My Year Abroad is a book about appetite, about wanting more (and more and more, and infinitely more). It’s a story about how our appetites can make us and unmake us. It’s… very weird, if that’s your thing. Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then…
Leave a CommentCategory: 2 Stars
It’s a buddy read! My lovely pal Jeanne, of Necromancy Never Pays, suggested recently that we do a buddy read, so I proposed one of the books that has languished for ages and ages on my TBR list: Joan Vinge’s classic SF novel The Snow Queen, which was published in 1980 and won a Hugo Award. Here’s our conversation. Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). There are also lots of less good things. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long. Jenny: The thesis…
Leave a CommentI figured out nonrepresentational art in the spring of 2009 at the Tate Modern. I was there with my mother and a close friend, and the friend asked my mother– (Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.) –what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit…
Leave a CommentIt’s June and I have been reading some YA and I will be so honest with you: A lot of it has let me down a little bit. I’m going to start with the one that I thought unequivocally was terrific, and then I’ll work forward and we will get through this together. Genesis Begins Again was an impulse grab at the library, and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s a YA book that feels written for young teenagers, and specifically for black girls. Debut author Alicia D. Williams is dealing with difficult topics, and she never talks down…
Leave a CommentHere’s what happened in January: I had to wear this neck brace that made it impossible to ever sit comfortably. In part because of this, I was very, very cranky in the month of January.1 Every time I thought about going out and doing something, I’d be like “ugh I’m too cranky for that so instead I will stay home and read and that will cheer me up.” But because it was impossible to sit comfortably, staying home and reading did not cheer me up. But because I am very stupid, I did not figure this out until I had…
5 CommentsWell, first up, we just do not have enough books with intersex protagonists, and as always happens when representation is lacking, that puts an impossible amount of pressure on any single book. It’s hard to criticize a book like Abigail Tarttelin’s Golden Boy, even when I think criticisms are merited, because mainstream fiction rarely, rarely features intersex protagonists (and even rarelier do you find #ownvoices intersex fiction, so if y’all know any, get at me in the comments). So let me start by saying what I did like about this book. First of all, Tarttelin lets her protagonist, Max, feel…
23 CommentsWell that was a long and frustrating book. The New York Times review of Justine van der Leun’s We Are Not Such Things promised that the book would “overturn” the traditional narrative of Amy Biehl’s death, and in the process expose the weaknesses of the famed and beloved South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In case you aren’t familiar with Amy Biehl’s story (I wasn’t), she was an activist and Fulbright scholar who was attacked and murdered in the South African township of Gugulethu in 1993, on the eve of apartheid’s demise. Four men were convicted of her murder, then…
32 CommentsOr, that time I was deceived into reading more of Black Widow than I cared about (two trade paperbacks of it) because the art was so beautiful. I really cannot say enough about Phil Noto’s art. It’s dreamy and watercolory, and if I had one takeaway from this book aside from “please stop perpetuating harmful myths about domestic violence” (about which more later), it would be that I need to find every comic Phil Noto has illustrated and put it straight into my brain pan. Further investigation on the Marvel website has revealed that Phil Noto draws like he’s running…
11 CommentsIn today’s review of The Nurses, by Alexander Robbins (author of Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities), we shall play a game of, Why Didn’t Someone Stop This White Lady? The Nurses has a similar structure to Pledged, in which chapters following four individual nurses through their work days alternate with chapters that offer contextual information based in research and interviews. For instance, one chapter may address a specific nurse’s concern that her coworker is stealing narcotics from patients, and the next will discuss narcotics addictions in the nursing profession. I love reading about jobs that are not my job, and I found…
37 CommentsMan. If this were any of the last three years, I would have failed at Comics February. But this year is Leap Year, and I am squeezing this post in just under the wire, because I want you to read Genius. And, I mean, I love Comics February as well. Just mainly I cannot understand why Genius hasn’t gotten more (and by “more” I mean “all the”) attention. Genius, Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Afua Richardson Shitdamn, this book was good. I’ve had a medium reading year thus far — nothing that I’ve hated (although see below re: puppy), but…
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