Zach
Whoever wrote this is reeeaaallll uncomfy with the fact that Louisa May Alcott liked women.
It had some stand-out moments, but they were fleeting, and the obsession with dude's dicks (and concomitant insulting of all the women around Alcott) meant that multiple opportunities for more interesting raunch were passed up.
MAKE IT GAYER NEXT TIME
I put five hours of my life into this book. I can probably rant to you about its flaws for at least that long. Much like Left Behind, this book is great when you enjoy shoddy theology and terrible, terrible plots. It really wants to be The Exorcist Meets Constantine– innocent young woman is possessed, virtuous priests try to save her, meanwhile Lucifer's second-in-command wants to be ~forgiven~ and is now wandering the human world. You know it's written by a Catholic because only Catholic exorcism will save her and the virtuous Protestant priest dies halfway through the book and goes to hell, and everyone is guilty ALL THE TIME. Also the author has daddy issues you can see from orbit, and all women are either victims or whores– usually literally (and they all go to hell). The theology of the book is by turns flagellatingly masochistic and blindly sadistic about the fact that so many people are going to BURN IN HEELLLLLLLL. That said, I deeply enjoyed it, but I love terrible literature.
Strongly mediocre. If you like weird body horror, this is decent, but it's definitely a slow-paced book.
2.5
More of a polemic than a chronicling of the post-hip hop moment.
I'm definitely reading it outside its intended milieu— a non-black adult reading it a decade after publication. So I am aware that some of the issues that twigged me may not bother other readers.
Some chapters were solid ethnographic and historic discussions, and sections of exhortation were really strong. But the pacing was thrown off by the faux-interviews and the author's personal meanderings.
It was striking to me that even while arguing for a post-colonial Afrocentric eduction, Asante rarely, if at all, mentioned pre-colonial black figures in his history lessons. Marcus Garvey was mentioned more than once, but not Mansa Musa or even Shaka Zulu.
An entire star off for casual antisemitism— why did there need to be a digression about wanting Mos Def's possibly-antisemitic song to be published? it was very visible that he named an antagonistic music producer as Jewish, but Elie Wiesel and Emma Goldman were “Romanian” and “Lithuanian”.
It's a book written by a white American man in 1903 for the white Americans back home so that they could get a taste of ~exotic~ India. I probably shouldn't have to point out that it was colonialist, patronizing, and judgmental about the stupidest things. I was expecting that going in. I read it and read the entire way through because I wanted to get a good feeling for the relationships and politics of the time, and there were certain historical bits of information that I wasn't aware of thrown in. But the guy had a boner for numbers and the lists of census numbers got really tiresome.
Still, it's a historical perspective of British India that might be useful as long as you're taking it with a HUGE grain of salt.
I picked it up at the library while pulling down a bunch of other, more general, books on the subcontinent. For some reason religious fundamentalists fascinate me, and I will read books on them, not matter what flavor of fundamental they are. This was an interesting read, since it seems like a lot of history books gloss over the impact of religion in the area aside from Pakistan = Muslim, India = Hindu and/or Secular-ish. It seemed at times like a bit too much of a travelogue and Fernandes gets up her own ass occasionally with the flowery descrptions of things, but the basic information about the way the British partition plan fucked up Indian conceptions of religion and self, and therefore the subcontinent's history from the 1950s on is solid. There's some really interesting stuff about Catholics and Baptists mixed in with the meatier information about the political and social structures and interactions between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
If you like the White Savior narrative where a white person is assigned an unruly class of underprivileged non-white kids and through the magic power of their whiteness manages to teach the kids how to behave, you might like this book.
I didn't.
Not really the best collection I've seen from Tanith Lee. Some of the stories were fairly mediocre and knowing Lee's penchant for certain plot twists, I knew the ending of some before I got there.
At her best, the stories in this volume are haunting and powerful, but at their worst they are meandering and try too hard to be evocative, so they just end up being obvious and kind of frustrating (I'm looking at you “Anna Medea” and “Cain”).
You have no idea how much I wanted to like this book. A fascinating premise and an interesting mystery with a host of colorful suspects? Sign me up. But the pacing was off, that characters were either cardboard cut outs, unlikeable, or both and the mystery itself fell flat. I nearly gave up multiple times (especially since the narrative never took issue with the homophobia and sexism— you can write your main character being a period-appropriate bigot without the narrative taking it at face value).
