#Olondria

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.

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[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

Four women, soldier, scholar, poet, and socialite, are caught up on different sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their families are torn apart, they fear they may disappear into the unwritten pages of history. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.

[freckles-and-books]

Currently reading: A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

[mapas-fantasticos]

Map of the Empire of Olondria from A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar.

[frigidwife]

good morning, do you have any book or poetry recommendations… i trust your taste

off top of my head!

gothic

wuthering heights

villette

frankenstein

rebecca

the haunting of hill house

we have always lived in the castle (+ companion film ginger snaps)

sci fi/fantasy

the farthest shore

the left hand of darkness

annihilation by jeff vandermeer

a stranger in olondria by sofia samatar

literary fiction(?)

giovanni's room if u want permanent emotional damage

mrs dalloway + the waves + to the lighthouse

kitchen by banana yoshimoto

lucy by jamaica kincaid

in another place, not here by dionne brand - please read this novel

[highladyluck]

Current TBR pile!

I just bought Exordia because I trust Seth Dickenson and I’m too impatient to wait for it to be available through the library. SF is my home genre anyway.

A Stranger in Olondria was available at my library; I’d gotten the rec from somewhere online (probably tumblr?) listing books that were doing interesting or beautiful things with urban environments.

The Circumference of the World was on the new releases shelf at the library. I generally like Lavie Tidhar’s work and the premise seemed fun (based on the blurb alone, it’s giving Rabbits but with a protagonist I’ll care about more, or perhaps The Cartographers.)

[sentience-if]

Things Sentience reminds me of:

- Blade Runner (the first movie only)

- the game "Primordia"

- "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"

- the album "Dead Cities" by The Future Sound of London

- that time in high school I read "House of Leaves" too many times in a row and then in very minor ways some really weird shit started happening around me

- just a wee dash of "The Abhorsen Series" by Garth Nix

- a smidge of "Strangers in Olondria" by Sofia Samatar

As an ex-religious person who grew up in a high liturgical setting, was obsessed with everything sci fi, and who has maintained an extreme affection for the saints + medieval mysticism a la Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, your story is my catnip! Thank you for writing it.

Signed,

Faithful Rat #712

I've read Abhorsen and I Have No Mouth, and seen Blade Runner. House of Leaves is on my list but I'm... afraid lol. Will definitely be looking into the rest of these :)

you 🤝 me

religion brain worms

[librarycards]

UMMM books I like... the southern reach trilogy, the broken Earth trilogy, and the man who couldn't stop :>

OH WAIT FIVE. um I also like guardians of ga'hoole and (the lore in) warrior cats

here are some recs!!

Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

China Miéville, The City & The City

Renee Gladman, Event Factory

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

[aldieb]

it’s the yearly books post 📚 i read 52 this year (so nice and even!) which is a 6% increase from last year’s 49. although it doesn’t really show on this list, the overarching theme turned out to be a bunch of shorter stuff (graphic novels and novellas). here’s what we’ve got:

best fiction: winner is still a stranger in olondria by sofia samatar. 3 runners up = the spear cuts through water by simon jimenez, the actual star by monica byrne, and the name of the rose by umberto eco

best series: also extremely obviously, foreigner by c. j. cherryh, despite the fact that i’m less than halfway through. made me realize the true meaning of the word “blorbo.” the three-body problem series by cixin liu gets an honorable mention just because it ate my brain for a while.

best nonfiction: the wounded storyteller by arthur w. frank, with the faraway nearby by rebecca solnit as the runner-up. i read a lot of bad and mediocre nonfiction for professional development reasons and am excited to not do that next year!

worst book: i also read lessons in chemistry by bonnie garmus for work purposes. the reason for this verdict can be encapsulated in the fact that the protag’s hair is described as being the color of “burnt buttered toast.” what does it mean

books read aloud with friends: (new category bc i realized it would be fun to capture these, and many are rereads so i don’t include them in my total count.) part of the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin, a tree grows in brooklyn by betty smith, tarashana by rachel neumeier, and the unknown shore by patrick o’brian + all of tuck everlasting by natalie babbitt and the age of innocence by edith wharton + also a christmas carol by charles dickens, but that’s a Yearly Event so i won’t note it down again.

[pomea]

He took my arm and pulled me out of the way of the turning sail, and we leaned on the rails at the edge of the boat together and watched the city take shape. Miros did not resemble his uncle: where the priest was pale and black-haired, Miros had the brown curls and golden skin of the Laths, the people of the Valley. He had only recently joined his uncle's service—to escape some trouble, I understood from his evasions and nervous fumbling with the pearl in his earlobe.

"I don't know a thing about being a valet," he added gloomily. "I only hope we get some hunting in the highlands. If I were home I could hunt in the Kelevain with my other uncles. . . . But it's my own fault. It's always a mistake to leave one's home."

Recalling my own situation, he stammered: "I mean for me, for people like me, uneducated, suited for nothing but idleness. . . ."

I laughed and told him he was right. "I ought to have stayed home myself," I said. At the end of the sentence sorrow clenched my throat.

After a moment I managed: "But you're with your uncle the priest, at any rate. You must admire him."

Miros stared at me, half laughing and half aghast. He glanced about him, then bent to my ear and said in a heightened, roguish whisper like that of a stage villain: "Admire him! I hate him like the cramp."

sofia samatar, a stranger in olondria

[devoutjunk]

currently reading

A Stranger in Olondria (Sofia Samatar)

gorgeous prose, rival religious cults, political intrigue, books within books, lush & labyrinthine cities, angels not as forces of salvation but as the dead come back for their revenge, and caught up within it all, Jevick, a young man far from home, driven on a quest he doesn’t want by a dead girl he hardly knew

The Corner that Held Them (Sylvia Townsend Warner)

a sprawling novel about a “Benedictine convent of no great note” that winds through several decades at Oby with the unending ever shifting current of the stream that marks the boundary of their land, shifting between the minds of its varied cast with ease. it doesn’t seem like it would be gripping reading—the petty grudges and predictable woes of the nuns and their village—but Warner somehow makes that dailiness transcendent, poignant, and darkly funny

Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones)

A history of the Middle Ages. Good so far as a kind of general overview that gives you a sense of the wider political and cultural currents/a sense of the motion of history. As always I crave details about the people themselves but I know this is somewhat limited by the subject matter and source material (Stacy Schiff manages it w/ Cleopatra though!!). Author loves to compare like, Byzantine chariot riots over the nature of Christ to 90s British football club antics regardless of how relevant the comparison is. which could get annoying but I’m choosing to find it amusing (I can’t help be charmed when someone’s own obsessions are clearly creeping into the work). He admits a bias towards/focus on “the west” in his intro and after reading the section on the various Islamic empires of the 600s I’d agree with his assessment. He tries to give everything its due but I have a feeling his interest lies more w/ post-Roman Britain so I’m curious to see if those chapters are more detailed

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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[y6le]

wait whoever already voted can you vote in this one now instead please and thank you

[freckles-and-books]

A Stranger in Olondria is beautiful but slow, so I’m taking a small break with this one.

[sessilywatt]

2023 Week 1: Snow on a frog statue.

My plan for 2023 is to complete one outdoor sketch per week in this small Stillman and Birn sketchbook, as an artistic record of the changing seasons. I was inspired in part by Lara Call Gastinger’s perpetual journal, which is a nature sketchbook which has a spread for each week in the year. (I say ‘in part’ because a perpetual journal should have space on each spread for entries over multiple years, which is not my plan for this particular sketchbook.)

I started this sketch outside in pencil on January 2nd and then inked it at home as I had time over the last couple days.

I am still rereading a Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. From Chapter 17: “A breath of wind went whispering among the trees, and they quivered, their shadows glancing over the layer of new snow on the ground. The tiny sound, the movement, emphasized the isolation of that place, so iridescent and remote. I grasped the pail at last and rested it on the lip of the well, holding my aching side, waiting for my breath. When I raised my head the trees all looked like shadows and their thorns like mist, and the sun spangled everything with leaves of ice.”

[mssarahmorgan]

Book 44 of 2024: The Telling by Ursula K. LeGuin

This was a new LeGuin for me, and, no surprise, I loved it. It's a Hainish cycle novel, and there's a lot of plot here, actually - the main character, Sutty, is an Observer from Earth sent to a planet that's relatively new to the Ekumen. The planet has just gone through an accelerated industrial revolution and has outlawed the old religion. Sutty comes from an Earth that has just been struggling through a period of theocratic dictatorship, so she's predisposed to be suspicious of religion, but she also recognizes the new state/corporate dogma as propaganda just like the stuff from home. Sutty is sent upriver, to the mountains, to a small town where she might get to see some remnants of the old religion. She discovers a whole hidden world, and is, against herself, drawn into this world's belief system, which feels sort of Buddhist and also sort of indigenous and ultimately very LeGuin. It's called The Telling - all the world is a story, and people's role in the world is to tell the story. Sutty also has a tragic personal history which is gradually revealed through the course of the novel - this book is very LeGuin and very, very good. Simple and quiet on the surface, with extremely complicated depths; achingly beautiful prose; will tell you how to live in the world if you let it.

What to read next: A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar, for another gorgeous spec-fic that's all about story.