The year ends, and it's time for another summation of the various readings I've been able to complete in between the big reviews (here's my post for the first half of the year).
This has been my itinerary for the latter half of the year:
(Two Lines Press, 2022)
A work-at-home father hears strange sounds from the nearby forest while his pregnant wife is visiting family. More a portrait than a story, this book abounds in luxurious poetic imagery that doesn't quite coalesce. The man's little son has a close link with the creatures in the forest, but the mystery is kept locked from the reader. There's passing mention of war, flooding and a refugee crisis, but they're just background decoration. Dialogues meander with no logical endpoint, scenes are abruptly cut, and character choices, especially those of the little kid, make no sense. The surreal events don't help tell a story; they're just there to give vibes.
Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.
(Elsewhere Editions, 2024)
This short but delightful picture book follows a lonely unicorn searching for its herd across landscapes and centuries, each gorgeously illustrated in a different art style. From 20th-century surrealism to Medieval illuminated manuscripts to ancient Greek pottery to Tang dynasty murals to Persian bas-reliefs to Egyptian wall hieroglyphs to Indian miniature painting to DIY chapbooks to prehistoric cave art, our unicorn can travel the world to its edge and back, stretch, mutate, metamorphose, be every color or none, talk to buffaloes and narwhals, and meet unexpected companions that will give meaning to its journey.
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.
(self-published, 2023)
The winner of the third Self-Published Science Fiction Competition is a very strange book. Alas, the only meaningful way to properly speak of its qualities is to spoil it: imagine the plot of Tenet set in the Pandora ecosystem of Avatar. At the beginning, the novel appears to be about a xenoarchaeological exploration, but it quickly shifts into a breakneck solo infiltration/heist thriller, then a small first contact drama, then a time travel puzzle, then a war/survival adventure. I promise it all makes sense when put together. The first-person narration gives us a compelling protagonist with a fully delineated personality, forged by fire in a backstory marked by hard choices and regrets. Definitely a worthy winner.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
(New Directions, 2021)
Regular humans share an unnamed town with a different subspecies of humans, who are hermaphrodites and eschew clothing. In this town, the clothed subjugate the unclothed with every form of bigotry, including namecalling, public ridicule, segregation, ostracism, and legalized murder. We follow the perspective of an unclothed person narrating from inside a closet in the only house where the unclothed are allowed to live, which serves as both shelter and prison. Our protagonist describes with a sharp eye the peculiar social rules of this town and the extent of the evil that people will commit if it's deemed publicly acceptable.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
Clone by Priya Sarukkai Chabria
(Zubaan, 2018)
In a rigidly stratified dystopia of post-human slave castes, one slave dares hope for more. As it turns out, this slave is a clone of a high-ranked government figure who died mysteriously when she was just about to publicly challenge the established order. Will the clone finish the job? With a Buddhist perspective on the equalizing effect of suffering and death, tracing a whirlwind trajectory from the extravagance of cruel spectacles for the amusement of the spoiled elites to a series of extended flashbacks of previous reincarnations, this novel argues for the indestructible dignity of humanity even under the most horrific circumstances.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
(Goldsmiths, 2024)
A girl in Vietnam acquires psychic powers after a near-death experience. Blessed by a goddess of compassion and guided by her beloved grandmother's spirit, she's soon afterward hired to help identify unmarked graves of soldiers, but when she notices that the Vietnamese government doesn't honor all dead combatants equally, she starts disobeying orders, taking bigger and bigger risks out of her sense of duty to the restless spirits. This novel addresses thorny questions about reconciliation, authoritarianism, migration, the limits of patriotic loyalty, our responsibilities toward our dead and the compromises that must be made in a world of imperfect rules.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
(CreateSpace, 2014)
Prime Meridian by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
A young man has been banished to a psychiatric hospital by his detestable rich father. His strange neurological disease has put him in a wheelchair, with the side effect of opening his mind to the speech of animals. He doesn't take long to make fluffy and feathered friends around the block, and he's now eager to take the next big step and make his first human friend. Only two problems: he has very little experience with human interaction, and not all animals approve of his newfound gift. With deep empathy and brutally honest humor, this novel crafts from slice-of-life sketches a tender portrait of self-reinvention that dares laugh in the face of life's everyday absurdities.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
(Innsmouth Free Press, 2017)
In a near-future Mexico City ravaged by even worse economic inequality than the real one, a young woman barely managing to make ends meet with soul-crushing rent-a-friend gigs has a dream that refuses to die: the dream of one day saving enough money to emigrate to Mars. To do what? It doesn't matter. On Earth she has no career, or loving family, or romantic prospects, or nice neighborhood, or a reason to look to the future. She doesn't know what Mars can give her; all that matters is leaving. This short novel captures with hard-hitting precision the snowballing of little disappointments and resignations that precedes every migrant's choice to leave normal life behind.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