It gets two stars because the conclusion of the story was satisfactory, but I can't bring myself to give it any more than that.
An incisive, entertainingly written book on history of the concept of “heterosexuality”, which, as it turns out, was a term invented in the late 1800s and only picked up for reals in the early part of the 20th century. The author tends to go on tangents a bit and the introduction is a little self-absorbed, but it provides a nice overview of how male-female couplings evolved as they went from being “just the relationships everyone has” to “heterosexuality”. A fairly short book, as it says, it clocks in at slightly over 200 pages, a good third of that is endnotes and bibliography. It's well-researched, and thoughtful– she unpacks the common sense notions that “everyone knows” about the way orientation is talked and thought about, firmly grounding everything she in history and science.
This book was a solid three stars for me most of the way through.
The essays ranged a bit in quality, and Kumar absolutely shined when he turned his intellect outward. His discussion with Arudhati Roy, the boxer on the flight, and the essays on Kashmir were strong and hit hard. His contemplations on writing tended to be more hit and miss, as I find most writers writing about writing tend to be. The weakest essay in the book was his piece on ten rules of being a writer– it felt very self-satisfied, and that obsession with self pops up in a number of the essays in ways that got on my nerves.
And then I hit the last essay and legitimately started sniffling in public. The books started on a strong note and left me with a lasting emotional impression.
Beveridge has written a fairly engaging book on the motifs of Norse and Celtic folktales, mythological cycles and possible pagan religious concepts. She has a tendency to get a little purple prose-y talking about her preferred folktales (it's always “starkly haunting” or some such) and sometimes it can get frustrating when she discusses two nearly identical stories several chapters apart, but the research is solid, and the history is fascinating. She says that she chose Norse and Celtic stories mainly for practical reasons– both communities actually managed to save a decent portion of their folk stories– and I believe it, since despite the similarities, she never seems to really want to discuss the whys and hows of those similarities. The book is not hyper-academic, but it's definitely thoughtful and I learned plenty about the history of salvaging pagan stories in the context of fairy tales.
All the characters were cardboard cutouts, the pacing and plot was shot to hell, descriptions of characters bordered on racist caricature at times, and the women were all rape-traumatized or whoreswhoreswhores.
DNF
Holy shit, I have no idea why so many people like this book. I gave up a quarter of the way through because it was creepy and fetishizing.
Like, great all the characters are mixed race, but after the fiftieth repetition of the super fetishizing reification of race (the Spanish king had exotic eyes because his grandmother was Chinese! This character has “deep Indian skin”! This other one was a Chinese but had just enough African blood that her hair was curly) I wanted to scream.
But the fucking last straw was the bullshit with Dominic and how he's so clearly female bodied but he's such a ~manly man~ and that means being creepy and touching other people without consent! And then the narrator gets all “he's so manly don't you want to know if he's wearing a strap-on, isn't this so taboo and exciting?!” No, the character is rapey and you're a fetishizing asshole.
Grosssssssss
Dellamonica is one of those mid-list authors that I am bound and determined to get people to read. She's a queer author, who writes fascinating stories featuring great world-building and an assortment of queer people and people of color. While Child of a Hidden Sea is not quite as mind-bending as her previously duology (Indigo Springs and Blue Magic), the plot is a serviceable “modern person thrust into a fantasy world”. The fantasy world is an archipelago-based Mediterranean ocean-going set, with pirates, religious fanatics, hedonists, matriarchal societies, and a naval-based United Nations. The main character? Sophie Hansa, an adopted child looking for her parents who, upon intervening in an attack on her (possible) biological aunt ends up crash-landing on one of the smaller islands. Where, for me, the story really shines is the interactions between Sophie, and her siblings– Bramwell, her adopted brother, and Verena, her just-met biological sister. The feelings of discovery and stress rang really true. Dellamonica also put a lot of energy into developing an intricate and believable ecology and mysterious origin for her fantasy world, allowing a focus to drift from the political drama at times because Sophie is an oceanographer/videographer, which, for me, rounded out not only Sophie's character by the world in a way that's almost never explored.
“If you ask, ‘Why yet another Ramayana?'
