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Reading Wednesday meme
Sep. 4th, 2019 08:05 pmOkay, I need distraction from thinking about news and politics right now, so here's the Wednesday reading meme.
What I've recently finished reading
I raved enthusiastically about Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War here. After that, I've finished S.A. Chakraborty's City of Brass, the first in her Islamic-culture-inspired historical fantasy, and feel conflicted about it. I really loved lots of things about the worldbuilding, and some of the characters were refreshingly complex, and it had many interesting elements, but it also dragged a lot in places, and it was overall too violent for me. Also, it had the problem of 9/10 of the books and other media that involve any m/f romantic elements for the main character, namely that I couldn't stand those elements or the romantic interest and found the dynamic super uncomfortable and threatening.
Some day I'll write a post about the remaining 1/10, ie. the het romances in books and TV shows and so on that I actually do like and that don't make me want to run away and never hear of straight romances again, either fictional or real. Because actually there are m/f romances that I really like, and I have het ships, and I don't have anything inherently against people being straight, it's just that a lot of the romantic tropes involved seem really fucked up to me. So anyway, while a lot of people have liked this book and I appreciate that, I'm probably not going to read more of this series. But I do appreciate there being more and more fantasy based on non-Western mythologies and cultures. I really find it very important, and even as a white woman from a Western country I feel I get a lot out of seeing a more diverse world in fiction; the dominance of Western narratives in culture is harmful to all of us, not only to those cultures and peoples it erases (though especially them, of course). But this particular example didn't work that well for me, so I'm going to focus on those that do work.
What I'm reading now
Uh, well, I seem to be kind of rereading This is How You Lose the Time War before the library demands it back because it's just that gorgeous.
I'm also reading Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories, a collection of short stories (and a post-Revenant Gun novella) taking place in the universe of the Hexarchate books aka Machineries of Empire series. I haven't even yet got around to raving about how I read Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun in about one week's mad rush (not necessarily a healthy way to read them, but oh well) and fell head first in love with the series. I need to do that. (I read Ninefox Gambit earlier this summer and I liked it as well, but I spent so much of it confused about what was going on that it didn't yet create the same level of 'OMG obsessed' that the second and third books of the series did.) But anyway, I'm liking the stories a lot.
I'm also tentatively starting Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow, a Mexican historical fantasy with Maya gods and the 1920s, and I've got some Finnish non-fiction going on in the background, as I often do.
What I want to read next
Everything? Let's see, I've got Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire from the library again, and this time I really want to read it since I'm not simultaneously swamped in Hugo reading, like I was the last time I had it. I've got a whole lot of books on my shelf that I really should try to read and I don't even know which one to pick up. I really should read more Finnish fiction, but I keep having trouble finding books I actually like, so maybe I just need to read more translations. And I've got a whole lot of rereads I want to get to as soon as possible, from Imperial Radch to Murderbot, and honestly I'll want to reread the Machineries of Empire books very soon, too. And I'm overdue for some Pratchett...
And I'd like to read more nonfiction books about nature and animals and all sorts of things.
What I've recently finished reading
I raved enthusiastically about Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This Is How You Lose the Time War here. After that, I've finished S.A. Chakraborty's City of Brass, the first in her Islamic-culture-inspired historical fantasy, and feel conflicted about it. I really loved lots of things about the worldbuilding, and some of the characters were refreshingly complex, and it had many interesting elements, but it also dragged a lot in places, and it was overall too violent for me. Also, it had the problem of 9/10 of the books and other media that involve any m/f romantic elements for the main character, namely that I couldn't stand those elements or the romantic interest and found the dynamic super uncomfortable and threatening.
Some day I'll write a post about the remaining 1/10, ie. the het romances in books and TV shows and so on that I actually do like and that don't make me want to run away and never hear of straight romances again, either fictional or real. Because actually there are m/f romances that I really like, and I have het ships, and I don't have anything inherently against people being straight, it's just that a lot of the romantic tropes involved seem really fucked up to me. So anyway, while a lot of people have liked this book and I appreciate that, I'm probably not going to read more of this series. But I do appreciate there being more and more fantasy based on non-Western mythologies and cultures. I really find it very important, and even as a white woman from a Western country I feel I get a lot out of seeing a more diverse world in fiction; the dominance of Western narratives in culture is harmful to all of us, not only to those cultures and peoples it erases (though especially them, of course). But this particular example didn't work that well for me, so I'm going to focus on those that do work.
What I'm reading now
Uh, well, I seem to be kind of rereading This is How You Lose the Time War before the library demands it back because it's just that gorgeous.
I'm also reading Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories, a collection of short stories (and a post-Revenant Gun novella) taking place in the universe of the Hexarchate books aka Machineries of Empire series. I haven't even yet got around to raving about how I read Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun in about one week's mad rush (not necessarily a healthy way to read them, but oh well) and fell head first in love with the series. I need to do that. (I read Ninefox Gambit earlier this summer and I liked it as well, but I spent so much of it confused about what was going on that it didn't yet create the same level of 'OMG obsessed' that the second and third books of the series did.) But anyway, I'm liking the stories a lot.
I'm also tentatively starting Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow, a Mexican historical fantasy with Maya gods and the 1920s, and I've got some Finnish non-fiction going on in the background, as I often do.
What I want to read next
Everything? Let's see, I've got Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire from the library again, and this time I really want to read it since I'm not simultaneously swamped in Hugo reading, like I was the last time I had it. I've got a whole lot of books on my shelf that I really should try to read and I don't even know which one to pick up. I really should read more Finnish fiction, but I keep having trouble finding books I actually like, so maybe I just need to read more translations. And I've got a whole lot of rereads I want to get to as soon as possible, from Imperial Radch to Murderbot, and honestly I'll want to reread the Machineries of Empire books very soon, too. And I'm overdue for some Pratchett...
And I'd like to read more nonfiction books about nature and animals and all sorts of things.
