From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …
#SFFBookClub February pick.
#sffbookclub
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enne📚 reviewed How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
How High We Go in the Dark
5 stars
I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.
It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.
It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background …
I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.
It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.
It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background characters narrate their own chapters added quite a bit of emotional nuance. Pig Son especially would have hit differently without the background from a few chapters earlier. Some of the stories were quite full of knives, but my one complaint is that some stories in the back half felt like retreading similar grounds of grief and remembrance; they just didn't have the same level of impact for me. Both the final chapter and the title-generating chapter were thematically strong, but didn't quite carry the same level of emotional weight or closure that I wanted. I am not sure subjectively why I felt this way, but I think this is some of the flipside of its short story nature--that there's only a consistent emotional thread running through the book rather than a character or plot arc.
I'm really glad to have read this, and feel like a lot of these stories and feelings are going to stick with me for a long while.
el dang wants to read Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming …
Adding this to the #SFFBookClub poll; go to weirder.earth/@eldang/111807462468721007 to vote
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …
Adding this to the #SFFBookClub poll; go to weirder.earth/@eldang/111807462468721007 to vote
Tak! reviewed How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
How High We Go in the Dark
4 stars
A series of bleak, gritty glimpses of what's in store for us over the next few decades.
The tone is lightened a bit here and there with injections of optimism, but I think it works against itself a little when the optimism feels unwarranted.
The way that the characters from the different stories are linked reminds me a bit of Cloud Atlas (although I only saw the movie (sorry)).
el dang commented on How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
Chapter 3: I see now that characters from one story do show up in others, so the book overall will get to have character arcs not just a zoomed-out plot one. Makes me even more curious how much the stories have been reworked between individual publication and collecting into book form.
Tak! commented on How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
Wow, the second story is bleak. Do not recommend for people with children in their lives.
el dang commented on How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
Content warning Chapter 2 spoiler; CW for plague
At first, I thought the plague business was a bit too much of a neat topical tie-in. But then I noticed in the front matter that many of the chapters are adapted from previously published short stories, and the original version of ch2 was published in 2013. So at least the outline of the plague predates COVID by years.
I'm curious whether the line about disagreement whether the virus was airborne was added in the editing for the book, because if not then that detail is astonishingly prescient.
Either way, I find myself wanting to know what happens to Skip and Dorrie after the events of this chapter. I can't tell yet if the book will pick them up again later or if each chapter's going to be a totally isolated vignette within the overall setting.
el dang commented on How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
Just sharing Enne's set of CWs for this book from weirder.earth/@picklish/111701657327009106 because hashtags still seem to only partially work between Mastodon and Bookwyrm:
"I wanted to pass on content warnings for: suicide, pandemic, climate change, death, euthanasia, animal experimentation, body horror, despair" #SFFBookClub
el dang started reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
From the one chapter I've read so far I can tell this is going to be a lot heavier than the last couple of things I've read. Promising start, though. #SFFBookClub
Human survival hinges on an bizarre alliance in Semiosis, a character driven science fiction novel …
This fell off the #SFFBookClub poll because it didn't seem to grab other peoples' interest, but I am still intrigued.
Tak! commented on How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
The #SFFBookClub January pick is How High We Go In The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Thank you to all who voted and/or suggested books.
el dang reviewed Wondrous Journeys In Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr
Award-winning historical fantasy and literary folktale. Winner of the presigious Etisalat award.
In a tent …
Interesting but sort of unsatisfying
3 stars
This is a set of stories-within-a-story, which are their best are very entertaining and vivid. But as another #SFFBookClub mentioned, I think it would have worked a lot better as a series of separate stories. In trying to pull it all together as one person's adventures, Nimr ended up making a lot of the dramas resolve too quickly and neatly to maintain interest, and the ending manages to be simultaneously too neat and unresolved.
el dang wants to read How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
#SFFBookClub Jan 2024
Tak! reviewed Wondrous Journeys In Strange Lands by Sonia Nimr
Award-winning historical fantasy and literary folktale. Winner of the presigious Etisalat award.
In a tent …
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands
3 stars
I enjoyed the setting, and some of the substories were compelling, but as a whole it was too rambling and incohesive for me.
I feel like it would have worked better as a series of stories about different people from the same village or whatever instead of repeatedly being like "despite being in the middle of this incredibly urgent life crisis, the main character decides to spend six months teaching an older woman to fold laundry" or "despite having a very bad outcome two chapters ago, the main character decides to engage in exactly the same dangerous behavior with no additional precautions"