggle to image an alternative. This book provides an alternative, showing what history looks like when Islam is the pervasive religion and the geography Ansary defines as “the middle world” is the focal point. With that in mind, this is an important read.

This book is very much what it claims to be: it’s a world history book written for a western layperson, and also a demonstration of how subjective even factual history can be, based on which events are considered important or not. In the introduction, Ansary talks about how he was inspired to write this book as a result of having previously written a history textbook, specifically for a Texas school system in 2000, that had a set outline of what was important to discuss, with most of Arab history missing entirely. He was inspired to write a pointed response, since in this book, much of European history is insignificant and the US is barely considered a nation before the late 1800s.

Ansary makes a point that there are many world histories that can be truly told very differently depending on which culture is providing the perspective. World histories told through the East Asian, African, or Native American eyes would have just as little or even less overlap than world histories through Islamic and European eyes have. I kind of want to read those histories now too. But in the meantime, I’ll just have to read Ansary’s other books, because he really is an excellent writer.

While writing up this review, I also discovered that the book is available, in its entirety, on the Internet Archive! Go read it!

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

by Anna

By Greer Stothers

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching Heated Rivalry, completely smitten with its unexpected (to me at least) beauty and sensitivity, so this book was a bit of a whiplash. Written in broad farce, every character and situation is absolutely ridiculous, but once I acclimatized, I had a wonderful time.

I’ve been following Stother on social media (okay, tumblr) for years for high quality cat content on the gorgeous Pangur and Grim, so figured I owed them a preorder of any book they put out, but the title definitely sweetened the deal. The basic premise from the very beginning is that the death of a cowardly knight is prophesized to bring the downfall of an evil sorcerer, so the knight has no recourse but to flee to the sorcerer himself for protection against pretty much everyone. It spirals out from there, and nothing is quite what it seems. A spoiler so minor and obtuse that I think it is more of a teaser: it occurred to me afterwards that if you wanted a comedic fantasy version of The Handmaid’s Tale for some wild reason, you might end up with something similar to this??

With knights, sorcerers, elves, and a handful of mythical beasts, a more natural comparison is to Nimona, and I was somewhat braced for a twist from cute and quirky to poignant. However, instead of poignant, it got real weird, which I love. The blurb on the front says, “Come for the silliness, stay for the twists” and it’s not wrong! The twists cover so many different fandoms that it felt like a brilliant kaleidoscope homage, but in a much more cohesive and satisfying way than you’d imagine. In top reader praise, I started to read slower as I got toward the end to stretch it out more, and upon finishing, immediately went back to read my favorite parts again.

Cinder House by Freya Marske

by Rebecca

Cinder House
by Freya Marske
2025

This is shockingly good! It’s only 136 pages long, a retelling of the Cinderella story, and it starts with Ella’s death, because she’s a ghost for the entire story. The prince is, notably, not a ghost. Also, I have rarely hated a character as much as I hated the second step-sister.

Marske manages to create an incredibly well-developed and fascinating world of magic and politics, a cast of characters who are each unique and complex, and a host of delightful but seemingly-loose threads that all get pulled together into an incredibly satisfying conclusion. All the pieces and plot points were laid out ahead of time such that no action or event happens without plenty of backing for why and how, and yet the twists and turns were still surprising and exciting, and all the more wonderful for how everything slots perfectly into place. I read this in a single evening and am giddy with it! I highly recommend!

I Want To Be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson

by Rebecca

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture here on Earth, A Memoir
by Brenda Peterson
2010

This is an excellent book and I found it quite difficult to read. I read it one chapter at a time with breaks in between and had to renew my library check-out. It’s 275 pages across twelve chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue. It’s a memoir about growing up in an extremely devout Southern Baptist family during a time of great social change where her values and the values of her family are increasingly diverging.

Her whole extended family are devout Southern Baptists who talk excitedly about looking forward to the Rapture, are stalwart Republicans who supported the Vietnam War, don’t believe in global warming, and don’t approve of those hippies. They are also loving people who care for her and for each other, live closely with nature, hold holiday feasts like no one else, and support their friends and neighbors. Peterson realized relatively early that she didn’t have the same faith or beliefs as her family, and thus struggled with how to be true to herself and her beliefs without hurting her loved ones. In a warm and welcoming social group that is all looking forward to the end of the world when they’ll be taken directly to heaven, how can she say that she actually wants to stay behind and protect the world instead?

The twelve chapters of the book progress through time from Peterson’s young childhood, through her education and exploration of other faiths, her young adulthood of trying to find a career path, to being the established nature writer that she grew into. Every chapter is a story about the stretch, pull and tug of growing into someone that doesn’t fit with her family but is also forever a part of that family: how the love and discomfort go side by side, for both her and her family members.

It is very timely as US politics become ever more polarized. I highly recommend it.