jdscott50's reviews
1547 reviews

We all have regrets. We wish we could go back in time to tell a loved one how much they meant to us, have one last conversation with a good friend, or seek advice from our past. In Kawaguchi's series, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, your wish can be granted. You can go back in time and have that one last conversation. A specialty coffee shop with special rules. You can speak to anyone as long as they have entered the shop at some point. More importantly, when you return, you can only go as long as the coffee stays warm. You must finish your drink in that time or be stuck in time. Lastly, you cannot alter the past. 

We see the tragic tale of a man who is raising the daughter of a friend who died in a car accident. Now that she's grown, he has to tell her the truth. He seeks the advice of her now-dead parents and what he should do. Another person has lost his investment and wants to consult his dead mother for advice, with ulterior motives. Lastly, an old detective wants to see his now-dead wife one last time. 

This is the second book in a series. This is the first book in that series I have read. It doesn't seem like you would need to read them in order once you get the gist. The coffee shop background allows for great storytelling and a variety of situations. It can be a bit saccharine, but if you are looking for a nice cozy story with life advice and a happy ending, this is the series for that. 

One of the lines that stuck with me from Munroe's first book in this series, What If, was that when you ask physics a question, it has to answer. I really enjoyed the first book from the variety of silly and yet educational scenarios, from what happens if a pitcher can throw at the speed of light to how to use climate change to fill your backyard pool. 

I thought the questions in this book were a little more juvenile and uninteresting. What if the Solar System was made of soup? How much mass would the Earth need to lose to lose weight yourself? It was still funny but lacked the punch of the original.

A young, directionless woman runs into their old high school teacher at a bar. He hasn't changed a bit with his rigid ways. He even begins to correct her as if he is still her teacher. Even though she resists at first, she seems to welcome his direction. Maybe he can get her out of the slump she is in. Sensei does dispense wisdom, but he also has his mysteries and issues. She thought his wife died, but it seemed she had just run off. She makes a lot of untrue assumptions. She finds that he always has a secret wisdom that is just what she needs. (The book is originally titled Sensei's Briefcase since he always carries it around and almost always has a solution to their current situation). Eventually, their camaraderie turns to affection. It is a sweet connection and a heartfelt ending. 

I enjoyed the dynamic between the two. The Sensei and student relationship is educational for the reader as well. I wasn't sure about the romance part, but it was handled well and came off mostly platonic infatuation. The deep caring they have for each other is touching and very endearing. 

Our favorite SecUnit returns for another installment of the Murderbot Series. In the previous novel, SecUnit is caught up in alien intrigue, causing them to face their biggest challenge and, as a result, cause them to doubt their abilities. This PTSD carries over into this novel and is a main background focus. Gone is the overconfident SecUnit who can seemingly defeat foes almost by magic. Now, SecUnit second-guesses their every move. 

The story begins when a pre-corporation rim colony is discovered, only to have a corporation swoop in and attempt to woo them to their side. The University is only interested in their freedom and self-choice rather than a lifetime of slave labor to a faceless corporation. It would seem to be a straightforward decision that one would not want to be a corporate slave, but this is a pre-corporation rim colony, and they are unaware of the troubles. After taking out a chaotic agricultural bot, SecUnit, a copy of ART, and his human companions venture to the other side of the planet to look for more survivors. When they find the colony, the corporation has gotten their first. Can they convince them of the horrors of Corporation life? If anyone can show the damage a corporation can do to an individual, SecUnit can. 

Another fun installment. The PTSD suffered by SecUnit was heartbreaking. Normally, they would be able to hack, blast, or talk their way out of situations, but here, they are vulnerable, compromised, and not feeling confident. For a robot, their experiences are always very relatable. 

Award-winning author Brandon Taylor returns with a new novel. Fresh off the success of Real Life and Filthy Animals, Taylor's book, The Late Americans, details the lives of students and residents of a small Iowa college town. Each struggling for their identity and future, they confront the illusions that make up their life to create solid ground. 

They are poets, dancers, and townies, all struggling into the next phase of their lives. It is a novel, but broken up like short stories, we follow those characters through their relationships and what happens next. 

I like this book focuses on the great uncertainties of life. College can be a dreamland with endless possibilities. As that dream comes to an end, panic sets in. A cold shower to awaken the senses of the dangers of life. Can I make a career out of this? Pursuit of passion, but will that lead to survival? Take the safe route, but is that a life of fulfillment? The landscape of Iowa can come off as Hellish as if they are all in limbo. Who will escape? Who will meet their fate?

I enjoyed the classic literary undertones of Taylor's work. Even the turn to Fatima at the end, like he's approaching his fate. It's another magnificent tale from a modern master. 

Favorite Passages:

 “It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.” 

 Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry. 

 Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But soon that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died. 

 Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little. 

He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

 Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance. 

 Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart. 

 How to make his own feelings understood? How to say, I see you, I love you, I’m sorry? But sorry was just a cheap, dirty little word. It presupposed an orderly world. It presupposed that it was ever possible to make up for what had come before. 

 Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence. 

 He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die. 

 “Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.” 

 Perhaps that is what you call it when you appeal to the world about something that has happened to you and the world answers back that it’s fine if you leave, as though you were nothing but an irritating child being sent on your way. 

 

Academy award-nominated actor Elliot Page has a new memoir dealing with his life. An actor making his way in the film industry, he would make breakthroughs and rack up awards. Just as he was coming to terms with his identity as a boy, his success would force him to hide. He would spend years playing a part beyond acting in a film. Elliot decided to transition during the Covid-19 pandemic and was the first trans man to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 2021. Already starring in the Umbrella Academy, his character would also transition. 

