I am an enthusiastic member of #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
Catching up on last month's #SFFBookClub pick
Catching up on last month's #SFFBookClub pick
A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which …
The concept is one I really want to like: a twist on the Count of Monte Cristo that recasts it to make racism the motivating factor of all the betrayals, and uses a future setting to make a point about the durability of colonialism. But the pacing is so off that it takes away the impact from most of its own story.
The concept is one I really want to like: a twist on the Count of Monte Cristo that recasts it to make racism the motivating factor of all the betrayals, and uses a future setting to make a point about the durability of colonialism. But the pacing is so off that it takes away the impact from most of its own story.
"First volume of Shigeru Mizuki's meticulously researched historical portrait of twentieth century Japan. This volume …
Not sure if this will be a quick read because manga or a very slow read because heavy and timely subject matter.
Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of …
Content warning Long quote about antisemitism
Imagine racism is a millstone, a crushing weight that grinds and presses down relentlessly on people intended to be a permanent underclass. Its purpose is to extract the oil of profit from us, right to the edge of extermination and beyond. It presses and crushes and grinds, but the people push back, and it generates heat that begins to rise. If the owners of the mill, their handle on the switches and cranks, don't insulate themselves, it will all get too hot to handle.
Image the oppression of Jews is that insulation, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the steaming rage of working people away from the mostly white and Christian 1%, who own the machine and collect the oil pressed from our lives. Imagine a valve they can open at will, a pipe that diverts the scalding heat off to the side. For Jews to be blamed for oppression, some of us must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible, positioned as the public faces of an inequality we help to administer, but do not own. The purpose of oppressing Jews is not to crush us day after day. It's to have us available for crushing. To be the bone they throw.
Nobody sees the owners. They don't let their faces appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They hire us to be their faces. They send us to collect taxes. They appoint us as judges. Long before they let us live in their neighborhoods, they let us manage their inner city buildings full of brown people. And some of us agree. And some of us don't. But they keep telling stories about how we're greedy. When they cut 500 million dollars from the budget of the City University of New York, the tell the working class people of color who study there that the reason isn't that they hate public universities. The reason, they say, is that the people of color have upset the Jews. We are 1.7% of the world's people and 1.7% of the world's rich, but they say we are the reason people are poor.
Imagine the people under the grindstone are in a fury, marching down the road toward where the owners live. Imagine the oppression of Jews is a conjuring trick that works through misdirection, that the Protestant heirs of slaveholder fortunes, pilgrim entrepreneurs and railroad barons grown rich from stealing Indigenous land, the people who shoot our children, poison our water and break the circle of seasons are holding a great big DETOUR sign with red arrows pointing toward the Jews, and some of the marchers on the road begin to think the problem with Jewish financiers is that they are Jewish, not that they are financiers, that the problem with Jewish slumlords is that they are Jewish, not that they are slumlords. They don't notice that nobody ever says Presbyterian banker, Baptist slumlord. Some of them wander onto the side road, the momentum of their fury drains away into resentment, and they talk about Jews instead of class, begin to think maybe Jews ARE class. The steam thins out and blows away, and the owners are safe for another day.
— Rimonim by Aurora Levins Morales (Page 61 - 62)
This is a much longer excerpt than I would normally take the trouble to type out, but what it has to say is so important, and the specific example used so prescient, that it feels worth sharing. If you want to read more about this idea, I would actually recommend Levins Morales's essay in outside.ofa.dog/book/151039/s/on-antisemitism which gives a longer historical perspective and unpacks the idea further.
el dang
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A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which …
Space colonization had not been the great equalizer the capitalist billionaires had advertised.
— Countess by Suzan Palumbo
Content warning relatively minor setting spoilers
This is one of those books that took over my head at times, and I'll be thinking about for a long while after finishing it.
Before I say any more, general content warnings for the book itself: there is a lot of gruesome violence, and particularly physical and sexual abuse of children in here. Some of the violence is what I understand to be realistic descriptions of Argentina's 1970s & 80s history, some is taken much further than that. It never feels gratuitous in that it establishes characters and story, but it is A Lot.
So, a simple summary of this huge book would be to say that it's Enriquez processing the horrors of Argentina's dictatorships through fantastical macabre fiction. But that could be just the first chapter. As it goes on, the book encompasses so much more about modern colonialism, the utter ghoulishness of the rich, the hollowness of Swinging London, the AIDS crisis, and so on. The most consistent theme is how completely those with power are willing to treat those without it as un-people, which makes the death / immortality cult at the centre of the story a perfect microcosm. And the ways different characters struggle to make sense of what's going on with limited or no knowledge of that cult feels like a very realistic exploration of how conspiracy theories develop.
I'm definitely a little biased in favour of this book because the author and the main character are just a couple of years older than me, and because an assortment of random factors left me a little less ignorant about Argentina's 20th century history than most of Latin America's. So the real world parts and the cultural references hit home particularly well - even down to a scene when Gaspar puts on "The Cure's new album" to work through his feelings about something and I could identify which album and remember how I'd felt when I first heard it. But I also think it's just a very well told story in general.
