#BOOKVAS

[sljoka]

Скопје / Skopje

[burpenterprisejournal]

SLOVOKULT : BERLIN IN SKOPJE

2023/09/21-23 SlovoKult : Berlin in Skopje ELIZABETA KOSTADINOVSKA JD ZAZIE MARGARET UNKONOWN RON WINKLER MANUELA ZLATKOVA ALEKSANDAR KIRKOVSKI AMPLYDINE EFFECT ANDREJ TARTARCHEVSKI Skopje - MK

SlovoKult: is a text/Vision/Sound - a multilingual polyphony with video and experimental improvised sound curated by Elizabeta Lindner. From 21 to 23 September, this Berlin-based project will tour Skopje, presenting three events in different locations.

21.09.23 :: Café-Bookstore Bookva For the opening, Miss Drexler, the German ambassador, will speak about the political significance of languages and poetry. Her speech will be followed by the press conference, after which the art interventions will take place. The programm will include two premieres

Premiere : video in trilingual polyphony on the poem “anyone everyone no-one - Joker” by Elizabeta Kostadinovska with art works by SlovoKult artists and sound by Matt Burnett

Premiere : duo performance by JD Zazie and Elizabeta Kostadinovska

Cult music videos selection

22.09.23 :: Kulturno-informativen centar (KIC) Skopje :: During the second evening at 19:30 SlovoKult will present an art exhibition in the Small Gallery featuring illustrators whose works have been published in SlovoKult books collections: Irena Paskali, Ivan Ivanovski, Dijana Tomikj and Elizabeta Kostadinovska.

At 20:30 in the Imperial Gallery SlovoKult multilingual poetry books will be presented and performed in a bilingual and trilingual polyphony by Ron Winkler, Elizabeta Kostadinovska, Manuela Zlatkova and Aleksandar Kirkovski with live music by JD Zazie and Margaret Unknown, and from Skopje, Amplidyne Effect and Andrej Tatarchevski. Poems by Sophie Rayer and Crauss, who will not be able to attend the event in person, will be presented via video. The event will be accompanied by a video exhibition of works by artists published in SlovoKult and Art Equilibrium publications, partly exhibited in the Small Gallery.

23.09.23 :: Mladinski kulturen centar - MKC :: Slovokult's last show in skopje will close at the Festival Zdravo Mladi Here Margaret Unknown , Elizabeta Kostadinovska and JD Zazie will play a trio interspersed with small solos.

[kakovchovek]

bookva

zboor

[hag-o-hags]

I read a lot of books in 2020. Why did it take me until mid-February to post this? I’m tired. And old. Time is a lie. Have some superlatives.

Books What Made That Shit Worth Living Through:

All The Birds in The Sky, Charlie Jane Anders

The Majesties, Tiffany Tsao

The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers

Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor

The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher

Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente

Best Books for Not Rereading Discworld Again:

Rivers of London (series), Ben Aaronovitch

Orconomics, J. Zachary Pike

The Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine, T. Kingfisher

Books You Could Sell A Few Loose Concepts And Generally Be Like FUCK YEAH!:

A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS, WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TIN!, Marie Brennan

BROADSWORD LESBIAN SPACE NECROMANCERS!, Tamsyn Muir

MAGIC JAZZ DETECTIVES!, Ben Aaronovitch

HIPPO-RIDING GUNSLINGING OUTLAW RIVER HEIST!, Sarah Gailey

HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO EUROVISION FOR THE FATE OF EARTH!, Catherynne M. Valente

Worst Insufferable Slogs, DNF, Or Hardest To Resist Flinging At The Wall:

Rogue One, Alexander Freed (Star Wars sucks and I am no longer burdened by illusions that it doesn’t! The good bits are the exception!)

Caraval, Stephanie Garber (YA Syndrome)

A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas (YA Syndrome)

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Fred Savage voice: Is this a Jesus book?)

The Postmortal, Drew Magary  (Margaret Atwood voice: Male fantasies, male fantasies)

This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal el-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Aziraphale voice: Oh. Po-Mo.)

The Gilded Wolves, Roshani Chokshi (BETRAYED by terrible narration, should have loved it probably)

The Magicians, Lev Grossman (protag is unbearable, highly punchable)

We Hunt the Flame, Hafsah Faizal (YA Syndrome)

Under A Painted Sky, Stacy Lee (#ownvoices but also teeth-peelingly gross to like everyone else. Also YA Syndrome)

Books That Support The Growing Feeling That You Need To Go Ask A Rabbi Some Questions:

Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality and A Deeper Connection to Life In Judaism (After Finally Choosing To Look There), Sarah Hurwitz

Most “I Have No Memory of This Place” And Must Therefore Reread To Continue the Series:

The Reader, Tracy Chee (yeah I read it like four months apart, sue me, I retained NOTHING)

