wednesday reads
To start out, a whole bunch of book-related stuff:
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. As usual with a collection, I loved some stories and was meh on others. My favorites were the ones that started from the assumption that some earlier conception of the world was literally true: that heaven and hell (and God and angels) literally exist("Tower of Babylon" and "Hell is the Absence of God"), or that golems and homunculi (the miniature fully-formed humans that were thought to exist in sperm) literally exist ("Seventy-Two Letters"). I felt that all these stories were less emotionally involving than I prefer (other than perhaps "Tower of Babylon", which was probably my favorite), and all of them, except for maybe the three-page "The Evolution of Human Science", were too long.
I really enjoyed the author's notes at the end, especially those for "Seventy-Two Letters". And of course it's always interesting to read the book a movie is based on (in this case, for those who don't know, the movie Arrival was based on "Story of Your Life") and see the differences.
What I'm reading now:
Still reading Word by Word by Kory Stamper, and listening to Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray.
What I'm reading next:
Well, I just got all these ebooks...
I was going to make this a general media post, but it's already pretty long, and I have to think about what I'm going to say about what I'm watching and playing, so maybe I'll do the rest tomorrow.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
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- Tor's posted a second free ebook for August: if you're in the US or Canada, you can download The Black Company by Glen Cook until midnight (EDT?) August 30th. (I actually have this ebook already. I started it but didn't like it, and abandoned it early.)
- For those of you who are either reading or have read Foundryside, or enjoyed City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett has posted author's notes about these books: notes for Foundryside, notes for City of Stairs.
- Speaking of RJB, I got a Goodreads notification that his book American Elsewhere was on sale as ebook for $3 for one day only from various online stores. I have a system for getting my books from Amazon, but that one wasn't included, so I picked Google Play. MISTAKE. They use DRM (.acsm), and I have to use Google's ereader software on my phone, which - I like using Moon+ Reader, damn it. This makes FOUR ereader apps I have to use depending on the book's source (the others are Overdrive for library books, which are also .acsm but it won't open the Google Play .acsm file, and Aldiko for NetGalley) and they all work differently and it's annoying af.
- In better news,
sovay's new short story collection Forget the Sleepless Shores is being offered by its publisher, Lethe Press, as part of the Eerie Waters Ebook Bundle: for $6 you get not only her stories, but also two other thematically similar short-story collections. To quote
sovay's post: "Along with my collection, you get Chaz Brenchley's Lambda Award-winning Bitter Waters (2014) and the Lethe anthology The Touch of the Sea (2012); the latter looks like a beauty, but the former is my single favorite other author's collection ever put out by this press, a superlative seventh wave of queer male sea-stories, sharp and breathtaking." This is a screaming deal and it made up for my disappointment in the previous list item!
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. As usual with a collection, I loved some stories and was meh on others. My favorites were the ones that started from the assumption that some earlier conception of the world was literally true: that heaven and hell (and God and angels) literally exist("Tower of Babylon" and "Hell is the Absence of God"), or that golems and homunculi (the miniature fully-formed humans that were thought to exist in sperm) literally exist ("Seventy-Two Letters"). I felt that all these stories were less emotionally involving than I prefer (other than perhaps "Tower of Babylon", which was probably my favorite), and all of them, except for maybe the three-page "The Evolution of Human Science", were too long.
I really enjoyed the author's notes at the end, especially those for "Seventy-Two Letters". And of course it's always interesting to read the book a movie is based on (in this case, for those who don't know, the movie Arrival was based on "Story of Your Life") and see the differences.
What I'm reading now:
Still reading Word by Word by Kory Stamper, and listening to Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray.
What I'm reading next:
Well, I just got all these ebooks...
I was going to make this a general media post, but it's already pretty long, and I have to think about what I'm going to say about what I'm watching and playing, so maybe I'll do the rest tomorrow.
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth