@Tak@reading.taks.garden Thank you! There's a complete list at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UW-L9gSLjk8cNaMviI3veGv7ScQa4eEcA5sFeZd7fJM/edit?usp=sharing but tbh bookwyrm is a much nicer format for it. I might start a companion list of potential future candidates.
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I'm currently the coordinator of the #SFFBookClub so a lot of what I'm reading is suggestions from there.
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el dang reviewed A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Once, Lovelace had eyes and ears everywhere. She was a ship's artificial intelligence system - …
made me cry more than once
5 stars
I absolutely adored this book. I realise that part of this is that it was a perfect little escape while I was stuck at home with covid, but I do also think it's really wonderful.
It has some similar strengths to the first in the series, in that it's mostly about the relationships between a few outcast characters that become a chosen family and just happen to be in space. But if anything I think it's better written (I guess Chambers getting into her stride with book 2), and benefits from being a more focussed story of a smaller number of characters. And has some weightier things to say about embodiment, the tension between fitting in and freedom, and loyalty & reciprocity.
I am excited about the rest of the series.
el dang started reading A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Once, Lovelace had eyes and ears everywhere. She was a ship's artificial intelligence system - possessing a personality and very …
el dang started reading The Butterfly's Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
el dang reviewed Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that …
How does one review a millenium-old poem?
No rating
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in …
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in just 2 sittings).
But even in this best translation yet, the story frustrates me. However much Headley tries to open it up, and pushes back on this reading in the translator's introduction, it's still a story of macho men bragging and proving themselves with violence, in which womens' main role is to be prizes and servers. And Grendel's mother still gets short shrift. She's the character whose violence is the easiest to justify, but her role in the story is still to be an enemy whose defeat we cheer for.
It's amazing to be able to read this snapshot from so long ago, and this translation is now the one that I'd recommend to people. But I'm still so ambivalent about the actual content.
el dang started reading Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that …
Bro, I've been looking forward to this one for a while.
el dang reviewed Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
From the publisher---
It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied …
Fitting end to an amazing series
4 stars
I don't think I liked this book quite as much as the previous two, but it still sucked me in and I'm not sure how better the trilogy could have been wrapped up. There are a lot of still unanswered questions at the end, which feels fitting but something about the style of this one felt like a tease, where the previous two volumes felt more convincingly like the answers simply weren't there to be had.
I still love and strongly recommend this trilogy overall.
el dang finished reading Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
From the publisher---
It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing …
@Tak@reading.taks.garden Me too! So far I don't like the style and pacing of this one quite as much as the other two, but it's making sense as a third instalment in the series.
el dang started reading Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
From the publisher---
It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied …
Finally completing this trilogy, the previous 2 instalments of which I loved.
el dang reviewed The lathe of heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Lathe of Heaven” ; 1971 ( Ursula Le Guin received the 1973 Locus Award …
Weirdest thing I've read by Le Guin
4 stars
It's funny how of all the books I've read by Le Guin, the one that's set on a baseline plausible Earth-in-my-lifetime would turn out to be the weirdest. Also funny how in what starts as a pretty reasonable extrapolation from 1971 to ~2000 has one repeated glaring error: multiple references to the perfect cone of Mount St. Helen's.
Against that background, we get a story of a man running away from his dreams because they give him a power he doesn't understand and can't control. And another man who wants to channel that power, setting up a modern Daoist fable about the hubris of trying to control too much.
el dang finished reading The lathe of heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
The lathe of heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Lathe of Heaven” ; 1971 ( Ursula Le Guin received the 1973 Locus Award for this story) George Orr …
Composed in the twelfth century in north-eastern Iran, Attar's great mystical poem is among the …
It was in China, late one moonless night, The Simorgh first appeared to mortal sight – He let a feather float down through the air, And rumours of its fame spread everywhere; Throughout the world men separately conceived An image of its shape, and all believed Their private fantasies uniquely true!
...it's almost as if this 12th Century poet anticipated what Western Christians would do to all of Persian poetry centuries later....
el dang reviewed Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
Change or die: the only options available on the Durallium Company-owned planet GP. The planet's …
Ammonite
4 stars
Content warning Ammonite (whole book)
I enjoyed this book a lot, and it's the kind of juicy food for thought that I've spent the week since finishing it digesting. Elements of it felt like an homage to The Left Hand of Darkness, but not heavily enough that to get in the way of Griffith having her own story to tell. There's also a big echo of the stories of early European colonies losing people because they either couldn't handle the environment they were trying to colonise or "went native", liking the cultures they were supposed to subjugate better than their own.
It's beautifully written too, but at times some of the human interactions felt implausibly easy. We get the protagonist almost dying a few times, but she seems to settle in to a wholly alien culture quicker & more easily than I've managed moving between countries on one planet. And the resolution at the end of the book feels too convenient.
SFFBookClub
el dang reviewed Lonely Planet Travel Photography by Richard I'Anson
Review of 'Lonely Planet Travel Photography' on 'LibraryThing'
4 stars
Useful manual. Fairly concise, but with enough information to still be helpful to people like me, who know the basic technical stuff pretty well but have plenty to learn about composition and material. Not much of it is actually specific to "travel", but then why would taking a picture of some other city be magically different from taking one of where I live?