Kanarthi continues to read authors of color

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Kanarthi continues to read authors of color

1Kanarthi
Redigerat: jan 21, 2020, 12:48 am

So last year I started counting mid-June and read 16 books by authors of color. Not spectacular. Hopefully this year I can crank it up and get to 50! By the way, I'll take any recs, especially for nonfiction, poetry, science fiction, fantasy, or romance. Special bonus if it's translated.

Books which I set down at some midpoint and should really just finish:
Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America
The Jazz of Physics
Midnight Robber (really good but REALLY heavy)
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

Books which I have my eye on to read this year:
Chilling Effect
The Art of Gathering
Seed to Harvest (4-book omnibus)
Go with the clouds, North-by-Northwest, volume 3
The Grace of Kings
Pachinko (that was on the list from last year, oh dear)
The Best of All Possible Worlds (also from last year's list)

Edited to fix touchstones.

3rocketjk
jan 23, 2020, 1:06 pm

I've got Trailblazer on my short TBR list. With luck I will get to it this year.

4Kanarthi
jan 23, 2020, 1:58 pm

Yeah, I think it will be a "post primaries" project for me. What I read of it I enjoyed.

5Kanarthi
Redigerat: jan 26, 2020, 2:27 pm

1. Divorce Islamic Style by Amara Lakhous*

This book follows two main protagonists: Safia/Sofia, a young Egyptian woman in an unhappy marriage living in Rome and Christian/Issa, a Sicilian man posing as a recent Tunisian immigrant to learn about two terror cells planning an attack in Rome. The chapters alternate their perspectives, and the tone is lightly comedic, drawing the portraits of their friends and acquaintances. The writing was full of references and sayings, which I enjoyed. (Honestly, the football references were probably the hardest to get.) Sofia's story is a little more compelling than Issa's. She has clear wants and desires and he kind of ... floats along ... as the plot moves around him. It's a short book with that slightly open ending that you see in a lot of literary fiction. I read it very quickly in one sitting, as it's less than 200 pages. It touches a lot on identity, immigration, feminism, and ideas of home and family. The characters argue about these ideas from many different perspectives. Recommended.

*I want to acknowledge that term "people of color" is subject to interpretation. I have chosen to interpret Maghreb people as people of color, although the differences in skin tone between Algerians (such as the author) and northern Mediterranean peoples Greeks or Italians can be slight. The point of this challenge is to open myself up to reading more books by authors I might overlook otherwise, not definitional purity.

6Kanarthi
feb 4, 2020, 10:43 pm

2. Go with the clouds, north-by-northwest, volume 3 by Aki Irie

This is a fantastic series, with the most recent volume cranking up the supernatural elements. The plot is also heating up, as the characters seemed poised for a dramatic collision. As always, the art is beautiful.

7Kanarthi
mar 11, 2020, 3:05 pm

So I've been a little distracted recently by work but I am in the middle of a few books... and the COVID precautions taken by my university mean that I will have more time for reading now! But in this last week I ran really quickly through a romance series.

3. The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas
4. Private Arrangements
5. His at Night

These were very tropy romance books, so I don't recommend them for anyone who isn't a romance fan. However, they were outstanding examples of the genre. The prose was beautiful (which is even more impressive because English is her second language). The first and third even reminded me a little of Heyer, as the main characters were manipulative people at cross purposes, which led to quite farcical situations. Thomas is also very good at describing characters' backstories and emotions at the appropriate time in the story and not drawing it out too much. The plotting was impeccable. One note, perhaps, is that these romance novels are VERY focused on the main couple, and that you don't get a clear pictures of the larger society at all. Even the secondary couples feel quite flat by comparison.

8Kanarthi
mar 23, 2020, 4:57 pm

6. An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole

A romance novel set during the Civil War that features enemies-to-lovers and a hero with trauma. I've liked some of Cole's contemporary-set novels, but I didn't enjoy her voice in this more historical setting. It felt a little too emotional and overwrought to me. I'll still check out her contemporary books but I probably won't try one of her historical books again.

