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The Great Gatsby entered public domain this year, and of course there are immediately people doing things with it, because it is enormously famous. The Chosen and the Beautiful is a retelling of the novel from the character Jordan Baker's perspective, with bonus magic, and also Jordan is bisexual and Vietnamese.

And somehow this book is exactly that. I don't know what I was expecting but.... it fits so tidily into exactly what the premise would imply, and I think I thought that Vo would go somewhere interestingly unexpected with it?

But it is in fact a straightforward retelling of the events of the original, following remarkably close, including all of the expected scenes. Oh, it's definitely a more enjoyable book to me than the original, extremely queer and much more interested in complexities of identity and where people come from. But it is still at its heart a retelling of The Great Gatsby, updated.

The addition of magic and demons doesn't do much for me either tbh. It seems to be added solely to highlight the themes that were/are already present in the story -- and it doesn't strike me that it actually adds much of anything? Those themes were already clearly legible without it!

Idk, I guess my overall issue with the book is that it seems to have been written from a place of love for the original canon. Yes it's criticising the original in some ways, but it comes across to me like criticising a thing you love. And I emphatically do not love The Great Gatsby!

Is this book good at doing the thing it's doing? Absolutely! But it's not quite the thing I hoped it would be doing.
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Recently I attempted to read Middlemarch, one of those 19th century novels that I always kind of figured that one day I would read and enjoy, as it seems the kind of 19th century novel that's entirely up my alley.

However! Turns out I gave up on it by 20% of the way in. Not because it's a bad book, but because....I just wasn't enjoying myself.

Here's the thing. The author, George Eliot, is evidently a clear-minded person with great powers to observe and depict the fullness of the complexities and foibles of humans. In the parts of the books I read, there were conversations that struck me as being impressively reflective of reality. But Eliot doesn't seem to like people. I don't need characters in books to all be paragons or something, but if the author can't give me reason to want to care about people in all their flaws, then what's the point in hanging out with her characters for 800 pages?

I think Middlemarch is very probably a brilliant book, and also, no thank you, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of it.
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As you may know if you read my book posts regularly, I am a wuss. And this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. And I am a wuss!! It's very tense and emotionally intense in places. It's really good though so I am glad I read it.

Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.

Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.

So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.

This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!

My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.
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Historical fantasy set in late 19th century New York, featuring a Golem woman and a Jinni man, and their experiences as immigrants and trying to find their place and who they are and what they want from life.

There were aspects of this book that I really enjoyed, and I loved reading all the Golem's sections, but overall I was frustrated with the kind of book it was, I guess? My biggest frustration is that I didn't particularly care about the Jinni, and he's one of the two main characters of the book! My other big frustration was with the plot choices made. The through-line of the semi-immortal evil wizard as the antagonist mastermind was just...idk, it didn't feel right for this book, to me. It didn't add anything to the themes the author was trying to develop, and in fact felt like a redirect of the reader's attention away from the more important and interesting aspects of the story

So although I appreciate the things the author was doing in this book (eg the depictions of community, identity, belonging, and making choices), the execution didn't work for me overall.
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A collection of letters from Rabindranath Tagore at the end of the 19th century, consisting largely of descriptions of scenery, weather, people-watching, and philosophical musings. The letters are sometimes beautifully evocative and thoughtful, sometimes self-consciously pretentious in that arrogant-young-man way. Overall the style of writing is...very much the kind of thing I expect of a person who has received major acclaim for Literature, which is not so much my kind of thing. I don't think I would have made it through this book without the Librivox reader, who did a good job of putting animation and feeling into what she was reading. (note though that there's a fair number of editing errors in the audio for this book, more than I have generally found in Librivox)

Tagore almost never mentions anything personal in the letter excerpts he includes in this book. But occasionally he mentions his travels by houseboat, practically the only personal detail that makes it in, and he makes that sound very pleasant indeed. Of course, he's a well-off enough person to be able to just wander extensively by houseboat to wherever he wants, taken care of by servants all the way.

It's pretty clear from Tagore's attitudes throughout the book that he comes from a well-to-do, high-class family and he comes across in places as rather out of touch as a result. The letter where he talks about the servant who comes to work late one day because his daughter died, and then just sets to work as usual, and Tagore takes this as inspiration to reflect on how work can be a consolation in the hard things in life......oof. You don't know your servant's interiority, sir!

There's a part in the letters where he reflects at some length on The Thousand and One Nights, and I found it fascinating to read an orientalist perspective from a non-european. The way he talks about that book!!

