kitewithfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kitewithfish) wrote2025-09-10 11:43 am
kitewithfish) wrote2025-09-10 11:43 am
Wednesday Reading Meme for Sept 10, 2025
What I Read
Space Opera by Catherynne Valente – I think this is a book about hope and about regret and about really excellent coats and having sex with the first alien you meet. It’s so good on a sentence by sentence level that I can’t decide if the I’m disappointed by comparing the writing to the plot. I’d recommend it – I’m only getting a fraction of the musician jokes. I didn’t want to finish it because then it would be over. Like a lot of stories where the stakes are “the end of the world,” it feels like a forgone conclusion that they’ll pull it off eventually, but Valente does a very good job of seeding all the components of the ending steadily throughout the book. If you like her short stories, and I do, it feels like a well-organized collection of those about the same characters, right up until the end.
What I'm Reading
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton – like 75% paused because the library called the book back. Really interesting and easy to read look at the writing and ideas in the early French Revolution – thanks to Jo Walton for mentioning it at Reactor Magazine in her monthly reading round-up. I will pick this up when the library releases me from audiobook purgatory.
Lent by Jo Walton – A re-read for a book club – 50% in and I have stopped because book club meets soon and I was clear about not reading ahead. It’s a great book to read and a great book to re-read. I cried, as I have before, but in new places, and caught new allusions that Jo Walton was weaving into the text. (“’Will there be poetry in heaven?’, he asked, like a child”!)
I really enjoyed the book’s comfort with ambiguity – our main character is a monk born in the 1450s. His values not our values, his thoughts are not our thoughts - Walton’s fictional history is doing a better job than a lot of straight history narratives of making the past as weird and human as our current day. Savonarola is trying so hard to be a good person and doing it thru a framework that is at times familiar and a times totally alien.
It pairs oddly wells with The Other Olympians, where the past was both familiar and utterly foreign, and the author walks us thru the differences; and with She Who Became the Sun/ He Who Drowned the World, where fantasy allows the reader to believe the same things that a historical figure in China might have believed.
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing Sofi Thanhauser with Rebecca Lowman - just started, suddenly there's a lot of New England clothing history?? Nice!
What I'll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for book club
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Monsters and Mainframes?
I feel due for a Pratchett.
Space Opera by Catherynne Valente – I think this is a book about hope and about regret and about really excellent coats and having sex with the first alien you meet. It’s so good on a sentence by sentence level that I can’t decide if the I’m disappointed by comparing the writing to the plot. I’d recommend it – I’m only getting a fraction of the musician jokes. I didn’t want to finish it because then it would be over. Like a lot of stories where the stakes are “the end of the world,” it feels like a forgone conclusion that they’ll pull it off eventually, but Valente does a very good job of seeding all the components of the ending steadily throughout the book. If you like her short stories, and I do, it feels like a well-organized collection of those about the same characters, right up until the end.
What I'm Reading
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton – like 75% paused because the library called the book back. Really interesting and easy to read look at the writing and ideas in the early French Revolution – thanks to Jo Walton for mentioning it at Reactor Magazine in her monthly reading round-up. I will pick this up when the library releases me from audiobook purgatory.
Lent by Jo Walton – A re-read for a book club – 50% in and I have stopped because book club meets soon and I was clear about not reading ahead. It’s a great book to read and a great book to re-read. I cried, as I have before, but in new places, and caught new allusions that Jo Walton was weaving into the text. (“’Will there be poetry in heaven?’, he asked, like a child”!)
I really enjoyed the book’s comfort with ambiguity – our main character is a monk born in the 1450s. His values not our values, his thoughts are not our thoughts - Walton’s fictional history is doing a better job than a lot of straight history narratives of making the past as weird and human as our current day. Savonarola is trying so hard to be a good person and doing it thru a framework that is at times familiar and a times totally alien.
It pairs oddly wells with The Other Olympians, where the past was both familiar and utterly foreign, and the author walks us thru the differences; and with She Who Became the Sun/ He Who Drowned the World, where fantasy allows the reader to believe the same things that a historical figure in China might have believed.
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing Sofi Thanhauser with Rebecca Lowman - just started, suddenly there's a lot of New England clothing history?? Nice!
What I'll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin for book club
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Monsters and Mainframes?
I feel due for a Pratchett.
no subject
That's so interesting. Maybe I'll try it.