chelseagirl

This is a quick round-up post I decided to make to clear out a bunch of “backlog” “you shoulds” cluttering up my mind – I can always do a proper review or meta post later, can’t I? So here’s a quick and dirty run down of what I’ve read this year:

Murderbot by Martha Wells – I’ve made it from All Systems Red to Rogue Protocol and then bounced, which I’m assuming now is the fault of the transition from novella to novel pacing. I liked these a lot, and do see why they inspire the fandom they do. I was put off this series for a long time because I often do not vibe with Bit Tumblr Fandoms, and also quite frankly because I saw some truly obnoxious takes around about how Murderbot is “finally” some “readable” sf because it’s not about “boring tech shit” but about “real things” like people’s relationships, unlike That Kind of sf. Which, luckily, is not actually the case - Murderbot’s voice is and the themes of this are great, but one of the reasons for that is that this is a comparatively hard, techy, unflinching exploration of where our current tech might go, and the societal repercussions of that. I know that’s not how this fandom gets talked about a lot, but I find it unbearably obnoxious how parts of the SF fandom have decided to devalue, discount and silo off the abilities of (notably and especially marginalized) progressive writers in this field because they’ve somehow decided progressive is when STEM is for (conservative) Boys and Social Sciences is for (progressive) Girls and Never Shall These Two Touch. Cooties aren’t real and I don’t think we need to do the Sad Puppies’ job for them nor join them in their pursuits to segregate SF into two genres. Anyway. Rant over.

Sacred Bodies by Ver – this is an indie graphic novel with a beautiful watercolour style (reminiscent of early Ghibli imo) about an arranged marriage between a human woman and a giant bird creature, and How They Make It Work. Queer, beautiful and complicated. I heartily recommend this to anyone interested in niche works about queering intimacy, and also all monsterfuckers. Ver's tumblr, where you can see a preview of the beautiful style I mentioned. I got my physical copy during a short window when shipping to the EU mainland was possible, which sadly isn’t any longer. Alas.

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite – reread. As the title suggests, a quick, witty book about a woman whose more beautiful and fvoured sister is a serial killer successively murdering her boyfriends, which comes to a head when they both vie for the same man. My main draw about this book is and will always be how complicatedly awful both these women are, because spoiler alert: THEY BOTH SUCK. Just in vastly different ways. I also really like the almost jaunty vibe the combined dry wit of the prose and the quick pace of the plot create.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – I ranted about this book a lot on tumblr when I read it, because I was fucking baffled by how bad one third of it was in comparison to the other two thirds, and how much that retrospectively tanked my experience of the good parts. This is a follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale following the infamous Aunt Lydia, a young woman from Gilead and a young woman from Canada as their lives intersect in a daring escape from the draconic and isolationist country, and I regret to say, the circumstances that cause in Margaret Atwood what I like to term a Colossal Failure Of Authorial Empathy are apparently ‘contemporary teen girl’. It’s exactly as bad as you are imagining. So, if you are over the age of 50 and your only interaction with people born past the millennium is the strawman version you invoke in Facebook screeds about the decline of western civilisation, this is the book for you. Otherwise, the first two thirds are good, but beware.

Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen – I am making my way (making my way) through Jane Austen for the first time this year. P&P was fun and I enjoyed it a lot – I def see why this is a universal classic & fave. Persuasion, I have to say, was a bit of a hard sell for me because the Obnoxious Rich People where a bit very Obnoxious, and while I get that on some level that’s part of the fun of the book, it didn’t work for me here in the same way the Obnoxious Rich People-ness of e.g. Braithwaite did. Sense and Sensibility is my least favourite of the lot until now, but that, I think, is partially to blame on the narrator of my audiobook who has an already baseline annoying voice and does an extra annoying ‘whiny’ voice for like half the characters in a distinctly unfun and migraine-inducing way, so I’m wondering how much I would have enjoyed this if I’d sprung privately for the new Rosamund Pike version. I think I’ll take a break from these for now.

I think I’m forgetting something, and I left out a bunch of novellas and short stories and plays, but it is what it is.

Currently Reading and almost finished:

Duma Key by Stephen King – A rich man suffers a horrific accident that leaves him one-armed and brain-damaged and moves to Florida to recuperate and get away from his divorce and trauma, where he discovers an unknown (and perhaps supernatural???) talent for painting, a queerplatonic-ish second romance an Epic Bromance and A HAUNTING (dun dun dun). Haunted House but it’s a haunted florida key but actually it’s Cosmic Horror but actually it’s Race Horror (as in, the Racism Of The Past is haunting our white protags). I’m in the final act of this, and it’s a good King, if, as you may guess, racist-as-expected-for-King and failing at what it wants to do in that regard. The King-Podcast I listen to (and the reason I picked it up) warned that there’s a ‘distinct moment’ when King realises he’s writing a book about race, and OH YEAH, THERE SURE IS. Why is this man only good at writing about [ISSUE] as long as he’s unaware he’s writing about [ISSUE], and can Tabby please put the Vaudeville accents on the high shelf already? Otherwise, once more intrigued by King’s depiction of disability, especially post-accident, which is what I come for with him a lot. This is very in conversation with The Shining, both the book and the adaptation(s). Fascinated by it’s depiction of anger management issue and domestic violence as a recognised character flaw, especially in comparison to the Jack Torrence character. In general, there’s a fascinating amount of mirroring and inverting happening both within this book as well as between this book and The Shining.