Hello, reader…

*Note to first time readers: the following is a summary of a discussion by friends and bookworms who gather monthly in a virtual space called Second Life. Book notes are lightly edited reflections shared in real time via text chat.

What a lovely way to welcome the new year.

Old and new friends made their way to our new reading room in the Somdari region of Jeogeot for our first Book Lovers Coffee Hour of 2024.

It was clear that we’d all been blessed with time to read over the holidays – hooray! Here is a sampling of some of those reads…

Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Veyot read a book about the travels of a music group that performed all over the USA for about 4 years and filmed 2-hour nature specials for PBS – but, they only pretended to play their instruments while recorded music played. The book earned it’s title because people thought the music sounded like the movie soundtrack. Veyot found the memoir to be both humorous and serious.

Dead by Proxy and Hunted by Proxy – a series by Manning Wolfe

FireWoman dove into these thrilling lawyer mysteries by Manning Wolfe, an RL lawyer based in Austin, Texas. Wolfe writes short mysteries with other authors, called Bullet Books. She encouraged us all to read them – “you won’t go wrong reading Manning!”.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Fleming recently read this slow-paced eco-thriller about a gardening guerilla collective. He commented that it’s a good read, very political, about idealism versus capitalism. And as the title suggests, in the end it’s very Shakespearean.

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss

Fleming is also reading this collection of sonnets. Through this most formal of all poetic forms, Seuss tells a story that Fleming described as fascinating. It is the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry – and many other prizes.

System Collapse – part of the Murderbot Series by Martha Wells

Sierra had been anticipating the publication of this book for months, which picks up right after the previous installment of the series. The series itself focuses on the adventures of a kind of Blade Runner-ish cyborg character that is a ‘SecUnit’–security unit. In the series, these are mostly controlled by different corporations and have a lock on their being autonomous via a ‘governor module’.

The first book started with our Murderbot (the name it used to describe itself) hacking its governor module and thereby becoming a free agent. By book 7,  our SecUnit is basically working for/part of a different non-corporate entity.  They are down on a planet that was settled but then abandoned .. but there are still some descendants of the colonists there. Book 7 is basically about preventing another corporation from moving in.

Sierra commented that the book is enjoyable but one thing .. since it is very much a continuation of the story from the previous book… she did find that she had forgotten certain things… who certain characters were, etc. So this is maybe a case where it is good to re-read the previous books before starting this one.

She’s enjoying this series and hopes Wells keeps writing these stories.

Kissa by Kissa: How to Walk Japan and Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod

For Christmas, Zoe received 2 books that she’d been lusting after for awhile but never bought. So her husband kindly gifted them to her! They’re both self-published – though Random House has picked up the second book so hopefully they’ll be seen stateside in 2025.

The author is an American who has lived in Japan for the last 23ish years. His name is Craig Mod. His books document his journeys on foot through various landscapes in Japan.

The first book, Kissa by Kissa: How to Walk Japan, focuses on the Japanese coffeehouse, known as ‘kissa’ or kissaten. He journeys 1000+ kilometers, speaking to kissa owners and sampling what kissa are known for – pizza toast!

The second book is ‘Things Become Other Things‘. Again, Mod walks thousands of miles through the countryside, talking to local folks, and observing the decline he sees in some of the towns. This was my favorite of the two because it’s also about a friend of his whom he lost and what grief looks like as it traverses the passage of time.

Here’s a link to a short documentary by the author about the craftspeople involved in the making of the first book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4u5_UyQoyw

Things Become Other Things is the best book Zoe read all year. Possibly in several years. And the book itself is an object of beauty. 🙂

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Our next gathering is February 11 at 1pm SLT. All are welcome – bring a friend!