The weirdest thing about writing this post was looking back at my reading spreadsheet for this year and going “Wait, that was this year?” In some cases, I was so sure I’d read the book in a prior year that I went and checked its publication date online to see if I was losing my mind. Result: I was! The feeling that 2021 passed by in a morbid, exhausting flash and also lasted for two thousand and twenty-one years would be notable were it not for the fact that all of the past few years have felt that way. At…
1 CommentTag: Nghi Vo
tldr: Wow. When Nghi Vo released her first novella, Empress of Salt and Fortune, I was blown away by her talent at the task category “putting a book together.” I know that’s a very unsexy way to describe a novella, but it applies! Empress packed so much plot, emotional insight, and character development into its 128 pages that it felt like an apotheosis of the novella form. (My use here of apotheosis will be but the first of many hyperbolic shrieks throughout this review, because I’m about as bullish on Nghi Vo’s writing as I have been about any author…
1 CommentSo it turns out that 2020 was a pretty amazing reading year? I hadn’t really noticed because there were so many other things to occupy my brain, such as the quarantine and the election and the crumbling of American democracy, but in looking back at my reading spreadsheet I discovered that I had read a shocking number of books that needed a place on my Best Of list. There are, in fact, so many that it has necessitated me breaking this post down into two parts. This one covers my reading through like mid-June or something, and represents the number…
Leave a CommentEmpress of Salt and Fortune slaps. I review books and I am very professional and Empress of Salt and Fortune fucking slaps. I could honestly end this post here. You would believe me, right? You would just read The Empress of Salt and Fortune based on that! Plus this gorgeous cover! Chih, a cleric from the Singing Hills abbey, has come with their ?familiar? to Thriving Fortune, where they meet an elderly woman with stories to tell about the Empress of Salt and Fortune, who once lived in exile in Thriving Fortune. The elderly woman, Rabbit, offers Chih and their…
Leave a CommentFantastic news, months have returned! I read a finite, yet manageable, number of short stories in April, and I am here to tell you about the best of them. Because I am predictable, each story is about some combination of the following themes: the nature of truth flora and fauna living and dying fraught familial relationships Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” (3780 words, Uncanny) is one of the first short stories I read in the month of April, and it reminded me of all the reasons I love short fiction. We begin with a…
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