Reading Journal Nov 15 2024

What I’ve Read
I have read nothing to completion.

I’m having some pretty negative feelings about myself around that, actually.
So, to combat the sense of passivity and ennui that is plaguing me just now, I’m going to write about some NONBOOK things that I have enjoyed recently.

The Terror – I’m watching this slowly and I’m up to ep 4 or 5 – really good and creepy, the production values are drool-worthy, I love the whole cast.

I have listened to a bunch of podcasts!
I’d recommend Kill James Bond, which is three British people of various transnesses talking about spy and action movies. I really enjoyed their commentary on the Rambo series and the politics behind it – also, they are very funny. This is Abigail Thorne, November Kelly and Devon.

I am really enjoying the Michael Hobbes Expanded Universe of podcasts, including If Books Could Kill, and Maintenance Phase.

Daniel Molloy’s Incredible Showstopping World-Famous Model Train Extravaganza for Children and Easily-Awed Vampires (Please Knock) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/60371995 – This novel-specific Interview with the Vampire fanfic is hilarious and Arieste remains delightful.

What I’m Reading
Paladin’s Strength – thru no fault of T Kingfisher, this book’s ending phase coincided with the election and so my brain is bouncing off it hard. Which is sad, because it’s a great book with mystery, real horror, and some exquisitely horny people who are too stupid about each other from a place of care and affection. It contains one of the best set up surprise magical reveals that I have ever read.

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror – 46%
Power Broker – Audiobook Part 3 – 1%
The Archive Undying -12% (Going to restart, this did not work for me as an audiobook)
He Who Drowned the World – 34%
Ash: A Secret History – 23%
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 5%
Count of Monte Cristo 48%
The Lottery and Other Stories – 31%
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – 31%


What I’ll Read Next

Petals on the Wind
Swordcrossed
Strange Practice
The Centre -Sidiqi

 If you are reading this, I hope you are taking care of yourself and finding space for kindness to your human frailty.

October 23 2024

What I’ve Read:

A Sorceress Comes to Call – T Kingfisher. Great little mind control horror novel, sort of based off the Goose Girl fairy tale but with Kingfisher’s usual style of fleshing out angles on the characters in a way that feels so real and also so fun. She loves a decent man and a scoundrel of a woman.

What I’m Reading
The Power Broker – Audiobook #2 -Robert Caro – 90+% - I’m back on my bullshit here! I fell quite far behind on the reading schedule for the 99% Invisible Podcast, but I am catching up! I have read about 25% of this book in the last week, which is not a small amount of book. Robert Caro can write like no one’s business.

Episode 3 — March 15 — Chapters 11 through 15 – done!
Episode 4 — April 19 — Chapters 16 through 20 - done
Episode 5 — May 17 — Chapters 21 through 24 - done
Episode 6 — June 21 — Chapters 25 through 26 – done
Episode 7 — July 19 — Chapters 27 through 32 – done
Episode 8 — August 16 — Chapters 33 through 34 – in progress on chap 34
Episode 9 — September 20 — Chapters 35 through 38
Episode 10 — October 18 — Chapters 39 through 41
Episode 11 — November 15 — Chapters 42 through 46
Episode 12 — December 20 — Chapters 47 through 50

He Who Drowned the World – Shelley Parker-Chan – 34% Messy and complicated, full of plots and gender fuckery.

A Sorceress Comes to Call – T. Kingfisher, audiobook read by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens – Very funny! Slightly horror, slightly romance.

Back Burner
Conflict is Not Abuse
Ash: A Secret History –
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers – 67%
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet

What I’ll Read Next
Petals on the Wind
The Archive Undying
Swordcrossed
Strange Practice - (This was a fun choice for the book club – we were chatting about what to read next and a friend brought up “a book I read a while back where Bram Stoker’s family are involved in magical community in London, and it’s a period piece and it’s a mystery” and within five minutes a search of GoodReads, I had found it – I was pretty sure it was a Van Helsing descendant and once I confirmed the main character was a doctor and a woman, I had it for certain.)
The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Sidiqi - A friend went absolutely wild about this quite recently.

 (October 9 2024

What I’ve Read:

Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews –

A bit of navel gazing: I am a proponent of direct experience of a piece of art. (Under the cut - Spoilers for Flowers in the Attic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Brokeback Mountain)( Read more... )

that’s Biz’s video https://youtu.be/RykXvaMi-ic?si=xNh6GOWNfxtvA1Ep – I think there are some things I would do differently in this analysis (her discussion of the history of the Gothic before the literary meaning of the word is thin) but I found it a fun watch and I’m interested in reading the rest of the books.


Network Effect by Martha Wells (Murderbot Diaries #5) – a re-read! Actually, a multiple re-read, Storygraph tells me I have read this four times, once per year since its been out. This is indeed one of my favorite books! If you have read All Systems Red or any of the other Murderbot Diaries, you’d get a novella that’s absolutely packed with an anxious construct trying to figure out its personal wants and also keep some people alive – but it’s a bit light on how those relationships shape Muderbot’s life going forward. This book’s is longer and it has room enough to do some deep digging into the relationships that Murderbot has made and how those don’t all have to be defined by utility. I love the element of multiple viewpoint this book gives – Murderbot’s friendships and work really do create a network effect that defines this story and shapes the future.


What I’m Reading
Oh, nothing actively, I'll figure it out

Back Burner
He Who Drowned the World
Conflict is Not Abuse

Ash: A Secret History –
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broker – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet

What I’ll Read Next
Petals on the Wind
The Archive Undying

What I’ve Read:
Yakuza’s Bias – Vol 2 – fun little goofy manga about a mafioso who loves a K pop band. The first volume of the manga was very much about said yakuza trying to square his very ‘girly’ fandom with his very masculine and tough guy career, which was kind of fun! This second volume is more straightforwardly about being yakuza and being a fan – neither are of particular innate interest to me. I’m getting some anthropologically interesting cultural notes! But I think this is my last volume of this manga that I’ll read.

She Who Became the Sun – Xing book club – Really enjoyed this book on the re-read. I definitely feel fresher about it and it’s very possible I remember more about it overall? Zhu’s intense desire for power at all costs is engaging and a bit scary to those around her, and I have started the sequel. There’s a lot of really compelling stuff about gender and outsider status and revenge and drive. 

Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne Jones - Wow, this was great AND really different from the movie. This Sophie feels like a person who is stubborn and capable and yet still completely unable to see her own value until it’s pointed out to her. I kind of adore her approach to magic. I had some spoilers but not nearly as many as I thought, and overall, I think this is a better piece of art than the movie would have suggested.

What I’m Reading

Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews – I started reading this because I wanted to watch a deep dive into VC Andrews on Youtube and the artist implored people to read the book before watching the series. She specifically took the stance that the gap between reading this book and the pop cultural knowledge of this book is vast and weird – a very compelling argument to me! The book is very melodramatic and has some fascinatingly screwed up ideas about God and propriety. It feels very much “going to the garden to eat worms” as a lifestyle.

Back Burner
He Who Drowned the World
Conflict is Not Abuse
Ash: A Secret History –
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet

What I’ll Read Next
Murderbot #5 -Network Event – Xing Book Club

Sept 11 2024


What I’ve Read:
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Oh, man, this is delightfully weird.
Spoilers ahead!
So the first book in the series started with a terraformed world, an unexpected disaster on earth, and an opportunistic species that wasn’t intended to get a boost in evolution to human level intelligence and cooperation actually getting that boost and becoming the dominant species on the planet.

In the background, humans from earth flailed around and tried to figure out how to live somewhere else, but failed, and basically were all set to commit genocide in order to get enough of the liveable planet to survive. It has an unexpectedly positive ending where cooperation and Science! win the day, and humans and spiders live in harmony enough to build an exploratory space program together.

The second book looks at a different terraforming team that landed on a different planet and what happened to them during the Big Disaster that ended Earth’s run to space – in this case, they land on a world with actual factual alien life to deal with, and pivot to terraforming an entirely different world in order to provide a safe haven for that alien life to develop on its own. Like the first book, humanity goes thru a HARD bottleneck and actually, the worst happens, everyone dies, and the species that survives on the terraformed world is a bunch of hyper-intelligent octopuses, and they are So Delightfully Weird. They are volatile and have a completely weird de-centralized neurology, so they have intuition and quick action as a main tenent of their civilization and it’s wild to figure out how these people managed to survive each other. The alien life takes the form of a slime mold that is straight out of a horror movie about invasive fungus (and actually reminds me a lot of the way demons in Penric and Desdemona are described) that relies on the cognitive function of the humans it invades for understanding – its so weird and functionally more akin to the character that is a computer program saved from a human personality template

This book was so fucking weird and fun and horrifying and so so hopeful – the spider civilization’s connection to humans makes a deeply interesting connection which is that their chief export to the galaxy is going to be COOPERATION and UNDERSTANDING of each other, and I found all of the characters (human and spider and octopus and even the sentient slime mold) to be incredibly compelling and so weird. I loved this book. I’m going to the next one eventually but I’m taking a short break first to chew on it.


What I’m Reading

She Who Became the Sun – Xing book club – Re-reading as an audio book. This is a fascinatingly gendery book and the vibe was so interesting that I actually started a C-Drama to keep the feeling going – I’m watching Nirvana in Fire, which I have absorbed a great deal of via fic. (I do not speak Chinese, the dubbed version would have been fine for me but Viki keeps shutting down when I click that version so we’re on subtitles. )

Paladin’s Grace - Re-Read – As seems to be the case, I have read this before and picked this up in audiobook form to fall asleep to, which is working nicely, but then it gets actually too engrossing and I end up listening to it ahead of things. It starts in a fascinating place, but is very much about two people with a lot of trauma being deeply horny for each other and trying to be decent to themselves and each other while they figure their shit out.


Back Burner
Ash: A Secret History –
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stories
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet

What I’ll Read Next
Murderbot #5 -Network Event – Xing Book Club

Back from my travel and it was not really a reading vacation, so I have some finished books and a near complete lack of focus!


What I’ve Read:

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King - Horrifying story, very relatable and well told. It’s a single narrative, a confession in a police station by Dolores Claiborne as she effectively confesses to one murder to get herself off another. It’s chilling and touching and foul. As in the best of Stephen King, the most horrifying thing is what people will do to each other – we enter the narrative addressing the question, Did Dolores kill her rich elderly employer, Vera Donovan? But the main drive of the story is Dolores’s relationship with Vera and how they both share the burden of surviving abusive husbands and the knowledge of what they will do to survive. It’s also a love letter to a certain kind of small New England town, and a kind of Stephen King special of ‘a selfish man in a patriarchal society is the most dangerous thing a woman can encounter.’

Can I also just say, the timing for reading this book was serendipitous?

A major element of Dolores’s story is timing her final confrontation with her husband to coincide the solar eclipse, b/c everyone in their small community will be distracted, and there was literally just a solar eclipse in Maine this year, so I have a really clear image in my mind of what the preparations and celebrations would have been like.

Also, I basically read this in a single sitting on the plane, which I definitely recommend. I then went on to watch A Quiet Place, which is an apocalyptic survivalist horror-lite love letter to the patriarchal fantasy of ‘a man will protect his family from anything, including Laying Down His Life’ – it’s perfectly competent as a horror movie except for not being very scary, but it’s like, wow, this is definitely a world where Patriarchy is the Right and Only Choice to handle life’s challenges. Really interesting contrast to Dolores Claiborne, where patriarchy will kill you slowly with a useless man demanding you keep swimming as he drags you slowly down. Of the two, one of those feels like a fantasy.

The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery – This is complete wish fulfillment and a great read. It’s from 1926. An old maid with overbearing relations is given a medical diagnosis that tells her she will die in a year and she decides to stop living for other people. She mocks her deeply self important relatives who have a high horse and shitty morals, goes and gets a job working with people who also don’t care about their social standing, and falls in love with a man based on his joy in the world. She tells him about her fatal diagnosis and they marry knowing it will be for a short term of happiness together.

It’s got a happy ending and is also nearly a century old, so I’m going to spoil the ending – the letter with her diagnosis was perfectly serious but was sent to the wrong person, she was dealing with a benign heart palpitation instead of fatal angina – she finds out that the penniless man she married is actually the estranged scion of an absurdly wealthy man and also secretly the author of her most beloved books about nature, and he loves her even if she feels initially like she might have trapped him into the marriage.

The book is so deeply satisfying because fundamentally, the fantasy is about being a person forced to live for the good opinion of relatives who have stupid opinions and suddenly being able to throw it off in one fell swoop to go and build a life you enjoy. It absolutely rules.

Masquerade in Lodi (Penric and Desdemona novella) by Lois McMaster Bujold – This is a heist, a caper, perhaps even a romp! It’s cute and short and has a reasonably happy ending.

What I’m Reading
I appear to be reading about a dozen books that I haven’t technically given up on.
A Civil Campaign – I did just start listening to this today, I feel like I have read this far too often. I think this may have been the first Bujold I read, borrowing a paperback from my grandma’s stash.

