Books and comics read in June 2020
Thursday, 2 July 2020 21:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usuallyhatsDeeplight - Frances Hardinge
Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins II
The Wicked + The Divine: Okay
Minor Mage - T. Kingfisher
Catfishing on Catnet - Naomi Kritzer
Paper Girls Vol 5
Paper Girls Vol 6
Riverland - Fran Wilde
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Monstress vol 2: The Blood
Monstress vol 3: Haven
Monstress vol 4: The Chosen
LaGuardia - Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
Mooncakes - Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu
Middlegame - Seanan McGuire
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P Djèlí Clark
The Deep - Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Dragon Pearl - Yoon Ha Lee
Silver in the Wood - Emily Tesh
(hello yes I am doing my Hugo reading)
The Wicked + The Divine: Okay
I've been back and forth on WicDiv throughout its run, but this was such a joyous, uplifting finale; exactly what I needed to read right now.
Gideon the Ninth
So this is basically space Gormenghast meets (skip) And Then There Were None and The Hunger Games, with necromancers, all as written by tumblr, and I kind of loved it? I didn't love every choice it made, but the wild confidence of the prose hooked me in and carried me through - it knows that not everyone's going to like it and that's fine, it's just going to do its thing regardless. I feel like I won't know for SURE if I loved it until I read the rest of the trilogy, but I certainly had A Lot Of Feelings.
(Content notes: death, gore, lots of child death, the horrible potentiality of necromancy continually explored. Not really zombies though oddly, for which I am grateful.)
Middlegame
I was very back and forth with this book. It took about the first 10% of the book to get into it, then I spent some time thinking it was a perfectly enjoyable slice of sff/horror, until it did something I could not get over: (skip) it killed off its one major brown character, who is largely there to provide science and sarcasm before raising the stakes by getting murdered. And it not only killed her, it lingered on her murder in a way that I found deeply unpleasant, and then we were supposed find her murderer sympathetic? "Oh I had to kill her to keep you safe," she tells the protagonists casually, while toting around a hand of glory made from her corpse; "eh, fair enough," they reply. Ugh, no. This really killed the last third of the book for me - after that, I couldn't really enjoy it any more, and as a result I also got more and more bothered by the fact that a lot of the plot/worldbuilding logic was basically nonsense. But even before that point I had some issues with it: the prose is somewhat self important, it's weirdly hetero- and gender normative, it's suuuper white... the more I think about this book, it turns out, the less I like it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015
I really liked the world this was set in - 1910s Cairo with magic! - but the characters didn't quite work for me. I'm not sure if that was to do with the style, or because the main two were both men, or both. Nevertheless, I would love to read more in this world - the good parts of this were really good.
Didn't finish: The City in the Middle of the Night
This just didn't work for me. There wasn't exactly anything I disliked about it, I just got to about 43% and realised that I didn't feel particularly strongly about finishing it.
Short stories I enjoyed this month:
Away with the Wolves - Sarah Gailey: This was a lovely, hopeful story about friendship, chronic pain and building the life you want, not the life you've been told you should have.
Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins II
The Wicked + The Divine: Okay
Minor Mage - T. Kingfisher
Catfishing on Catnet - Naomi Kritzer
Paper Girls Vol 5
Paper Girls Vol 6
Riverland - Fran Wilde
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Monstress vol 2: The Blood
Monstress vol 3: Haven
Monstress vol 4: The Chosen
LaGuardia - Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
Mooncakes - Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu
Middlegame - Seanan McGuire
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P Djèlí Clark
The Deep - Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Dragon Pearl - Yoon Ha Lee
Silver in the Wood - Emily Tesh
(hello yes I am doing my Hugo reading)
The Wicked + The Divine: Okay
I've been back and forth on WicDiv throughout its run, but this was such a joyous, uplifting finale; exactly what I needed to read right now.
Gideon the Ninth
So this is basically space Gormenghast meets (skip) And Then There Were None and The Hunger Games, with necromancers, all as written by tumblr, and I kind of loved it? I didn't love every choice it made, but the wild confidence of the prose hooked me in and carried me through - it knows that not everyone's going to like it and that's fine, it's just going to do its thing regardless. I feel like I won't know for SURE if I loved it until I read the rest of the trilogy, but I certainly had A Lot Of Feelings.
(Content notes: death, gore, lots of child death, the horrible potentiality of necromancy continually explored. Not really zombies though oddly, for which I am grateful.)
Middlegame
I was very back and forth with this book. It took about the first 10% of the book to get into it, then I spent some time thinking it was a perfectly enjoyable slice of sff/horror, until it did something I could not get over: (skip) it killed off its one major brown character, who is largely there to provide science and sarcasm before raising the stakes by getting murdered. And it not only killed her, it lingered on her murder in a way that I found deeply unpleasant, and then we were supposed find her murderer sympathetic? "Oh I had to kill her to keep you safe," she tells the protagonists casually, while toting around a hand of glory made from her corpse; "eh, fair enough," they reply. Ugh, no. This really killed the last third of the book for me - after that, I couldn't really enjoy it any more, and as a result I also got more and more bothered by the fact that a lot of the plot/worldbuilding logic was basically nonsense. But even before that point I had some issues with it: the prose is somewhat self important, it's weirdly hetero- and gender normative, it's suuuper white... the more I think about this book, it turns out, the less I like it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015
I really liked the world this was set in - 1910s Cairo with magic! - but the characters didn't quite work for me. I'm not sure if that was to do with the style, or because the main two were both men, or both. Nevertheless, I would love to read more in this world - the good parts of this were really good.
Didn't finish: The City in the Middle of the Night
This just didn't work for me. There wasn't exactly anything I disliked about it, I just got to about 43% and realised that I didn't feel particularly strongly about finishing it.
Short stories I enjoyed this month:
Away with the Wolves - Sarah Gailey: This was a lovely, hopeful story about friendship, chronic pain and building the life you want, not the life you've been told you should have.
no subject
Date: 2 Jul 2020 21:51 (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Jul 2020 19:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 Jul 2020 22:15 (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Jul 2020 19:12 (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Jul 2020 07:42 (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Jul 2020 19:16 (UTC)it's been a bit dissonant and strange to see folks talking about it like it's the best and most complex and sophisticated thing ever
Agreeeeed. Like, it's fine? But it's definitely not that.
no subject
Date: 4 Jul 2020 21:52 (UTC)Yes! The prose is just absolutely tits out, balls to wall, and it's amazing -- the prose and narrative choices are a wonderful case of the form marrying up with the protagonist's character, and I love it.
no subject
Date: 6 Jul 2020 19:17 (UTC)