A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan

Seraphina, Rachel Hartman

Green Rider, Kristen Britain

A Gathering of Shadows, V.E. Schwab

The Star-Touched Queen, Roshani Chokshi

Cold Magic, Kate Elliott

Best Books by Authors More Known for Their Work On Camera:

Last Smile In Sunder City, Dead Man In A Ditch, Luke Arnold

Little Weirds, Jenny Slate

Axiom’s End, Lindsay Ellis

Best Movie That’s Like Fine As A Book But Actually The Movie Improves on the Source:

The Shining, Stephen King

Doctor Sleep, Stephen King (also best movie I’ve seen in recent memory that wasn’t Birds of Prey fight me bye)

[sljoka]

Скопје / Skopje

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS

This year, I’m trying to stop reading the same seven authors (do they make addiction patches for Terry Pratchett?), and focus on books that:

are written by women (✍️)

feature effortless and authentic female characters (🎭)

explicitly identify characters of color (👍🏾)and queer characters (🌈)

pass the Sexy Lamp Test (🗽) and the Mako Mori Test (🤖 )

I like swordfights, magic, REVOLUTION!, absurd silliness, and when the girl doesn’t end up with the boy in the end. I wrote reviews of all the books I read this month detailing their ratings, but here’s how they did against my criteria:

Stardust - Neil Gaiman 🌟🌟🌟 🗽

A Blink of the Screen - Terry Pratchett 🌟🌟🌟 🎭🗽🤖 

Clariel - Garth Nix 🌟🌟🌟 🎭🗽🤖

Snow Like Ashes - Sara Raasch 🌟 ✍️🎭🗽🤖

Coraline - Neil Gaiman 🌟🌟🌟🌟 🎭🗽🤖

The Star-Touched Queen - Roshani Chokshi 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ✍🏾 🎭👍🏾🗽🤖

Stranger - Rachel Manija Brown & Sherwood Smith 🌟🌟🌟 ✍️🎭👍🏾🌈🗽🤖

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford🌟🌟🌟🌟🎭👍🏾🗽🤖

Talon - Julie Kagawa 💀 ✍🏾 🗽

The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater 🌟🌟🌟 ✍️🎭🗽

Huntress - Malinda Lo 🌟🌟🌟 ✍🏾 🎭👍🏾🌈🗽🤖

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula LeGuin 🌟🌟  ✍️👍🏾

Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl - Carrie Brownstein 🌟🌟🌟🌟  ✍️🎭🌈🗽🤖

Green Rider - Kristen Britain 🌟🌟🌟🌟  ✍️🎭🗽🤖

Furiously Happy - Jenny Lawson 🌟🌟🌟🌟  ✍️🎭🗽🤖

The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf - Ambelin Kwaymullina 🌟🌟  ✍🏾 🎭👍🏾🗽🤖

His Majesty’s Dragon - Naomi Novik 🌟🌟🌟🌟  ✍️🎭🗽

A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟  🎭🗽🤖

all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS 7-9

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

I’ve been writing short reviews of all the books I’ve read this month, with the idea of starting a big post with all of them at the end of each month but, uh, then I finished a book like every two days, and also I am not what you would call succinct, ever, (case in point, this is one sentence). It became a really, really long post. So I’m breaking up the reviews, and I’ll probably do a masterpost with everything at the end of the month. Stranger - Rachel Manija Brown & Sherwood Smith 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ I don’t remember checking this out, and I nearly did a catch-and-release on it when I realized it was Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian YA, esp. after getting Dead Dove Do Not Eated by Snow Like Ashes. But it was actually pretty good. The world-building is kind of Fully Terrestrial Firefly (If Joss Whedon Wasn’t A Fucking Hack), none of the six MCs are white, a character with PTSD is (not hugely nuanced but nevertheless) well-handled, and none of the baby!gays die. Although there is a love triangle (because I guess by law there has to be one?), it’s two girls and a dude and the solution is “friendship is more important”. It’s a pretty big ensemble with a lot of solid, well-rounded characters.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆ Mongols. Are. Awesome. Well. I mean. Genghis Khan was awesome. His daughters were also awesome. His male progeny were pretty fucking useless, but I didn’t really get how useless until learning about how they overthrew the khatuns ruling the inner kingdoms, and their nephews, sons, and grandsons collapsed Genghis Khan’s empire, all but erasing his legacy in a single human lifetime. The problem is that the chroniclers of the era tried to erase the influence of Mongol women, and so the book is, like, 50% about the khatuns, and even then the information is pretty vague. But it’s a lot more than they’re discussed anywhere else. I don’t care. Mongols are my jam.

