Y’all know what I hate? I hate it when reviewers say shit like this: Chances are none of these people will be deemed sufficiently “likable” by the pop-culture-coddled, uplift-craving audience that makes up a goodly portion of Rowling fandom. But hats off to her for not toning things down an iota in order to please them. It’s irritating when a reviewer implies that people who didn’t like a book she liked are somehow a less virtuous kind of reader than she is (in this case, the kind of reader who doesn’t want to think about Important Social Issues); or to…
32 CommentsReading the End Posts
I have a weird, specific pet peeve which is that Latin should sound like Latin. There is a way that translated Latin sounds, and if you’re writing something that’s supposed to be an English translation of a Latin manuscript, it should sound like it was Latin before it was English. I get antsy reading something that’s supposed to be a translation of Latin, and thinking, Wait, how would that go in Latin? Wouldn’t there sometimes be some ablative absolutes? Wouldn’t a lot of those words have been left out because that would all get conveyed by the way the nouns…
14 CommentsI’ve had this book since December 2010. Not in that generic bought-a-book-and-forgot-about-it-until-a-TBR-challenge-happened kind of way, but in the sense that I constantly saw it on the shelf and struggled with fierce opposing forces within my soul. Arrayed on one side of the battle were the numerous things about this book that appealed to me: Laura Miller, founder of Salon.com, a website I regularly read and enjoy; the Chronicles of Narnia, the books that taught me what stories are supposed to be like; writing about books; critical analysis by intelligent people of literature I love; etc. On the other side was…
44 CommentsI have a strong but mostly theoretical affection for stories about fairies. I say “mostly theoretical” because I do not often find myself pleased by books that deal with these topics. Of books that bother about The Faerie Realm, the reigning champion is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which manages the necessary but apparently really difficult task of making the world of faerie interesting, creepy, and specific. Other books I have loved that have Faerie Realms in them (like Fire & Hemlock) tend to shunt the faerie realms off to the side and just hint at what’s going on in…
18 CommentsMagazine-making is a career not far off from my own that I am not sure I would like to attempt. Fact-checking maybe. Copyediting yes because I am amazing at copyediting. Quickly because this is great: Robert Gottlieb was writing about the differences in editing for books and for magazines, and he told a story about this one copyeditor called Miss Gould, who was the queen, evidently, of all the copyeditors. When she would mark up a proof, it would be so brutal in its mark-up-edness that most authors could not be permitted to see it, because the radiance of the…
9 CommentsA More Diverse Universe is a blog tour hosted by the lovely Aarti to spotlight speculative fiction by authors of color. Hence, I tried Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (my word, that cover is gorgeous). It is all about an albino girl, Sunny, who comes to live in Nigeria, where she feels utterly out of place. Her parents are African but she has grew up mostly in America. She can’t go in the sun but she loves playing soccer. One day at school as she is being bullied, a boy called Orlu comes to her defense, and through him, she learns…
25 CommentsOMG y’all. THIS BOOK. READ IT NOW. It’s taken me a little while to spit this review out, because I feel like this is or will be one of those books that gets a lot of hype. I don’t want my review to become one of an avalanche of reviews that raves about a book, and then you are like, “Hey the people really love this book, Imma read it too,” and then you read it with your expectations sky high and when it doesn’t turn out to be the second coming of The Color Purple you’re like, “Why is…
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