Book Chatter

Too Like The Lightning
By Ada Palmer
Tor Books, January 2017, 448pp.

The Short of It:

This was a wild read to ponder. Good discussion book.

The Rest of It:

“Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer–a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.”

What sucked me in was the premise. What kept me going were the questions.

The story is told from Mycroft’s POV. The problem? He’s a convict, slightly annoying, and an unreliable narrator. Everything he says, including those moments when he speaks directly to the reader, has to be taken with a grain of salt. Truth or fiction? With Mycroft, you’re never quite sure.

Religion has been done away with. Countries are no more. Instead, there are Hives, communities of like-minded individuals who can move from Hive to Hive as they see fit. Which raises the question: who’s in control? I couldn’t help but compare this world to the one we live in now. Certain people are still considered elite. You can take a guess who those people are.

Is it really utopia when there are so many social constraints? Who gets to rewrite history? As Mycroft navigates this world and ends up protecting the one kid who could upend everything they know, we’re pulled into questions about what it means to be a society. Even with familiar social norms gone, isn’t it still the top tier calling the shots?

My book club chose this for October, and although it was dense in places and sometimes hard to navigate, the world building and the questions it raised kept our discussion going. This is the first in a four-book series, and it feels like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Recommend. It’s sci-fi, but it’s also politics and a whole lot of philosophy.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

The Things We Never Say
By Elizabeth Strout
Random House, May 2026, 224pp.

The Short of It:

Not what I expected.

The Rest of It:

“Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation.”

I love Strout and have read and loved so many of her books, so I have to be honest that this one fell a little short for me. Artie is a genuinely nice guy, and I appreciated his vulnerability, but he never quite had that special something that makes Strout’s characters so deeply endearing and memorable.

He can be a little whiny, and his wife is truly awful. I could absolutely relate to his being blindsided by the secret she had been keeping from him, but the revelation was not quite enough to carry me through the story. I kept reading because it’s Strout, and there were still moments of emotional insight and quiet sadness that worked for me. Even so, I found myself setting the book aside more than once because the story felt a little heavy and, at times, depressing.

I do not shy away from difficult or melancholy books, but Artie was missing that heroic quality that makes you root for a character and feel deeply pulled into his journey. This was still a thoughtful, well-written novel, but it was just okay for me, especially compared with Strout’s other work.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.

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