Entry tags:
books from July-August
It's been a month since I last posted about books and other media -- let's see what I can remember!
I LOVED Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson. If you like cranky Asian-Canadian cyborg women protagonists who have to write a lot of project proposals to keep the contractor money coming in, you should try this.
I caught up on some Gordon Korman -- Restart, Whatshisface, and War Stories. The last of those is in the same subgenre as his serious football-and-a-senior-citizen work Pop. A teenage boy thinks a thing (football or war) is awesome, and learns from a senior citizen that it has serious downsides. Also I reread his The Twinkie Squad which was fun as always. I always love that reveal at the end so much, about Doug's motivations. Whatshisface is Korman's first work of fantasy (that I know of), and surprised me with how far it went into a revisionist Shakespeare authorship theory direction. Restart is fine -- kind of standard modern Korman along the lines of Unschooled.
Via paper mail and ebooks I have now read ALL OF ZEN CHO'S PUBLISHED FICTION!!!! This makes me feel more prepared to write fannish "did you notice these themes???" stuff, including panel suggestions, for use at WisCon next year when Cho will be a Guest of Honor. I bought a few paper copies of the now out-of-print anthology Love in Penang which has a very sweet mimetic/naturalistic/what is the word we use now for "takes place basically in our consensus reality"? romance story by Cho. I hope that next year, I can do something cool involving giving them away or auctioning them in a fun way during the Otherwise Auction.
You too can buy an ebook of LONTAR Issue # 1 so you can read "Love in the Time of Utopia" which is incisive and just, like, quintessentially Zen Cho, IMO. There's a theme there that's a little like -- I don't want to be too spoilery -- a theme that emerges in Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, about the sideways failures of utopian schemes.
I feel like I reread a few other things for comfort over the past month.... maybe Lifelode by Jo Walton and a few other things?
I read A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee, which is a mystery written by a Scot of Bengali descent, taking place in 1919 Calcutta: "Desperate for a fresh start, Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up an important post in Calcutta’s police force." I agree with this book's politics but it really shows that the author had never written a novel before, in particular in the dialogue. Characters speak their subtext or otherwise exposit in that "unrealistically monologue coherently about national politics for six paragraphs" kind of way. I am a little interested in reading the next books in the series, because maybe the writing will improve.
My friend Andrea Phillips wrote America, Inc., a sequel to her short sf piece "The Revolution, Brought To You By Nike". I think that America, Inc. is jump-up-and-down mind-chewy, with a particularly relatable protagonist in Matapang, and with some reallllly neat design fiction.
Thank you![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants for reviewing Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts which is just as engaging, observant, and satisfying as that review promised. As I mentioned in comments there: Funny, incisive, moving, clever, really insightful about human lives, sweet, celebratory of ridiculous joys.
I did finish Consolation Songs which I mentioned last month. The particularly optimistic stories in there, to me:
"Storm Story" by Llinos Cathryn Thomas
"Seaview on Mars" by Katie Rathfelder
"Low Energy Economy" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
"This Is New Gehesran Calling" by Rebecca Fraimow
"Love, Your Flatmate" by Stephanie Burgis
and I might have missed a few. Some of the others have melancholy endings; some of them have fairly happy endings but the emotional stuff people go through during the story just makes the whole thing not very happy for me. But I highly recommend "Storm Story", "Seaview on Mars", and "This Is New Gehesran Calling" and think they're worth the price of the collection by themselves -- and I did like Iona Datt Sharma's story, "St-Anselm-by-the-Riverside", even though it was bittersweet rather than just sweet.
I have embarked on a low-key effort to read all of Naomi Kritzer's short fiction -- this will probably turn into "all of her fiction, period" because I always like Kritzer's work. People (often -- always? -- women and girls) get to be resourceful, sensible, and brave. I bought Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories and enjoyed everything. And I bought some ebook copies of past magazines her stories appeared in and liked those too.
And the other day a friend and I caught up on the phone, and she has just read Pat Barker's Regeneration, so we got to talk about it for like an hour. Dr. Rivers will judge you but he will not let that judgment into how he talks to you! Pat Barker, like Philip K. Dick, is so good at observing people make the stubborn self-destructive choices they feel driven to make! The shorthand that Sassoon and Owen fall into when critiquing and editing poetry! People being decent to each other in an obscenely awful time!!!!