A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which …
#SFFBookClub April
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
This is the rare sequel that I like even better than its predecessor. The action is all in one world this time, and that lets the magical physics element disappear into the background. It also lets Ashtown and Wiley City both feel more developed - they're much more complete places in my mind now. More importantly, this is a much more direct, much more straightforwardly angry book. Johnson clearly wanted to wield a chainsaw, and she's very good at that.
It was not an escapist read in 2025, but the conclusion was very satisfying.
This is the rare sequel that I like even better than its predecessor. The action is all in one world this time, and that lets the magical physics element disappear into the background. It also lets Ashtown and Wiley City both feel more developed - they're much more complete places in my mind now. More importantly, this is a much more direct, much more straightforwardly angry book. Johnson clearly wanted to wield a chainsaw, and she's very good at that.
It was not an escapist read in 2025, but the conclusion was very satisfying.
I'm actually about 3/4 of the way through this by the time I got around to updating here. It is an incredible book but oh god it needs so many content warnings especially right now.
Obvious general things: gore, violence, intense macabre, supernatural death cult, lots of abuse including sexual, including intra-family, including of children. More specific: a major strand of it is the author wrestling with the trauma of Argentina's era of military dictatorships, and the role of colonialism in them, by way of a supernatural horror story.
One thing it doesn't have, at least so far, is jump scares. The plot unfolds slowly and every new horror revealed is such a clear consequence of or context to what happened before that it's never terribly surprising. Which in itself feels like a stunningly effective allegory for a lot of political horror.
I'm very glad to be …
I'm actually about 3/4 of the way through this by the time I got around to updating here. It is an incredible book but oh god it needs so many content warnings especially right now.
Obvious general things: gore, violence, intense macabre, supernatural death cult, lots of abuse including sexual, including intra-family, including of children. More specific: a major strand of it is the author wrestling with the trauma of Argentina's era of military dictatorships, and the role of colonialism in them, by way of a supernatural horror story.
One thing it doesn't have, at least so far, is jump scares. The plot unfolds slowly and every new horror revealed is such a clear consequence of or context to what happened before that it's never terribly surprising. Which in itself feels like a stunningly effective allegory for a lot of political horror.
I'm very glad to be reading this, but not sure I can recommend it for right now, especially to people in the US. I am also very much wishing I'd got around to reading it last year.
Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …
#SFFBookClub March
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Can someone remind me what Mr. Cross's significance in the first book was? #SFFBookClub
[and as an aside: I'm just a few chapters in and it is already very clear that this one should be read second. I think there's juuuuuuuuust enough recapping that it would be intelligible on its own, but there have already been multiple mentions / introductions that have way more impact with the first book for context]
Can someone remind me what Mr. Cross's significance in the first book was? #SFFBookClub
[and as an aside: I'm just a few chapters in and it is already very clear that this one should be read second. I think there's juuuuuuuuust enough recapping that it would be intelligible on its own, but there have already been multiple mentions / introductions that have way more impact with the first book for context]
el dang
boosted
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Is this what science is? Putting your blood and sweat into something that might be nothing? Well, I fucking hate it.
— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
@Tak@reading.taks.garden I am curious how essential that will be. On the one hand, it seems to be being marketed as more of a parallel story than a sequel. On the other, I remember a pair of Neon Yang novellas that were also described as such, and #SFFBookClub seeming to pretty much unanimously agree one should be read first.
@Tak@reading.taks.garden I am curious how essential that will be. On the one hand, it seems to be being marketed as more of a parallel story than a sequel. On the other, I remember a pair of Neon Yang novellas that were also described as such, and #SFFBookClub seeming to pretty much unanimously agree one should be read first.
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
#SFFBookClub February
This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.
I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.
What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot …
This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.
I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.
What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining in the mouths of its characters--kind of Legend of Zelda style--while at the same time throwing a lot of Bantu (I'm not sure which specific language[s]) vocabulary at the reader without notes or translations - in at least one case, about 1/4 of a page. I have a lot of time for using the languages that cultural references come from, without necessarily translating ( outside.ofa.dog/book/146782/s/david-mogo does this to good atmospheric effect), but it made the over-explaining all the more jarring.
I then learned that the author is white, which bugs me for a story so heavily rooted in Bantu mysticism. He clearly is knowledgeable about the subject, but these aren't his stories to tell, and in this light the over-explaining feels like a white man showing off how cool he is because he knows about the subalterns' culture. I think the "Runes" character (a jumbled Celtic / New Age Druid wizard in Durban) is meant to be self-deprecating, but he's so secondary to the "Bones" character (the Bantu wizard) that I'm still left feeling that the wrong person is telling this story, in ways that are definitely to the book's detriment.