Talon - Julie Kagawa 💀☆☆☆☆ Special rating because oh my god. I was expecting Revolution & Dragons!and got The OC (feat. Dragons). No actual plot happens until like ¾ through the book, and it only almost barely kind of mostly manages to pass the Mako Mori Test, which is sad given the fact that the main character is a friggin dragon, like goddamn. I can totally own that this is Not My Thing, but it’s also … not very well written. Blar blar love triangles, blar blar characters with like 2.6 dimensions between the bunch of them, blar blar WHAT MOTIVATION WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING MOTIVATION. Nuh-uh.

all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS 16-18

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

I’ve been writing short reviews of all the books I’ve read this month, with the idea of starting a big post with all of them at the end of each month but, uh, then I finished a book like every two days, and also I am not what you would call succinct, ever, (case in point, this is one sentence). It became a really, really long post. So I’m breaking up the reviews. Check the link at the bottom for all of January’s books. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf - Ambelin Kwaymullina 🌟🌟☆☆☆ Oh man what to do. So on the one hand, hello First Person Post-Apoc Dystopian YA my old friend. On the other hand, we haven’t devolved into a garbage racist society! We just hate mutants, X-Men style, and we give them Silly Names With Capital Letters. BUT there isn’t Only One Chosen Heroine Destined To Save The World -- there’s a team of girls, and a few boys, who work together! The very cool part about this story is the incorporation of Aboriginal Australian mythos hundreds of years after the collapse of the world as we know it, and the OH SHIT twist half-way through that’s quite good -- I really like the way it was set up. Unfortunately, the writing feels kind of flimsy, and the story is like ... a third of a book. Which, okay, this is the first part of a trilogy, but the main characters don’t really develop in any way? So this was a hard one to rate. I didn’t think it was great, but the parts I did like are enough to make me want to go for the second book, to see where all this is going.

His Majesty’s Dragon - Naomi Novik 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆ I got my super awesome dragon story, hell yeah! Based on the writing alone, I liked this -- it’s set around 1805, while Napoleon was storming around Europe, only everybody’s military force has got aerial dragon combat teams. The main dragon is almost laughably special -- he’s the smartest, prettiest, most unique, most talented dragon Europe has ever seen! But honestly I have no beef with a Mary Sue dragon: he’s a fucking dragon. The worldbuilding is super rich, just considered from the dragon biology alone. Going into the book, I’d been kind of mislead on how big a role women and PoC would play, though -- Our Special Boy is a Chinese dragon and somehow that was enough for people to describe the book as having, like, a Chinese component? Some vaguely icky Georgian-era commentary on East Asia doesn’t actually count, y’all. And while there are three women involved in the dragon corps -- two dragon captains and one tiny cadet -- they’re actually pretty peripheral. Women are allowed in the corps because one token breed will only take female riders -- and they’re a crazy rad acid-spitting breed! But one woman gets infantilized by the main character (again, in that ~lovely~ era-appropriate way), Damsel-In-Distressed, and sidelined pretty hard. The other captain is hearty and awesome as a character, but most of her Super Cool Dragon Fighting happens off-camera, and we don’t get to see a lot of why she’s so badass. All things considered, I really want to knock off half a star for Not Doing Well Enough At Representation, so pretend it’s 3.5. Apparently there’s actually characters of color in later books, though.

A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Okay, I had a rough week, and even though I have four other books going, I just badly wanted the literary equivalent of my pajamas on the last day of the month. This is cheating because I have read the Tiffany Aching books once or twice or upwards of seventy times also something about my username idk. The books center around the extremely matriarchal witches of Discworld, and they’re at their core about stories. Over and over, Tiffany wins by acting in the rules of stories, and then figuring out how to bend those rules to her advantage. And while a tribe of heavily armed battle smurfs could easily take the power away from her, the victories are clearly because of her own skill. And, you know, Pratchett was a cunning bastard ... there are times when you have to wonder whether not he did something intentionally, or if he just managed to hit on a spectacular piece of insight accidentally. In this book, Tiffany gets possessed by an ancient, power hungry, fearful being, and somehow, he manages to describe an experience that I know viscerally as mania, to a degree that makes me wonder how a person who doesn’t have bipolar disorder could know what it’s like. I’ve seen people say, “Tiffany is definitely autistic”, and I can see where that comes from, in the way she is and how she relates to the world, and even though it’s not explicitly represented as autism, if a kid sees themself in her, that’s amazing.

all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS 10-12

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

I’ve been writing short reviews of all the books I’ve read this month, with the idea of starting a big post with all of them at the end of each month but, uh, then I finished a book like every two days, and also I am not what you would call succinct, ever, (case in point, this is one sentence). It became a really, really long post. So I’m breaking up the reviews, and I’ll probably do a masterpost with everything at the end of the month. The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ I’ve been super leery of this series despite EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON EARTH losing their mind over it, because A) it’s a reverse harem, whoop-dee-doodle, and B) I knew the boy’s names WAY before I knew a girl was even a feature so well done, there, Fandom. Overall it was an enjoyable read and I’ve got the rest of the series queued. It is an ensemble in which Blue is an equal part, and while she’s surrounded by women in her family, her only peers are the boys. The way fandom talks about it, it’s about Four Very Gay Boys Who Are Very Gay For Each Other, and while this book is spent establishing & solidifying their dynamics, I swear to christ, subtext is not representation, FANDOM, and if I’ve been mislead, I will be FLAMES ON MY FACE FURIOUS

