Current Girl Crushes
Regina Spektor. It's true, I do have a notorious weakness for singer/songwriter chicks with heavy professional music training and a mean piano. Spektor also has a one-of-kind, stick-in-your-skull voice, one part bubblegum and one part, well, maztoh balls, I guess. And when she gets tired of singing in English, she switches to Russian, or throws in some Hava Nagila, or just starts using her voice like a extra percussive instrument.
Arundhati Roy. Somehow I got into a conversation with Chris about _The God of Small Things_ at breakfast. And it's a good, riveting read in the first place, though the quasi-poetical style can be off-putting to some readers... but it's also one of those tales, sort of like Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life", in which it maybe isn't until you are trying to describe it to someone else that you suddenly realize, holy shit, this thing is a genuine piece of grade-A genius. "...right, see, it's about the caste system and anglophilia and the powerlessness of women, and how that hurts everyone, but no-one notices except the most powerless, and so Roy tells it from the viewpoint of the children, and you'd think she was trying another _To Kill a Mockingbird_, and maybe she is, but she tells in such a way that it's like peeling apart an onion to find the core, and after each layer you think you know, but then you peel away another layer and realize that that's what happened, and then you get to the center, and oh, my god."
Allie who writes Hyperbole and Half. Case closed.
Arundhati Roy. Somehow I got into a conversation with Chris about _The God of Small Things_ at breakfast. And it's a good, riveting read in the first place, though the quasi-poetical style can be off-putting to some readers... but it's also one of those tales, sort of like Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life", in which it maybe isn't until you are trying to describe it to someone else that you suddenly realize, holy shit, this thing is a genuine piece of grade-A genius. "...right, see, it's about the caste system and anglophilia and the powerlessness of women, and how that hurts everyone, but no-one notices except the most powerless, and so Roy tells it from the viewpoint of the children, and you'd think she was trying another _To Kill a Mockingbird_, and maybe she is, but she tells in such a way that it's like peeling apart an onion to find the core, and after each layer you think you know, but then you peel away another layer and realize that that's what happened, and then you get to the center, and oh, my god."
Allie who writes Hyperbole and Half. Case closed.