Ash: A Secret History – weird and wonderful, but slower moving than I can handle
Paladin’s Grace
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Two Towers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Lottery and Other Stoires
The Power Broken – Audiobook #2
Mo Dao Zu Shi vol 5
It Came from the Closet

What I’ll Read Next
I am totally without plans! Maybe one of the things I am actually technically currently reading??

Wednesday Reading Meme and Some Thoughts on the Hugos of 2024

What I’ve Read

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older – Hugo nominee – I suspect I might have gotten more out of this book as a text rather than audio, but I didn’t mind the audiobook at all. It has interesting world building and a slightly Batman The Animated Series vibe, in that the setting has a blend of technology from the past and future working together in ways that surprise the reader and challenge expectations. (A key element of the world is ubiquitous rail lines running between human settlements around Jupiter, but there is no ticketing system! A human colony where transport is entirely free! Wild.) Overall, tho, I found this just not quite landing for me, bc it felt like there wasn’t space to dig into the two main characters’ romance. If you enjoyed Cat Sebastian’s Hither, Page, this might work for you!

Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold – a re-read of a favorite of the Vorkosigan early books. Partially picked up in order to have a book I could fall asleep to, but it’s too engaging to ignore and fall to snoozing. I love how Bujold writes *thinking*. I loved the image of Miles getting directly in between two factions of people trying to screw each other over and deciding to make it as inconvenient for them as possible.


What I’m Reading:

Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey – Barely into it, very foreboding. Too spooky for an audiobook. I have only read Upright Women Wanted, which I liked but found the writing a bit…. Simple? Repetitious? But not bad! Just not my favorite, but the story was quite engaging and I am considering this a second try. I am a big sucker for stories of women returning as adults to an awful childhood home. I picked this up again after a slow start bc of a Storygraph view that "RIP abigail hobbs, you would have loved this" and well, I'm sold. 

Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle – An alternate history focused on a woman warrior – I picked this up from some recommendation online, I’m not sure precisely where, but it’s looking enormous and weird, very much fore me. The reviews on Storygraph are all clear that this is a long ass book and there is something very weird in the alternate history divergence, but I found out that there’s META, the book is presented as a translated document discovered for the first time, and I’m delighted to find that out.

In purchasing it I found out about the SF Gateway, a place to buy genre classics in ebook form - https://www.sfgateway.com –

Two Towers! - Tolkien – 42% Might listen on the plane, if possible.

Mo Dao Zu Shi - Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu – Part 5 – 23% - No movement

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – 31% (aka 9%of audiobook #2)- back to reading this a bit

Conspiracy of Truths - abandoned, will have to restart.

What I’ll Read Next

Flouncing about a lot with the random feelings regarding what to read next. I just picked out a bunch of random things from the library and I'm all caught upon the book club, sooooo, I'm at leisure. 





Hugo Award Thoughts

You can watch the archived live stream of the 2024 Hugo Award Ceremony in Glasgow here on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evGAZXdHH6Y I recommend it as a piece of good fun!

Ceremony Thoughts: Ruoxi Chen is utterly charming, I have a whole bunch of new things to engage with (Three Black Halflings, for one), the Best Graphic Novel category was the most boring choice possible, I’m irritated that no-one sends anyone for the film categories, and no one can stop T. Kingfisher from talking about weird fish.


Full Voting information is here - https://www.thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024_hugo_statistics.pdf I enjoyed going thru and finding the works that were nominated but didn’t make the short list.

This is the third year that I made some reading goals around the Hugo Awards. I pared back this year, tho, to just the Best Novel Nominees and a few interesting things in other categories. (In the past, I have tried to read all the nominated works that didn’t involve taking on a whole series; tho, a few times, I did commit to reading a whole series!)

Hugo Award for Best Novel 2024
1) WINNER - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom,Orbit UK) – I was surprised this won, - not sure I should have been, tho. It’s got a view of fascism from the inside and a hopeful ending that shows people expanding the breadth of ‘who is worth caring about,’ and I think it was a competent piece of writing. Emily Tesh’s acceptance speech was excellent – she wished for a world where this book was a forgotten entry into the scifi canon, one where it will not be considered prescient or important or foreshadowing of our real world.

2) Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, OrbiTUK) – Did not read, because I haven’t read this series. Might, tho!

3) The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK) – Read and enjoyed, but I didn’t think it was a contender for the big prize due to being lighthearted and fun and more historic fantasy than epic fantasy. I would have loved it to win, and I recommend it.

4) Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom) – Read and enjoyed before the Hugo Nominees were announced, but it has a structural element that I predicted would not work for the Hugos – most of the action has already happened and get revealed in flashbacks. It’s a great sandbox to play in, and I hear Wells will be doing more in it? I am glad that I had reason to watch The Untamed and read the associated webnovel, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, because there are elements of Chinese storytelling that Wells is working with here at kind of a structural level. Chinese SFF in translation is going to be very important in the coming years of the Hugos, and I hope it comes with a braver face about censorship than last year’s Hugos put to the issue.

5) The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) – FASCINATING. Really interesting world, but I didn’t think it would win bc the main character doesn’t fit classical heroic tropes in some major ways and the story is very interested in trauma and social instability and what it means to actually resist those things personally. It’s not set in anything close to the Balkans, and yet it reminds me of literature I have read based in and around there - a similar flavor of layers of suffering painted right over each other and people just getting on with their lives. People flounder, sometimes. I will read his next book.

6) Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK) – Chose not to read – Scalzi seems like a nice man, but I don’t tend to enjoy his writing.

What I’ve Read
Fanfic – Bloodlines by LadyBundle – Dune II (film canon only) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/54258223 - I had been reading this Feyd/Paul omegaverse arranged marriage AU and it’s very id-fic for me. Delightful, mind the tags.

Some Desperate Glory – Xing Book Club (EDIT: I finished reading this today and I'm moving it up to the Read section.) I’m glad Sineala did such a good write up of this book’s structure, because while I’m enjoying it, I definitely would not have much patience with some of the internal issues. It’s got a firm divide between the first part (a bit adventure, a bit character study, lots of interesting space culture comparison) and the second part, which is alternate universes based on the main character’s attempt to a decision that she’s had to live with her whole life.

I like the main character a lot – Tesh shows her with an inherent emotional honesty. Kyr is a true believer in a deeply awful system and seems really really uncompromising, which makes her decision to really change things come from a place of internal conviction in a way that I find really compelling. I’ve got a bit more of the book to go, but I can confirm that I think this book got YA’d – it’s not marketed in that genre and does not have a stupid romance, but everyone here is young and flailing and dealing with the aftermath of decisions an older generation made. I don’t dislike that but it does feel just…young. Tesh does dig into some of the grosser sides of Kyr's cultural beliefs in the run-up to the book's finale, and the ending has a weirdly charming hopeful twist. 



What I’m Reading:


The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera – Xing - static
Mo Dao Zu Shi - Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu – Part 5 – 23% - static
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – 31% (aka 9%of audiobook #2) - static 
Conspiracy of Truths - This is my 'falling asleep' audiobook - I have read and re-read this book enough that I can set it up to fall asleep to. I'm sort of re-reading it? but not really? Not sure how to count this. 

What I’ll Read Next
Two Towers! I have a road trip coming up so there will be some Tolkien in my life. It’s a accompaniment to a long drive.
Bury your gays – chuck tingle – purchased!
Space Between Worlds – Neocromancer’s Book Club

Hugo Nominees:  I have lowered my expectations on this one - Translation State is the last book I am going to try to read before the actual Hugo ceremony. 

Reading Goals Check-In - 7 months in

What I’ve Read:

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6)– Matha Wells, Narrator Kevin R. Free – Reread for Xing Book Group – This book series remains a delight. The book group continue to be unified in liking this series a lot, which is nearly miraculous for us in our disparate tastes. Kevin R. Free remains a great voice for Murderbot – nails the deadpan jokes and brings out the subtler emotions that Murderbot would rather not look directly at.

While I have read this book twice before, this is my first time reading thru the series in this order (aka, 1-4, then reading #6 before #5). I think it works better than publication order, since it follows the journey of the main character, and this series hinges so much on MB’s personal development thru and around each experience it has. The first quartet of books are a very cohesive story and end in a fairly significant decision for Murderbot – Fugitive Telemetry is a good transition from the hectic focus of the first four books to see MB actually living with the results of its decision (mostly for the better). There were such great themes of inner truth v exterior perception thru-out this story, and how the exterior can be misleading but nevertheless is what you have to engage with for other people. I really enjoyed the book club’s discussion about the whole thing – we’re going on to the next book in …. three books


What I’m Reading:

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi -Novel by S. A. Chakraborty – (Hugos and Xing) audiobook (Narrated by Lameece Issaq and Amin El Gamal) – about 80% and it’s a wild ride. I have not read any SAC before this and I like the characters here – they feel like they have really different voices and tone. The structure of the book is that Amina (voiced by Lameece Issaq) is telling her story verbally to a scribe, Jamal (voiced by Amin El Gamal), and they both really nail the different tones of each of these characters – Amina is savvy and bold and has lots of life experience in a lot of places; she prioritizes decency over societal morals and she’s not hesitant to criticize her own religion or culture. Jamal is a scholar and has ~niceties~ and ~shame~ - it’s adorable when he’s shy about Amina talking about her life. From the author bio, Chakraborty is a white American who converted to Islam in her teens and her background for this book’s world is “historical fanfiction” – the characters are fictional but the non-fantasy part of this book are based in historical studies. Overall, I feel like it makes the world really accessible to someone who, like me, has basically no exposure to this historical period in this region. I hope she’s got a bibliography somewhere to dig into.

