Book Review: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Peter and Beatrice Leigh are 30-something British couple who are devoutly evangelical Christians and are living in a Britain of an imagined near future. In this imaginary Britain things look largely similar to how they are right now, except that there’s a colony of humans living on a faraway planet called Oasis. These pioneers are eking out a civilisation and trying to engage with local alien life there.

Enter Peter Leigh, a devout pastor on earth, who is hand-picked to join the small crew on the distant planet for a diplomatic mission to civilise and convert the alien population, whom he dubs Oasans. Meanwhile Peter’s wife Beatrice is left to her own devices on an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable Earth.

This novel by Michel Faber, (I have reviewed other books of his before) is completely astonishing and amazing. I have to admit that I’m not a fan of sci-fi and avoided reading this one for a while. As Michel Faber is a wonderful wordsmith and one of my favourite authors of all time, any reservations I had about this novel were swiftly put to bed. It’s deftly and masterfully written, by an author who can completely allow you to suspend your belief system and enjoy an amazing yarn about what it means to be human and all of the spectrum of human emotions that haunt us.

The book strangely enough doesn’t read like science fiction, even though it’s set on another planet. It’s a novel that’s relevant to the human condition as War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

The Book of Strange New Things is endlessly compelling and you won’t be able to put it down. I have avoided all spoilers here except to say that the unspooling and unravelling of Peter and Beatrice Leigh’s relationship is like watching a couple of very likeable humans failing, having blind spots and being exceptionally beautiful and beautifully ugly at the same time. It’s incredible, powerful and moving. It’s also unlike any other novel I’ve ever read before in my life. I recommend you get this for your summer or (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) your winter reading.

Content Catnip

'Enshittification': technology around us keeps getting worse.
Google’s ads.
Washing machines that break after 4 years.
Big Tech's extortion.

Doctorow’s book explains why.
My full review:
https://wrenwrites.substack.com/p/the-book-with-a-poop-emoji-on-the
#Enshittification #BigTech #DigitalRights #TechCritique #BookReview

Recent readings and other activities

I have been on a reading journey of late. It helps make me feel alive in times like these, when our rights are being stripped, our economy is in the toilet and everyone is afraid to quit their shitty jobs, and our nation has become an international embarrassment.

What better way to deal with the world than escapism!

A few short observations:

Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler

I was intrigued by the novel at first because of the initial setting in Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent nearly 20 years. I grew up in Alabama and somehow managed not to go to the White House of the Confederacy, a family home of the Sayres. Only through this book did I learn that Zelda’s kinfolk were integral in crafting the environment of racial oppression that became Jim Crow Alabama, and the Zelda in this book was a Confederacy apologist. By the time I got to Montgomery in 2000, Zelda and her daughter were long dead, and though the F. Scott and Zelda home is available for viewing near the Cloverdale area of town, I never bothered.

I shouldn’t have bothered with this book as well. Once you get past the initial setup and get into the drunken debauchery, the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald become an exercise in destructive tediousness. You do get a feel for how controlling Scott Fitzgerald was through this work of historical fiction. But the tediousness did me in, and the first-person narrator of this book never felt like an authentic voice. Perhaps I will try to wade through this manuscript again at some point. For now, I have other tomes competing for my attention.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

In a better world, I think this would be a pretty decent Young Adult novel. I was surprised to see it available on Libby at the public library, though I doubt I will see a physical copy of it at the library.

Upright Women Wanted, a Hugo and Locus Award finalist, brings LGBTQ characters front and center. The librarians survive at the fringes of society, and these particular librarians serve an important role in the foreground by distributing approved materials to far-flung outposts in a new Wild West. As becomes clear-ish toward the end of the novel, they serve a covert purpose as well in the fight for freedom against a fascist society.

It was an action-packed novel, though not really a page-turner like some I read this month.

The novel would have been served by better world-building. By the last page, readers are still left with a lot of questions about the political situation, how all this came to pass, etc.

Die Me a River by Denise Swanson

I took on a cozy mystery for a change, and though this particular book was a page turner, the fictive world here felt like it was propped up by fantasy. The school psychologist who helps out the police happens to be married to the chief of police. The police chief husband has a rich dad who helps them out big time by buying them a giant RV when their house is destroyed in a tornado. And the police chief is a sexy, sexy man, the writer keeps reminding us, and the protagonist continues to be smitten by him despite having a baby to take of. He’s not an old guy, a tub of lard or an alcoholic like is often the case in reality.

Well, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than reading this book, though it on the whole has very little to do with reality. Not altogether a bad thing!

Blightsighted by Karin Slaughter

This was another page-turner I finished in a day. It’s the first novel by the author of the Will Trent series, the TV show of which films locally, so it’s something I’ve seen a few episodes of.

Every chapter ended in a cliff-hanger, propelling you through the book. I wound up staying up much too late finishing it.

But boy, it started out rough: a bloody, gruesome murder in the very first chapter. The extreme details of our protagonist finding the body and trying to save her were almost enough to get me to stop reading. But I kept on.

And it kept on being rough, gritty, truly nightmarish, depraved crimes. Of course, there’s the required red herrings, and our protagonist figures out, almost too late, who the killer/rapist is.

Huh, what a coincidence! The previous tome’s protagonist is married to the police chief. As part of the backstory, it’s revealed our protagonist divorced the police chief after she caught him having an affair. But because she’s the town’s part-time coroner, full-time pediatrician, she still has to interact with him. Gritty, but also feels a bit unlikely and too convenient.

More to come!

I’ve joined a book club, so expect more book reviews in this space. And perhaps I can try harder to make them more comprehensive. In the flush of a page-turning spree, trying to find out what’s going to happen next, I kind of put note-taking on the backburner. I need to regulate my reading better.

#BookReview "This is a hypnotic story of a treacherous time, and it is written with a rare, haunting, lyrical beauty."
http://mybook.to/wsb
When Secrets Bloom - step into medieval Transylvania

#HistoricalFiction #goodreads #StrongWomen #ForbiddenLove #secrets