Don’t you love a debut novel? Admittedly in this trashfire world I am prone to getting sentimental about things it is insane to get sentimental about, like tiny foods and sitcom episodes where people discover emotional truths about themselves; but I do feel sentimental about debut novels and the hope they represent. There’s something quite magical about an editor believing in a brand new author, and there’s something even magical-er about an author setting their first-ever book into the world like a message in a bottle, searching for their exactly-right community of readers. Which is why I’m mightily grateful to…
8 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
By coincidence (OR WAS IT?)1 I read Food of the Gods directly after The Prey of Gods, which has led me to make numerous errors about which book title has the word the in which place. But both are weird, and both left me feeling decidedly unsettled after I turned over the last page. Food of the Gods is a combination of two novellas about Rupert Wong, who works part-time for the lord of hell and part-time as a chef for a particularly powerful ghoul mob boss with a taste for flawlessly prepared human flesh. Ordinarily this is fine for…
5 Comments“Whatcha reading?” said someone to me as I was waiting in line at the post office the other day. I flipped up the cover of The Prey of Gods (which is a p. cool cover, as you will see below.) “What’s it about?” they said. And I was like, “My friend, that is a GOOD FUCKIN QUESTION.” The Prey of Gods was described to me by two separate people as being the craziest SF book they’d read in a while, and they were not mistaken. What’s it about? Gods and robots, sometimes working together, sometimes really not at all. Viruses.…
12 CommentsHere it is halfway through the year (well more than half but not that much more), and I have read three of my planned four histories of African nations for 2017. YAY ME. Because I happened to see it at my library, and because it was blurbed by Desmond Tutu, I picked up a copy of Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat’s A History of South Africa. One thing that struck me about South African history is the role that economics plays in how colonialism ends up working. In the early-to-mid 1800s, England had a presence in South Africa, right? And…
1 CommentWHAT. A GREAT. BOOK. WHAT A GREAT BOOK. I confess that I delayed reading Ninefox Gambit, recent well-deserved winner of the Locus Award for First Novel, given that all the reviews I read of it said that it was SF as hell and explained absolutely nothing. And look: That was correct information. Several people explained to me in advance the whole deal with calendrical rot and what it all meant, and even so, I was at sea for the first AT LEAST forty pages, like to the point that I did not feel confident I had grasped the meaning of…
8 CommentsWHAT A DELIGHT. If you’re one of those people who laments the decline of the rom-com as a movie genre, and you remotely enjoy YA, I must insist that you read When Dimple Met Rishi. I yearn and yearn for it to be made into a teen movie. Whatever happened to teen movies? Where are the Can’t Hardly Waits of the new generation? So the deal is that Dimple, a budding coder, gets permission from her parents to attend Insomnia Con, at which the winning app design will receive support and backing from legendary computer person Jenny Lindt. BUT THERE’S…
13 CommentsHa, ha, just kidding. How could I possibly enumerate every single thing that I learned from this year’s edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing? Impossible! I have already forgotten most of it! My brain is a leaky sieve and I am lucky even to remember my blog password in order to log in and write this post! I read this as part of the #24in48 Readathon, which was great except that right as I got to the end and I was all like “nailed it, book finished, no more science to be learned here,” and then they…
8 Comments