I'd say that in this world, for all times
everyone eats the same food every day,
but the taste of it is one's own.” (Vishwanatha Satyanarayana)
I mean, ACAB
But at least Peter is trying, I guess. But man I wish he'd actually gotten kicked out so I could stop thinking “yeah but this is racist system, Peter”
So. The overarching metaplot is still fascinating to me— I have a bunch of theories about Maeve and where she is. Hooks from earlier books keep paying off.
That said, every bit of book focused on Gillian and Toby's relationship makes me mad enough to stop reading. Toby's self-centered desperation to reconnect with her estranged biological daughter reminds me of all of my friends who have had to forcefully cut off ties with a parent, or who have had parents show up years late. The narrative seems to support this idea that because they're a biological relation, Gillian is doing something wrong by putting boundaries in place. She asks for Toby not to be referred to as her “mother” and is treated as though she said she hated Toby's guts. She says that she's done with being used as a pawn and wants Toby to leave her alone— and the narrative sees nothing wrong with Toby immediately ignoring the boundary and sending a boy who may as well be Toby's adopted son to talk to her. It's nearing the edge of what I'd call “harassment” if not “abuse”.
The murder mystery wasn't up to par either. The whole Isla Chase murder and reveal are treated as barely a c-plot, and the reasons as well as method aren't treated with much respect. It felt more like a mystery being thrown in because the Toby books are supposed to be about mysteries, but it doesn't mesh with the rest of the plot. (And the reveal focused so fucking hard on Toby's feeeeeeeeeeeeelings about Gillian that she barely notices a man grieving so hard he was in a murderous berserker rage. The fuck.)
Call it 3.5 stars
I had Philosophical Differences with Toby and with the narrative— let's just say, I really hope Seanan is intentionally sidelining the humans because Miranda appears to be my bias and I feel like the POVs are giving her short shrift. Also sometimes the narrative's take on mommy issues made me break out in hives a bit.
But it's a compelling story and I read it in about 24 hours, so I can't complain about the plot or the pacing. As always, Seanan McGuire is a master at writing a tight story that keeps you turning pages, whatever my personal nitpicks are about the use of themes.
And, just because it annoyed the shit out of me, can I just note that San Francisco hasn't used metal garbage cans in decades?
Half-Off Ragnarok is the third in Seanan's newer InCryptid series. The main characters of InCryptid are the Price family (Verity Price in the first two, Alexander Price in Half-Off Ragnarok), a family of cryptozoologists who actually know what they're doing. In this case “cryptozoologist” actually means “people what study and work with species that humankind likes to pretend don't exist”. Alexander is a reptile specialist, which means HOR mostly deals with weird reptile monsters, like gorgons, basilisks and wadjets (which are sort of like cobras, only not). While doing boring zoology things, someone turns up murdered and, as happens in these sorts of books, it ties right into Alexander's work specialty. It was a cheesy, fun romp although it's definitely not one of the more inspired plots I've seen from this writer. If you like Harry Dresden, Seanan's stuff might be to your taste– she has a very similar self-deprecating humor, although the InCryptid series tends to be a little more cheerful and open about the crazy shit going on.
Better than the last book, though there were some annoying dangling ends (like the rest of the cu sidhe wtf).
So, Toby is fairie Jesus at this point, she and Tybalt are irritatingly codependent, Seanan really likes shelving May for books at a time. Thank thank you for the queer characters now can we work on some characters of color who have plot relevance and show up for more than a line or two?
But an interesting, and fairly tight plot that kept me up reading so it's still a good story despite my irritation at the number of miracles Toby can pull off.
Japanese fiction can get a little... odd for someone used to the traditional Western rising-climax-falling-conclusion plot set up. I rarely read Japanese novels for that reason. But Tanizaki is considered a master and father of modern Japanese fiction (“modern” here meaning World War I and II era), so I found a copy of his early short stories. Some of them did get a little long-winded, but Tanizaki has a real talent for narrating the strong and sometimes strange passions of his characters. His preoccupation with the control women have over his male protagonists is an absorbing thread that runs through the stories– in one a young man's obsession with his mother/stepmother brings him to ruin, in another a tattoo artist's drive to tattoo the most beautiful woman in Gion leads to his destruction by his most beautiful creation, in a third a servant blinds himself so that his mistress will not feel ashamed of a disfigurement. And yet the narration is always calm and measured, even when the emotions of the characters are roiling. This was not a set of easy reads, but they were good.
Anthologies are always a bit uneven but despite some extremely disparate interpretations of the theme almost all the stories hit their mark.