9Kanarthi
apr 4, 2020, 8:42 pm

7. Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

This is a dense, genre-shifting work. It was a little confusing, but that just makes thinking about it more fun! I found the interview here useful when thinking about the book, especially understanding why the author chose to end it as she did. It had many interesting themes and ideas, and it's one of the few books I've seen that have managed to turn fairy tales into something really relevant to modern concerns.

Below is the review I added:
Gingerbread has many twists and turns and sudden changes of genre. At the beginning it's a very funny look at a mother negotiating her local parents' association and her relationships with her mother and daughter. Then it morphs into a darker, more fairy-tale tinged story, which morphs into a satirical coming-of-age story, which morphs into a drama looking at a privileged and dysfunctional family, which morphs into a story about haunted houses....

As other reviewers have noted, the ending is unsatisfying, but oh, what a ride to get there! The story operates primarily using dream-logic and the poetic writing means that moving slowly through the story gives you gems of sentences to discover and savor. Characters have complex behaviors and relationships, and much of these subtleties are in the subtext. This book has a lot to say about families and inheritance, and it does so in a way that will leave you mulling over the characters for days afterwards. If you don't mind ambiguities and enjoy books which morph genre and tone, I would check it out!

10Kanarthi
maj 7, 2020, 10:02 pm

8. Severance by Ling Ma

Like many people, current circumstances have encouraged me to seek out fiction involving pandemics. Overall I loved most of the book that didn't involve the pandemic or the depiction of the slow descent of New York under its throes... but not the chapters of the book that dealt with a lone group of survivors. I've copied my full review below.

---

The parts of this novel that focus on Candace Chen's family, her early-twenties carrier and life worries, her trips to China, and the slow envelopment of New York by a fungal pandemic are great. I especially liked how each member of her family had a different relationship with their adopted country. The writing is stylish and has a humorous, precise bent. The juxtaposition of the sections and the measured ways that characters reappear in the story and information is doled out all show signs of a skilled hand.

But as someone who usually reads fantasy and science-fiction, I was most disappointed by the portions of the novel that described Candace's trip westward with a band of survivors. This band is led by an authoritarian religious zealot, who uses violence and verbal cajolery to manipulate its members. These sections feel like an underthought, unsubtle caricature compared to the rest of the book. The book's dreamy tone and slow revelation of details don't match the high drama occurring in these chapters. In the scenes in New York and China, Candace's malaise and passive observations feel like an honest depiction of the uncertainty of young adulthood and a developing pandemic, but on the road trip they become annoying and unbelievable character traits. The final fifty pages bring together interesting ideas about routines and memory and humanity, but they also make it clear that Candace's character is an artificial shell for this story and its themes, losing the dynamic, reactive quality she had in earlier chapters. Also, pregnancy in the middle of a pandemic is incredibly cliche and the author does nothing interesting with this plot element.

A reader with a lot of time on their hands who's interested in the themes of its better sections might consider picking this up, but it's not for anyone who cares primarily about tight plot, dynamic characters, or genre elements. I can't see this book gaining much traction beyond readers of trendy literary novels.

11libraryperilous
Redigerat: maj 28, 2020, 2:32 pm

>10 Kanarthi: The only Walking Dead episode I've seen had that garbage pregnancy as hope in an apocalypse trope, and I was like, "Nope! This show is bad."

I can't see this book gaining much traction beyond readers of trendy literary novels

I have been waiting for the trend of trendy, glittering literary novels to be replaced by at least another trend in glittering literary novels since, oh, Jonathan Franzen's first novel.

Edited: verb tense correction

12Kanarthi
maj 30, 2020, 9:46 pm

>11 libraryperilous: I almost never read literary novels (I'm much more of a nonfiction or genre reader), so I'm not very good at picking up trends. Yet somehow the literary novels I read now seem to have the same basic feel as ones published decades ago? Young aimless protagonist and some sort of philosophical musings about love or fate or coincidence. It could be Auster! Alternatively: a couple or multiple couples are getting divorced and their lives are complicated and contrast so much with their carefree younger days. I rarely completely dislike these books, but reading one suppresses the desire to read anything similar for, oh, around six months.