Huntress - Malinda Lo 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ We’ve got lesbian MCs! This is not a drill! They are not, repeat, not side characters! There is no agonizing over compulsory heterosexuality! Two girls fall the fuck in love & smooch a lot! That being said, um, their love is #Prophesied, and therefore kind of a foregone conclusion? The prose is lovely and lush, and the worldbuilding is really interesting, set in Fantasy East Asia with faeries from the European oeuvre. But the plot itself (and the ~falling in love~ by extension) feels … sparse? The whole thing is kind of an anticlimax? We journey, a Dramatic Magic Thing Happens, we lose a member of the party, repeat until finished. It’s enjoyable, but it felt like it had enough plot for a short story that got stretched like hell to be a 300 page novel.

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin 🌟🌟☆☆☆ Re-read. So real talk, I listened to an audiobook of this and I … did not enjoy the narration. Like, whatever the audio equivalent of chewing the scenery is, he did that. Yelling, gasping, panting, adding filler words, and in general ACTING! his way through. It was jarring as fuck, to the point that I kept replaying sections and retained nothing, over and over and over. I powered through and finished, not because it fits the tests (THERE’S LIKE TWO FEMALE SIDE CHARACTERS?), but because I really want to do a critical reading of it on the grounds that 1) Ursula LeGuin is an iconic fantasy writer, and 2) I’m looking at what YA fantasy was before obligatory modern tropes like Love Triangles and The Special. Also, famously, this series features predominantly characters of color. So in a vacuum, GODDAMN, I hated this book this time, but it really wasn’t the book’s fault, and I’m going to come back to it in a different format.

all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS 3-6

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

I’ve been writing short reviews of all the books I’ve read this month, with the idea of doing a big post with all of them at the end of each month but, uh, then I finished a book like every two days, and also I am not what you would call succinct, ever, (case in point, this is one sentence). It became a really, really long post. So I’m breaking up the reviews, and I’ll probably do a masterpost with everything at the end of the month.

Snow Like Ashes - Sara Raasch 🌟☆☆☆☆ Number of times I rolled my eyes LITERALLY OUT OF MY SKULL: a lot. Written in first person present tense, the surprise twist is visible from space, there’s a stupid unnecessary love triangle – one angle of which have GROWN UP TOGETHER FROM INFANCY AS LITERALLY THE ONLY CHILDREN IN THEIR REFUGEE CAMP ew ew ew ew, and all exposition is delivered by backhoe. I had pretty low expectations after the first chapter, and finished it out of sheer tenacity.

Coraline - Neil Gaiman 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ Re-read. I just wanted to read something nice to cleanse the last one from my palate. I hadn’t read this since the movie came out, and while I really like Wybee and think he adds a lot to the movie version of the story, I think Coraline on her own works better in the book. I really respect Neil Gaiman’s ability to write a story for young readers that doesn’t feel infantalizing and manages to convey wonder & whimsy.

The Star-Touched Queen - Roshani Chokshi 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Probably my favorite thing I’ve read in a while. A little bit Bluebeard’s Wife and a little bit Persephone, and set in Mythical South Asia. The prose is the best kind of gilded, and the MC manages to toe a line between Roll With It We’re In A Fairy Tale and Real World Skepticism. It’s at it’s core about romance and Destined Love, which, normally, ick, but it dodges a lot of the pitfalls and stereotypes, there’s a ton more that happens, and frankly, I would read Roshani Chokshi’s description of watching grass grow. I fucking love her voice. I saw someone complain that the story doesn’t pass the Bechdel test and her only female ally is a horse but, um, 1) not a horse, a TALKING HORSE CARRION DEMON (awesome), 2) the MC only interacts with like half a dozen named characters more than once in the whole book, half of whom are women, and 3) her very positive relationship with her little sister is a not-insignificant plot point.

all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

JANUARY READS 1-3

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

I’ve been writing short reviews of all the books I’ve read this month, with the idea of starting a big post with all of them at the end of each month but, uh, then I finished a book like every two days, and also I am not what you would call succinct, ever, (case in point, this is one sentence). It became a really, really long post. So I’m breaking up the reviews, and I’ll probably do a masterpost with everything at the end of the month. (Also, these are the last few books in my queue from 2016, before I started queuing books with my Qualifications.)

Stardust - Neil Gaiman 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ Re-read. Abysmally fails the Mako Mori test. Otherwise, I give it 10 Farmboys off to seek their fortune out of 10 for solid fairy-telling. It’s been about 10 years, so it was nice to come back to, but I put it on hold before deciding I was trying to avoid Man Stories About Men. And read with that perspective, the fact that all the female characters are there to support Tristran’s story is glaring.

