bluejayreads's reviews
837 reviews

 This is, ultimately, just another case where I am not actually the target audience for the book. I picked this up because it covers topics I'm quite interested in - the commodification of self-care that turns the concept of taking care of yourself into just one more thing to buy, the gentrification of good health, the wellness mandate (the idea that there exists a state of perfect health which everyone can achieve and that it is a moral obligation that everyone achieve it), how basic human body management things like "exercise" and "eat veggies" became the compulsive purview of mostly white upper-middle- and upper-class women. And it did have some interesting information. This is one of the few places I've seen that actually goes into the connection between "wellness" and spirituality, which I appreciated. But it tried to cover too much ground in too short a book to really go in-depth into anything. This is very much an overview. Which is not a bad thing! If this isn't a topic that you're fairly familiar with, you will likely find it as eye-opening as the people quoted on the back cover of my copy. But it's not really written for those like me who have already read a lot about the ideas. It's engaging, well-written, and clearly thoroughly researched. It just doesn't go into as much detail and depth as I hoped it would. 

My sample of old science fiction I've actually read is still quite small (to my recollection this and Childhood's End are it), but I'm starting to really appreciate the genre. There's just something appealing about the lack of character focus. Sure, the characters are there and doing things. And they're generally not half bad (although most of what makes them interesting comes from them being some kind of cool alien, a vehicle to show the weird ways this world works - or, in the case of our protagonist, a Mary Sue whose Mary Sue abilities to be very good at everything keep pushing the plot along). It might just be as contrast to the books I've been reading recently, which even in fantasy have been character-first, emotions-forward, and internal monologue-heavy, but I found the characters taking second place to an engaging and wildly creative plot to be refreshing. This whole story has a delightful feeling of being a small story in a much bigger world - sure, there's a lot happening here, but there's also so much hinted at that implies the world is bigger than this handful of characters and the problem(s) they're trying to solve. And the actual plot that is the focus of the book is wonderfully complex, intellectually challenging for both the characters and for me as a reader, and above all wildly creative and unique. (Read: Extremely weird, which is something I generally appreciate in a book.) I'll admit, I really didn't understand why certain aspects or elements were important at times or how they fit into the questions the characters were trying to answer. Frank really leans into the "let the reader figure it out through context clues as they keep reading" style of explaining this weird and wonderful far-future sci-fi world, and either I missed some clues or there actually weren't enough of them because I finished the book still not really understanding several things. But not in a frustrating way - in a way that made me want to read a sequel or two. There actually is a prequel novelette and a second novel in the series, although it's really hard to tell from the descriptions whether they feature any of the same characters or are just set in the same world. But even though I don't know if they will actually answer any of my questions, I'm sure they'll be enjoyable reads. 

I don’t think the title of this book could have called to me any more if it was titled “Jay Needs To Read This Book.” I am generally always working. Most people assume it’s because I have three jobs. But though I do actually need two jobs to pay the bills, the third one is optional and voluntary. I have the time to not be working if I actually knew how to not always be working. I just have some sort of compulsion towards always doing something, and that something is almost always some variety of work. 

I was so excited about the premise of this book that I actually paused when I got to the first exercise to do the exercise (which I’ve only ever done for one other book – generally I read books all the way through and then come back to any exercises). But that actually became the problem here. The first exercise was to write out a list of things that are your work. My list included items like “mending clothing,” “social media” (because, as one of my jobs is digital marketing, I’m hardly ever on social media if I’m not getting paid for it), and “most activities that happen in the kitchen.” Then I looked at the sample list Marlee provided, which included items like “balancing the books,” “posting on Instagram about a new product,” and “uploading a new podcast episode.” And realized that I had fundamentally misunderstood the actual audience of this book. 

This book was not really written for people like me, who take extra jobs even though we don’t need them and who are always working because we have an undefinable, insatiable, irrational drive to always be “productive.” It’s targeted towards people who are self-employed in creative or hobby businesses or influencer-type gigs and who have a hard time drawing the lines between “I’m doing this for work because X is my job” and “I’m doing this for me because I enjoy X.” It is, fundamentally, about figuring out how and where to draw boundaries when your life and your hobbies are your work. (This is, obviously, not my situation. Besides reading, I don’t really have any hobbies. I was hoping this book would teach me how to change that.) 

