What I Read Last Week:

A bunch of stuff! I finished up Han Kang’s The White Book, which was strange and beautiful as translated by Deborah Smith. A favorite line:

A person who had met the same fate as that city. Who had at once time died or been destroyed. Who had painstakingly rebuilt themselves on a foundation of fire-scoured ruins. Who was therefore something new. Who, some broken pediment having survived, has ended up bearing a strange pattern, the new distinct from the old.

I also accidentally read the third in a mystery series (oops), which was bad from a knowing-who-the-characters-are perspective, but good in the sense that an author tends to have found their feet by a few books in. The book was Abir Mukherjee’s Smoke and Ashes, and it is set in interwar Calcutta. It has many critical things to say about the British occupation of India, so naturally I was here for that.

I read Lamar Giles’s latest book, Spin, a terrific and suspenseful YA novel about the mysterious death of an up-and-coming artist and her estranged best friends’ efforts to find out what happened. Lamar Giles’s books are always a real treat, the exact right YA balance among plot and characters and feelings. Plus, there is no romance! It’s really a book about the uneasy friendship between these two young women who lost one of the most important people in their lives.

What I’m Reading Now:

I am hashtag blessed because Tor sent me a review copy of Lara Elena Donnelly’s book Amnesty, the final entry in the Amberlough Dossier series. It’s set in a world that’s not ours, so it’s officially fantasy, but really it’s mainly just quite sociological and political, but with fishnet stockings. Cabaret but even gayer, as my wonderful pal Audra described it. I am mondo excited.

Up Next:

I think it’ll probably be Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, which we’re reading for podcast. But we’ll see! The spirit might move me elsewhere!

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