13Kanarthi
jun 21, 2020, 12:18 pm

Okay, I've been out of commission for a while, facing some major life events, but I'm slowly returning to reading. Here's what I've read recently:

9. Iron Cast by Destiny Soria

This YA story is set in pre-Prohabition Boston, in a world where magic users are those who have blood that reacts to iron. These hemopaths have different gifts which manifest in the arts. The main protagonists use poetry and music, for example. This was an interesting magical set-up, which I appreciated. The plot is a bit more conventional, but I appreciated that the emotional focus of the story was the friendship between the main characters Ada and Corinne. The plotting was only okay, but the way the book handled romance was at least unconventional. Ada is already in a healthy and happy relationship, and Corinne has a romance with a character who is revealed to have nefarious motives. Laudably, Corinne doesn't end the book with this character. Less laudably, the character still gets a redemption scene where they admit their wrongdoings and help out Corinne and Ada in the climax. That was frustrating and cliche, and it didn't seem to fit with the themes of the book, regarding betrayal and support. . Overall the book's morality tended towards the black-and-white, which is par for the course in YA but fit a bit oddly with the more realistic setting. Worth picking up if you want some YA featuring female friendship, and I did enjoy the different applications of magic that Soria came up with.

14Kanarthi
jun 21, 2020, 12:30 pm

10. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

This was a novella by an author who seems interesting on twitter. I really have bad luck with picking books that way, because I really disliked this book. Even at around 100 pages, I had to force myself to finish it. Partly, I think I don't really appreciate the novella format. Novellas are long enough to have plots and development but too short to have interesting character developments. I do appreciate how skillfully the main character Jade was portrayed. The entire novella is presented as her diary entries, and the narration conveys just how unconventional she is while also subtly conveying how other characters view her. But I didn't find Jade charming, and I found the plot mildly infuriating. I'm all for sexual freedom , but in a historical novella, I found the levity with which the main character treated this matter surprising and frustrating. The romance was also relatively unsatisfying, because that character barely appeared in the novella at all. He was ... studious? That's all I can say about him.. I wouldn't recommend this novella to anyone, unless they are really interested in historical novellas written from a quirky point of view

15libraryperilous
jun 21, 2020, 2:11 pm

>14 Kanarthi: I didn't have success with Cho's Sorcerer Royal series, but I'm looking forward to next month's The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water.

>12 Kanarthi: Someone on Twitter referred to 'shit person view' as a literary tense and I think it seems a good fit.

Hope things calm down for you re: major life events soon.

16Kanarthi
Redigerat: jul 6, 2020, 12:56 am

>15 libraryperilous: Hm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it then. I probably won't pick anything else up by Cho unless there's a really compelling reason.

11. Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie Dao
Now this is more like it! Song of the Crimson Flower is a well-written young adult fantasy story. It simultaneously feels very contemporary and like a fairy tale. Someone in my book club remarked that combining these two aspects made it feel like a Disney movie. I don't think that's inaccurate. I read it without reading the prior two books in the same universe. Some characters are shared, and there are spoilers for these two previous books, but I still plan to circle back and read them at some later date.

The main two characters have a believable romance, even if the side characters you meet halfway through are a little more interesting. The best part of the book was the first few chapters, which laid out the characters and situation in a juicy and suspenseful way. The actual journey the two characters went on felt more conventional in contrast. The main villain was probably the most interesting part of the book, as she was both convinced that she was right but demonstrated to be a liar and a thoroughly bad person. The book also made it clear that it had a feminist point of view and was depicting a healthy relationship between the two mains, making a point that romance involves not just infatuation from afar but knowing someone intimately. This modern approach contrasted with the fairy tale tone, but the implementation still felt believable for the characters, so it wasn't too grating.

The plot also was torn between fairy-tale like influences and political machinations, which gave the story a more modern perspective. I far preferred the fairy-tale influences, and I was a little disappointed by how prevalent the political aspect was in the end, but I suppose that's the trend in YA fantasy these days. I would recommend this book for anyone who likes YA fantasy with a folktale influence.

17Kanarthi
jul 5, 2020, 9:48 pm

12. Patternmaster by Octavia Butler

I had a lot of fun reading this book and a lot of opinions, so strap in for a big wall of text.

