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el dang Locked account

eldang@outside.ofa.dog

Joined 1 year, 10 months ago

Also @eldang@weirder.earth

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's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

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Babel (2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Content warning ch15 spoiler

avatar for eldang el dang boosted
Nose Dive (2020, Hodder & Stoughton) No rating

The ultimate guide to the smells of the universe – the ambrosial to the malodorous, …

We usually describe the smell [of blood] as "metallic" because it's similar to the smell left on our fingers when we handle coins, or in the air when we scrub a bare metal pan or sink. ... Our hominid ancestors would have known that molecule [epoxy decenal] and smell long before they paid much attention to rocks and ores, so for much of our prehistory, they may well have experienced metals as bloody-smelling.

Nose Dive by 

Babel (2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Babel (2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Content warning ch12, non spoiler

The Kingdom of Copper (Hardcover, 2019, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

Nahri’s life changed forever the moment she accidentally summoned Dara, a formidable, mysterious djinn, during …

moar Daevabad!

5 stars

Book 2 in a series, and a wonderful fleshing out of things that were introduced in City of Brass. The politics get more complicated and feel more real as a result, the focus characters get more developed, and the city feels more alive. It feels like such a sharp analysis of the ways resentments and conflicts get stuck and self-feeding that I kept seeing real-world stories reflected in it. But it's never as narrow as an allegory for any one thing in the real world, it's much more an exploration of the whole type of thing.

It does have weaknesses: never getting Ghassan's perspective lets him feel like a cartoon villain, and never getting Muntadhir's makes his growth feel lurching and unpredictable... which in fairness it probably would have done to people around him too. And where the ending of City of Brass deftly managed to stand on its own …

Babel (2022, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Content warning minor spoilers for book 1 / the first 4 chapters

How High We Go in the Dark (Hardcover, 2022, William Morrow) 4 stars

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 very emotional and structurally interesting book - somewhere between a set of short stories and a set of chapters with very varied styles and points of view.

I loved the ways the stories were connected to each other, and the best of them were absolutely heartrending pictures of grief, fear, and mourning. Many of them did live on in my mind for some time afterwards. But towards the end I felt like some of the broader attempts to pull it all together in one arc didn't quite land for me.

#SFFBookClub

@calor It's open to anyone, but it's a bit confusing at the moment because hashtags don't quite sync right between Bookwyrm and Mastodon (probably true for Misskey, Pleroma, etc too, Mastodon's just the one I have experience with). All you have to do to participate is to post about the book with the tag. But:

1) We all really appreciate it if anything at all spoilery is behind a warning that says how far into the book you are, so people can wait until they've reached the same place to read it.

2) If you also have a Mastodon account, you'll see more traffic on the #SFFBookClub tag over there, and you'll get more replies if you use that one.

The Kingdom of Copper (Hardcover, 2019, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

Nahri’s life changed forever the moment she accidentally summoned Dara, a formidable, mysterious djinn, during …

CW for this book: a big piece of what it's about is stuck conflicts and deeply ingrained oppression, and the ways in which mutual fear / the fears of the people currently on top keep them stuck with horrifying consequences. Reading it right now I keep thinking about Palestine, which I think is partly intentional but there are also strong echoes of many other things. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and I think it's excellent, just also a very grim read.

To some extent this applies to City Of Brass too, but this volume paints a lot more of the history of the trilogy's world and goes a lot harder on the political themes.

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A City On Mars (EBook, 2023, Penguin Press) 4 stars

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate …

If a nation wants to convey to the world that they are the strongest and best, they can, of course just announce it at the United Nations. But it won't be convincing. Talk is cheap. Space programs are not. Very few nations can successfully fire a guy around the world at 7.8 kilometers per second, then land him and send him on a goodwill tour. Human spacefaring has little utility for the price, especially compared to things like military or commercial satellites, but what it does do is dramatically demonstrate wealth, organization, and technical competence. Throw in the fact that early space rockets were often literally the same as military rockets, and you have an excellent show of raw power that demands to be taken seriously. You of course never hear a politician say, "we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it'll provide short-term geopolitical advantage," but something like that is a pretty solid explanation.

A City On Mars by ,