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What I'm reading now:
A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski: Bronski interweaves specific LGBT-related history information with broader questions of sexuality, gender policing, and cultural change, such as the growth of cities, immigration, and ethnic identity. Still working on this, in part because I don't like traveling with library books.
Bloodchildren. This is my kindle book, an anthology of stories by the writers of color who received Octavia Butler scholarships to Clarion, plus one story by Butler and a couple of reminiscences about her. It's one story per writer, so a very mixed bag of style and theme, and some of them worked better (for me) than others.
What I've read recently:
Quite a bit, mostly borrowed from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel and papersky while visiting Montreal.
A Natural History of Dragons: a memoir by Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan: I don't think it's at all Brennan's fault, or that of the people who recommended it, that I was hoping for more dragons and more natural history, along with the narrator's coming-of-age story, as a scientifically curious adolescent girl in a world that both knows little of dragons and barely has room to imagine that a teenage girl might be interested in them.
We do get hints of what dragons are like/how they behave, and the "Natural History of Dragons" is a book-within-the-book that Isabella (the future Lady Trent) reads and values, incomplete though it is in a world where dragons are known to exist, but little more is known by scholars, and the people who live near dragons are mostly concerned with avoiding dragons and protecting their livestock. The world-building is well done. I just wanted more dragons, asmrissa might put it.
Two Anthony Price thrillers, The Labyrinth Makers and The Alamut List. Good, very definitely of their time—a different shape of "the past is a foreign country" than the Amanda Cross I wrote about last Wednesday, because "the Brezhnev era" is broader and more distant than "New York City when I was a child" (though not quite as distant in time as Cross's In the Last Analysis.
When the King Comes Home by Caroline Stevermer, partly because I wanted something a bit more recent after two in a row giving me that past-as-foreign-country reaction. This is secondary-world fantasy, and I suspect might disappoint someone looking for a High Fantasy worldview. It's more coming-of-age narrative, but not of the king or anyone like him: it's the memoir of an artist, about events during her apprenticeship, after old sayings/prophecies about when the king, always called Good King Julian, returns. Only the man who turns up looking exactly like that king asks for a priest, because he knows he needs an exorcism; he knows he isn't really Julian. But he's still a problem, especially in uncertain times. The apprentice artist gets tangled in events, plausibly so, but seems to have no notion of trying to disentangle herself. Definitely good, with a satisfying ending; the tone is a bit more serious than in Sorcery and Cecilia.
I also reread a couple of rysmiel's Rex Stout books, Before Midnight and Murder by the Book, suitably light for annoyingly hot, sticky summer days. Again, the past is a foreign country, but these are enough further into the past that I didn't have that "wait, I lived there once" reaction that I did to the Amanda Cross and Anthony Price books. (Archie Goodwin's and Nero Wolfe's differing attitudes toward women can, each, be annoying in different ways, and I can't tell whether or to what extent Stout realized Archie is being as unreasonable as Wolfe (since these are all told in Archie's voice, and "he won't shake hands with a woman" is presented as unreasonable on the same level as "he almost never leaves the house and is terrified of all forms of transport."
What I'm likely to read next:
The Cambrian Explosion, by Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine. I had to give it back to the library without having time to read more than a few pages, because someone else had it on hold, but another copy is awaiting me at the Bellevue Library.
A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski: Bronski interweaves specific LGBT-related history information with broader questions of sexuality, gender policing, and cultural change, such as the growth of cities, immigration, and ethnic identity. Still working on this, in part because I don't like traveling with library books.
Bloodchildren. This is my kindle book, an anthology of stories by the writers of color who received Octavia Butler scholarships to Clarion, plus one story by Butler and a couple of reminiscences about her. It's one story per writer, so a very mixed bag of style and theme, and some of them worked better (for me) than others.
What I've read recently:
Quite a bit, mostly borrowed from
rysmiel and papersky while visiting Montreal.A Natural History of Dragons: a memoir by Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan: I don't think it's at all Brennan's fault, or that of the people who recommended it, that I was hoping for more dragons and more natural history, along with the narrator's coming-of-age story, as a scientifically curious adolescent girl in a world that both knows little of dragons and barely has room to imagine that a teenage girl might be interested in them.
We do get hints of what dragons are like/how they behave, and the "Natural History of Dragons" is a book-within-the-book that Isabella (the future Lady Trent) reads and values, incomplete though it is in a world where dragons are known to exist, but little more is known by scholars, and the people who live near dragons are mostly concerned with avoiding dragons and protecting their livestock. The world-building is well done. I just wanted more dragons, as
mrissa might put it.Two Anthony Price thrillers, The Labyrinth Makers and The Alamut List. Good, very definitely of their time—a different shape of "the past is a foreign country" than the Amanda Cross I wrote about last Wednesday, because "the Brezhnev era" is broader and more distant than "New York City when I was a child" (though not quite as distant in time as Cross's In the Last Analysis.
When the King Comes Home by Caroline Stevermer, partly because I wanted something a bit more recent after two in a row giving me that past-as-foreign-country reaction. This is secondary-world fantasy, and I suspect might disappoint someone looking for a High Fantasy worldview. It's more coming-of-age narrative, but not of the king or anyone like him: it's the memoir of an artist, about events during her apprenticeship, after old sayings/prophecies about when the king, always called Good King Julian, returns. Only the man who turns up looking exactly like that king asks for a priest, because he knows he needs an exorcism; he knows he isn't really Julian. But he's still a problem, especially in uncertain times. The apprentice artist gets tangled in events, plausibly so, but seems to have no notion of trying to disentangle herself. Definitely good, with a satisfying ending; the tone is a bit more serious than in Sorcery and Cecilia.
I also reread a couple of rysmiel's Rex Stout books, Before Midnight and Murder by the Book, suitably light for annoyingly hot, sticky summer days. Again, the past is a foreign country, but these are enough further into the past that I didn't have that "wait, I lived there once" reaction that I did to the Amanda Cross and Anthony Price books. (Archie Goodwin's and Nero Wolfe's differing attitudes toward women can, each, be annoying in different ways, and I can't tell whether or to what extent Stout realized Archie is being as unreasonable as Wolfe (since these are all told in Archie's voice, and "he won't shake hands with a woman" is presented as unreasonable on the same level as "he almost never leaves the house and is terrified of all forms of transport."
What I'm likely to read next:
The Cambrian Explosion, by Douglas H. Erwin and James W. Valentine. I had to give it back to the library without having time to read more than a few pages, because someone else had it on hold, but another copy is awaiting me at the Bellevue Library.