Last year I started with Octavia Butler's work by diving into her last published book, Fledgling, because it was a standalone novel. This year I decided it was finally time to get around to reading a series by her. (Another standalone novel, Kindred, is one of her best-known works, but I am not a huge fan of time travel stories.) I'm not planning to strictly follow publication order with this series, but I started with Patternmaster, her first published novel, even though that's not the order in the omnibus Seed to Harvest I'm reading. And, well, you can tell it's her first novel. It is delightfully weird but a little underbaked. She is astonishingly good at maintaining tension: it's clear starting in the first chapter that the book will be centered around the struggle between the protagonist Teray and his brother Coransee, but they avoid fighting each other directly until the end. Chapter to chapter, the tension between them ratchets up as they feel each other out and use other characters to put each other at more of a disadvantage. However, the character writing wasn't as good as in Fledgling, which isn't surprising for a debut novelist. You understand the emotions driving Teray and Coransee but you don't really understand their thoughts or worldviews nearly as well. Several times you are bluntly told that Teray is naive, because he is fresh out of school, but you don't have as clear an idea as to WHY he is naive or WHAT his expectations of the adult world are. He expects rules to be followed, okay, but are schoolchildren not as manipulative as full-grown Patternists? I feel like a boarding school full of budding psychics would be full of complicated interpersonal relationships, even if Coransee is the first person Teray meets who can match his strength. The female characters Iray and Amber do have their own motivations, but they feel distant and secondary. Amber was critical to Teray's eventual victory, and she cares more about independence than power, but many times she felt more like a plot device than a person. She decided to have a surprise pregnancy! That fired up Teray's motivation, but ... why did she do it? I have no clue Oh, seventies sci-fi. Even your female authors wrote women as if they were another, unknowable species.

I was delighted with how bizarre the world was. Psychics who mostly concentrate on infighting and maintaining power, while maintaining bizarre rules about power and marriage? That it is eventually revealed that they've taken over the earth and that their mute slaves are the remnants of our current race, whose city's ruins dot the landscape? That the main outside threat are Clayarks, who are turned into sphinx-like creatures by a disease? That these antagonists use both primitive technology and the infection to attack Patternist society? This is weird stuff! I enjoy it just for being really out there, and I also enjoy the pace at which you learned about the world and the number of details left unexplained. For example, we get some tantalizing hints about the adolescent transition Patternists undergo, and I like that this wasn't fully explained, because it wasn't directly relevant to the story being told. But when you combine the underbaked character writing with this efficiently described, wacky setting, you get some unpleasant thematic aftertastes.

The creativity of the world sets up tons of connections to themes of power, responsibility, government, human autonomy and dignity, personal greatness, and implicit talent. But... the story doesn't really engage with these themes enough, and the limited connections it does establish more definitively are a little ... worrying. The denouement of the story involves us learning that Coransee had enough power to take control but would have been a bad leader because he lacked the personal qualities necessary to oversee society. I guess we're supposed to feel happy that the society will now have a naive schoolboy taking over. Teray's powerful and has a natural healing ability ... but although you empathize with Teray's victory, it's not really clear that society will be much better under Teray. There are examples throughout the book of societal issues that are exacerbated by Rayal's disaction, but you don't know Teray well enough to be confident that he won't fail the character tests that will undoubtedly come his way. This society is a mess and needs to be reformed from the ground up, but Teray doesn't really WANT to reform anything. He wants to return it to normality, which is not great motivation for a leader whose only sense of normality is from school. You also don't get the sense that he is good at leading people! He's isolated from everyone in the story except for the two significant female characters (both of whom fall in love with him). Can he not motivate people to follow him unless he fights them or they find him sexually attractive? Is he self aware enough to realize his lack of experience with people puts him at an extraordinary disadvantage? The prologue of the story definitely makes it clear that Butler's aware of Rayal's character faults, but by the end of the story, his approval of Teray is presented at face value to provide a conclusion by resolving the story's tension. Teray's true character isn't explored enough, and that makes the ending dissatisfying on a thematic level, even though it is satisfying at a narrative level.

Anyway, my thought is to continue with Clay's Ark, but the ideal reading order of this series does seem to be contested.

18Kanarthi
Redigerat: nov 23, 2020, 2:31 pm

Okay, so, I've kept reading but I fell behind on posting my thoughts. I have some saved reviews, so I will post those first, although they are big, unedited walls-of-text.

13. Clay's Ark by Octavia Butler.
Quick opinion: This was a great piece of science fiction world-building, and it engaged with questions about society and human agency that sci-fi is built for exploring. The characters and their relationships were incredibly well detailed. However, the climax was stretched out over too many pages and was not as satisfying as the build-up.

More details: Blake and his two daughters, Keira and Rane, are abducted while traveling through a dystopian US where gangs roam the roadways. They are taken to a small, self-sufficient community in the mountains. They are separated and paired with members of the community, who reveal to them that they have been infected with a mysterious and inexorable disease. The story of their captivity is interspersed with the story of how the disease was introduced to the community.

The love and fear that Blake, Keira, and Rane experience is contrasted with the resignation and fearlessness of the community which took them in. They are all survivors of the disease, but it has changed them, both biologically and morally. They've adopted new customs and disagree about how their secrets should be revealed to the newcomers. Butler is especially interested in the emotions of desire and disgust. They're both base emotions, but they feature heavily in higher order, abstract emotions (the sort which we like to point out as distinctly human): love, shame, morality, and so forth.

I enjoyed how slowly the secrets were revealed. For the first few chapters, it is not at all clear how the "past" and "present" timelines are related, and after their connection is revealed, I had to go back and reread one or two chapters. After these initial connections are made, the slow revelation of details makes the first two thirds of the book exciting. During this beginning part of the book, the plot is stretched thin as phyllo dough, and time moves as slow as molasses. Most of the text consists of characters discussing their situations, but the details of the disease and how the community has changed to accommodate it kept my attention.

The last third of the book was ... violently different in setting and tone. The plot takes center stage here, over the characters. There are still character details -- Blake, Keira, and Rane react very differently to the danger that they're in -- but the return to more conventional plot beats actually dampened my excitement. I'm still unsure about the purpose of this last third of the book. After escaping, B+K+R are abducted by a second community following different norms. This community is a violent gang, who murder and rape people. They're very clearly bad people, whereas the community which infected BKR has a much more ambiguous morality. But each group's choices depend on the others. By kidnapping B+K+R, their fates have become intertwined..

So far I am very pleased with my chosen reading order. This book was a vast improvement over Patternmaster, and learning some of the details about the disease was fascinating. I'm partway through Wild Seed and it's better by far.

EDITED to fix spoiler tags.

19Kanarthi
nov 23, 2020, 2:28 pm

14. Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

This book was so incredible. I am very happy that I did not read this book first in the series, because it was an absolute masterwork. I'm having trouble finding the words to talk about it, because it is so interesting and layered.

The main plot describes a struggle between two super-human individuals. Doro is an essentially immortal body-hopper who cultivates communities of "his children", attempting to breed them while keeping them under his thumb. Anyanwu is an African women whose is discovered by Doro and is brought to America. Her attitude towards magical gifts and children is completely the opposite of Doro, but she is also excited to meet others who have magical gifts like her.

Anyanwu is such a compelling and sympathetic protagonist, and Doro is such a threatening and malignant presence, whose backstory is hinted at enough to make him completely believable. The book really sets the stakes up between those two. And the social implications! Slavery! Misogyny! Immigration and being an outsider! Family and inheritance! It's so rich.

Many of Butler's favorite tricks are here: using flashbacks to establish character motivations, plunging the reader into scenes without explaining the SF mechanics (because they're irrelevant), surrounding dramatic scenes with sections where characters reflect on what they should do next. It's also a very dark book. Anyanwu's loyalty and kindness are some of the biggest disadvantages for her fight against Doro, but they're also some of her best qualities. The implications that Butler sets up around families and heterosexual relationships in general are a little grim. Yet, she's such a skilled writer that the shape of the story and the believability of the characters swing you along breathlessly, and the dark themes work at a more subconscious level.

