I realized yesterday that I haven't run the text of this, my very favorite book, over my eyeballs in a while. My paperback is out with a friend and my hardcover is too nice to carry around, so I sprang for the ebook, which has a surprisingly lovely cover image.

This is a masterpiece both of big picture and detail, along with some truly rage-inducing stories.

This is an absolute masterpiece of both science explanation and history. The same friend who got me this also got me THE GENE, which I'll be reading posthaste.

It's possible I'd have been happier with this if it had been the last book I read on vacation instead of the the first. It's still fun, though, and if you liked the first two, you'll probably like this one, too.

Great recommendation from a friend. This is just a lot of fun, and the Bobiverse is a place I'm happy to inhabit for a few hours.

This feels like an oddball among Lemire's work - ESSEX COUNTY and SWEET TOOTH, for example, are big stories fit beautifully into a few hundred pages of words and pictures. ROUGHNECK is an intense zoom-in on a relatively small story, but no less beautiful.

Why is there not a Squirrel Girl movie? Why??!!

This mostly boiled off my eyeballs as soon as I finished, but is fun and pretty and a solid 45 minutes of entertainment.

"...we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn‘t actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. [...]A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. A political regime like the one our Founders inherited and rejected. An order they spilled their blood to defeat.

I'm not sure this book is quite as good as it thinks it is, but it's still very good.

Hayes doesn't waste any time reminding us this isn't a fun book.

The mystery here is admirably twisty, but the sci-fi bits take some odd jumps around, and I didn't get as good sense of the characters as I'd have liked. For all that, it's still fun reading - Lafferty has a knack for moving the story forward engagingly.

I like Hail. 😀

Damn.

It's finally, "Circle back to all the stuff I was too emotionally exhausted to read last year" time.

My editions of these novels are all a little beat up, and the local bookstore had these. Replacing the old copies makes for a nice excuse to re-read these.

I wanted to re-acquaint myself with this while waiting for the library to get Hayes' new book, A COLONY IN A NATION. My recollection was that I liked it more than I admired it.

In a post-Trump world, those proportions have been reversed. Reading about elite failure is even less pleasant now than it was in 2012, but Hayes' suggestion that failure combined with Balkanization of knowledge could lead to authoritarian impulses looks like prophecy.

Not quite as emotionally powerful as THE ARRIVAL or THE RED TREE, but a beautiful read nonetheless. Tan's sculptures and photos tend to play up the primal nature of the Grimm stories.

I spent almost the whole time I was reading this trying desperately not to ugly cry in public. Almost made it, too.

The view from the library is...something else.

The frame story of President Obama's inauguration makes the historical parallels - between Emancipation and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement and its backlash, and President Obama's term and today - visible in shameful clarity.

Like the OLD MAN'S WAR universe got in a three-car collision with THE GOBLIN EMPEROR and FALL OF HYPERION.

The settings and societies Hurley creates here are as aggressively weird as Miéville's Bas-Lag. There's something exhilarating about the work of an author who makes it clear they just don't care if you get it.

The world of Spider, Yelena, and Channon is *true* in a way that's surprising and dismaying. A book written about the politics of 15 years ago shouldn't feel so current; either things were just as bad then, or we were heading this way all along. But it's also about playing a bad hand well and believing you can make a difference, which I desperately needed. Plus bowel disrupter jokes.

I wish the story-about-stories bit featured more prominently here, because it's lovely. Not to say the rest of the book isn't fun, because it absolutely is.

The degree to which this series feels predictive is getting a little frightening.

I've been meaning to reread this series for a while. I did not expect it to be so relevant.

Day 28 of #Riotgrams: confession. Despite owning them all since high school and repeated attempts, I have never finished any of these books.

Day 27 of #Riotgrams: doorstoppers! A selection of my favorites (or, as with the Calvino and GORMENGHAST, most anticipated owned tbrs).

Day 26 of #Riotgrams: most badass heroine. This is a tough choice: there's Breq from the ANCILLARY novels; Agnieszka from UPROOTED; Shara from CITY OF STAIRS (or Mulaghesh from CITY OF BLADES); Harry from THE BLUE SWORD; Phedre from the KUSHIEL novels; etc., etc. In the end, though, I had to go with Jane Sagan, the intelligent, forceful, ruthless (but not cruel) Special Forces officer and colony leader of Scalzi's OMW universe.

Day 25 of #Riotgrams: favorite quote.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Day 24 of #Riotgrams: rainbow book stack. It's a rainbow of colors *and* genres.

Nearly there #Riotgrams, day 23: funny books! This one's easy - Sir Terry is always the first place I go for laughs.

Continuing #Riotgrams catch-up, day 22: bookface. This turned out to be a challenge, but I eventually found something suitable. That I got to be reminded of a good movie and a great book is a nice bonus.

One more this evening - #Riotgrams day 21: cool spines. I did not realize until just now that the ANCILLARY book spines made a complete picture. I feel like I need to go get a full-size edition of ANCILLARY JUSTICE so they'll match.

Belated #Riotgrams, day 20: favorite cover. This is the leather-bound edition of my favorite book ever, so it *has* to be my favorite cover.

Further catch-up on #Riotgrams, day 19: great dedication. This was a wedding gift from my BFF ❤

Further catch up on #Riotgrams, day 18: something pretty. In this case, both the words and the art of Catherynne Valente's Fairyland stories. ❤

Still catching up on #Riotgrams, day 17: freebie. In this case, a gift from my mom when I first got interested in film a few years back.

Slightly less belated #Riotgrams day 16: bookmark(s). Since I was in college, my mother has given me a stack of these every few years. They're made of laminated Japanese paper. There's something about opening a book to one that never fails to fill me with joy.

Very belated day 15 of #Riotgrams: books and treats. These are both old favorites.

Day 14 of #Riotgrams: kissing books 😙

After getting this out of the library a few years back, I read it in one sitting that night. Then I read it again the next day. Then I read it again before I took it back to the library. Then I went out and bought a copy and read it again.

I love this book, is what I'm saying.

Day 13 of #Riotgrams: pink. I was hard-pressed to find a qualifying entry, but, if you're gonna flail, do it in magical-phone style!

Belated day 12 of #Riotgrams: outside! If it were July, I could have captured some better scenery from my front porch at 11:45 pm.

The nonfiction aspects of this were generally good - lots of good stuff about the past and present of both crewed and robotic space flight. The authors' attempts to extrapolate into the future are at best mediocre science fiction. Worse, they're clearly skilled nonfiction writers; a more straightforward style would have resulted in a better book. The bad sci-fi is worth it if you're interested in astronomy, though.

Belated day 11 of #Riotgrams (posting is hard when you have the flu): favorite children's book. My mother read this to me at least a few hundred times when I was small, but I didn't have a copy. Then, after I told my BFF about this book, SHE BOUGHT ME A COPY! because she is amazing.

Day 10 of #Riotgrams: my comics shelf. I only wish there were more.

Day 9 of #Riotgrams: finding an author/character who shares my name was rough, since "Joseph" has become less popular over the last few decades.

Belated day 8 of #Riotgrams: Black history. This was my first exposure to Du Bois, and it kind of blew my head off.

Day 7 of #Riotgrams: my local library - the Ketchikan, AK public library.

I've had to adjust after living in Madison, WI and Columbus, OH - two of the best library systems in the country; there's only so much a librarian can do in a small town on an island. The nearest library will always be a happy place, though, and this one's no exception.

Plus it's made of cedar, so it aways smells good.