I’m sure this book would be valuable for people in that particular situation. I did finish it, and though it’s definitely influenced strongly by Marlee’s New Age-style witchy spirituality, a lot of the advice is very good and the exercises are practical. Honestly, I would probably find some of the exercises helpful anyway. But I haven’t done any besides the first one yet because I’m just so disillusioned with this book. I really love the principle and the idea and the concept and the call towards not always working. But I didn’t expect such a narrow focus on specific types of work. I probably will take the time to go back through the exercises and see what ideas I can extract and re-shape to fit my life. But sometimes you just don’t want to have to do that work, you know? 

I didn’t pick this book up entirely by choice. For Valentine’s Day, my local library did a “blind date with a book” promotion where they wrapped the books up in paper and just put a few facts about them on the front. I love the concept (I appreciate anything that gets me to try new things), so I knew I had to try one. Eventually I picked this one, and here’s all I knew about it until I got home from the library and opened the wrapping: 

 

This is where the blind date with a book concept really comes in handy, because I had actually looked at this book on the shelf previously and decided it didn’t look interesting. The back cover introduced way too many characters and not enough plot, and it seemed like it was going to be very unclear what was actually going on and maybe a little dull. But since I had been convinced to check it out, I figured I might as well read it. 

First of all, Joe Abercrombie is clearly a very good writer. This book was extremely well-written, and despite how many things are going on, it’s balanced well, and though the place is slow, it never gets dull. I did not find myself eager and enthusiastic about reading this story as fast as possible, but I also never considered putting it down. It seems strange to call a book full of as much death, violence, and bloodshed a pleasant reading experience, but it was – not slow or dense enough to lose interest, not enthralling enough to get me truly invested in anything that happened or anyone involved, no protagonists I disliked but also none I really loved. (Actually, while they were perfectly fine to read about, every protagonist was a terrible person in their own way.) I had quite a good time reading but didn’t get emotionally involved. It was the violent fantasy version of casual reading. 

But then I finished it. And my husband asked if I liked it. And I realized how difficult of a question that actually was to answer. Because, as previously mentioned, I did have a good time reading it. And there were lots of really interesting aspects. Glokta’s experience of existing in a disabled person in a world that’s built for able-bodied people was intense and quite well-done. Bayaz’s wizardly shenanigans were entertaining and I liked that the history of the magic system was part of the story. And though it was violent, the violence never felt excessive or overdone, except in a way that made it clear that violence is always a tragedy, despite how the people who benefit from it may try to reframe it. So for that, it was good. 

But then we come to the struggle that I really have no idea what was going on, plot-wise. There are a lot of point-of-view characters. There’s Logen, Jezal, and Glokta, as mentioned on the back cover. Despite being on the back cover, Bayaz isn’t a point of view character. There’s also the Dogman, a member of Logen’s old warrior band. And there’s Farro, who doesn’t get introduced until a third of the way throught the book, and who is 98% rage by volume, mostly feral, and whose primary goal in life is to commit as much murder as possible, with or without provocation. So there’s a lot of people running around doing things. But none of those things really coalesce into a plot. Glokta is doing his job; Jezal is shirking swordsmanship training and falling in love; Logen is tagging along after Bayaz, who definitely has plans but isn’t sharing them; the Dogman is traveling with the warrior band; and Farro is trying her best to commit a lot of murder, but is mostly being guided to somewhere by a magical old guy who also has plans but isn’t sharing them. There’s also two brewing wars, some internal politics driven by people who definitely have goals (but again, no indication as to what those are beyond “I want power”), a subplot with a swordsmanship contest that didn’t seem to have a point, and mostly just a lot of little things happening with no overarching plot or even protagonist goals. Farro’s story didn’t even meet up with any of the other characters until the last few chapters. And almost everybody felt like they were wandering through the story with no real goals or interest in doing much beyond live their lives. The only primary character who seems to have any sort of motivation or goal that could drive a plot is Bayaz – and as I said, he’s not telling. 

This whole book really felt more like the setup than a story in and of itself – which is a very strange choice, considering that this book is over 500 pages long and there’s only two more books in the trilogy. (Although there are a bunch of standalone books, a second trilogy, and some short stories in the same world, so who knows what the thought process was here.) At the very end, something happened that felt like the inciting incident of an actual plot. So perhaps things will actually happen in the next book. I’m on the fence about reading it, though. On one hand, The Blade Itself was a perfectly fine read. On the other, it wasn’t any better than “perfectly fine”, and if the next book is anywhere close to this length, that’s an awful lot of pages to commit to when the story doesn’t even have an identifiable plot yet. I don’t regret the time reading this one, if for nothing else than exposure to something I wouldn’t have voluntarily picked up otherwise. But I don’t think I’ll be voluntarily seeking out book two, either. 