A Blink of the Screen - Terry Pratchett 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ Divided into Non-Discworld, and Short What-You-Probably-Came-For-Yes-Here’s-The-Discworld. The DW half has The Sea And Little Fishes in it, AKA Granny Weatherwax Is The Best Witch Also Don’t Make Her Angry Or She’ll Be Nice At You, and that’s important. It’s interesting to see where the non-DW pieces eventually found their way into Discworld – I’m thinking of the Death and the philosopher story that turned into a scene between Lu-Tze and Vimes in Night Watch. There’s a proto-The Long Earth story, too, that makes me feel I should break some rules (YEAH!) and get on with reading that series.

Clariel - Garth Nix 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ I never read Sabriel when I was a kid, so I’m coming to this series with new eyes, and as much as I loved the first three, and enjoyed Nix’s writing, I had a hard time with Clariel as a protagonist, because she’s so goddamn self-absorbed? At one point she complains about how her mother is SO! RIGID! AND! INFLEXIBLE! like she hasn’t spent the previous 2/3rds of the book announcing the only way she’ll EVER BE HAPPY is to RETURN TO THE FOREST AND LIVE ALONE! and refusing to compromise or listen to anybody (which, god I hope was intentional, because it’s ACE CHARACTER TRAITS even if it does make me want to scream at her). I honestly wish we got to hear more about what happens to her, because the book ends just about when I started to like her, and I would be super interested in the story of how she winds up becoming what she does. all january reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

FEBRUARY READS 13-15:

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆ This feels a bit like a spiritual successor to Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell: set mainly in Victorian England rather than Georgian, it’s about a couple of petty-as-hell magicians who make a bunch of people’s lives really hard by their own hubris, it’s wonderfully atmospheric, there’s a number of character threads that converge as the plot progresses, and it gave me super weird dreams. It actually manages to use present-tense narration effectively, shock and awe, and that alone earned it like half a star for me. There is (1) Japanese character, and (1) French-Indian character -- the former is pretty tokenistic and pretty much just serves the plot of the petty magicians, and the latter is half Indian mostly as a dressing for his Eccentricity rather than it having any appreciable effect on his character, so it pretty much tanks Representation scores. On the flip side, though, there’s a classic love triangle (think Austen not Hunger Games) where the spurned love interest is grief-stricken, behaves selfishly, and isn’t thrown under the bus for being a Woman with Woman Feelings. Yaaay.

Fledgling - Octavia E. Butler 🌟☆☆☆☆ I’ve had Parable of the Sower on my bookshelf for eons but have never read it, and I’m wondering if starting to read Butler with her last book was a bad idea. I would love to fill out my critique of her writing, but I just can’t get over the whole thing where the protagonist is a 53 year old vampire in a 10 year old’s body who 1) has no post-pubescent characteristics, 2) is a child by vampire standards, and 3) fucks a harem of obsessive & jealous adult Renfields. I just! Nope! Wow! You found my completely insurmountable hangup and no amount of intra- or extra-canonical explanation is gonna make me cool with these haps to a degree that I want to discuss Departure from Deeply Ingrained Human Taboo Through Biological Differences in Made-Up Vampires! Haha!

Of Metal and Wishes - Sarah Fine 🌟☆☆☆☆ I am really, really tired of being grossed out by media, and that’s a big part of what informs my reading choices -- both the criteria I’m trying to fulfill in new books and why I just keep reading the same stack over and over. I am bone-deep fed up with having to say “I enjoyed the parts that didn’t leave me vaguely nauseated!” And I was trying to not drop books, because I’m really bad about leaving books unfinished, but that’s counter-productive to what I want to do, i.e., find new books to enjoy. Which is a very round-about way of saying, I Did Not Finish Of Metal And Wishes at about 50%. I’m keenly aware of the fact that I made it through the vampires & pedophilia book, so it’s probably deeply unfair that I dropped The Phantom of the Slaughterhouse, here, just because it’s in first-person-present-tense, light on worldbuilding and character development, and generally super rapey and victim-blamey. But I’m done! You can write creepy and horrible and ugly things without bludgeoning us with Virgin/Whore dichotomies and using assault as a backdrop for ~romance~!

all february reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag

[hag-o-hags]

FEBRUARY READS 10-12:

