kitewithfish

What I’ve Read

RIP my Storygraph streak – I missed a day three days back and ended a streak of 150 continuous days of logging my reading. That means I started it April 20th, 2023, when I had covid and before my dear spouse’s appendix got removed. (It’s been a year, don’t recommend)

Saga Vol 9 & 10 – 10 is nominated for a Hugo for Best Comic. This series remains very solid. I think the heart of it is the relationship of Hazel to her parents and them to each other, the spiral of family that is vulnerable and unsettled because, well, people are trying to kill them. I did read them all rather quickly so they flowed together a bit.

Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld – This was charming! A collection of short cartoons, zoomed thru it in a day.

Into the North by Amber Huxley – Debut novel – billed as a “Dark MM Romance” and while it doesn’t really come together for me, there are some interesting points between characters, and I hope she doesn’t stop writing. I found out about it from a tiktoker who didn’t actually recommend it, but liked a particular scene in which the captive Roman character explains the size of the Roman empire by drawing a map of the Empire for the Germanic tribes that are interrogating him. They cannot comprehend the scale of the Roman Empire until they ask him to mark their village and the site of the recent battle where he was captured. Tho these locations are days of travel away from each other, on the map, they are almost on top of each other – and at that point, the Germans understand the scale of the Empire that has just attacked them. That scene was good! The romance was largely meh. Didn’t see the attraction between the main characters. Made me want to re-read Patience, A Steady Hand by Helenish, which had much darker darkness and much more believable romance.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes – Caitlin Doughty – Audiobook – I have enjoyed Doughty’s YouTube channel “Ask a Mortician,” which has provided a thoughtful and compassionate approach to answering questions about death, and does a great job of looking at historical corpses from a thoughtful and funny lens. This books is much more autobiographical, and quite touching, and also, very very blunt about the realities of death and the death industry. It was great book and I really enjoyed her story about how she got to where she is, and holding the criticisms she does about the death industry in the US.

- A note on fatness: I have seen Caitlin Doughty discuss the reality of dying while fat with compassion and helpful information. However, the opening anecdote about the corpse in the chapter “Bublating” is… not that. It feels gross, and that’s striking to me; I was surprised by that from Doughty. The rest of the chapter goes into decay as a topic, and is not focused on fat bodies in particular; just, this anecdote felt like it leaned into the whole “fatness equals death and that’s a fat person’s fault” narrative in a way that doesn’t actually doesn’t add to the book or need to be highlighted. There’s an element of moral shaming in the story where a colleague warns her against getting fat as a risk to her life – which is funny since the whole point of the book is that death is inevitable and everyone is going to die, and we should maybe talk about that as a society? I mentioned this when reading this last week and most of the rest of the book is mostly okay. I do like Doughty, but this one part was in fact a bit hurtful.

Short stuff - “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” S.L. Huang - Up for the Hugo for Best Novelette – This is an article on real world internet harassment and AI with a fictional conceit at its core. It’s fine – I think the reporting is probably more interesting to me than the fiction, and that’s okay.

What I’m Reading:
To Shape a Dragon's Breath - Moniquill Blackgoose – 6% - Just starting, but really enjoying it.
Thud! By Terry Pratchett
Kristeva Powers of Horror – 51%
Dracula – Keeping up with Dracula Daily
The Count of Monte Cristo – 46% - Static
The King in Yellow 25% -static

What I’ll Read Next:
House of Leaves – The Discord book group has picked this to read next! We’ll see how it goes!
Murderbot Diaries 1 +2 for Xing Book club
City of Blades – Robert Jackson Bennett Xing Book Club

Hugos (longer stuff)
A Mirror Mended (Hugos, novella)

Hugos Short Stories and Novelettes:
“The Difference Between Love and Time” Catherynne M. Valente (Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed
“A Dream of Electric Mothers” Wole Talabi (Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction
“Resurrection” Ren Qing (Future Fiction/Science Fiction World
“The Ghost of Workshops Past” S.L. Huang (Tordotcom)
“D.I.Y.” John Wiswell

Owned and need to read: California Bones, Raven Song by IA Ashcroft, Kraken's Sacrifice by Katee Robert, At The Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard, Tamryn Eradani's Enchanting Encounters Books 2 and 3, Tom Stoppard, Invention of love, "You Just Need to Lose Weight" and Other Myths about Fatness by Aubrey Gordon, Alisha Rai Partners in Crime, the Right Swipe, Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle