Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches By Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde): Like all fine things in life, to be taken in a little at a time, with great attention. That focus goes not only toward Lorde's words, but to one's reaction to them, because - I think - she exhorts the reader to be more aware of the world. There's only so much of that I can take ( Read more... )

SEPTEMBER
The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson): ..meh. Postapocalyptic "what is America" bildungsroman where the protagonist learns that sometimes people lie to you and don't have your best interests at heart. This has some of the elements I like about KSR's other novels - attention to detail, location as almost a character in its own right - but ( Read more... )

Usually I don't worry about reading affecting my mood, but usually I am reading something more cheerful than The Zanzibar Chest. It's exactly like the PTSD and narrative fragmentation in All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, now with more drugs, explicit post-colonial queasiness, dicey unexamined gender politics, and eye-searing descriptions of human ( Read more... )

Today outdoor work was canceled on account of rain. I pulled The Honor of the Queen from a box in lieu of doing anything useful. I chewed through the Honor Harrington novels in late high school / early college; hopefully my taste in infodumps has since improved. (It's also tempting to make notes about the progression of feminism in the nearly two ( Read more... )

This is a placeholder for a Cryoburn post. If this were a real post, there would be links, spoiler-cuts and possibly capslock.

Air (Geoff Ryman): Absolutely worth reading. Do you know why this got a Tiptree? Because it's a story about a woman in a fake -stan. There's a number of interlocking plot threads that dovetail and swoop around each other to say more than the sum of their individual stories. Do you know why you've never heard about this story? Because there's really ( Read more... )

I checked my email and found a message about the imminent read/rate deadline for the WSFA Small Press Award nominees shunted into a "to do" folder. So I read, and rated, on a two-day deadline. If I'm in a tearing hurry to read a set of short fiction nominees, I get mean. Really ( Read more... )

If you read, say, multiple "I was in Iraq in the Naughts" memoirs, eventually you start noticing the writers have agendas. At which point, bravo, I have rediscovered my favorite literary trope, the unreliable narrator.

This weekend's fun and sibling bonding were compounded by an absent wallet. Finally got it back today, lighter a $15 stupidity ( Read more... )

Mirror Dance, Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold): Ah yes, the classic signs of a bad day: you are in complete sympathy with Howl, in a "let's go to Macy's and buy several hundred dollars of makeup and professional clothes I don't need" way. (I didn't go to Macy's. I may have browsed the website, though. Ironing gets really old ( Read more... )

The library notified me of two novels on hold for me: Geoff Ryman's Air and A Wizard of Mars, the latest in Diane Duane's Wizards series. I am pretty sure cracking a beer and opening a YA book like Mars is some flavor of wrong.

It's been brought to my attention that the library has books and DVDs. What should I watch? So far I'm thinking The ( Read more... )