I've been traveling a bunch and reading a bunch, so I'm three books behind now, but I want to save the book I just finished, Homegoing, for a separate post.
For the past few years, I've read at least a couple sci-fi books each year, but I still feel I'm a newcomer to the genre. I read some sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent books as a kid (Douglas Adams and Madeleine L'Engle, mainly), but for most of my adulthood I didn't think it was for me, so I didn't read any. I'm not sure when exactly that changed. The first sci-fi book I read as an adult might have been Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I had to read for a class I took at Harvard in 2002. I had seen Bladerunner dozens of times, and yet I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book. Around the same time, I also read his A Scanner Darkly. But I always thought Philip K. Dick was a special case and not like other sci-fi. Aside from Dick, the first sci-fi book I read was The Last Castle by Jack Vance, and my decision to read that can be attributed entirely to this article, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. I'll admit that I thought of reading the Vance as sort of an experiment, a wading into genre, which I felt I read at a remove. I still have this feeling reading some sci-fi. A few months after reading the Vance, I read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and I subsequently went on to read nearly all his other books, starting with the Baroque Cycle. Which is to say, the first of Stephenson's books I read were not so much sci-fi either, but I do think reading Stephenson was probably a significant factor in me changing my mind about whether sci-fi was for me. So, in the intervening decade, I've read a dozen or maybe a bit more sci-fi books, and it's part of my regular rotation, but still sort of new to me and I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I like, so when I come across recommendations, I note them and that is how I ended up reading Probability Moon. I don't actually have anything profound to say about it, but I enjoyed it.
I finished reading Probability Moon on my commute to work one morning last week, and so on my lunch break that day, I did what I do in that situation: I visited the thrift store by my office that sells paperbacks for $1 to find something to start on my way home. (This despite the fact that I also keep about 8 books at the office for precisely this scenario. I said to myself, if I don't find something to read a the thrift store, then I'll read one of my office books.) I picked up The White by Deborah Larsen, which I'd never heard of, as well as All That Is, by James Salter (and two Lidia Bastianich cookbooks!) and almost started the Salter, but then wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, so started The White instead. I wasn't sure it was what I was in the mood for, but I got through more than 40 pages on the subway home and finished the whole book 2 days later (it's very spare). The White is based on the true historical figure Mary Jemison, the daughter of Irish immigrants to the colonies, who was captured by the Shawnee in 1758 and ended up making a life among the Seneca. Toward the end of her life, Mary Jemison narrated her life story to a doctor who recorded it for posterity, but she reportedly said she hadn't told him the half of it, so this book imagines the other half. The book was violent and quite troubling in parts, but of course the times that Mary Jemison lived in were violent and troubling. One of the things that I found troubling about this book, though, is that it focused (very effectively) on the personal struggles of Mary and her families, but the larger historical context feels vague in the book. This may, in fact, be true to Mary's experience, but to tell in the 21st century, a story about a white woman living among Native Americans that spans the period of American independence, knowing what we know is to come seems like leaving a lot out.