I ended up taking a long break after this, and I still haven't read Mind of My Mind. I will someday, but Wild Seed was such a high point that I needed a break before continuing. I'm certain that I won't forget Anyanwu or Doro in that time, because this work branded them into my brain.

20Kanarthi
nov 23, 2020, 2:45 pm

15. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

I am not typically a short-story reader, as I far prefer novels. But I'm trying to expand my horizons a little, and this volume has gotten so much acclaim, that I thought I would check it out. The best of these stories were absolutely fantastic, but even though I spaced out reading the stories by days or weeks, the similarities among them started to grate on me a little. The volume contains some wonderful speculative fiction ideas and exquisite character writing. Many of the stories are based in feminist analyses. (Heterosexual relationships in patriarchal societies in "The Husband Stitch", lesbian relationships in almost every story but especially "Inventory" and "Mother" and "Real Women have Bodies", female solitude in "Inventory", body image and weight loss in "Eight Bites" and "Real Women Have Bodies", motherhood in "Mother", creative anxiety worsened by comparing yourselves to other women in "The Resident", violence against women in "The Husband Stitch" and "Eight Bites", sexual assault in "Eight Bites" and "Difficult at Parties"). I appreciate these themes, but after a few stories, I dreaded opening the volume to read the next one. The characters were all suffering, or miserable, or neurotic, and I wanted them to actually find some joy or peace that didn't seem like a deluded illusion. Maybe other readers found the endings to the stories uplifting, but I never did.

My favorite stories were often the long ones, like "The Husband Stitch" and "The Resident", probably because we had enough time that the characters accumulated enough distinct traits to give them a real sense of individuality.

My least favorite, however, was also long. This was the horrible Law and Order SVU anti-fantic "Especially Heinous" which consisted of short surreal parodies of episodes. I realized that there were throughlines between the short blips which were building up to something greater, but after 10 or 15 pages, I just couldn't keep going for the full 50. Was this added to flesh out the book or something?

Anyway, I think that this book is a perfect library read. Check it out and read the best stories, or those whose themes interest you, but skip the more mediocre ones.

21Kanarthi
Redigerat: dec 1, 2020, 11:05 am

Okay, so now we get to the books where I did not prepare a review, and so I only have short thoughts. I haven't read as much this past month, because real-world pursuits have been more time consuming.

16. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

I really enjoyed this novel, which followed a Japanese-American television producer, attempting to slip progressive elements into a show designed to sell American meat to Japanese housewives, and a Japanese housewife who uses the show to mentally escape her abusive marriage. Unusually for me, there were no speculative elements, but the details of the unfamiliar worlds of television production and the meat industry compensated beautifully. I enjoyed the structure of the novel, switching between two viewpoints, because the main characters had such different perspectives on everything. The chapters were long, as each one covered a full month, but Ozeki's writing was so fluid and they were each so varied, that I enjoyed them immensely. It's also very possible that many of the meat industry specific practices described in the book are now obsolete, but as a vegetarian for over half my life, I was certainly prepared to enjoy a book which criticizes the meat industry. The cultural commentaries, however, still felt very fresh to me. (Feminism in the workplace and in the context of childbearing, cross-cultural communication, the responsibility of media to include racial or sexual minorities.) Maybe this novel seems less original to people who regularly read in this genre, but as someone who primarily reads speculative fiction, I found it a welcome change and full of creative touches. The character writing was top-notch, especially involving the character Ueno. He is clearly a MISERABLE person, but this misery drives him to brandish power at everyone to try to comfort himself, making everyone around him much more miserable.

17. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

I was stressed out and need a change of pace, so I picked up this short YA book which is written entirely in verse. It follows Xiomara, a teenager in New York who loves writing poetry but who is enmeshed in a very complicated and damaging relationship with her mother. The poems were fun, the voice of Xiomara came through very realistically, and the plot was tight, with a satisfying ending. I recommend highly for people looking for YA fiction which has an unusual style or which is focused on contemporary teens in urban environments with immigrant backgrounds.

