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Books
Alex Beecroft: Trowchester Blues
Nanna Foss: Leoniderne
I can't help but compare this book to Cirkeln and find it not as good. I mean, it's a fine book - group of young teens getting thrown together by suddenly acquiring mystical powers, there's a mysterious danger lurking - you can see how I got associations to Cirkeln, right? But I must admit, I prefer Cirkeln's subversion of the standard narrative, with its new witches basically refusing the call to work together and being friends, and everything being spectacularly fucked up. Leoniderne is so far interesting YA fantasy, but it's a lot more - clean? Nice?
N.K. Jemisin: The Fifth Season
Yeah, alright, it's okay.
Claire M. Johnson: Pen & Prejudice
Paul Koudounaris: Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs
This is an absolutely gorgeous book - about the admittedly rather curious phenomenon of Katakombenheiligen, catacomb saints, which were basically skeletons fished out of the Roman catacombs and transported to Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the 17th and 18th century, were they were given mostly fake saints names and were completely covered in gold and gems and then put on display. Most got taken down later, but the surviving specimens look gorgeously macabre - *checks list at back of book for still on display saints* Hmmmm - maybe an extended weekend to Munich might be fun?
Kim Newman: Johnny Alucard
Charles Stross: The Nightmare Stacks
Yes, yes, invasion by the bloody fair folk, lovely - but I'm actually much more interested in what happens after the last page, after the newly-crowned fairy queen has officially requested asylum for her supernatural army. In the Cthulhu-is-about-to-make-a-come-back world of these novels...
Rebecca Traister: All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and The Rise of An Independent Nation
On one hand this is a very interesting book about how women are staying single longer and how society is changing as a result. It's a good book, it's interesting. But - first, it's very American. As in, it's about the specific context of US women staying single longer, and all sorts of consequences - career, children, so forth. Second, it's not really about single women - don't the main title fool you, look at the subtitle. It's about unmarried women. Which - personally, I don't think you're single if you're in a relationship, but apparently, the US is still a lot more conservative about that sort of thing, so I guess? Anyway. It's just jarring to read a portrayal about a "single" woman and then it's mentioned how she had the same boyfriend for 30 years. Yeah. Single. Right. I mean, mostly it comes across as being about actually single women, but. Also, it gets points for actually touching on some women being childfree, but kinda looses them again, because it's a book written in 2016, and apparently the author has never heard of asexuality. There's a bit in one chapter about single women choosing not to have sex - and it's mostly about religiously motivated (either the woman's own or close relatives' religion) abstinence, and a bit about women who just don't get around to it a lot. Would it have hurt anybody to just, you know, touch on the fact that there are women who don't want to have sex just because they don't want to?
That said, the book included a quote from another author, Rachel Moran, that feels like an accurate summation of my issues with second wave feminism: "One of the great ironies of second-wave feminism is that it ignored single women as a distinct constituency while creating the conditions that increasingle enabled women to forego marriage."
Carrie Vaughn: Low Midnight
Comics
John Arcudi: Rumble: The Color of Darkness
Kurt Busiek: Astro City: The Dark Age: Brothers in Arms
Gerry Duggan: The Wedding of Deadpool
Alexandro Jodorowsky: Bouncer: To Hell
Alexandro Jodorowsky: Bouncer: And Back
Robert Kirkman: The Walking Dead: No Turning Back
Riad Sattouf: L'Arabe du Futur: Une Jeunesse au Moyen-Orient (1984-1985)
This trilogy better end with the wife leaving.