Told in short snippets, it is part Trans memoir, gay memoir, and celebrity memoir. He talks about growing up in Halifax with divorced parents. Splitting his time, he would feel isolated from both parents. More so from his father and stepmother. He also struggled with his identity early on. When he was 10, he had to stop playing coed soccer and had to go on the girl's team. When he has a breakout role in Show Pit Pony, it will lead to stardom but also further his internal crisis. Hollywood is also very homophobic, as we see him being forced to hide his love and wear very feminine clothing. He faces hate from friends, family, the industry, and even random people on the street. His decision to transition is life-saving. It is wonderful to read someone move toward their happiness. Despite the struggle, the ending chapters are magnificent, and we can see his joy in finally stopping playing a role and being himself.

Favorite passages: 

 “I think I may be bisexual." I said this seemingly out of nowhere, having never conveyed anything like this to anyone. "No you are not," she responded immediately, a sharp reflex, giggling after she said it. This time, the sound of her laughter was harsh and cutting. Still, I wanted to laugh with her, I mean being queer is funny and bad right? The word "homosexuality" simply uttered in health class would give way to a cacophony of snickering. All the sitcoms I watched when I went home from school reinforced this. Whenever a joke was made, or I made one, it stuck; shit in the treads of my shoes. A spotlight moving stage right to stage left. I would tap-dance around it. Like a wet dog, I'd scramble to shake it off, to shake it out.  

 My inability to vomit until then always felt poignant. Eleven was the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent. As an adult, I would say, "I just want to be a ten-year-old boy," whenever dysphoria belted out its annoying song, a pop hit that you know the words to and don't know why. It's hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don't experience it. It's an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don't. 

 I will receive enormous waves of hate, not because I made harmful jokes, but because I am trans. It often seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than they do to support trans people as we deal with an onslaught of cruelty and violence. 

Author Catherine Lacey made a name for herself with the breakout hit No One Is Ever Missing, which would become a New Yorker's Best Books of 2014. Her new fiction book, Biography of X, chronicles the mysterious life of X. An Author, An artist, and a creator who mesmerized the American public for 25 years until her death. When a biography is written about her life, X's wife finds it flat and sets out to write her own biography. However, she finds the ever-elusive X is a mystery even to herself. 

A biography within this fiction book, C. M. Luca, the author and wife, sets up to find the true story of X. Whether this act is out of love, grief, or her own need to know is irrelevant. She finds X's true birthplace in the South (or Southern Territory), a timeline where the South succeeded again after World War II and created a Christofascist state.) She finds Xs real name and that she escaped by faking her own death. This is just the beginning of her crisscrossing the territories and around the world. Each place had a different identity and a different art movement. She's a writer, an actor, and a painter; the changing identities become art in and of itself. Finally, going by X, she claims that one's entire identity is drag. Ultimately, is the wife unknowingly part of the act? Or is the final act one of love? 

A fun journey through contemporary art movements with some creative license for a more feminist world. 

Favorite Passages:
Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better. 

The title of this book—as titles so often are—is a lie. This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed, the document of a woman learning what she should have let lie in ignorance. Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

“The circumstance of someone’s birth should have no bearing on their life, and any insistence on the importance of those accidental facts is violence, ignorance. A person can be understood only through the life they choose, the people they choose, the things they do, and not the things that are done to them.*”

The photo develops. And this is what life is, little Waldo Emerson, little Charlie, darling. You put people in situations and their personality develops. Their little freaky heads.

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

“How close I felt to him, close against my will. Despite every trouble she caused me, and despite all the falsehoods I was left to untangle, and despite the rage I sometimes feel these days toward her, I wanted then and still want now to be singular in X’s life. Was that all this was? An attempt to prove myself to be irreplaceable, the victor, the most crucial and true love in her life? I didn’t know that trying to prove this fantasy would so certainly undo it.”

That’s a real story, Gioia said. A real story from a real life. It’s never a kidnapping, a deathbed confession. It’s always much simpler—letters thrown out. That’s a real story.

In the not-so-distant future, private prisons get creative in how to make money. Not content with federal tax dollars and crooked schemes, they create a reality show network. CAPE develops Hard Action Sports, a gladiator show where prisoners kill each other for a chance at freedom. One-on-one attacks with weapons in a stadium arena, complete with announcers. 

Prisoners have teams known as chains and links (hence chain gangs). Hurricane Staxx and Thurwar are the leaders of their chain. Kill after horrendous kill moves them closer to freedom until a change in the rules will bring them face to face. 

A condemnation of the carceral state and the horrors that exist in prison combined with exploitation and entertainment. I think prisons wouldn't do this because they would not want to set anyone free. Of course, even that problem is solved in the worst way in the conclusion.



Favorite Passages:

Door number two slides away, then the man sees his own dead body. Jackpot, triple seven, somebody wins, just definitely not him. He stops shaking. I watch him close. Workers hand him a purple pillow with a spoon resting on top of it. More salt for new wounds. He holds the spoon in his hand. Looks at it. Sees himself stretched against the curve. I watch him close. It’s a show I’ve seen before. When a man sees he has been forsaken. Discovers he might be unblessed. Thinking he understood. All at once he see the gods he kept don’t keep him the same way. Not how he hoped. He see he had it all wrong the whole time.

His mama named him a king’s name
’Cause she knew what he had within
His only sin, was too human
So please, God, let him in
So please, Lord, let him in