then there are blackbirds

One of the many things I plan to do in this before-the-storm summer is read ALL the fun things, but I seem to have been slowing down on that lately for various reasons. I figured going back to booklogging would help with this problem, so here's what I've read in May so far:

♣ An Ember in the Ashes, Sabaa Tahir: I waited ages for my library request to be filled, and I enjoyed this quite a lot, though I'm not sure it was great enough to deserve a two-month wait. I think I'll be rereading it before I return it, just to process some more.

♣ Grapefruit, Yoko Ono: The other thing I decided to do was tick a bunch of things off my to-read list on goodreads, so since I saw this was available, I borrowed it. :D I really liked this one, not as much for the language as for the processing it requires. Yoko's instructional poems are deceptively simple, you have to let them sit in the back of your head for a while before you realize how interesting the concepts are. As a result, I blew through the first half of the book in about 20 minutes before slowing down. I think it would have been even better if I'd read a few a day for a couple of weeks, but I'm a habitual book-binger and the return date was sneaking up on me, so. ^^;

♣ Invisible Flower, Yoko Ono: This little story is also deceptively simple.

♣ Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih: I've definitely spent too little time reading non-academic things lately. I ended up being so confused by narrative chronology that I didn't really process everything this book had to say.

♣ The Mirror Empire, Kameron Hurley: REALLY interesting concepts in this one! God's War had a much more visceral impact for me, though; in comparison, this book was less satisfying.

Un-hermit? Whatever. Trying to stay more in touch, anyway.

♣ Quick booklog! It's been a while since I've bothered to play catch-up, but here's what I've read in the past couple of weeks:
+ Shadows Return, Lynn Flewelling
+ The White Road, Lynn Flewelling
+ Casket of Souls, Lynn Flewelling: basically I picked up these three because I was rereading the Nightrunner series at the beginning of last month and realized there were more books! Definitely not the most intriguing in terms of plot or worldbuilding, but I wasn't in a state to process more complicated things at the time.
+ Claymore, v.1-4: I started the first volume and was like, monsters and monster-killing ladies, this is awesome in theory but idk why people love it so much? Then suddenly I hit the third one and went TERESAAAAAAAAAAA A:SDLKSJDF:LSDKFJ ♥ ♥ ♥ and okay, yes, now I get it. xD
+ Uraboku, v.6: This required that I backtrack through v.5 to remember character threads, lol. Cracktastic fluff remains fluffy and (so, so, so) cracktastic.
+ Kamisama Kiss, v.14: I love that Nanami never gives up. Also, aw, more backstory! ♥

(If you want to see what else I've been reading you can check out my 2014 shelf, but I leave almost no commentary on Goodreads.)

♣ A friend recently reminded me of the awesomeness that is Penn Masala via this video, and then I accidentally a not-so-mini vortex.

♣ Zouk earworm throwback! I hadn't realized that the singer was such eye-candy, heh. ( Gage- Pense à moi )

Tomorrow I head off to parts Canadian for a few days, so the December meme posts will be on a brief hiatus. Feel free to keep jumping in on the previous posts if you like! :)

livrelibre asked about something I've read lately and/or an old favorite! Since I finished Battle for Bittora the other day, this post will also serve for deepad's Anuja Chauhan reading club.

Jinni Pande is a cartoon animator who comes from a line of Indian politicians. When her bossy, supposedly-retired grandmother ropes her into campaigning for the upcoming elections, she soon finds herself running for a Parliament seat against Zain Altaf Khan, a childhood friend from her hometown of Bittora.

As with The Zoya Factor, Chauhan conveys the feeling of being swept up in larger social currents incredibly well, but my favorite aspect of this book was the family dynamics. Jinni's relationships with her mother and grandmother were heartwarming and hilariously, believably complicated. Pushpa Pande is probably the most indomitable Terrible Old Woman I've ever had the pleasure to encounter in fiction, and I wanted more of her backstory with Jinni's grandpa!

I also loved Jinni herself- her sense of perspective, her self-awareness, her refusal to forget about the social problems other politicians keep glossing over during the campaign. It's easy to let cynicism about politicians and their motives become cynicism/fatalism about politics, but Jinni never slides into that, and I admire her for it. She's aware of the realities of campaigning, she isn't afraid to face dirty truths, and she wants to make a positive change, even though becoming an election candidate was never her idea in the first place. "Social responsibility" is an easily warped term, but I think a certain interpretation of it does describe Jinni's attitude pretty well: since she's running, she wants to stand up for the interests of all the people she's representing, not just the wealthy and powerful.

Jinni's romance with Zain was pretty adorable; friends-to-lovers and childhood sweethearts are narrative tropes I enjoy, and I thought the development of their relationship in the context of the campaign was very well done. One thing I really appreciated about Battle for Bittora and The Zoya Factor is that the romance is one thread in a larger plot arc, rather than the main (or at least singular) focus. Romantic relationships always happen in the context of something else, and I like them best when the "something else" is at least as big and messy and well-fleshed-out as the relationships themselves. Chauhan is amazing at doing exactly this!

