April 2025 Reading

Published: 2025-05-01 7:00 PM

Category: Books | Tags: reading, dave barry, peter pan, michael mammay, andy weir, octavia e butler, science fiction

I finished three books in April, mostly toward the start of the month. I slowed down at the end of the month because school got really busy and I generally fell asleep as soon as I could.

This month features finishing another read-aloud for my kids and a bunch of science fiction.

Peter and the Sword of Mercy - Ridley Pearson, Dave Barry

Book four...similar plot to the last two books. Peter gets pulled to London, Mollusk Island is in trouble because of pirates. The middle is long, with one-chapter pages giving tiny details making the movement feel extremely slow.

My kids like it, but I think they should've stopped after book three. That ended neatly and felt like a satisfying finale for a trilogy. I understand wanting to continue the story into the Wendy plot line, but the stretches made to try and make it work felt like they went too far.

Generation Ship: A Novel - Michael Mammay

A standalone novel of a ship, travelling from Earth for hundreds of years, as it approaches their destination star system. The story is told from the perspectives of different crew members (more citizens now, than crew) and their political and social shifts that occur as a result of finally reaching their new potential home. The story moves along well and each particular character has their niche (the scientist, the military guy, the hacker, the farmer, and the politician) and each works to make sure their perspective is the one that makes the difference.

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

A lone scientist is on a save all of humanity mission. It read similar to The Martian, with a lot of first-person narrative in both the past and present tense. The main character is a scientific catch-all who seems to have expertise in all things astronomy. I think, like The Martian, it was a little too "science your way out of this" problem for my taste and I found myself reading along just to get to the next plot point.

That said, it was a good book with interesting perspectives on what resources and sacrifices might need to be made in order to save humanity.

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E. Butler

I felt tense with every page. The shadows of society in the book are already visible today and it's a stark look at how quickly things can devolve. I don't feel like an anxious person, but this book felt a little too close to home with our current trajectory.

I keep my reading list current and post update to LibraryThing if you want to connect there.