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This is a series of stories selected to tell the story of how the author became an astronaut and in the process discovered what her particular gifts were. I originally learned about this through Adam Savage's YouTube channel. It follows a chronological order describing how she became a PhD chemist, joined the Air Force, was accepted into the astronaut program, trained for Space Shuttle missions, worked for NASA in various roles, qualified to live in the International Space Station for a nearly six month stint. All of it was accomplished despite casual and pervasive sexism, a committed long distance family arrangement, and conquering the many physical challenges going along with the job. There are three appendices covering frequently asked questions astronauts need to field. It all seems so orderly a march a goal, studded with perfectly crafted anecdotes along the way which lead to lessons the author wants to share with everyone. This book is an easy sell to space nuts but also tries hard to be relevant to everyone who can appreciate an upbeat story of persistence winning out over obstacles also featuring nicely drawn personality descriptions.

I listened to the author reading her work which also has an additional musical bonus excerpting the flute duet she organized and played with Ian Anderson of the band Jethro Tull in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of space exploration. I enjoyed hearing her describe the rigors of centrifuge high-G training, practicing shuttle maneuvers in a NASA neutral buoyancy tank, and the years parenting and sustaining a marriage while "geographically single," all in her own words. There wasn't a great deal of suspense as to whether every challenge would be conquered in the end, and rather few lasting scars and regrets to dwell upon.

This is an example of hypertextual fiction decades before this re-emerged when webpages made linked literary forms easier to implement, where the ostensible subject of the book, the thousand-line poem by the character John Shade ends up being dwarfed by the extravagant and erratic commentary supposedly written by the character Charles Kinbote. The commentary spins out with extended musings on the history of the country Zembla which is dominated by political intrigue to the point of unhinged obsession on the part of Kinbote. By the end, he shows signs of monomania which call into question the sanity of any of what have read, the classic sign of an unreliable narrator. The writing parodies popular melodrama and thrillers, literary criticism, and academic life in its own pompous way, only increasing our doubts.

I had trouble finding this in a regular ebook edition I liked, so I listened to this in the form of an audiobook which only increases the difficulty of keeping any of the literary tricks straight, with so many characters and snippets of plot flying around it felt nearly impossible to keep it all in my head. So I wouldn't recommend this way of experiencing this book to anyone reading this for the first time. I would imagine that a better setup would be to have two hardcopy volumes in front of you so that you could avoid much of the flipping back and forth or of following hypertext links it would take to join up all of the allusions multicursally. The experience reminds me of the book S. by Doug Dorst, only not as annoying because the reader is spared having to keep track of layers of marginal notes and drop-in ephemera.

I do like experiments in literary form that also play with language, but I know they can be a lot to ask of the reader. It is clear that this odd work will always belong to the academic crowd, not the mass market, like all the books Nabokov wrote except for Lolita with its multiple film adaptations.

I don't remember why I checked this out of the public library over fifty years ago, as a teenager, the first time I read it, but I do recall the comfortable feeling this story gve me then. When I saw it in a used bookstore not long ago I knew it was time for me to pick it up again. I really didn't remember any of the details of this long correspondence between the author and her London counterparts but I did pick up on the contrast between the letters of the brash American and those of the more restrained British forms of expression that give the the book much of its charm. The two main characters shared a love of out of print British literature but more than that they each came to feel a transatlantic love for one another over their twenty years correspondence. The economic hardships of early 1950' England were something the author was able to help with through gifts, and she also received a wealth of inspiration in return which she somehow transformed into teleplays and the like. At the end there is an unexpected development whch accounts for why these letters were assembled into this little book for the world to read (and later view in a film adaptation).

I liked rereading this very much, and felt as though I obtained a second-hand feeling for what it was like to come to know someone you have never met in person but have come to know on the page. Maybe there were some editorial decisions in picking which letters made it into the book which would enhance the sentiment. It isn't for everyone, I'm sure, but it worked for me.

This was the first of this author's Culture science fiction books, introducing his ideas about artificial ship minds, drones, weird habitats, and aliens in conflict. I felt like he was still trying things out as a genre writer, learning to portray convincing non-human voices, describing alien settings, and so forth. It is a long story with many substantial digressions more or less unrelated to the main object of the protagonist's quest, some of which I liked but mostly found they posed problems with pacing. I read this whole thing in fifteen to twenty minute sessions over nearly three months. I think that I would have been unhappy trying to finish it in just a few marathon sessions. The prose is mostly serviceable but sometimes gets overwhelmed when the plot runs to the absurd. At one point the ship the characters are on punches its way out of a much larger vessel, getting away scot-free in a way that I thought pretty ridiculous. One experiment that I think worked better than expected was the way he wrote the personality of the drone Unaha-Closp in a way that was fairly convincing.

The author's later books show him much surer of his craft, with characters more fully realized and with interesting philosophical implications taken seriously. Since the Culture books are all standalone, this book isn't required to understand any of the later ones in the series.

This is the first book in the long-running Culture series. It couldn't measure up to the ambitions the author had when conceiving of it, but shows the way to books which are better realized.

I think the big appeal of this Hugo award winning novella was the care spent building the character of the viewpoint character. The author succeeded in giving Murderbot a convincingly non-human personality and interior life. I think of this as something distinct from worldbuilding, because that would be more a matter of fleshing out the natural and social structures the characters are placed in, which is there but I think as occupying definitely a second place in the concerns of the story. At the same time, there is a well managed increase in the level of suspense until the main action scene is complete, followed by a denouement where Murderbot does something both unexpected and in character which motivates the other stories in the series.

There is violent action in the story, but the graphic nature is blunted by the viewpoint of a SecBot who is accustomed to being repaired from a point of non-functionality over and over again. It understands that the humans it has been charged with to protect do not have this capability, and so logically places itself forward at the point of greatest peril on more than one occasion. It is interesting to see the the way human team interprets this as loyalty, altruism, and maybe courage even though Murderbot does not think any of those terms truly apply.

I like concentrated stories in the novella format which provides enough room to explore a number of different aspects to a character while still paying attention to a narrative drive much faster than a full-length novel. Not every novella-length story I have read can do that, but it is clear that well-versed in craft from her years producing well-regarded science fiction and fantasy.

(Reposting this now that this has been adapted into a miniseries on Apple+ TV)

I've been wanting to read this for a while

This non-fiction book is by an author known better for his fiction and social media presence. He grew fascinated by the biggest killer disease around the world and researched how something so deadly today could have a treatment that is able to treat it successfully for the last half century. The book began when he met a young tuberculosis patient in Sierra Leone with a magnetic personality who suffered a series of challenges in his illness that each threatened to cost him his life. Along the way, the book delves into the history of researchers who worked on a cure including the big pharmaceutical firms which control the production and distribution of the drugs in the treatment. It explains the biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in simple terms for non-experts.

I listened to this as an audiobook, read by the author. He has a talent for making a subject you had some preconceptions about new and interesting, and one that you would expect to be grim and depressing into something that says something illuminating about the human condition. I hope that the book advances the conversation on what society ought to be doing to safeguard the well-being of humanity as a whole.