novel

This is book 2 of The Themis Files.

I enjoyed the first book enough to read the second book, and this was the second book. It starts about a decade after the last one ended, where everyone has pretty much become used to having a large (like 200' large), alien robot hanging out on the world doing book readings and press conferences.

And then another robot shows up and starts killing everyone.

The book moved at a more frenetic pace than the first one did, which is reasonable given the first one needed to world-build and this one can coast along on those words. Not everyone dies in the end, and we don't see enough of the characters we saw in the first one, and the rough edges have been smoothed off everyone's personality, all which contributed to this being a typical sophomoric book: less good than the first, but sufficient.

There's one more book in the series, coming out in May, which I'll read. I think this book is better experienced on audiobook, to be honest.

Military people — people like me — need intelligence to be useful. We need to know what’s going on. Without intelligence, take my word for it, you do not want your fate in the hands of the military. We do not improvise.
Page 18

Scientists are like children: They always want to know everything, they all ask too many questions, and they never follow orders to the letter.
Page 18

— Do you remember what you told me the second time around to get me to take this job?

— I do.

— You said: “I found you a military post where you’ll never have to kill anyone ever again.”

This is a book about baseball, in the way that the Chariots of Fire is a movie about running. Baseball is a part of this book, but it isn't a book about baseball. It's a book about a kid who wants nothing more than to play baseball, who has incredible natural talent, who is willing to put in the work, who finds someone who can help him achieve his baseball dreams, and who makes a mistake.

Sorta. Because it is a book about baseball.

The title refers to a fictional book in the book, also about baseball. The fictional book is a zen-like non-fiction book on how to be the best shortstop ever, from the best shortstop ever. The quoted passages of the fictional book inside this also-fictional book (the one I read, not the one I read about the character reading), are inspiring and very zen, which I liked. I was expecting baseball in this book, and got it.

What I wasn't expecting in this book was Stoicism and the realization of just how much I f'ing know about baseball. I was also not expecting to understand the want and the need to play baseball. Well, not so much baseball, but the need for movement, the need for flow, the need for the joy of being so excellent at something to the point of stillness in action. I may have had moments of brilliance in my ultimate career, but it wasn't consistent, I didn't own it. I had glimpses, though. Enough to understand what this book is trying to say, with the beauty of baseball and the stillness in action.

Growing up, baseball for me was exactly how Affenlight, the college president in the book, views baseball:

Baseball—what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around.
Page 64

I didn't review this book immediately after reading it. A large reason for this delay is the impact of the book. I recommend this book.

The premise of the book is that on the day someone is going to die, they receive a call from Death Cast, some time after midnight, letting them know they are going to die today. No one escapes death if they are called, you'll be dead by the next midnight. In this world, some people make the death happen. Others try really hard to escape it, only to slip on the floor and die from a concussion anyway. Everyone adapts in some way.

The book is delightfully constructed with the view from a dozen lives that (spoiler, probably) you realize are all intertwined in some way. I really like the vignettes of the smaller characters that dash into the story and step out, but are still very much a part of the tale.

The two main characters meet through an app called Last Friend, a social network for people who have received their calls and people who would like to support people in literally their last day. Of course, some people abuse the network, but most people are there to help. Each of the main characters helps the other find what he needs. That it happens on their last day is heartbreaking. Kinda knew that from the title, though.

I loved that this book isn't about two white boys. Very few of the characters are white male. I enjoyed changing my mental picture of the characters as their descriptions were made. I loved the challenge of rethinking all of my assumptions while reading the book.

I'd like to know if "you're going to die today" means dead-dead or does dead-but-brought-back work? Can you be clinically dead and revived, or is the call dead-dead and you're dead?

This is Book 4 of The Chronicles of Narnia.

I will likely be done with all of these by the end of the month, at the rate I'm going and ease of reading. I will be okay with being done hunting for Christian allegorical elements in the books I'm reading by Christmas.

This book puzzled me a lot in a couple places. I'm okay with time passing, and the kids being pulled back to Narnia - it's magic, and if you accept magic, you need to suspend disbelief and let the newly defined laws of nature reveal themselves. That's fine.

What I'm struggling with is that that talking animals, the Talking Animals, eat their own kind. They serve bacon and eggs and bear to the kids. In another book, the kids ate roast. Okay, so, maybe the animals who can't talk are a different species, distinctly farm animals? Nope, turns out that Talking Animals can devolve into non-talking animals. This means, there is a spectrum of Talking in Narnia with the animals. If we take Talking as a measurement of intelligence, then the Talking Animals eat their stupid, their dumb, their deaf, their mute, their mentally incapacitated, their learning-disabled. While this could be okay in some societies to cull the herd, I'm not sure this is what C. S. had in mind when he had his Talking Animals.

This book was published in 1951. The Two Towers was published in 1954. Why is this significant? Because C.S. Lewis had the protagonists saved by a giant forest of trees in this book. That's three years before the Ents were released on the world. Another struggle.