Books and comics read in April 2018
Monday, 7 May 2018 13:46![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usuallyhatsThe Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks - Jeanne Theoharis
Verdigris Deep - Frances Hardinge
The Island at the End of Everything - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The Lost Plot - Genevieve Cogman
Doctor Who: Rose - Russell T. Davies
Doctor Who: Lucifer Rising - Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
Hunger Makes the Wolf - Alex Wells
Saga vol 8
Doctor Who: Rose
What a delight this was. It managed to bring back the feelings I had watching this episode for the first time and combine it with my glee over all the nerdy references I wouldn't have got back then. The extended Clive section was lovely, especially RTD's thoughts on what Fourteen and Fifteen might be like. And on a similar note, I love that RTD clearly sat down and went "right, how can I make this MORE DIVERSE?". Mickey gains three friends, all of who are queer (though NB his trans friend Sally is deadnamed a few times, by the narrative and herself, but not by other characters), and it's great. The action sequences towards the end didn't translate as well to prose as the rest of the episode did, but otherwise this was a good time.
Hunger Makes the Wolf
I had high hopes for this book, given the reviews, and how much I'd enjoyed the author's novella Angel of the Blockade. And to be fair, it was a fun sf western with an entertainingly cranky heroine and plenty of feelings about labour rights, but it was also bafflingly gender- and heteronormative. Most of the miners were men, most of the guards were men, most of the mercenary bikers were men, gendered and homophobic insults popped up from time to time; thankfully there wasn't much of a romance plot, but all the couples we saw or heard about were m/f. I spent a lot of the book waiting for the other shoe to drop - it was recced on Liz Bourke's Sleeps With Monsters column! Surely this is going somewhere! - and the rest annoyed about the fact that it clearly wasn't going to. (Women don't generally become undertakers because they're more about ushering life into the world than out of it, did u kno.*)
I hear the sequel is queerer, but I don't think I can be bothered.
*sure, character perspective =/= author perspective, but there wasn't anything in the narrative to suggest she was wrong
Verdigris Deep - Frances Hardinge
The Island at the End of Everything - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
The Lost Plot - Genevieve Cogman
Doctor Who: Rose - Russell T. Davies
Doctor Who: Lucifer Rising - Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
Hunger Makes the Wolf - Alex Wells
Saga vol 8
Doctor Who: Rose
What a delight this was. It managed to bring back the feelings I had watching this episode for the first time and combine it with my glee over all the nerdy references I wouldn't have got back then. The extended Clive section was lovely, especially RTD's thoughts on what Fourteen and Fifteen might be like. And on a similar note, I love that RTD clearly sat down and went "right, how can I make this MORE DIVERSE?". Mickey gains three friends, all of who are queer (though NB his trans friend Sally is deadnamed a few times, by the narrative and herself, but not by other characters), and it's great. The action sequences towards the end didn't translate as well to prose as the rest of the episode did, but otherwise this was a good time.
Hunger Makes the Wolf
I had high hopes for this book, given the reviews, and how much I'd enjoyed the author's novella Angel of the Blockade. And to be fair, it was a fun sf western with an entertainingly cranky heroine and plenty of feelings about labour rights, but it was also bafflingly gender- and heteronormative. Most of the miners were men, most of the guards were men, most of the mercenary bikers were men, gendered and homophobic insults popped up from time to time; thankfully there wasn't much of a romance plot, but all the couples we saw or heard about were m/f. I spent a lot of the book waiting for the other shoe to drop - it was recced on Liz Bourke's Sleeps With Monsters column! Surely this is going somewhere! - and the rest annoyed about the fact that it clearly wasn't going to. (Women don't generally become undertakers because they're more about ushering life into the world than out of it, did u kno.*)
I hear the sequel is queerer, but I don't think I can be bothered.
*sure, character perspective =/= author perspective, but there wasn't anything in the narrative to suggest she was wrong