22Kanarthi
Redigerat: nov 23, 2020, 4:48 pm

18. Oh, and I almost forgot, I gobbled Go with the Clouds, North-by-Northwest, volume 4 by Aki Irie last week. I had read the third volume earlier this year, and the English translation of the fourth volume just came out. As usual, the art was beautiful, and the character writing was fun. This particular volume didn't move the main mystery plot forward as much, although the adolescent flirting between two of the main characters was very amusing. Teenagers with crushes are not sympathetic -- they act irrationally and sometimes even like jerks -- and I really enjoy when books capture that spirit.

EDITED to add images establishing how great the art is. Her art of characters is great at conveying emotion, and the landscapes in this entire series are just breathtaking. Here are two examples, even if the photography quality is dubious (mea culpa). To clarify, the two characters in the first photograph are NOT the flirting couple. She's a side character caught up in the main plot, and her fear, shown here excellently, is related to the central mystery.



23Kanarthi
nov 23, 2020, 3:59 pm

Adding the images completely broke the touchstones in the previous post for no clear reason. Oh well. Here they are: Go with the Clouds, North-by-Northwest, volume 4 by Aki Irie.

24libraryperilous
nov 23, 2020, 4:07 pm

>20 Kanarthi: I don't like short fiction, so I disliked this collection. I could see why people found it compelling. However, I felt some of the stories, in particular the Law and Order one, ended up sensationalizing violence against women, rather than rebutting it.

25Kanarthi
nov 23, 2020, 4:52 pm

>24 libraryperilous: Congratulations on finishing that story. I couldn't get through it. I agree that it attempted for a subversion but didn't succeed.

I'm glad that I read this collection, and I found the majority of the stories interesting, but I'm not eager to read anything similar soon. Maybe next time I try short fiction I should avoid single-author volumes and try a collection of different authors? Whenever I try to read a Borderland anthology, the wide variance among author style usually means that I lose interest, though....

26libraryperilous
nov 23, 2020, 5:00 pm

>25 Kanarthi: I've tried collections of SFF and found that my interest wanes before I finish them. I even have tried limiting myself to one story per day. I've accepted that I don't enjoy the format. It's a bit sad, as science fiction and fantasy seem like genres with strong short story markets. I'm sure I miss out on good stories by authors who might never write novels. I'm just not interested, alas ...

27Kanarthi
Redigerat: nov 23, 2020, 5:12 pm

>26 libraryperilous: Yeah, there are individual short stories which I've really loved (am I mostly thinking of Bradbury?), but I am also much more of a novel reader than a short story reader. Short stories just don't stick in my head the same way.

28libraryperilous
dec 1, 2020, 10:01 am

>27 Kanarthi: I have just tanked on a collection of Connie Willis Christmas-themed stories. Apparently, I'm just a pre-transformation Grinch about the short story format. :(

Short stories usually feel lacking in the 'story' part to me. One exception is "Sonny's Blues," which I think is affecting and a complete story unto itself.

29Kanarthi
dec 22, 2020, 2:36 pm

It's taken me more than a year, but I finally finished
19.The Jazz of Physics by Stephon Alexander.
This book is part memoir and part physics explanation. The author uses music and sound waves to explain some of the mathematical concepts in the book, describing advanced concepts like the Fourier transform without using that term. All told, I was very impressed at his ability to express complicated ideas for a general audience. The book touched on physics concepts as disparate as the structure of galaxies, the expansion of the universe after the big bang, and the movement of quantum particles. The rest of the book describes the author's education and career, in which he took inspiration from the jazz sets he played on the side. He also describes some jazz greats' approaches to improvisation, pointing out how improvisation is also how many great scientists do their work. I learned about jazz, and I learned even more about physics. I also think the Alexander really captured the sense of grad school and how inspiration can come from unexpected people or unexpected connections. Highly recommended for anyone interested in music and the universe.

30rocketjk
dec 22, 2020, 6:31 pm

>29 Kanarthi: "he took inspiration from the jazz sets he played on the side. He also describes some jazz greats' approaches to improvisation, pointing out how improvisation is also how many great scientists do their work. "

Wow, that sounds fascinating. I've interviewed many jazz musicians, both as radio producer and as a freelance print journalist. It didn't take me very long at all to tumble to the fact that a lot of jazz players (probably a lot of musicians, period) started out as math majors. Rhythm is about counting, after all.