This book definitely had an old-timey feel, what with all the flowery language, characters as drivers of plot as opposed to a person you're supposed to connect with, and the whole optimism about the future thing. The way everything shook out was extremely unsettling with strong cosmic horror vibes, made all the more horrifying by the fact that pretty much everyone in the book viewed it as an inevitability at worst, and at best the extremely positive ultimate achievement of the human race. It also left me with a nagging feeling that it didn't quite finish wrapping up. Sure, that's the end of the story, but I still have many questions. And it also feels like there's some sort of message or theme or moral or reflection on the nature or purpose of humanity that I haven't fully grasped but I'm not sure I particularly like. Perhaps the point is to make you think about the ideas rather than provide answers or express opinions about them, and admittedly some of the questions it raises are interesting. Mixed feelings overall towards this weird little book. 

I have not read much poetry, and it's not usually what I gravitate towards. But I was drawn to the topic of this book because I actually appreciate housework. (It's a great combination of physicality and solitude - nobody's bothering me while I'm scrubbing splattered spaghetti sauce off the stove.) So I was excited to see both the good (aforementioned physicality and solitude; the pleasure of a well-cared-for home and of having a home at all) and the bad (it never ends; the persistent gender dynamics of who does it) of housework explored in poetry. And like any collection of anything, there were some I liked more than others. "Perhaps the World Ends Here" snagged my brain and pulled me up hard. "A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs" used housekeeping as a metaphor and I didn't love it. "Upper Peninsula Landscape with Aunts" didn't do it for me from a poetry angle, but I found the subject itself engaging and true-to-life. But I did devour this book in a single evening, found a lot to appreciate it, and spent the rest of the night imagining how my own housework experiences (getting meat out to thaw for tomorrow's dinner, putting away clean dishes, putting away the miscellaneous things that didn't end up where they belonged throughout the day) could be made into a poem. I even considered writing this review as a poem, but I am not good at poetry and it didn't work. So I'd say on the whole it's a solid collection and a good read. 

 For as lackluster as this back cover is, I enjoyed Bloodshot enough to be excited about reading this book. I’m not generally an urban fantasy fan, but I found Raylene a well-done snarky protagonist and surprisingly well-rounded for a badass vampire thief, and the whole book to be more action thriller than urban fantasy mystery. It’s like urban fantasy lite, and I enjoyed it.

This book, though, leans heavier into the urban fantasy elements of the series. Raylene interacts with multiple vampire Houses, she’s hunting down some magical artifacts, and of course there’s the whole sorceress thing. But despite that, it didn’t really have an urban fantasy feel to me. I think that’s because every other urban fantasy I’ve read has had some variety of romance (often a somewhat unhealthy romance), and even though the back cover tries to imply that Raylene and Adrian are going to get together, they are most definitely not. And I think having the first book be so light on the urban fantasy elements helped ease me in, as well.

It’s a general tendency of sequels to be just not quite as good as the first book. That’s not really the case here. Bloodshot and Hellbent are both well-written, well-plotted, interesting, and enjoyable to read. Raylene herself is still great. She is, as I’ve said, remarkably more full and well-written than I anticipated. Her snark works, she’s experiencing some growth, and I love her dynamic with the unique cast of characters she’s surrounded with. She’s dynamic and quite fun to read about, and she’s a large part of the reason why I’ve enjoyed this series.

Plot-wise, there’s a lot happening, but it’s balanced very well and all of it is enjoyable. In many ways, it exactly the same plot as last book – someone wants Raylene to obtain something, but someone else wants that to not happen. Last time, Ian wanted her to get some records and the government didn’t want her to do that. This time, she gets a job to steal some magical bones, and the sorceress who also wants them doesn’t want her to do that. But this one manages to make itself unique in a few ways: First, a single slightly-crazy sorceress uses much different Raylene prevention methods than the federal government. And second, this book leans harder into the urban fantasy aspects of the story. It becomes clear that there’s other supernatural creatures than vampires in this world (although none of them actually show up on-page, they’re mentioned). Raylene interacts with people from three different vampire Houses, and actually visits one House’s house. And there’s a sort-of subplot that’s a little bit trying to figure out who murdered a particular guy (although figuring out the answer requires less “figuring out who did it” and more “walking into the correct room while doing something else,” so it doesn’t really count as a mystery in my mind).

