el dang wants to read Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer
«Oh, sí, mis buenas gentes, sí, ya lo creo que sí. Se puede vivir en …
#SFFBookClub October/November.
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I'm currently the coordinator of the #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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el dang wants to read The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is …
el dang reviewed Circe by Madeline Miller
The daring, dazzling, and highly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Song …
Wonderful slow read that works much better for me than its source material does
5 stars
I never found this book a page turner, but I loved it from start to finish. Miller's writing is beautiful, and the character she turns Circe into is a wonderfully biting commentator on the affairs of gods and men alike. What she does with this story feels at once very true to the Homeric tradition--in that everything she adds is woven into the mesh of stories that previously existed--and a clearly intentional addressing of the most frustrating things about the old stories. She isn't kind to the macho man heroes of old, but does make them much more interesting, believable characters. In particular the "here's what happened after" she does to the Odyssey deals with everything I find frustrating about that story in a very effective way.
el dang started reading Circe by Madeline Miller
Circe by Madeline Miller
The daring, dazzling, and highly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Song Of Achilles that briliantly reimagines …
el dang
boosted
Tak! commented on Counterweight by Anton Hur
The #SFFBookClub selection for September 2024
el dang commented on The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
Content warning Ending spoilers
The other things I'm noticing are very much to do with now knowing the partly-twist, partly just ambiguous ending:
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Some of it sure reads different now that I know the narrator is causing the odd feeling in Fetter's gut that leads him in fruitful directions.
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He is so very adrift for most of the book, even with his shadow pushing him this way and that. If anything the ending feels more ambiguous now, with that knowledge that the shadow did some orchestrating, without being able to tell how much of a grand plan it ever had.
el dang commented on The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
The biggest thing I'm noticing on re-reading this is how the early parts of Fetter's left felt in my memory like they took up a lot more of the book than they actually do. I think this is skillful writing by Chandrasekera - he packs a lot of worldbuilding into the first few chapters without it ever feeling like Worldbuilding, it's just richly drawn background to this one guy's story.
el dang started reading The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
Yup, just gonna re-read this immediately. Probably a lot slower than the first read, though.
el dang wants to read Things We Found During the Autopsy by Kuzhali Manickavel
New option for #SFFBookClub September poll: weirder.earth/@eldang/112945694205071024
el dang wants to read Counterweight by Anton Hur
New option for #SFFBookClub September poll: weirder.earth/@eldang/112945694205071024
@j12i@wyrms.de It's certainly special. Can't promise it will work for everyone, but it's definitely worth a look.
@whami@bookwyrm.social I've heard really good things about this book and haven't got around to reading any of Spufford's yet myself. Looking forward to hearing what you make of it.
el dang
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Tak! commented on The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS has been out in the world just over a year. As of today, it's collected NINE award nominations (today's news: the Dragon Award shortlist is out) The Ignytes and Dragons are now open for public voting! See the post for how to vote. vajra.me/2024/08/05/ten-toes-in/
el dang reviewed The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
Weird, inventive, and pointed commentary at the same time
5 stars
I tore through this book, and might just re-read it immediately, which is something I never do.
It starts out as a fantasy story that feels exceptionally weird because Chandrasekera's willing to do his world building / exposition very slowly. I kept going through a lot of confusion because the writing itself is just so beautiful. And then gradually as the exposition falls into place it becomes clearer that the book is at least partly a critique of religious fanaticisms and chauvinisms... but each time I felt I really had a handle on the book something in its world would shift - either the protagonist learning a new piece of his own story or a significant detail the the author waited until a dramatic moment to show the reader. Even the ending feels like another instance of that, and it is a relatively unclear ending, though it fits the whole …
I tore through this book, and might just re-read it immediately, which is something I never do.
It starts out as a fantasy story that feels exceptionally weird because Chandrasekera's willing to do his world building / exposition very slowly. I kept going through a lot of confusion because the writing itself is just so beautiful. And then gradually as the exposition falls into place it becomes clearer that the book is at least partly a critique of religious fanaticisms and chauvinisms... but each time I felt I really had a handle on the book something in its world would shift - either the protagonist learning a new piece of his own story or a significant detail the the author waited until a dramatic moment to show the reader. Even the ending feels like another instance of that, and it is a relatively unclear ending, though it fits the whole mood of the book enough not to be frustrating.
To be clear: I like this kind of storytelling better than spending pages and pages on worldbuilding before anything happens, and all loose ends tied up by the conclusion. It just needs a damn good writer to make it work, and Chandrasekera is one. I also never felt like I was more confused than the protagonist himself, which I think is how the book managed not to fall into feeling like a cheap trick.
After reading it, I read up on the story of Rāhula, and realised that many more details in this book are clearly-intentional references to that than I'd picked up on. And I read some Sri Lankan history and realised that much of what felt like echoes of Myanmar or Israel were more direct references to specific aspects of Sri Lanka's civil war. Part of why I want to re-read is to have those things in mind, but I think it's also a strength of the book that it works as a more general allegory too. I think I would advise other readers to go in the same order as me: dive into the book first, and catch up on its references after.
el dang reviewed Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
The power of a tight focus within a bigger story
5 stars
Content warning plot, setting, and ending spoilers
It took me a little while to get hooked by this book, but in the end I loved it and found it very haunting.
What really made it work for me is that there's a cliched SF cataclysm in the background--electricity and everything that depends on it going down--but the story is so focussed on one small community's response that we never learn why or how that happened. The lack of answers could have been frustrating, but I found it really tightened the focus and let this be a story about a few characters instead of about technology.
There were two things that frustrated me a little. One was a bit too much explaining vs showing, both about Anishinaabe culture and sometimes what was going on in a given character's head. I can see the first part of that being necessary to give the book a wider audience, but I wish it had been footnotes or something like that.
The other frustration, which I see at least one other reviewer on here shared, was at the characters themselves for not doing more about Scott sooner. But that's not really a weakness of the story, in that it feels quite plausible that Evan and his closest friends all realised how big trouble Scott was going to be and simply couldn't act, between being very preoccupied with day to day survival, and having to navigate a very disunited community.
That said, the ending really did take me by surprise. I'd been assuming that Scott's plan was to raid the canned food store and maybe some families' frozen meat stashes, which would have been a much less interesting way for it to go. I am curious whether someone more steeped in windigo stories would have been quicker to pick up on that being what Rice was painting Scott as; for me the reveal was a gut punch.