Osamu Tezuka: Phoenix: Future
Total number of books and comics read this month: 17
Currently reading: The Book of Cthulhu, The High Crusade by Poul Anderson, Fables: The Wolf Among Us by Matthew Sturges and The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
Total number of books and comics read this year: 165
Alex Beecroft: Trowchester Blues
Nanna Foss: Leoniderne
I can't help but compare this book to Cirkeln and find it not as good. I mean, it's a fine book - group of young teens getting thrown together by suddenly acquiring mystical powers, there's a mysterious danger lurking - you can see how I got associations to Cirkeln, right? But I must admit, I prefer Cirkeln's subversion of the standard narrative, with its new witches basically refusing the call to work together and being friends, and everything being spectacularly fucked up. Leoniderne is so far interesting YA fantasy, but it's a lot more - clean? Nice?
N.K. Jemisin: The Fifth Season
Yeah, alright, it's okay.
Claire M. Johnson: Pen & Prejudice
Paul Koudounaris: Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs
This is an absolutely gorgeous book - about the admittedly rather curious phenomenon of Katakombenheiligen, catacomb saints, which were basically skeletons fished out of the Roman catacombs and transported to Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the 17th and 18th century, were they were given mostly fake saints names and were completely covered in gold and gems and then put on display. Most got taken down later, but the surviving specimens look gorgeously macabre - *checks list at back of book for still on display saints* Hmmmm - maybe an extended weekend to Munich might be fun?
Kim Newman: Johnny Alucard
Charles Stross: The Nightmare Stacks
Yes, yes, invasion by the bloody fair folk, lovely - but I'm actually much more interested in what happens after the last page, after the newly-crowned fairy queen has officially requested asylum for her supernatural army. In the Cthulhu-is-about-to-make-a-come-back world of these novels...
Rebecca Traister: All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and The Rise of An Independent Nation
On one hand this is a very interesting book about how women are staying single longer and how society is changing as a result. It's a good book, it's interesting. But - first, it's very American. As in, it's about the specific context of US women staying single longer, and all sorts of consequences - career, children, so forth. Second, it's not really about single women - don't the main title fool you, look at the subtitle. It's about unmarried women. Which - personally, I don't think you're single if you're in a relationship, but apparently, the US is still a lot more conservative about that sort of thing, so I guess? Anyway. It's just jarring to read a portrayal about a "single" woman and then it's mentioned how she had the same boyfriend for 30 years. Yeah. Single. Right. I mean, mostly it comes across as being about actually single women, but. Also, it gets points for actually touching on some women being childfree, but kinda looses them again, because it's a book written in 2016, and apparently the author has never heard of asexuality. There's a bit in one chapter about single women choosing not to have sex - and it's mostly about religiously motivated (either the woman's own or close relatives' religion) abstinence, and a bit about women who just don't get around to it a lot. Would it have hurt anybody to just, you know, touch on the fact that there are women who don't want to have sex just because they don't want to?
That said, the book included a quote from another author, Rachel Moran, that feels like an accurate summation of my issues with second wave feminism: "One of the great ironies of second-wave feminism is that it ignored single women as a distinct constituency while creating the conditions that increasingle enabled women to forego marriage."
Carrie Vaughn: Low Midnight
Comics
John Arcudi: Rumble: The Color of Darkness
Kurt Busiek: Astro City: The Dark Age: Brothers in Arms
Gerry Duggan: The Wedding of Deadpool
Alexandro Jodorowsky: Bouncer: To Hell
Alexandro Jodorowsky: Bouncer: And Back
Robert Kirkman: The Walking Dead: No Turning Back
Riad Sattouf: L'Arabe du Futur: Une Jeunesse au Moyen-Orient (1984-1985)
This trilogy better end with the wife leaving.
Osamu Tezuka: Phoenix: Future
Total number of books and comics read this month: 17
Currently reading: The Book of Cthulhu, The High Crusade by Poul Anderson, Fables: The Wolf Among Us by Matthew Sturges and The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
Total number of books and comics read this year: 165
From:
no subject
Yeah, alright, it's okay.
Only okay? Haven't read it (yet).
From:
no subject
(It's a very good post-and-ongoing-apocalypse fantasy novel, with excellent worldbuilding and I've already requested the second novel from the library).