It’s time for another mega-post reviewing a bunch of books that have nothing in common with each other!
Lousie Erdrich’s The Mighty Red was so achingly beautiful that when I finished it, I got genuinely worried that I would never find a book this good again. Set in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, it follows two farming families during the 2008 financial crisis. There’s a local tragedy, a love triangle, and a scandalous crime, but the centerpiece of the book is Erdrich’s prose. She makes the most mundane moments feel drenched in awe, like in this description of dandelions: “They were the sun when they bloomed, the moon when they formed seed heads, and the stars when you blew on the fragile globes.” You are drawn into the sensory world of the characters and experience their surroundings in rich detail. This is.a story about grief and love and guilt and parenting and farming practices and the ways we interact with the natural world, and I loved every bit of it.
In complete contrast, Automatic Noodle is a cozy novella about robots running a noodle shop. After reading several reviews of it on this website, I decided to give it a try. It’s about a group of robots who awaken from deactivation to discover that they’ve been abandoned and the ghost kitchen they’d previously worked for is defunct. The robots decide to run the business on their own, pivoting from fast-food slop to gourmet hand-pulled Chinese noodles. Because robots aren’t legally allowed to own a business, they need to operate on the down-low, while combatting review-bombing by robophobic bigots. I liked this book. I liked that the robots came in a lot of different shapes. Some are humanoid, one is a cylinder, and one is an octopus. I liked the setting (it takes place in a post-war San Francisco, presumably after California has seceded from the United States). I did feel like the plotting left something to be desired. There wasn’t much of a story arc, and then it just kind of ended. I wanted to see these characters grow and deal with more challenges. It was a sweet, quick read, though, and it had an octopus robot, so I recommend it.
Finally, I read There is No Antimemetics Division because Angela Collier, one of my favorite Youtubers, recommended it. It centers around a secret government organization that handles supernatural threats (kind of like The X-Files but British). The threats can come in the form of dangerous ideas, or memes, that need to be prevented from spreading. They can also manifest as antimemes, entities that by their very existence destroy knowledge and memory. The Antimemetics Division is the division of this organization that combats these dangerous antimemes. But how do you fight a threat that can destroy your memory and erase your knowledge of how to fight it? I thought this book had a fascinating premise and some mind-bending twists and turns. It was also absolutely terrifying. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I thought the ending was a little bit sloppy and I didn’t quite buy it as a resolution. However, I still think this book was a thrilling puzzle that was absolutely worth the read.