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home - Carol Rifka Brunt 🌟☆☆☆☆ This novel wants to be about the pain of transition: how cruel and selfish we can be while growing up, and while trying to comprehend grief. It is about a family of terrible, repressed, fucked up people coping with the only methods they have. The gay men dying of AIDS, they’re a backdrop, which isn’t inherently bad -- this story is less about the enormity of the crisis, and more about the hysteria of that crisis bleeding through onto one family, and one girl in particular. It could have been about love being intense and confusing and necessary and painful and weird and forbidden, but instead it was all of those things and equated homosexuality to incest in a way that made me swear loudly in public, so once again, but without startling any joggers, OH FUCK NO.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 This book has a lot going on. It’s a cross-cultural Victorian England/Restoration Japan steampunk romance mystery with a semi-gratuitous clockwork octopus, which, not gonna lie, 15 year old me would have fucking loved, but Jaded Adult me was like, “Really? Scale it back a bit?” But actually, it works. Really, really well. Not unlike an octopus, what looks like a big wiggly tangle turns out to be incredibly dexterous and clever. The plot comes together wonderfully, and while there’s no real giant surprises built on Subtle Clues -- it’s reasonably easy to guess the mystery -- the way it’s constructed out of relationships is fantastic. Also, it’s gay. It’s beautiful and gay and delicate and achingly romantic, and I am fairly certain I felt my heart shatter somewhere in the middle of the book when it looked like I was going to be shelving Mori and Thaniel away under “Completely Obvious & Perf But Totally Doomed”. Aaaagh. There is a certain othering to the way the Japanese characters are portrayed -- it’s not egregious, and there’s a lot of subtle details about Meiji Japan, but certain things don’t ring true, even beyond the cameo of Gilbert and Sullivan debuting Mikado (Christ almighty.) Considered as a whole, though, the prose is beautiful, the characters are rich -- especially the female lead, who is fantastic and flawed and I lover her -- a complicated premise delivers on what it sets up, and I am way too emotionally invested in this book.

House of Ivy and Sorrow - Natalie Whipple 🌟🌟☆☆☆ Put this one down as really, really bad marketing. It came recommended as a gothic fantasy, (the title! the opening lines! what it says on the tin!) but it pretty quickly becomes kind of Sabrina the Teenage Witch in rural Iowa, and had I bothered to check Goodreads, I would have seen everyone saying the same thing. The only gothic elements (of either kind) are the animal parts and freshly harvested human bits used in spells (just fingernails and teeth; not even any grave-robbing, sad trombone), which is pretty hardcore for this genre. It’s largely innocuous, in a cookie-cutter, first-person-present-tense, love-triangle, ugly-duckling-becomes-a-super-babe urban-fantasy, teen-romance kind of way. Although it did give me the line “... his eyes glittering like chocolate diamonds”, which killed me dead until I remembered some company decided brown diamonds are ~*~Designer®~*~ and that’s a real thing, and god, I just don’t know if that makes it better or not. Takeaway: with the right marketing you can sell anything as anything.

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[hag-o-hags]

FEBRUARY READS 7-9: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE EDITION

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test. A lot of criteria were bent or ignored this time, and the results will absolutely not shock you! 😱 😱 😱

Sudden Death - Álvaro Enrigue 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ Oh, Literature. I appreciate post-modernism in the same way I appreciate ~modernist gastronomy~ -- that is to say, “Neat, but I prefer my green beans not in sodium alginate spheres and my novels without self-referential awareness.” It’s a very intriguing book, sort of about a tennis duel between the poet Quevedo and the artist Carravagio (and his buddy Gallileo), and the conquest of Mexico by Cortés, and 16th century European politics, and about developing the book itself. Certain themes work their way through the weft of the whole story, subtly binding together threads of plot that seem otherwise totally unconnected. Originally in Spanish, the translation does a good job with wordplay and tone, and it’s sometimes very funny. There’s a sense of Man-Writing that I can’t quite shake, and I think it’s especially clear in how sex is described -- the experience and physiology of two men versus a woman getting herself off -- but generally, the longer it settles in my brain, the more I like it as a piece of work.

The Thief - Megan Whalen Turner 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ In all honesty this was only in my queue because some list somewhere was like, YOU NEED TO READ THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA, and I hate jumping into the middle of a series. So here we go. It skews a little young, even for this project, but it’s not juvenile or watered down, just very light. There are no named female characters until about the last 8th of the book, and that’s always something that puzzles me coming from a woman author, but the very end sets up two queens, so, okay, here we go, ready for Queen of Attolia. Considered as a whole, I like this book, but it does illustrate one of the biggest reasons I dislike first-person perspective: the climax of the book is built around an OH SHIT twist from the main character, and you can’t just not tell us what’s happening when we’re inside his head. Nothing is done to make him an unreliable narrator, or to make us guess that something was happening, and in a third-person semi-omnipotent perspective we could not know what was going on. But as it is, it’s just not mentioned that anything is being set up, and after the fact the narrator says, “Oh, and btw this is the sneaky-deaky thing I did.” Boo, first person, boo.