Mo Dao Zu Shi - Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu – Part 5 – 23% - No movement

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – 31% (aka 9%of audiobook #2)- back to reading this a bit

What I’ll Read Next

Some Desperate Glory - Xing
Space Between Worlds – Neocromancer’s Book Club
The Saint of Bright Doors - Vajra Chandrasekera

Hugo Nominees:
Translation State Starter Villain “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” “Ivy, Angelica, Bay” “On the Fox Roads” “One Man’s Treasure” “The Year Without Sunshine” I AM AI Rose/House “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet” The Mimicking of Known Successes Mammoths at the Gates “Seeds of Mercury” The Culture: The Drawings A City on Mars A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) “Answerless Journey” / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, “The Sound of Children Screaming” “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” “The Mausoleum’s Children”

What I’ve Read:
The Fellowship of the Ring – JRR Tolkien - Audiobook with Rob Inglis -
Finishing this book marks a major accomplishment for me, as I have been intending to read the Lord of the Rings *someday* for a couple of decades at least. I have picked it up and put it down more than once (Tom Bombadil broke me, I'm sorry hardcore fans, I was not enchanted).

The time was right for this attempt because in the last few years I have been absorbing more background fiction about the First World War. So all the time in the Shire building up the relationships of the Hobbits to their community and to each other, they all just felt like the childhood idyll of a soldier's memoir - The Before that you have to understand before you get to The After. Even the Tom Bombadil section felt like it made more sense in light of Gawain and the Green Knight, which I saw in a musical adaptation more than once in the last few years. (But still a weird interlude.)

Also, this is a fantastic road trip audiobook - because I have been traveling four days out of the last seven and this narrative is so completely composed of Trudging Places, Awe at New Locations, and Longing for the Comfort of Home.

This narrator, Rob Inglis, deserves specific praise: he does competent voices for a large crew of people and SINGS in them, including several Elvish songs, and lands a solid performance for the whole book. (I will concede that his Gimli and Gandalf and Aragorn sound too similar to easily tell apart for short phrases, but usually are fine for longer sentences.)


What I’m Reading:

Leviathan Wakes – (The Expanse #1)- James SA Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) narrator Jefferson Mays - Really good mystery story, with some good world building. Rather more limited than the TV show, I would say, which breaks out of the POV of Holden and Miller regularly in order provide interesting context when something cool is happening off screen. I watched.... three or four episodes of the show, and the political elements of the show are much more fleshed out earlier than the books.

Finding out that the authors are both linked to George RR Martin made me realize what the flavor of the book reminded me of - this is very much a white guy book. It's not bad! It's just... the POV is very white, and very male, and uninterested in queerness, and other cultures are added for flavor but not really delved into... There are Asian women around as quests or love interests, but, well, they feel like the Dame of a detective novel. 

I would love a rec to a deep dive about TV series vs the books, if anyone has one?

The Spear Cuts Through Water – hugos and xing book club, 50% - no movement but a great and dreamlike books that I am interested in getting back to

Mo Dao Zu Shi - Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation – Mo Xiang Tong Xiu – Part 5 – 23% - No movement

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York– Robert Caro – 31% (aka 9%of audiobook #2)- back to reading this a bit

What I’ll Read Next:

Some Desperate Glory - Crossing
Space Between Worlds – Neocromancer’s Book Club
Fugitive Telemetry

Hugo Nominees:
Bea Wolf Saga, Vol. 11 Translation State Starter Villain The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi “Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” “Ivy, Angelica, Bay” “On the Fox Roads” “One Man’s Treasure” “The Year Without Sunshine” I AM AI Rose/House “Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet” The Mimicking of Known Successes Mammoths at the Gates “Seeds of Mercury” The Culture: The Drawings A City on Mars A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) “Answerless Journey” / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, “The Sound of Children Screaming” “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” “The Mausoleum’s Children”