psocoptera

Stormsong, C.L. Polk, sequel to Witchmark. I did not remember very much about Witchmark and struggled a bit with references to "the horrible secret character x had uncovered" and such, like, great, could you just... specify what that was... Anyways, I'll put the rest of this behind a cut. ( Read more... )

I read Invisible Kingdom on paper earlier in the year, but for some reason I then forgot that I could read the other Hugo comics that way too, and was miserably getting through a couple of pages at a time of the PDF of Parable of the Sower. But now I have once again remembered that just because something is in the packet it doesn't mean I have to use the packet copy, and have all the remaining comics on their way to me from the library. Parable got here first and it was much more readable in print, yay. Unfortunately I still didn't think much of it as an adaptation - I mean, it was fine, but it didn't particularly add anything or show me the story in a new light or anything. Except maybe that the "narrow lens" of the comic panels actually made it feel less real to me in some ways - I am not a big visualizer when I read, but I know California, and I can picture what it would be like to be in those settings changed in those ways, and in the comic it felt a lot more generic and vague, because there isn't much space devoted to setting. In fact almost every panel is either heads-and-torsos or heads-and-shoulders, with just enough full-body silhouettes or big many-person panels to make it not completely monotonous. Kind of ironic since the natural environment is important to the story. I wish we had gotten to see what this story might have looked like from an artist who cared about plants, or scenery - think about Ursula Vernon in the Digger era, or E.K. Weaver's use of place in TJ & Amal, or Melanie Gillman. Actually, my dream way to have done this adaptation would be Sandman-style, break the whole thing up and have a bunch of different artists show us their own interpretations of the characters and their own approach to choosing how to bring it to comics. (But maybe that would be less accessible, if part of the point of this was to appeal to an audience who wouldn't read the prose book, bah.)

Burning Roses , S.L. Huang, 2020 novella. Huang won the Short Story Hugo last year for "As The Last I May Know". A pair of monster-hunting ladies gradually relate their backstories, one based in European fairytales and one in Chinese mythology. I'm always happy to read stories about older women, and I liked the themes here about facing up to the past and trying to do the work of atonement and repair.

Raybearer, Jordan Ifueko. This was terrific. Perfectly paced, interesting worldbuilding, there's a bunch of world info and backstory to convey but it's always really smoothly fit into the narrative, the main character has a compelling arc, Stuff Happens including a heck of a climax that makes me eager to read the next one - the only reason I'm not instantly giving it my first place vote for the Lodestar is that I also really liked Cemetery Boys and Elatsoe and now there will be the pain of unavoidable ranking. But anyways if you like YA fantasy this is the good stuff. The cover is also *gorgeous*; I ended up reading it on my phone despite having a friend's paper copy because that way I had it in my pocket at random times, but if you like the-book-as-object this is a nice object.

The Last Emperox, John Scalzi. Conclusion of the Collapsing Empire trilogy. Another fast read without a huge amount of substance. I ultimately found these a little glib for the subject matter - Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer is a much more powerful book about civilizational collapse, and has turned out to be a book I find myself thinking about all the time - but on the other hand it's very genre-normal for space opera to be glib about giant catastrophes, and Scalzi delivers some funny moments and even a little poignancy, and, hey. Sometimes it's just nice to read something that isn't ever either uncomfortable or boring. (And I truly have a lot of respect for Scalzi's skill as a writer that he can deliver that consistently.)

Tenet. Entirely behind a spoiler cut so that I don't have to decide what's a spoiler. ( Read more... )

Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi. Had some good moments but didn't really click for me - for personal-context reasons* I have a hard time taking gang stories seriously, which wasn't the whole book but was significant early on, and I didn't have much of a sense of where it was going, and there was something about the style that felt very New Wave to me in a way I wasn't entirely into. (Can I still say New Wave about people writing fifty years later? I mean in terms of the fluid structure, the way the transitions flowed, I don't know.) Had an interesting moment at the end when I got to the bio and discovered that Onyebuchi is a dude - I don't like to think that gender is such a strong lens in how I read things, but it obviously is, because it was this instant reevaluation of which of the two siblings was meant to be the "main character"/who the author probably identified with/whose story was being told. An interesting experience. (I'm not sure now whether I subconsciously assume that all sff authors with names I don't automatically gender are women, or that specifically Black or African sff authors are women, or that people with names ending in vowels are women - multiple possible layers of sexism and racism here. So much to try to clean out of one's brain.)

(*I grew up a middle-class white kid in SoCal at a time when adults were Very Worried about Gang Activity, so that for instance my junior high had a bunch of dress-code rules trying to stop people from wearing colors. Which might have been a legitimate concern for kids who weren't in our little magnet-program bubble! I don't even know! But for me at the time resulted in me coming to view Gang Education in somewhat the same light as DARE, as a concern that was overblown, and it's hard to shake that, even though intellectually I know that kids actually died.)

Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire. More time with the teens who have AestheticsTM rather than personalities, yay. Gosh I hope we eventually get the book about some kid from Bunnyland or HotTopicTopia or whatever who's thrilled to stumble through a doorway into our world, where they can learn math in school and obtain food in exchange for currency, or however you'd spin the AestheticTM of reality. Not holding my breath.

Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey. Gailey is one of those authors who seems squarely relevant to my interests in theory, but who I don't click with in practice, and this was another case of that. Confusing action scenes (I never felt like I understood why anyone was doing the specific things they were doing), incoherent emotional arc - I don't mean to be monogamist about it, obviously people can have feelings/relationships in various states at once, but the flipflop from grieving the lost girlfriend to lusting for the new interest was jarring for me as a literary decision and it felt like they undercut each other. My recommendation if you want to read about badass queer ladies in a wild west type setting is to read Melanie Gillman's excellent graphic novel Stage Dreams, although of course if you need to read UWW for Hugo purposes that won't help.

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke. I didn't think I was interested in this at all, from the description I read of it, and then I loved it. Another case of what I think I want in books not being aligned with what I actually want, I guess. Anyways I don't want to say too much (this is definitely a puzzle-box book) but it is beautifully constructed and is the kind of thing that works in a bunch of different ways at once, plot and imagery and symbolism. (I will spare you my lit-class interpretations but I enjoyed making them.) Based on my own experience I recommend it even if you were dubious about what you've heard about it. Might appeal to fans of Byatt's Possession, or Stranger in Olondria. (Note: I feel obligated to say that unlike what you might expect of my age and general reading profile I haven't actually read Strange & Norrell, so I have no opinions about any comparisons there. (I was going to say I was one of the few sff fans who still hadn't and then I was like... except everyone *born since it came out* probably, yeesh, time.))