And now that I’ve finished expressing that I found this book quite good and an enjoyable read, I want to comment on the unusual aspect of it – which is that it doesn’t at all continue the plot from Bloodshot. At the end of that book, the main plot points were resolved, but there was still one antagonist on the loose who needed to be hunted down and dealt with. The implication was that this was the setup for the rest of the series, and Raylene and company would be working on tracking down and doing something (possibly murder) to the rest of the people involved in Project Bloodshot. But besides a mention at the beginning of this book that the events of the last book happened and there was at least one guy still out there, nothing in this book had anything to do with any of that.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more books. But there are only two Cheshire Red Reports books, and this one is over a decade old. Cherie Priest has said on her website that she may in the future write a third book in the series, but at this point there’s just the two. Which leaves the whole thing feeling incomplete. Sure, this book wrapped up really well, even resolved a few sub-plots from book one, and left the characters in an overall good place to end a series. But that one major thread left over from book one – that the guy behind Project Bloodshot is still on the loose and Raylene and company intend to hunt him down – is really bothering me. Even just one more book to resolve that would make this feel more complete as a series. Or it’s possible that I’m the only one bent out of shape by that one unresolved thing and everybody else is fine with the way it ended. Who knows.

This complaint really has nothing to do with this book, which I very much enjoyed. This series just feels incomplete with that one major thread left hanging, and I would love to see a third book come out at some point to resolve it. And if Cherie Priest ever decides to take up this series again and write more than one additional book, that works for me, too – I enjoy this series and would be happy to spend a few more books in it.  

I spent a remarkable amount of time trying to track down this book considering I didn’t know very much about it. I knew the title, and there was a photograph of the paperback cover available on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I couldn’t find a description or anything regarding what it was about, and I couldn’t track down any reviews. It probably has something to do with the book being a not-particularly-noteworthy longform journalism piece published in 1979, but even the few places on the internet that acknowledged the book’s existence didn’t seem to care to do more than that.

I eventually located in my local library’s storage archives and had to go request a librarian go into the archives and grab it for me. But in the end, I did get my hands on it. (And I added the back cover information to The StoryGraph, because that part of the dust cover was pasted inside the book itself and I don’t think it’s actually online anywhere else.) Which seems like a lot of effort for something that, again, I knew next to nothing about. But the title caught my interest, and even though I knew I was unlikely to find anything particularly actionable in a book about people opting out of work in the 1970s, I still wanted to read it.

The 1970s was nearly fifty years ago, so this book felt less like a current events analysis (which I’m sure it was supposed to be) and more of a capture of attitudes of a particular subset of people in a particular time. One of the things I found most fascinating about it, though, was how many beliefs and attitudes were exactly the same as today. Nobody wants to work anymore; people aren’t religious anymore; the government is full of liberals who want to destroy us conservatives; your job is your identity; maybe your job shouldn’t be your identity; these are all familiar ideas expressed at one point or another in this book. Even though economics have changed, societal beliefs about women working have changed, and ideas about the very meaning of work itself have changed, a lot of the attitudes Bernard and his subjects express haven’t.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how un-feasible most of the subjects’ strategies would be in today’s world. One person managed to get unemployment for seven years; several had their formerly stay-at-home wives go to work and support the family on a clerical salary; a remarkable number of them got their employers to say they were laid off so they could get unemployment in the first place. And that’s not counting the ones who were fairly wealthy to begin with and chose to just live on their savings. All of them put a big emphasis on cutting down their expenses, but I can’t help noticing all the ways none of this would work in 2024.

And, interestingly, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t work in the 1970s, either. A majority of the 100 people Bernard talked to for this book ended up going back to work. Many of them talked about the stress of cobbling together money to pay bills. At least one went to eviction court, and several more were close to it when Bernard’s research ended. A few got severely depressed by losing the sense of purpose and accomplishment that working and being the primary breadwinner gave them, and several talked about not really knowing what to do with their time now that it wasn’t going towards work. There’s a strange tension in this book between these people’s desire not to work, to be free from the job and the boss and the alarm clock and spending a bunch of their time doing things they hate or ethically disagree with or just aren’t the things they want to be spending their time on, and the fact that “living without work in a nine to five world” doesn’t seem to be feasible for more than a few years at a time. And the book never actually explores this tension. It covers people who are voluntarily not working with a sense of “I don’t really understand this but it’s the future of work,” but it also never seems to draw the connection that even for these people, it’s not really possible. To be fair, it is possible in some cases – if they already had a ton of savings to live on, if they were close to retirement age and had enough savings to live on until they could start getting social security or their pension, or if they had a spouse who was willing and able to go to work and who could earn enough to support their family. But those are all true today, as well. These people opting out of work hadn’t really found a way to opt out of work entirely. In most cases, it was something more akin to an extended vacation or sabbatical than dropping out of the nine-to-five world. But the book doesn’t acknowledge this. It presents voluntary unemployment and early retirement as the future while never seeming to notice that even most of the people already doing it couldn’t make it permanent.

