Books and comics read in December 2018
Tuesday, 1 January 2019 17:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usuallyhatsHellblazer: Original Sins
The Paper Menagerie and other stories - Ken Liu
Death in the Spotlight - Robin Stevens
Dotter of Her Father's Eyes - Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma
The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey
Ms Marvel: Mecca
Provenance - Ann Leckie
White Houses - Amy Bloom
Station Zero - Philip Reeve
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge
Merry Happy Valkyrie - Tansy Rayner Roberts
Not Your Sidekick - CB Lee
The Paper Menagerie and other stories
This is in many ways a very good collection of stories: well written, interesting and varied. But it's also quietly heteronormative, its attitude to sex workers is iffy, and a lot of its female characters carried a faint aura of having been written by a man, so I couldn't give it more than three stars.
(CN: rape and graphic medical torture, both in the last story in the collection.)
Death in the Spotlight
This series continues a delight. The solution to the mystery was pretty implausible, but the twists and turns to get there were so satisfying that I didn't mind. It was also super queer, which was an excellent time. That being said, though, although intellectually I'm super pro Daisy being a lesbian (and loved how it was handled), I have been reading her as aromantic for a while, and though I knew there was no way that was going to happen, I'm still a little sad that it's definitely off the cards.
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night
I had a lot of things I was supposed to do the morning I read this, but I ditched them all and I have 0 regrets. It's queer, funny and beautiful, full of warmth and magic and hope, and I loved it. I want to read a million more things in this world and with these characters.
Not Your Sidekick
Fun YA superhero adventure, featuring a very charming f/f romance (and that's high praise from me, Noted Romance Curmudgeon). It didn't do a huge amount that was new, but it didn't need to: it was engaging and well written*, and did throw in a twist or two that I didn't see coming. On the negative side, despite some tech flourishes, the society didn't feel like it was as far into the future as it was meant to be - I think it would have worked better as a contemporary AU - and a few aspects of the resolution didn't seem quite plausible, but overall it was a good time and I'll definitely be looking for the sequel.
*the use of the present tense didn't always work for me, but it's something I find hit and miss in general
Didn't finish: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story
There was some interesting material in what I read of this book, especially the stuff about the ways having two X chromosomes rather than an X and a Y chromosome affects health, but overall I found it too oversimplified and insubstantial to be worth continuing with.
Its attitude to gender was disappointingly binary. I really wish it had made explicit early on that it was using "woman" as a shorthand for "cis woman with XX chromosomes", but as it didn't, it left me uncertain as to whether or not the author realised what she was doing. To be fair, this may have got more nuanced later in the book (it does at least refer to the existence of trans people at one point), but I had enough other issues with it that it didn't feel worth continuing.
I felt like some of her treatment of her sources was pretty slight - I wanted a greater depth of engagement than the book was giving me - which led to a certain amount of unchallenged assumptions. The one that irritated me the most was where the author talks about how scientists wanting to avoid testing drugs on pregnant women (including those who don't yet know they're pregnant) leads to medical inequalities, summarises this as scientists putting all women of childbearing age off the table for drug tests, and then moves on, casually ignoring the fact that there are plenty of women of that age who are staggeringly unlikely to be pregnant and not know it, and also that women are capable of making choices for themselves when made aware of the risks (as well as continuing to conflate "woman" with "cis woman with XX chromosomes").
City of Strife
I took a break from this book several months ago and it's time to admit I'm not going to finish it. It had multiple aro ace characters* (multiple!), but it also had SO MANY MEN, and I had to think about whether the trade-off is worth it. (I would have minded less if it was a small cast that was mostly men, but it's a pretty big cast that was almost all men at the point I stopped reading.)
I JUST WANT TO READ A GOOD BOOK WITH AN ARO PERSON IN IT WHY IS THIS SO HARD
*or so I am given to understand, this hadn't actually been established by the point I gave up, but I'm sure it is later on
The Paper Menagerie and other stories - Ken Liu
Death in the Spotlight - Robin Stevens
Dotter of Her Father's Eyes - Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night - Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma
The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey
Ms Marvel: Mecca
Provenance - Ann Leckie
White Houses - Amy Bloom
Station Zero - Philip Reeve
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge
Merry Happy Valkyrie - Tansy Rayner Roberts
Not Your Sidekick - CB Lee
The Paper Menagerie and other stories
This is in many ways a very good collection of stories: well written, interesting and varied. But it's also quietly heteronormative, its attitude to sex workers is iffy, and a lot of its female characters carried a faint aura of having been written by a man, so I couldn't give it more than three stars.
(CN: rape and graphic medical torture, both in the last story in the collection.)
Death in the Spotlight
This series continues a delight. The solution to the mystery was pretty implausible, but the twists and turns to get there were so satisfying that I didn't mind. It was also super queer, which was an excellent time. That being said, though, although intellectually I'm super pro Daisy being a lesbian (and loved how it was handled), I have been reading her as aromantic for a while, and though I knew there was no way that was going to happen, I'm still a little sad that it's definitely off the cards.
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night
I had a lot of things I was supposed to do the morning I read this, but I ditched them all and I have 0 regrets. It's queer, funny and beautiful, full of warmth and magic and hope, and I loved it. I want to read a million more things in this world and with these characters.
Not Your Sidekick
Fun YA superhero adventure, featuring a very charming f/f romance (and that's high praise from me, Noted Romance Curmudgeon). It didn't do a huge amount that was new, but it didn't need to: it was engaging and well written*, and did throw in a twist or two that I didn't see coming. On the negative side, despite some tech flourishes, the society didn't feel like it was as far into the future as it was meant to be - I think it would have worked better as a contemporary AU - and a few aspects of the resolution didn't seem quite plausible, but overall it was a good time and I'll definitely be looking for the sequel.
*the use of the present tense didn't always work for me, but it's something I find hit and miss in general
Didn't finish: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story
There was some interesting material in what I read of this book, especially the stuff about the ways having two X chromosomes rather than an X and a Y chromosome affects health, but overall I found it too oversimplified and insubstantial to be worth continuing with.
Its attitude to gender was disappointingly binary. I really wish it had made explicit early on that it was using "woman" as a shorthand for "cis woman with XX chromosomes", but as it didn't, it left me uncertain as to whether or not the author realised what she was doing. To be fair, this may have got more nuanced later in the book (it does at least refer to the existence of trans people at one point), but I had enough other issues with it that it didn't feel worth continuing.
I felt like some of her treatment of her sources was pretty slight - I wanted a greater depth of engagement than the book was giving me - which led to a certain amount of unchallenged assumptions. The one that irritated me the most was where the author talks about how scientists wanting to avoid testing drugs on pregnant women (including those who don't yet know they're pregnant) leads to medical inequalities, summarises this as scientists putting all women of childbearing age off the table for drug tests, and then moves on, casually ignoring the fact that there are plenty of women of that age who are staggeringly unlikely to be pregnant and not know it, and also that women are capable of making choices for themselves when made aware of the risks (as well as continuing to conflate "woman" with "cis woman with XX chromosomes").
City of Strife
I took a break from this book several months ago and it's time to admit I'm not going to finish it. It had multiple aro ace characters* (multiple!), but it also had SO MANY MEN, and I had to think about whether the trade-off is worth it. (I would have minded less if it was a small cast that was mostly men, but it's a pretty big cast that was almost all men at the point I stopped reading.)
I JUST WANT TO READ A GOOD BOOK WITH AN ARO PERSON IN IT WHY IS THIS SO HARD
*or so I am given to understand, this hadn't actually been established by the point I gave up, but I'm sure it is later on