I LOVED Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson. If you like cranky Asian-Canadian cyborg women protagonists who have to write a lot of project proposals to keep the contractor money coming in, you should try this.
I caught up on some Gordon Korman -- Restart, Whatshisface, and War Stories. The last of those is in the same subgenre as his serious football-and-a-senior-citizen work Pop. A teenage boy thinks a thing (football or war) is awesome, and learns from a senior citizen that it has serious downsides. Also I reread his The Twinkie Squad which was fun as always. I always love that reveal at the end so much, about Doug's motivations. Whatshisface is Korman's first work of fantasy (that I know of), and surprised me with how far it went into a revisionist Shakespeare authorship theory direction. Restart is fine -- kind of standard modern Korman along the lines of Unschooled.
Via paper mail and ebooks I have now read ALL OF ZEN CHO'S PUBLISHED FICTION!!!! This makes me feel more prepared to write fannish "did you notice these themes???" stuff, including panel suggestions, for use at WisCon next year when Cho will be a Guest of Honor. I bought a few paper copies of the now out-of-print anthology Love in Penang which has a very sweet mimetic/naturalistic/what is the word we use now for "takes place basically in our consensus reality"? romance story by Cho. I hope that next year, I can do something cool involving giving them away or auctioning them in a fun way during the Otherwise Auction.
You too can buy an ebook of LONTAR Issue # 1 so you can read "Love in the Time of Utopia" which is incisive and just, like, quintessentially Zen Cho, IMO. There's a theme there that's a little like -- I don't want to be too spoilery -- a theme that emerges in Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer, about the sideways failures of utopian schemes.
I feel like I reread a few other things for comfort over the past month.... maybe Lifelode by Jo Walton and a few other things?
I read A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee, which is a mystery written by a Scot of Bengali descent, taking place in 1919 Calcutta: "Desperate for a fresh start, Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up an important post in Calcutta’s police force." I agree with this book's politics but it really shows that the author had never written a novel before, in particular in the dialogue. Characters speak their subtext or otherwise exposit in that "unrealistically monologue coherently about national politics for six paragraphs" kind of way. I am a little interested in reading the next books in the series, because maybe the writing will improve.
My friend Andrea Phillips wrote America, Inc., a sequel to her short sf piece "The Revolution, Brought To You By Nike". I think that America, Inc. is jump-up-and-down mind-chewy, with a particularly relatable protagonist in Matapang, and with some reallllly neat design fiction.
Thank you
skygiants for reviewing Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts which is just as engaging, observant, and satisfying as that review promised. As I mentioned in comments there: Funny, incisive, moving, clever, really insightful about human lives, sweet, celebratory of ridiculous joys.I did finish Consolation Songs which I mentioned last month. The particularly optimistic stories in there, to me:
"Storm Story" by Llinos Cathryn Thomas
"Seaview on Mars" by Katie Rathfelder
"Low Energy Economy" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
"This Is New Gehesran Calling" by Rebecca Fraimow
"Love, Your Flatmate" by Stephanie Burgis
and I might have missed a few. Some of the others have melancholy endings; some of them have fairly happy endings but the emotional stuff people go through during the story just makes the whole thing not very happy for me. But I highly recommend "Storm Story", "Seaview on Mars", and "This Is New Gehesran Calling" and think they're worth the price of the collection by themselves -- and I did like Iona Datt Sharma's story, "St-Anselm-by-the-Riverside", even though it was bittersweet rather than just sweet.
I have embarked on a low-key effort to read all of Naomi Kritzer's short fiction -- this will probably turn into "all of her fiction, period" because I always like Kritzer's work. People (often -- always? -- women and girls) get to be resourceful, sensible, and brave. I bought Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories and enjoyed everything. And I bought some ebook copies of past magazines her stories appeared in and liked those too.
And the other day a friend and I caught up on the phone, and she has just read Pat Barker's Regeneration, so we got to talk about it for like an hour. Dr. Rivers will judge you but he will not let that judgment into how he talks to you! Pat Barker, like Philip K. Dick, is so good at observing people make the stubborn self-destructive choices they feel driven to make! The shorthand that Sassoon and Owen fall into when critiquing and editing poetry! People being decent to each other in an obscenely awful time!!!!