I am an enthusiastic member of #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its …
And I hadn't realised quite how short it is, which makes my not having read it yet even sillier.
And I hadn't realised quite how short it is, which makes my not having read it yet even sillier.
Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its …
In the strange hybrid acknowledgements / epilogue to Cahokia Jazz, Spufford mentions this story as evidence that Ursula Le Guin (to whom the book is dedicated) wouldn't have liked the world he built. I've somehow got to now without having read Omelas so I'd better fix that now.
In the strange hybrid acknowledgements / epilogue to Cahokia Jazz, Spufford mentions this story as evidence that Ursula Le Guin (to whom the book is dedicated) wouldn't have liked the world he built. I've somehow got to now without having read Omelas so I'd better fix that now.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy …
The music is a big deal in the book, and Spufford made a Spotify playlist to go with it. I don't want to use or direct people to Spotify, so I made a qobuz equivalent - mostly the same versions but I couldn't always find them, and added a couple of things in: open.qobuz.com/playlist/42331567
Edited: I learned that without an account one can only hear snippets of each song. There are free accounts available at least, but I hadn't meant to be as much of a qobuz shill as this is turning me into.
The music is a big deal in the book, and Spufford made a Spotify playlist to go with it. I don't want to use or direct people to Spotify, so I made a qobuz equivalent - mostly the same versions but I couldn't always find them, and added a couple of things in: open.qobuz.com/playlist/42331567
Edited: I learned that without an account one can only hear snippets of each song. There are free accounts available at least, but I hadn't meant to be as much of a qobuz shill as this is turning me into.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy …
This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.
I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.
This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.
I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy …
“There is advice I could give you,” he said, “but in every culture I know, the offering of unsolicited advice is an extraordinarily hostile act.”
— Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford (Page 166)
Has Mr. Spufford met the Fediverse?
The apocalypse will be an HR nightmare.
Colin Harris is your typical twenty-something stuck …
Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.
The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.
Minor criticisms: …
Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.
The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.
Minor criticisms: even the other characters who get significant time don't feel fully fleshed out, probably because we only see them through Colin's eyes. And there are times, particularly towards the end, when the fantasy elements can get a bit USS Make Shit Up. Which would be very frustrating if the point of the book were Serious Fantasy Worldbuilding, but it's so not that.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy …
Content warning very minor early setting/character spoiler
I was a bit skeptical of this premise from a white British author so only picked this up because people I respect had recommended it. So far (a day in to the story) it's very well executed and has me totally reeled in.
CWs: 1) while the setting is a very interesting alternate history, I had somehow gone in expecting more of a utopian thriving Cahokia. In fact there's plenty of racism in the world of the book, skillfully handled by the author, so at times very uncomfortable to read. 2) some pretty vivid explorations of one character's post-war PTSD.
There's a character who keeps getting pigeonholed as an ethnicity he doesn't neatly identify with, and people keep projecting their own prejudices onto him, which I find very relatable indeed. The moment the book fully won me over was the first instance of a powerful person projecting positive things onto him as a result, and inappropriately favouring him as a result. I felt his discomfort in my bones.
When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for …
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
#SFFBookClub November
Content warning Subject matter spoiler from about 2/3rds in
@BEZORP@books.theunseen.city @picklish@books.theunseen.city FWIW, this was my read too. To the extent that a couple of scenes were kind of sexy that only increased my discomfort because they all at least pushed at a boundary of consent.
I actually found the whole book such an intensely uncomfortable read that I doubt I'll continue with the series in spite of also having a very high opinion of it.
Content warning second half and ending spoilers
If you're reading this and getting bogged down in that too-many-digressions second quarter or so, I think it is worth persevering. The story starts to pick up and get more coherent once the narrator goes back to Bulgaria, and when it gets incoherent again in the final section that has a real dramatic effect. I found the last few pages quite chilling.
A 'clinic for the past' offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces …
There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.
There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.
The apocalypse will be an HR nightmare.
Colin Harris is your typical twenty-something stuck in a dead-end job. He …
This evocative survey of Indian Jewish cooking profiles five different communities, which, though ancient, are fast diminishing. As author Esther …
Aha! I finally got around to working out how to actually link things properly instead of just pasting URLs in the text. I should have known it would be just a simple subset of Markdown but I wish Bookwyrm had either a prompt about that in the UI or a post preview mode like GitHub does.
Aha! I finally got around to working out how to actually link things properly instead of just pasting URLs in the text. I should have known it would be just a simple subset of Markdown but I wish Bookwyrm had either a prompt about that in the UI or a post preview mode like GitHub does.