There’s a point to be made about society’s view on work and how even though technology and automation has brought down the amount we really need to work, societal values have gone the opposite way than what Bernard predicted. Instead of normalizing early retirement and moving towards twenty-hour workweeks, we’ve made working into a moral and ethical good and busyness into a proof of your personal worth. It would be interesting to contrast this movement with today’s FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which has the same goal but aims to do it by becoming independently wealthy instead of by relying on social support systems. I would also be curious to hear from someone who lived through the 1970s about this book and how it matches up with the values, culture, and societal dynamics of the period. I’m especially interested to hear if the idea of living without work was a more mainstream idea at the time or if Bernard was reporting on an obscure hippie-adjacent subculture he was interested in. I can point out a bunch of things that were really interesting about this book and how it contrasts with attitudes about work in 2024, but my lack of context and historical understanding about this era limits what more I can get from it. As I anticipated, it’s most definitely not an instruction manual for how to quit your job and keep living afterwards in the modern day (or even at the time it was written). But despite that, it was extremely interesting, and I’m glad I took the time and effort to hunt it down. 

This book was recommended to me, and I generally attempt to read books recommended to me. This wasn’t my first foray into this author’s work, either. I’d read his book Recursion a while back and found it a sci-fi kind of weird that isn’t necessarily my jam, but that was well-written and had some interesting ideas. So I figured this probably wouldn’t be bad. 

And I was correct. Upgrade wasn’t bad. The protagonist may not have had very many interesting characteristics beyond being the protagonist, but the concept was interesting and Blake Crouch is a competent writer. The action moved along, the story was largely well-paced, and it kept me engaged the whole way through. Nothing spectacular, sure, but perfectly readable. 

However. As you might have guessed by the tone here, I do have some criticisms. Again, Blake’s particular brand of sci-fi weird isn’t quite up my alley, so some of this could definitely be me. But some of it is I just take issue with some of the fundamental concepts of the book itself. 

Upgrade is ambitious in scope and interesting in concept. In a world where genetic modification is very possible (but also very illegal), an anti-gene-modification enforcement agent finds his genes being modified against his will, making him almost superhuman. Now he has to tackle questions like “why did this happen?” and “would the world be better if it happened to everybody?” But as interesting and potentially thematic as this idea could be, the execution is a little wacky. Some parts are frighteningly realistic, others are laughably not, and the discordant combination made the whole thing feel a bit silly. It would have made a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie, but the attempt at thematic depth just emphasized how ridiculous some parts of it were. 

I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on my actual problem with this book. I had notes about how Logan Ramsey has big “r/iamverysmart” vibes, and whether or not killing the same character twice was too much, and how cruel Logan’s mother was and how I couldn’t believe that neither of her children realized how much they were like her. But then I was reminded of the word “eugenics” and realized my issue. Without giving away too many spoilers, the arguable antagonist of the first half of the book thinks climate change would be solved if people were only better in a specific way and wants to accomplish that with mass gene modification. It really feels like what a eugenics movement would look like in a world where you didn’t necessarily have to breed better traits into people because you could just modify people’s genes instead. But our protagonist seemed pretty against that whole idea, so I wasn’t too bothered. Up until the end, when (minor spoiler alert) he decided his problem wasn’t so much the eugenics-style idea, just which traits should be changed. It left a really bad taste in my mouth. 

It’s very possible that at least some of my complaints are because while I find these kinds of stories fine, they’re not the type of thing I generally really love. And on the whole, Upgrade was fine. I didn’t love it, I think its themes were handled poorly, and I really didn’t love some of the vibes it gives off. But it was readable. I found it interesting enough to finish. If it were made into an action movie, I think it would work pretty well. I just don’t particularly recommend it as it is.