John J. Vinacci

This was a fun read and a real page turner for me. All Our Wrong Todays is an alternate timeline/time-travel story warped by the crushing specter of personal despair and family drama. While I see this book as not being everyone’s cup of tea, its strength lies in the fact that you simply don’t know what’s going to happen next while our anti-hero, Tom, deals with what a fuck-up he is. (This is the really the only trope the book gives service to in a genre littered with tropes.) The book has some great lines, such as, “Every invention introduces you to the accident of that invention” and this goes for people, as well. If there’s a downside to the book, it would be that too often our (anti)hero is written in an immature and crass way with too much dialogue to reflect this and his inability to truly explore the philosophical implications of his actions. Tom, the (anti)hero is not someone we could admire but I believe he reflects that dark side of ourselves that we hate to admit exists somet...

 A man-vs-nature book set slightly in the future and on a different planet to boot, The Martian excels at something very particular: Making math relevant and accessible. Mathematical skills have never been my strong suit, but reading about an unintentionally stranded astronaut fighting to stay alive by having to do numerous calculations (that the story walks you through!) captivated me. Given our protagonist is a mechanical engineer and botanist with an everyman's sense of humor made astronaut Watney a character to root for when there are really no other characters to be found, not until more than a quarter of the way through the book. None of those characters are fleshed out, mind you, as this serves to keep the focus on 'the Martian' and this is a bit distracting as it makes the team at NASA working to save Watney caricatures. So, there is that flaw, while the eventual rescue attempt seem a bit rushed (yet thrilling nonetheless) and the book begins switching narrative pe...

Before coming into this year as the Year I Read Only Sci-Fi books, 'fun' is not a word I would have used to describe any sci-fi book I've read before. But this year I did have some fun reads, first with The Kaiju Preservation Society and now with Drunk On All Your Strange New Worlds . Drunk On All Your Strange New Worlds begins as a seemingly straight-forward murder mystery in which an alien cultural attaché's murder casts suspicion on his translator, Lydia, who sets out to prove her innocence by finding the real killer(s). Driven by dry wit and a clever finger on the pulse of the intersection between technology and conspiracy theories, this book was a joy to read. Moreover, we're given a realistic, relatable protagonist in Lydia who not only has to deal with the fact that translating for the aliens makes her drunk but has to deal with recognizing her other limitations and the mistakes she has and does make. While she takes on more than many of us might in her sit...

It was back the classics for my next read, or at least what was reported to be sci-fi classic by many reviewers... The Left Hand of Darkness is the story of The Envoy, Genly Ai, a representative of a confederation of planets seeking to bring a new world, Gethen (aka Winter per its near perpetual frozen state) into the confederation. The Envoy is stymied by cultures he struggles to understand, cultures which are based around the fact that its otherwise human inhabitants can be male of female once a moth depending on their hormones; the inhabitants are ambisexual . Strangely, this book is reportedly not only a sci-fi classic but a feminist classic, though not only did I struggle to find the (modern) feminist message, the fact that Gethen's inhabitants are ambisexual really doesn't figure into the plot beyond The Envoy failing to understand the nuances of behavior of the people he's dealing with (which you would think any alien ambassador would be better at).  Eventually, bec...

Nacho the peacemaker. Knucklehead the sweet boy. Niles the crackhead. 

I love you and I will always love you. There are some memories that no amount of time could ever erase.  I remember that first day. My partner, now my wife, and I thought her cat, Knucklehead, needed a friend so we decided to go to the Humane Society... You were one of the few that clearly stood out. Your captors cleverly named you Snowshoe – you were mostly white – but you were smarter than your cutesy name suggested. You were one of the few prisoners who seemed interested enough to rouse from their malaise as prospective new parents perused the potential adoptees. I remember you stuck your foot into your water-bowl before drinking – obviously some kind of ingenious feline test for the purity of your sustenance – and I said to my partner something to the effect of, “Look, this one does tricks.” You and I took to each other immediately and you crawled up into my lap though it was obvious you didn’t care for such theatrics. But, you probably figured you should go through the motio...

Let me begin by letting all writers in on a little secret: The ending is everything. Read that again. That said, Ben Oliver’s The Loop left me incredibly angry, giving us one of the worst endings since the movie Sliver and casts the entirety of everything that preceded it into question. This is another one of those “I wanted to like it more than I did” books, this one about a teenage boy locked in a futuristic prison in some dystopian future. Despite immediate Hunger Games/Maze Runner vibes, I was still captivated early on by the simplicity of the plot and ease of prose. There is a lot of suspending of belief to be had, though, as you wonder just how many times someone can cheat death (which could be resolved by the book’s non-ending, if you read it that way). There are a lot of good characters but many of them seem to transform on a dime which doesn’t seem plausible, either. Add in some pseudo-zombies for good measure and you’ve got…something. On a positive note (which will becom...