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Tag: WIBRL

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What I’ve been reading lately, insanity edition

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WIBRL: Firekeeper’s Daughter

I’ve been reading more than Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley, but that’s what I read most recently and it has wiped pretty much everything else out of my brain. I’m always kind of – worried, I guess, is the verb – when a book has a lot of hype. And Firekeeper’s Daughter sure has hype – Boulley received a seven-figure advance, the book is not only a NYT bestseller but won both the Morris and Printz awards, and Barak and Michelle Obama’s production company bought the TV rights and is making it into a series for Netflix. I’m probably forgetting a few honors. There have been many.

So I was wary about picking this one up, despite the fact that topically it is right up my alley: crime/thriller, Indigenous heroine with explicit explorations of identity, written by an Indigenous author.

But this book cracked me wide open.

It’s good. It’s really good. It deserves all the hype it’s getting, and more.

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What I’ve been reading lately, backlog edition

I’ve been reading…I just haven’t been posting.

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What I’ve been reading lately, witchy season edition

Just two books on this list. My reading has been slowed down with the turn of seasons – although again, I have actually read more than this. But I felt like these two books, one of which I loved, and one of which I had such a problem with I could not finish it, work as a single list.

  • The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec. Loved this book. Just loved it. It’s a Norse myth-inspired story, and I found its prose both modern and uncannily myth-like. But most saliently for this particular list, it presents the idea of “witch” in a way that to me is both original and compelling.
  • A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee – this was a DNF for me, in part (but not only – I had other issues with it too) because I found it offensive in a way peculiar to me. I feel strongly that any author who mentions the Salem witch trials (or really, any historical event) in a work of fiction, no matter how casually, has a moral obligation to be aware of the actual history of this event and to take it into account in their mentions; otherwise, they are perpetuating the belief system that led to those twenty executions (and to other lost lives as well). If you don’t know anything about the history of the Salem witch trials, this is a good summary. We Ride Upon Sticks is, in my opinion, an example of a novel about witchcraft that talks about the Salem trials and gets it right – something far too rare.
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What I’ve been reading lately, trying to keep up edition

There are more – even though I have been slowed down – I just can’t think of any right now. I’ve been too busy, but also, despite the fact that I enjoyed all three of these (esp. She Who Became the Sun), I’m in a bit of a reading slump. I was surprised to stumble across the suggestion (in this post) that reading slumps are a product of the social internet! This is definitely not my experience (and I know it because I’ve experienced reading slumps before I experienced the internet, and I participate in the social internet only minimally anyway – this blog is about it, and it’s not very social), and I was initially a little offended by the suggestion.

But in thinking about it, I came to what feels like an important realization about my reading: I’m a reader, not a fan. And this makes my situation different than that of those who are both fans AND readers. Clearly, the author of the post is both. I’d argue that the kind of slump that’s produced by the internet is more properly termed a fandom slump, since (as the post author argues) it has more to do with participation in reading communities than with reading itself.

What about what *I* term a reading slump – the inability to find a book that I want to read despite longing for something new? I think that’s a separate phenomenon. So does the author of the post, in fact. For this type of slump, she suggests, “Set aside a book you haven’t read yet by an author you love.” I suspect this is a suggestion that works for fans, but it doesn’t work for me. For me each book – not each author, each *book* – is a passage into another world. It stands alone. Even books set in the same world show different slices, different moods, of that world. There are few authors whose books I will always read – I can probably count them on one hand – and I can think of no examples of authors who’ve never written a book that I’ve found problematic, no matter how much I normally love their work (see, for example, Winterkeep).

(There are authors who, having tried a few of their books, I will not read again. But that doesn’t solve the reading slump issue!)

There are a lot of readers/fans out there, and those readers do to some extent drive what’s being written and published. I don’t know if my reading slumps correspond with the abundance of books that appeal to me in their concept, but that are associated strongly with reading fandom, at any particular time, or not. Something to consider.

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What I’ve been reading lately, shedding my skin edition

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What I’ve been reading lately, renewal edition

I’ve read more than this, actually, but what I haven’t listed is mostly re-reading. I’m recovering from last year and right now I just can’t muster the energy to list it all. Every day, a little more energy…or so I hope.

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What I’ve been reading lately, plain February edition

  • Winterkeep, by Kristin Cashore. I had some problems with this one, though I did read it all the way through, not just once but twice. Kristin Cashore is one of “my” writers and so her works get a level of trust from me that many other authors’ don’t. For this reason I found reading Winterkeep an interesting exercise in figuring out what my problems with it were. I think it comes down to three main issues (no real spoilers in what follows). First is a world-building issue. Cashore’s previous novels in this universe (Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue) suffered from a common and extremely problematic issue in fantasy: presumed (and in some cases explicit) whiteness (some discussions of this issue in fantasy generally here and here). Perhaps in part to remedy this, in Winterkeep Cashore presents a nation of people with brown skin, and clarifies that the Lienid are also brown-skinned (albeit lighter-skinned than the people of Winterkeep). All this is well and good, except that by this choice, Cashore has created a world in which human phenotype is completely unmoored from biological reality (the people of Winterkeep live in the far north). This worldbuidling thus gives credence to some mistaken ideas about the biology of skin color and race; such mistaken ideas inform quite a bit of present-day scientific racism (this project provides some background for what I’m trying to get at here), which is clearly not what Cashore intends – but nonetheless, it bothered me. I couldn’t not see those threads as I read. My second issue is also science-related. While environment is at the heart of the conflict in Winterkeep, and Cashore emphasizes this by having two point-of-view and one additional important set of non-human animal characters, all the animals seem completely human-focused. These three types of animals are the only wild animals we’re introduced to (and one, the telepathic foxes, would really have to be considered a semi-domesticate); otherwise the world is populated by domestic animals (that is, dependent on humans) such as cows, pigs, and cats. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem except that the responsibility of the denizens of Winterkeep to take care of the earth and the impacts of their decisions on ecosystem dynamics are a significant part of the plot. Similarly, while concepts such as cascading environmental effects and ecosystem mechanics are touched upon, the superficial way in they are treated supports the idea that people are the superior beings, the most important part of this world…which is directly in conflict with the stated environmental themes of Winterkeep. Finally, one of the aspects of this book that I really liked was the theme of coming of age out of a background of family trauma. However, the many viewpoints (there are five) made it hard for me to fully connect with the character of Lovisa. And this made the way in which Winterkeep treats family trauma, for me, fundamentally unsatisfying. Together these three issues made the entire book problematic for me; they may not be so much of an issue for other readers. But thinking about why things were problematic for me in this one was also a really fruitful and interesting exercise – one that’s given me some insights into writing craft.
  • Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu. I loved this book.
  • The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai, by Ha Jin.
  • Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary, by Briana Saussy

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What I’ve been reading lately, deep dark midwinter edition

It doesn’t sound like a lot, and it is in fact not a lot. I’ve been tired, laboring under darkness both real and metaphorical. But we’ve passed the solstice now and I see a glimmer of light in the far distance…enough that I’m able to at the very least, record what I’ve been reading.

Here’s to light returning, for all of us (including those of us in the southern hemisphere, for whom the returning light will be metaphorical at this point).

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What I’ve been reading lately, nightmare autumn edition

It’s autumn, getting on towards Halloween – usually, my favorite time of year. But this year I am weighed down, and though I am making an effort to get outside, to witness the birds and the leaves and the river, it’s not easy. Some of my current circumstance is flat-out on me: I am overworked, having said yes to not one but half a dozen or more obligations that I had no business taking on. (It is strange but true that the more overloaded I am, the more I say yes to demands; saying no is hard, and when I’m stressed out and busy, I don’t have the energy to do it. Which of course makes things worse.) But some of it is the state of the world. For the last four years I’ve been saying, it’s a hard time, but the difficulty has been getting more and more acute. Knowing that so many have it so much worse than I do does not make getting through the day-to-day any easier.

The weather and my mood are reflected in my reading. I’m not really a horror reader, but have read (or tried to read) two recently. Mexican Gothic received such good reviews that, despite the fact that I really didn’t go for Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, I gave it a try. But this one (though very different) was again not for me and I didn’t finish it. I’m apparently the only reader out there who found both of these works much better in concept than in execution. I see that there are some who found Mexican Gothic slow; that wasn’t my problem. I just wasn’t into the prose. Like Gods of Jade and Shadow, though, Mexican Gothic has been widely praised. What am I missing?

(Speaking of things I’m missing: I stumbled across Time’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time list and was horrified. I mean, really horrified, so much so that I just can’t bear to link to it. I could go on and on about the way in which it skips over everything up till about 15 years ago – after bragging that they go back to the 9th century at that! – and that is a problem for sure. So is the fact that 14% of the books on it were written by the authors consulted in making the list. But on a personal taste note, the correlation between books I’ve talked about disliking on this blog and the past 15 years portion of the list is stunningly high. There are some notable exceptions – I love N.K. Jemisin’s work, for instance, and I absolutely agree that The Fifth Season deserves a place on a top 100 list. But a lot of the others….)

By contrast, I was very impressed by The Only Good Indians (I’d never read any Stephen Graham Jones before!) and I’m enjoying Trouble the Saints so far (not a surprise, as Alaya Dawn Johnson is a favorite author for me; wow, looks like I never blogged about Love is the Drug? I’m going to have to do that one of these days). But of the set, the book that most lifted me above my current state was H is for Hawk. It is totally different and yet somehow reminded me of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.

I hope everyone is finding things to read (or just things, period) that lift them out of the nightmare. Stay safe. If you are American, vote. And above all, take care – of yourself, and of the rest of the world too.

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What I’ve been reading lately, 100+ degrees Fahrenheit edition

It is hot. The world continues to be difficult. But there is reading. I was completely blown away by The Changeling – I found it to be creepy, gripping, and nuanced all three, and that doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s a master class of a novel. I’ll be reading it again, that’s for sure.

None of the other three really grabbed me, though I have barely started Vita Nostra so that may change (but I don’t think so). It may be that they are suffering by comparison to The Changeling – not an unusual problem for me when I’ve read a book that really captures me; everything I read after seems flat for a while.

Stay healthy and well, readers. I hope something – whether books or something more concrete – is bringing you hope and comfort right now.