Author: librarykat

book collage, October 2021

Another month, another end of month book collage! Lots of reading got done because the better half went out of town for an entire week, which meant that in the evenings there was nothing antisocial at all about my curling up and reading for 2-4 hours before bed.

book collage for October 2021

The Dawn Chorus, by Samantha Shannon
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo
Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Rosewater, by Tade Thompson
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
Necessity, by Jo Walton
Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, by Aliette de Bodard
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson
The Oracle of Night, by Sidarta Ribeiro
Gold Diggers, by Sanjena Sathian
The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow
Son of a Trickster, by Eden Robinson

Son of a Trickster, by Eden Robinson

I got this from the Dominion City book club last summer and finally read it! This book was a pleasure to read, with snappy conversations and low-key show-don’t-tell narration. Jared is a teen Native just trying to make his way through life despite his rough home situation. He’s a good kid with an appealing mixture of toughness, thoughtfulness, and black humor, which sustains the reader through the continual drumbeat of intergenerational trauma that we see all around him. The introduction of the Indigenous mythical elements is a slow burn; it’s not until near the end that Jared figures out that the voices and visions he experiences are not just drug-induced hallucinations. The pacing feels more like a Part 1 than a standalone novel, but the writing is good enough that I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow

I started out loving this book, then found myself getting bored and just tolerating it; fortunately it picked up towards the end. Harrow painted herself into a corner by making her characters obvious archetypes; as such they could never really grow as characters, just asymptotically approach their fated roles. Although the language was lovely and poetic, the book couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a fairy tale (in which every encounter was fated) or a story in which the characters could pretend to have agency, instead of just making their peace with their foreordained roles.

Gold Diggers, by Sanjena Sathian

This was a really ambitious, multi-dimensional coming-of-age story. Narrator Neal (Neeraj) Narayan is growing up in the pressure-cooker environment of a diaspora community of competitive, striving immigrant families. He knows he should have been aiming for Harvard admission, but instead finds himself mostly aiming himself at the girl next door; the magical realism element kicks in surprisingly late (that of literally distilling parental ambitions for their children), but is worked in really well. Then the narration hops forward to present day, where Neal gets to follow up with a bunch of the kids and see where they ended up; after a bit of meandering, the book abruptly veers into a fast-moving heist story. I found the second half to be weaker and less focused than the first half, but still an enjoyable read; mostly I really liked how the portrait of the contemporary immigrant’s focus on wealth via American Dream was set against the much more literal quest embodied in the historical California gold rush.

The Oracle of Night, by Sidarta Ribeiro

The first half of this book was pretty awful, full of vague generalizations, tales of historical dreams that turned out to have been prophetic, and long paragraphs about the origins of life and consciousness that felt more like a high school research project than a published book. Towards the end it got much more interesting, turning abruptly to synaptic pathways, brain activity during sleep, and actual neuroscience, and that’s when I really got into it. Pity about the rest of the book.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson posits that the race-based unspoken social rules in America are analogous to a caste system like the one in India, and also pitilessly demonstrates how Nazi Germany formed their own systems of categorizing people based on what they learned of the US. There are oh so many details in this book (and it’s another one which I intend to buy later, so I can mark it up and drink it in properly) but my best takeaway from this book is that if you look at racism in the US from the viewpoint of a caste system, then it makes total sense that people doing racist things don’t see themselves as racist; the word “racist” implies a person who is acting outside the bounds of civil behavior, whereas since the entire foundation of American civil society is bounded and defined by racism, those steeped in that culture will justify any actions taken in upholding that system. With patient, inexorable detail, Wilkerson uncovers the pillars supporting the caste system, and provides many examples of how it hurts all Americans, not just the ones at the bottom.

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, by Aliette de Bodard

A novella about a city that disappeared, and the rippling effects on the society and nobility of the warlike Vietnamese space empire from which it escaped. The tight focus on the characters is the strength of the story; the very human conflicts – betrayal, filial duty, thwarted ambition – keep the story moving, while political and military space action adds plenty of tension.

Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

OK, if I have a genre type, then a book about a Jamaican-British 25-year-old trying to find love and confidence in London is… not generally that type. But Queenie’s experience of being too exotic for London, and too modern for her first-generation Jamaican grandparents, had a very familiar immigrant culture clash feeling for me. The author was unsparing in showing how people throughout various levels of society worked to hypersexualize and objectify Queenie, and how hard it was for her to separate her expectations for herself from those extremely negative expectations and experiences. Two things kept the book from being completely disturbing and grim: Queenie’s internal narrative voice, which remained strong throughout; and Queenie’s friends, who were a constant delight; their group chat interludes were some of my favorite parts of the book. There is some super strong social commentary in the background of this book too; the news from America includes George Floyd and BLM, and the various reactions of the characters say so much.

Necessity, by Jo Walton

I closed this book and was just smiling at the end, it made me so happy. With the conclusion of the trilogy Jo Walton goes full sci-fi; with the previous two, the sole fantastical elements were the embodied and empowered Greek gods, but with this one, you get aliens, first-contact scenarios, and time travel. Yet the overall theme remains focused on the pursuit of excellence as a worthy life goal, and that’s reflected in the characters, even as they deal with their own issues and emotions. It makes these books uniquely pleasurable to read, because the characters are rarely out for themselves; they are constantly examining their actions and really trying their best. I liked the concept of Necessity, which in this book took the place of that mysterious force that forces logic on time travel: it is necessary that nothing be affected in a past time, that the future time might take place as it’s meant to be; the characters are well aware of Necessity, and (these are philosophers after all) discuss it at length.

The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

How refreshing, I thought, a nice straightforward space trooper story… and then it turned out that whenever the troops went into battle they basically got Star Trek transported, broken apart into light and reformed, and every time the narrator broke into light, there was a chance that the reformation would take place in the past, or the future. Because the narrator feels constantly off-balance and uprooted, so does the reader, but for good reason; the journeys back and forth through time eventually uncover the roots of the futuristic war and lead towards a final solution. A really intense read that seems to ramble at first, before diving suddenly towards a conclusion.