Books I read in January

Okay, the formatting here is all messed up. I could spend days trying to figure out how to fix it, or you could just learn to live with my imperfection. Guess which one I chose.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry - 3/5

I enjoy a celebrity memoir, especially when they read the audiobook themselves. But I felt this one dragged. One thing memoirists are often advised to do is to fuse similar people or similar experiences into one lightly “fictionalized” person or experience. (This may be shocking to people who don’t write memoir, but this is what “creative nonfiction” is about—taking a tiny bit of artistic license to with the factual truth to convey the deeper truth. Don’t yell at me about it, I didn’t invent creative fiction.) Perry could have done with a little of such consolidation because he went to rehab so many times that I couldn’t keep track of what was happening when. The bouncing backward and forward in time didn’t help.

On the other hand, maybe this was his point: when you go to rehab as often as he has, it does all blur together.

I came away from this feeling really sad for Perry. He doesn’t seem like he’s in a great place still. His addiction is the worst I’ve ever heard or read of. I really hope his sobriety holds and that he finds peace.

If you’re looking for a lot of insight into Friends, there’s not a ton of it here. But overall, it was an okay book.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir - 5/5

Oh my gosh, I loved this book. I really enjoyed The Martian, skipped Artemis for reasons I no longer remember, and was prepared to have Project Hail Mary hang around on my TBR list indefinitely. But my best friend told me I should read it, and I’m so glad I did. It’s full of fun applications of math and science, like The Martian was, but with the whimsy turned up to a notch. It’s wholesome and heart-warming and I know this will be one I return to. A middle school math teacher wakes up on a spaceship without a clear memory as to what he’s doing there. He knows the mission is to save the world, but he doesn’t know why it’s up to him. He teams up with an alien sent into space for the same reason; hijinks ensue.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers - 4/5

I really love Becky Chambers’s books. Her world-building and characters are always engaging, but what really stays with you is the gentle, compassionate philosophy that underlies her stories. A Psalm for the Wild-Built has all of that—but I wish it had just a little more story in its story. I’m glad it’s a series, because I want to see a lot more of Panga. One thing I absolutely love, though, is the idea of Allallae, the god of small comforts. If we had one of these in the real world, I would worship it. A tea-serving monk follows an impulse to go into the wilds, which have been returned to nature after the end of the Factory Age. They run into a wild-built robot, who’s coming to check on humanity and see if they’re doing okay.

“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, by Aubry Gordon - 5/5

Aubrey Gordon is a goddamn treasure. If you’re not listening to Maintenance Phase what are you even doing with your time. As you’d expect from a Methodology Queen, this reads as a highly-researched and fully-thought out counterargument to just about everything you’ve ever heard or thought about fat people. There are pages and pages of citations at the end. This is a book that thin people need to read, and unfortunately probably won’t.

Re-reads

I re-read books at bedtime (because my brain won’t get drawn into the story and refuse to go to sleep), so you’ll see these books pop up over and over again.

Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Mockingjay
All Systems Red
Artificial Condition
Rogue Protocol