The Long Earth - Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ I try not to give too much away, generally, but in this case, fuck it, the book ends with Madison, Wisconsin getting leveled by a nuclear bomb, and that is literally the most cathartic fantasy scenario my frostbitten, traumatized brain could come up with after being stuck there for three miserable years, so hallelujah for that gift, praise allegorical Jesus. Here called Joshua Valiente. (Son of Maria; no other details about him being Latino, though.) Also in the Scraps department, we’ve got a couple casually mentioned sapphic couples, and (brace) a Tibetan motorcycle repair man who’s been reincarnated as a ghost in the machine. And, oh boy, for all that Terry Pratchett does well, he has a huge fucking problem with racist Asian stereotyping. Lobsang (why always Lobsang, Pterry?) could have been a weird, fun, NOT-RACIST thing in a sci-fi story. But instead of blurring the line between fully-rounded actual human consciousness vs program self-aware enough to make Turing hide under his desk, we get this empty Robo-Person vs program and it feels like Uncle Terry’s telling his uncomfortable racist joke again. I’ve never read any Baxter, so spotting his work is mainly filling in the gaps and guessing that the huge sciency infodumps explained by characters with all the authenticity and realism of macaroni art are probably him (Breaking: Male Hard Sci-Fi Author Doesn’t Know How To Write Teenaged Girl, More At 11). It kiiiiind of passes the Mako Mori test, but gets stuck in the Chosen Dude (What Woman?) trope. And all that BS? Is so frustrating, because conceptually the book is so cool, in terms of science and worldbuilding and structure and minor characters and uuuuuuugh JUST! DO! BETTER!

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[hag-o-hags]

FEBRUARY READS 4-6

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

Seraphina - Rachel Hartman 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆ Holy world-building, Dragonman. This is an amazing goddamn sandbox. It’s often a failing of YA that stories feel built around a set, like the development is  scaffolding meant to be put up and taken down quickly and easily. Seraphina feels like it’s told out of a real culture, like it wasn’t just built for this story. There’s philosophy, history, food, religion, music, biology, all of which are not to obfuscate our understanding but to highlight the setting. I will say, I listened to this one, so I didn’t see any spellings until after the fact, and some of them -- the dragons speak Mootya, the country of Goredd, the ambassador Dame Okra (really? really?) -- are kind of achingly 1980s. But oh well. There is ONE! token character of color, introduced early, whom I really hoped was going to have a significant voice: he doesn’t, but he’s fairly important; as well as ONE! token gay character, who’s a crabby gouty old composer. I was concerned for a while that we were going to hit that old I’m Not Like Other Girls trope where our heroine is the only Smart Special Grounded Realistic Rational teenage girl, but her flighty princess counterpart is just extremely 16, and far smarter and more capable than she lets on.

Uprooted - Naomi Novik 🌟🌟☆☆☆ Okay, so you know when you’ve got all the ingredients for a delicious pancake breakfast laid out in front of you, like, there’s bacon and blueberries and all you need to do is just put it all in the pan and fuckin’ cook it? Aren’t you always like, “You know what, I’m going to dig way to the back of the fridge and see if I can scrounge up a moldy bologna sandwich instead”? Right? Similarly, when the setup for two girls to fall the fuck in love is RIGHT THERE, I just find it so invigorating to have the 17-year-old hook up with the centuries-old wizard who calls her a useless idiot, but, you know, in a good way. (If we broaden the definition of “good” to include: disrespectful, gross, condescending, totally devoid of affection.) I really wanted to like this book! It’s, like, Fantasy Eastern Europe! The antagonist is Nature, Literally Not Allegorically! There’s a super awesome Black lady wizard! The setup for two girls to fall the fuck in love is RIGHT THERE! But the longer it went on, the less enchanting I found it. The action feels intense and high stakes, but the periods between just drag on and on and on. And, yeah, toxic heteronormativity irritates the shit out of me, but I would have been happy enough with a Beautiful Powerful Female Friendship, but the BFF -- rescued from certain doom, steadfast and loyal, turned into some kinda indestructible warrior golem -- gets shoved into character stasis where things happen to her but she completely stops developing, like, Oh Yes, My BFF Action Jackson Who We Put In The Off-Screen Cupboard When We Don’t Need Her. You let me down, book. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Chalice - Robin McKinley 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ I found The Hero and the Crown last year, and it was the first book in ages that blew me away, so I keep coming back to Robin McKinley wanting lightning to strike again. And it just. Doesn’t. Chalice is fine. The voice is unique (strange? confusing? too poetic for its own good?) You could plaster Aarne-Thompson-Uther numbers all over it, but it doesn’t feel derivative. On the other hand, it’s so slow to dole out exposition that not expecting what comes next is less to do with fresh takes and more about not being fully clear on what the hell is going on. As it comes together, the mechanics of the story become cohesive, and it’s actually quite elegant and lovely in retrospect. But by the time we’re solid on what has happened and what these people are doing, the book is at its climax and there’s 40 pages left.

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[hag-o-hags]

FEBRUARY READS 1-3

This year, my goal is to read books that are written by women, feature effortless and authentic female characters, explicitly include queer characters and characters of color, and pass the Sexy Lamp Test and the Mako Mori Test.