♣ Multifandom treat meme is still open! I haven't managed to fill anything yet since I have to prepare for a presentation this week, but in the meantime, prompt away! I'm just getting started, promise. :D

♣ This week's booklog:
+ Blade of the Immortal, v.1-2: I read these at Book-Off last week and it hasn't quite sucked me in (yet? haha), but I thought the mechanism of immortality was an interesting premise. Thoughts/opinions? Is this a series I should invest more time in?
+ Reader and Raelynx, Sharon Shinn: More interesting than the other Twelve Houses book that I picked up, definitely.
+ Troubled Waters, Sharon Shinn: I think this is my favorite out of all the Shinn books I've read so far. I loled at some "science what science" aspects of the worldbuilding, but since this is more on the fantasy side of SF/F, that was okay. Also, I found this setting much more intriguing than the Samaria or Twelve Houses ones.

♣ Found a new EP via angry asian man (soundcloud stream & free download at the link)! This has been a year of shiny new music for me; I'm quite enjoying Bright Vices. *___*

♣ Anyone interested in makeup blogs? Obviously tips and recs are never universal, but I spent an afternoon in a vortex of shiny pictures/etc. on sweet little place (mostly in French) and frmheadtotoe (thanks for the link, vi!).

♣ Random home remedy that my mom showed me recently: carve out the ends of an Asian pear, put it in a bowl, add some salt/rock sugar in the hole where the stem was, and steam it. The pear and its juices are supposed to be good for your throat/if you have a cough.

♣ And now for something completely hilarrible! Mandarin-speakers (I don't know if this also scans in Cantonese): 一只小白加一只小白是什麼?

⋄ Ahahaha, JLin, never stop being adorkable! ( you've changed, bro )

♣ Finally managed to find someone to watch Fruitvale Station with me... if we can fit in the time. ^^; Wire fans, you might be interested in this Michael B. Jordan interview if you haven't already seen it. (... I still haven't managed to watch The Wire yet, sigh.)

♥ I signed up for Touch Pass after all! I'm still debating whether I want to add more requests, but I like the ones I have so far (super-short-form: Riko + Satsuki + Alexandra being awesome/terrorizing their players, Aomine + Kuroko relationship repair + preferably spectators loling forever, Riko + Hyuuga + Kiyoshi being their OT3 little selves). Now it's definitely time to play catch-up, I guess.

♠ Booklog for the week: ( Graceling, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Monkey High, Vampire Knight, One Piece, Loretta Chase, Shadow of the Templar reread )

Continuing to booklog as opposed to properly bookblogging. Aside from being a fast reader, my rate of consumption is correlated to my job hunt frustration is correlated to my lack of critical/thinking brain! ^^;

Items read since my last book post: ( Agatha Christie binges, The Best of All Possible Worlds, some Anne McCaffrey rereads, Mushishi, Bayou, Darker than Black, Kamisama Hajimemashita, Georgette Heyer )

In the middle of inhaling Paper by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and OMG. I don't know if part of this lushness is because I haven't read fiction in far too long, but it's so pretty and so luxuriously tactile. Also I approve of what are basically endless odes to paper ♥ and sentences such as "She was like an orthographical error in a derivative script." :D

(I know, I know, this is a sad excuse for a bookblog post, pls excuse the brainless.)

While I picked up The Arrival thanks to various glowing comments, I actually had a very ambivalent reaction to the book. Shaun Tan's artwork is lovely and fantastically strange, but I find the immigration storylines as presented problematic on many levels. oyceter and I spent about an hour gchatting about it a while back, so this post is going to be something of a rehashing of the points we bounced off each other in that conversation, with some expansion on my part. (I was really tempted to just c/p chat log excerpts, except that I meant this to be more digestible to people unfamiliar with my/our thought processes! *g*) Anyway, I suppose everything to follow counts as spoilery- both for general themes and specific panels/subsections- so, you know, fair warning.

( Read more... )

So I finished Suki Kim's The Interpreter yesterday and was entirely blown away, but that book deserves its own post. Therefore, while I'm trying to do a proper write-up, have some bits and bats salvaged from stuff I read last year:

1. ( Spirits in the Wires- Charles deLint: )

2. ( A Live Coal in the Sea- Madeleine L'Engle [this one is a rant] )

3. ( Lucy- Jamaica Kincaid )

... oh! I also read Malinda Lo's Ash last night, and was fairly underwhelmed. I am a fan of retold fairytales and queering of the text and all, but it felt kind of lacking in depth? Maybe that's partially a worldbuilding thing, or maybe it's just that I'm tired of European-esque fantasy settings/settings that pretty much read as European-esque fantasy, I dunno. Granted that Cinderella is not my ~favorite fairytale of all time, and I probably would have liked it better when I was a kid, but still. *hands*

Enormous write-up post is enormous! But not as long as it was (and also not as detailed/spoilery as it could be), as I lost my first draft along with most of my notes and had to rewrite it. D: Sorry!

1. ( Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress- Dai Sijie )

2. ( A Good Indian Wife- Anne Cherian )

3. ( Troublemaker and Other Saints- Christina Chiu )

4. ( After the Quake- Haruki Murakami )

5. ( Candy- Mian Mian )

6. ( Singer from the Sea- Sheri S. Tepper (reread) )

7. ( A Private Life- Ran Chen )

8. ( Raising the Stones- Sheri S. Tepper )

9. ( Paradise of the Blind- Duong Thu Huong )

10. Bonus manga! ( Bus Gamer: The Pilot Edition- Minekura Kazuya )