He's also sexist, but that one didn't come as a surprise to me.

cut for discussion of pedophilia )

The thing is, I went into this book predisposed to like it. On a trip I took to India several years ago, I visited the Tagore family estate near Kolkata, where Rabindranath Tagore died, and which is now a museum dedicated to him. And I have very fond memories of that visit. It was a pleasant day, and we got there just after a major rainstorm, so the covered outdoor walkways on the second floor were wet. The sensation of the warm, wet, smooth painted walkways under my bare feet is a sense-memory that still brings me happiness. And it was so nice to just wander that huge estate quietly on my own -- it felt so peaceful, after spending time in Kolkata, which had been overwhelming to me and my sensory processing disorder.

So I wanted to like Tagore, because of those pleasant associations! But I do not like the version of him who exists in his letters, at the very least, and I am appalled by his personal morals around sex. Perhaps there is value in his poetry or his short stories or other works that I can't see in these letters. But I'm not feeling inspired in the slightest to seek out any more of his works, despite how important and influential a writer he was.
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Time to return to another childhood read! This book came out when I was approximately middle-school-aged, and was much talked about at that time. It was the sort of book that was aimed at children but which adults really approved of you reading, but also it was a fairy tale retelling so I actually read it. It won the Silver Birch Award, and I was encouraged to read a lot of Silver Birch and Red Maple nominees in school. (I didn't actually read many of them though, I mostly was unimpressed with the selection.)

After Hamelin is a retelling of the story of the Pied Piper, from the perspective of the one child who was left behind, and how she goes on a quest to save all the other children of Hamelin. And rereading it as an adult, with a finer tuned understanding of genre conventions, this book is 100% in the Literary Fiction genre.

I'm conflicted, a bit, in how I feel about it. I love the elderly Penelope's perspective (elderly Penelope's a delight!) and I love all the skipping rhymes. This might be one of the few books aimed at children that includes rhymes where the rhymes add to the experience of reading rather than detracting. And I really like that two of the big things that save the day are harp-making and jumping rope, neither of which are traditionally heroic skills.

But the ~literature~ aspects of the book are not really my thing, and I don't find the ending satisfying -- which, honestly, it's a very ~literature~ ending so maybe that's not surprising. And all the dreamworld stuff doesn't really do it for me, which is a problem in a book that is largely set in the dreamworld. None of her companions while she's there feel particularly real to me. Which perhaps makes sense for a dreamworld! But it means that for the majority of the book it's only Penelope carrying the whole thing for me, and young Penelope doesn't have the same force of personality as old Penelope.

Also, from a disability-representation perspective: I'm glad that Penelope doesn't get cured of her deafness and stays deaf her entire teenaged and adult life. BUT. She spends the whole time she's in the dreamworld (i.e. much of the length of the book) not being deaf, which I feel is a cop-out in terms of actively portraying a disabled character.....

So I don't know. I have a lot of nostalgic fondness for this book, and there's some stuff it does that I really do like, but I'm not sure how the balance comes out in the end between the stuff I like and the stuff I don't!

On another note, I googled the author when I was partway into this reread, and found myself fascinated. All I knew about him from when I read this book as a kid was that he was a famous radio person. Well, he is that, and also he once was a children's librarian, and also he's written a bunch of other books which all seem to be wildly different from each other, and also he is apparently currently working on a musical called "do you want what I have got? a Craigslist Cantata". A man of many interests!
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I am beginning to emerge from the post-surgery haze of exhaustion enough to...okay, not to actually read any entire novels (I am instead mainlining Great British Bake Off which doesn't require too much of my engagement), but to POST about books I read before? I think I can do that.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo is a fascinating book which I mostly really liked! Set in 1890's colonial Malaysia amongst the Chinese population there, Li Lan is a young woman who has led a very circumscribed life, until it is proposed that she become a "ghost bride", the wife of a dead man.

It was a little slow at the start to capture my attention, and I think the ending isn't quite its best self in terms of accomplishing what it's trying to do, but the whole middle part of the book, where Li Lan is discovering what it's like to be a spirit, is great.

But here's what I don't like about the ending.

yes okay discussion of the ending is probably spoilers )

On the other hand there's lots of other great stuff in this book! And I could see what the ending was going for and appreciate the intent, I just wish it had stuck the landing a bit better.
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This is a book which is in large part about the development of a romantic relationship, with the HEA and all, and yet it is somehow very clear to me that it is not a part of the Romance Genre, it's the Literary Fiction Genre. I don't know what it is about the book that is shouting this at me so clearly but there we are.

Anyway. I enjoyed the book? And I thought it was good. But I didn't particularly love it, idk.

Evvie is trying to figure out her life after her husband died on the day she was planning to leave him. Dean is a baseball player who's lost his ability to pitch (he's got the yips). He rents an apartment from her that's attached to her house, and they try not to talk about the things that are weighing heavily upon them but inevitably talk about these things nonetheless.

I liked the effort to show the importance of other relationships in Evvie's life, like how great her dad is, and her best-friendship with Andy, and her development of a friendship with Monica. But I did not like how Heterosexual this book was about friendships - after she and Andy both develop new romantic relationships, the book presents it as obvious and inevitable that their close friendship will pull back from what it was before. Which like. :( I was invested in their friendship! I was worried throughout most of the book that this was what would happen! I'm really annoyed that I was right!

The romantic relationship was....fine. I have a bit of trouble believing in it as a long-term thing, because I don't feel like the reader really gets to see why Evvie and Dean are into each other as individual people, instead of their relationship just being a side-effect of the inevitable intimacy of living together at a time when they're both emotionally vulnerable. But they seem happy with each other so that's very nice for them.

One final thing--content note for depictions of an abusive relationship. spoilers )
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A magic realism novel about American slavery written using the conceit that the Underground Railroad was a literal actual railroad underground. It's an interesting and compelling book in many ways but honestly....I am kind of confused by the point of the conceit in the first place. Possibly (probably) I am just not Literary enough for this book and am failing to recognize important thematic details that the corporealized railroad draws out but that part of the book doesn't work for me personally.

And between that and another part of the book that seems out of its historical context from my knowledge (one small spoiler) ) it makes me doubt the historical veracity of everything I'm reading. Yes, it's fiction, but what parts of its historical setting are based on fact and what aren't? How much is part of the alternate-world fantasy? I have no good way of judging. And so I could never get a handle on how to interpret the setting.

Which is a shame because there's a lot to love about the book. It's a vivid and gripping story about a young woman's experiences with slavery and with the many faces of racism and prejudice as she attempts to escape. I cared a lot about Cora and about many of the characters she meets along the way. It's a powerful book, and an important one. I'm just....very slightly off mark for being the right audience for it because of the magic realism. I'M SORRY.
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This book is definitely in the Literature genre, despite having strong elements of fantasy. But as Literature goes it's really quite good.

It's a retelling of the Rapunzel story, from the perspective of a) the author of the story, one of the French salon fairy-tale writer women of the 17th century, b) the Rapunzel character, and c) the witch character.

Kate Forsyth is clearly interested in grounding the story firmly in a historical setting, though one where magic is real. This is great. I love how many historical details Forsyth weaves into the story to bring the time period alive, and how the magic feels a natural part of that world because the people of the time at least somewhat believed in this kind of magic.

I also loved that this was a novel where all of the main characters are women.

Read more... )
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Back when this book was new I kept on seeing hype for it everywhere but didn't ever quite feel like it sounded enough up my alley to be bothered reading it. But then I read a short story by the author which I really enjoyed, and decided maybe I should get around to All the Birds in the Sky after all. It took me a while, but finally I did!

And this is definitely a good book, but like.... I don't know what to do with it. I'm not convinced I like it, but it is certainly very interesting. It's not quite like any other book I've ever read. And I don't know what to say about it! But I'm glad I read it.

Read more... )
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Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )
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The first time I read this book was in high school english class. I remember clearly how delighted I was to read this book at the time. High school english is heavy on the Serious, Depressing & Literary, but this book had whimsy. It was still about serious topics (particularly focusing on censorship and free speech) but it managed to be that while also being a charming and fun read! REVOLUTIONARY. It felt all the more special because it wasn't supposed to be on the syllabus but my teacher managed to talk the english department into letting him teach this book instead of the Serious, Depressing & Literary book we were supposed to be reading.

Rereading it now, I don't love it as much as I did in high school, I think because I'm not comparing it to all the books one reads in high school english classes, and ultimately although this book is much closer than those to the kind of book I most like to read it's still not quite my jam. But it's still definitely a good book.
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This is a novelized account of Mary Anning's life! Super exciting, yes? For those who are not massive dinosaur nerds, Mary Anning was a working-class woman in the early 19th century who was a fossil hunter and made some pretty significant finds (including ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils) and had a thorough understanding of what she found, which were really important in the development of scientific thought on the history of life on earth. She was very knowledgeable and capable, but of course never seen in the same light as the educated high-class men who talked with her, studied her fossils, and published papers on them.

This book was a very enjoyable read. It's from the perspective of two women, in alternating chapters - Mary Anning, and her friend Elizabeth Philpot who was also a fossil collector.

I liked the generally female focus of the book, and how the important relationship was always the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth as opposed to with any of the men who come in and out of their lives. And I like how it legitimizes these women's interest in and role in the scientific discourse of the time.

But I also felt like it did a bit of a disservice both to the friendship and to Mary's character.

Read more... )
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Wooo it's the latest Susan Palwick! Last time I reviewed a Susan Palwick novel I accidentally talked for like 1500 words whiiiich is possibly overkill? I don't have 1500 words in me this time, in part because this one is a less ambitious novel than the last. But this one was overall more successful than Shelter, I think.

It's...a literary fiction novel, I suppose you could say. It takes place entirely in our current real world and is about the reactions of various people to a terrible personal tragedy (tw for rape and murder and suicide in the book) that occurs. Except that I genuinely like the characters, and they feel like real people, and I care about them. And yes I cried.

It's a very Susan Palwick book, being about grief and loss and hard things and about how family (by blood or by choice) is important. And all that is great!

But what's really special about it is the other part - the stuff about the Comrade Cosmos comic book series and the Comrade Cosmos fandom. A number of the main characters are into CCverse, and the novel spends a fair amount of time talking about CCverse and oh dear god I love everything about this. It reads like Palwick GENUINELY GETS IT about fandom and it makes me SO HAPPY. And the book acknowledges that slash exists without getting weird or judgy about it! (and is also one hundred percent correct about what slash fans would ship because wow yes CC/EE practically writes itself)

(Also I have to say that I dearly want there to be fanart of the Emperor of Entropy at a birthday party. Lots of it. All the fanart. Also all the other CCverse fanworks.) (HELL YEAH I am requesting CCverse for yuletide this year!) (yes I already checked tumblr and AO3 and there's absolutely nothing about Comrade Cosmos and I am sad)

But the way that a fandom is a) fun for the people involved and b) also can be helpful and meaningful to people going through hard times is just... yeah.

And I love CCverse and its fandom as described in the book. I got genuinely squeeful reading each section about CCverse. And I love that the CCverse canon is explicitly imperfect - so Palwick didn't intend CCverse to be a shining paragon of a canon that does everything right. Which makes me feel better about things like the way that CC's backstory involves a fridged woman whose continued disabled existence is only to cause CC angst instead of her getting to be a person in her own right. And the only major female characters are the love interest(s) and the fridged/tragically-disabled family member. It's like...yeah. That's too often what comic books DO, unfortunately. CCverse is interesting and groundbreaking in other ways, but it also retreads some very familiar ground.

At any rate, I don't have any grand sweeping statements to end my thoughts with. But I really liked this book and I'm glad I read it. AWW YEAH SUSAN PALWICK.
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Okay wow I'm not sure exactly where to start in discussing this book? It's very good, and pretty weird (although actually not as weird as I thought it was going to be), and also very famous. I remember it from high school days when I helped reorganize the collection of books the English department owned; I remember thinking at the time that it looked like it might actually be worth reading, unlike a lot of the books a high school English department has.

Cue the passing of many years in which I did not read it.

Then a recent episode of Crash Course Literature was about Slaughterhouse-Five, and - okay, here's the thing. Generally speaking when I watch Crash Course Literature episodes about books I've read, I disagree with the majority of the stuff John Green says. He's just.... so literarily pretentious? And the things he thinks are important to talk about are often very different than the things I think are important to talk about. So it's always odd watching Literature episodes about books I HAVEN'T read, because everything Green says sounds very plausible and he's very passionate about what he says, but when I remember what I usually think about his opinions of books I have to be suspicious. Regardless, when I watched the episode about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was really intrigued by the book, so I decided to put it on my to-read list. And when I was wandering a used bookstore not long after and saw a super-cheap copy, I picked it up.

And then last week a friend was over for dinner and saw my copy of Slaughterhouse-Five sitting out and said some vastly complimentary things about it so I decided to bump it up on my priority list.

And now I've read it and I don't know what to say about it. In which I say things about it. )
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So I just reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since my grade 11 English class, lo these many years ago. I utterly hated it at that time.

My opinion now: well, I can see its virtues. On a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence level the writing is rather good. And the whole thing is very evocative of time and place and mood. But wow, I still hate every single character in this book! And am completely unsympathetic with their problems! And just wish they would all shut up and go away!

I guess my problem here is that I am really really really not into that particular genre of "literary fiction" that is all about horrible people being miserable. It is a celebrated genre and many people are into it and there are lots and lots of books in it published every year but I am NOT THERE. (see also: why I hated Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" so much, because it was written in the patterns of that genre despite being also a fantasy novel. NO GET YOUR LITERARY MISERY OUT OF MY SFF PLSKTHX)

So I think the highest praise I can give The Great Gatsby is that it is a really excellent example of horrible-people-being-miserable literary fiction? Because it is! BUT I STILL HATE IT.
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I picked this book up because I heard it belongs to the regrettably-rare BOOKS WRITTEN IN THE PAST ABOUT QUEER PEOPLE WHO GET HAPPY ENDINGS!!!!! category. Which is a pretty excellent category which I am ALWAYS happy to learn of further books to add to!

My (spoilery) thoughts about this book in particular. )

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