Birthmarked - Caragh M. O’Brien 🌟☆☆☆☆ Okay. Okay. Okay. I’d like to say I don’t know why I picked this up, but I do -- the main character is a midwife, and I thought it was going to be an interesting departure from the Fighter Heroine we get in a lot of YA, a heroine irremovable from cultural femininity. I just ... glazed over the fact that a story about a midwife would mean 1) babies and 2) pregnancy. I have a thing about pregnancy. It’s complicated. There’s a lot of content in this book that triggers that thing: death in childbirth, eugenics, baby-harvesting. That being said, there are plenty of good books -- books I love -- that I don’t actually enjoy. The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, and that’s appropriate, because this is almost a 4 KIDS! version of that story. Fascist overlords regress society and use the lower castes as breeding stock because they can’t have healthy children anymore; also, public executions! But where The Handmaid’s Tale created a terrifyingly plausible scenario, Birthmarked has flimsy worldbuilding, and a saggy, arbitrary plot, where things just are the way they are, purely because they need to be that way. Yes, the world ended, but we still have genetic research, so you’re telling me that a society in which Michael Crichton could have written Jurassic Park ALSO is regressed into bunch of inbred hemophiliacs like the fucking House of Hanover? Nobody kept records of harvested babies because one time someone tried to get their kid back, and so now unauthorized reproduction is a capital crime? The main character swings from shockingly naive to incredibly cunning within scenes, and she decides to escape the Fascist Machinations not when her family is arrested, nor when she’s arrested, but over something she’s known about her entire life. On its own, this is maybe a 2-star book, but between the stuff that heebs my jeebies personally and all the visible seams in the writing, there was kinda nothing that redeemed it for me.

The Naming - Alison Croggon 🌟🌟🌟☆☆ Pretty good classic high fantasy, in a Latter-Day LotR kind of way, both in terms of structure -- they journey and journey and journey and journey and journey and journey and journey and JOURNEY AND JOU-- and lore development. Language, world history, songs, Definitely Not Elves -- all in a formal, lyrical style of prose. Our heroine is the Chosen One, like, that’s the actual title, which is redic, but the whole book operates with the idea that yep, she’s probably the Chosen One, so it’s not a big reveal when she finds out she is. In a way, that’s good, because it dodges the cliched inevitability, and lets some other things be the bigger surprise. Also, in an interesting maneuver, we hear about the MC’s first period, and then it comes up again a few more times. The first time, The Nearest Dude has a Squealing Dude Reaction, like he would LITERALLY RATHER FACE DEATH than deal with a girl having her first period -- that’s not hyperbole, I’ve forgotten now what he actually said, but it was weeny and melodramatic and involved preferring GBH to explaining basic biology to a kid who’s panicked and in pain OH GOD HELP FETCH A WOMAN QUICK. So given that, I expected it was being included as a Plot Point, like somehow she was going her magic was going to hinge on Mystic Menstrual Powers. (Can we bury that trope under 20 feet of cement at the bottom of a lake by the way?) But nope. Just an exercise in normalization, which ... okay! Sure! I have net zero judgement on it -- kind of a weird beat to include since it had nothing to do with anything, even as a character trait, but also, all right, let’s work on destigmatizing people getting their periods. I bring it up at all because it’s pretty much the only time I’ve seen A Period Happen in YA without a) “I have to hide it because I’m pretending to be a boy” or b) “I’m not pregnant/ready to become pregnant/failing to fake a pregnancy”. (This concludes the OB-GYN-Focused Review Event, istg)

An Ember in the Ashes - Sabaa Tahir 🌟🌟☆☆☆ This was a hard one to read, honestly: I had to keep dragging myself back to it. Go ahead and slap some strong content warnings on there for violent abuse and Rapist Villain. It’s surprisingly cruel  to its female characters, in terms of their arcs and how easily they’re disempowered, and remarkably lenient toward the male MC. The POV is split between the heroine, who is posing as a slave in order to spy on the Violent Fascist Commander so the Rebellion will free her imprisoned brother, and the #1 Fascist Supersoldier, who is a petulant, selfish noodle who can’t turn away the gross Male Gaze even when his life is in danger and is really bad at long-term strategy for a Fascist Supersoldier? Also just to shake things up there’s a love SQUARE. Is that better? I don’t know. On the other hand it’s an interesting case study in how to approach White As Default, especially in a fantasy setting. This world is strongly coded to be the Middle East -- except The Fascists, the first people we get physical descriptions of, are Roman and explicitly white, other than the male MC whose unknown father was from the desert tribes. We don’t get much physical description of the female MC’s people for good chunk of the book, so a critical reader would assume they’re PoC. And yet, can an author really rely on readers to make that connection? I keep thinking of the person who wrote to Neil Gaiman boggled that Fat Charlie, the son of Anansi, wasn’t white -- White As Default is deep and insidious. So when we do start getting physical descriptions, and there’s a blonde slave, a rebel with red hair, and the “fair” brother of the MC, is coding and implication enough for us to know the female MC isn’t white? I went in assuming she was brown, and I still started to get confused until she was finally explicitly described near the end of the book. How does an author to effectively telegraph what a character looks like when the cultures of their world don’t 100% follow the real-world equivalents they’re coding? I don’t have any answers to these questions, really. I just think they’re important for us to consider as consumers and producers.

all february reads 🌟 all 2017 reads 🌟 super special book tag