Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Recently read:

The shambling guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty. ghoti lent me this, and I thought it wasn't quite my thing and anyway I was in the middle of something else. But it was in my to-read pile, and I picked it up one day and started idly flicking through it, and I almost couldn't help myself continuing to read. And it's still kind of not my thing, sort of paranormal romance type of urban fantasy, a bit frothy, yet totally unputdownable. It's very much second generation, self-aware and in dialogue with the genre.

I really liked Zoe as a character, she's sensible and competent but not magically perfect at everything she tries, and yes, she falls in love over the course of the book, but it's very much a thriller rather than a romance. And I like the world-building; it's relatively shallow, but the various undead and other magical creatures all have some original twist on the generic mythologies they're drawn from.

I have no idea at all whether Lafferty is straight (all these people who are doing author diversity challenges, I am mystified by how they know whether a given author is male and white, let alone straight and cis.) But something about the way sexual orientation is handled struck me as, hm, like a straight writer doing diversity in the manner approved by the younger generation of online fandom, there are gay characters and lesbian characters and people punctiliously observe that you shouldn't assume everyone is straight. But somehow the M/F romance and sexual tension just felt way more real than anything else. I could be totally wrong about this, and it's a lot better than in fact assuming all characters must be straight unless there's a ~plot reason~, but still.

Also via ghoti: A stretch of highway two lines wide by Sarah Pinsker. Cute story, doing interesting things with the cyborg theme and thinking about identity in the context of increasingly "smart" prosthetics. Not perfect IMO, but well worth reading.

In the comments on ghoti's rec post for that story, woodpijn recommended The story of Emily and Control by squid314. I wasn't as taken with this as woodpijn; it's a nice ideas-based short, but it suffers from the same problem of a lot of "Rational" fiction or discussions more generally, that it is trying to reinvent hoary philosophical quandaries without reference to any sophisticated philosophical / spiritual thought. I take issue with a Rationalist stance which deliberately values ignorance because actually knowing some facts about how things are might interfere with one's pure philosophical conclusions, and The story of Emily and Control really takes that to extremes.

Somebody on Twitter linked to this rather sweet satire: Travels in the land of the infidels: The island of Britannia by Karl reMarks. I particularly liked this, in the run-up to Red Nose Day:

Thus it is customary for people collecting donations to don the most outrageous costumes and humiliate themselves in public. Once the citizen is satisfied with the level of humiliation he will proceed to donate an amount of money that is proportional to the level of humiliation of the spectacle. Despite this odd procedure, the large charities have amassed sizeable fortunes using these primitive methods.

And via adarcrack (thanks, randomling!) the rather amazing Yedid Nefesh, which is by lannamichaels and is essentially a yeshiva AU of Les Misérables... It really is, well, cracky, and I love what it does with the whole beshert thing.

Currently reading:

About halfway through Imajica; I'm still enjoying it, still finding it a bit over-written both emotionally and in terms of too much description of the setting getting in the way of the plot actually advancing, and I'm not really getting any fonder of most of the multiple viewpoint characters. Pie at least is growing on me; it's an interesting take on a pangender character. And it's a prostitute who doesn't fall into too many of the obvious clichés, possibly in part because it's in fact not female or a woman. And I'm just starting to get some glimpses of its culture which is in fact satisfyingly different from just normal western humans with one tacked on trait to make them seem alien.

Still working my way through Purimgifts. I found a couple which turned out to be by people I know, Circuitry by kass, a very clever SF take on part of the golden calf story, and Ready by jae which has a really beautiful Esther. I have some niggles about the plot but the characterization is excellent.

I also quite liked Breathe deep like you mean it, a Pacific Rim fic by fenellaevangela. It's not an OT3 I buy at all, but it's well written and very sweet. And it has a little bit of exploring what happens when drift compatible Jaeger pilots are also lovers; I really ought to go looking for more of that beyond just happening to stumble on it in a Purim gift exchange.

Up next

Still not sure; at this rate it's going to take me until summer to finish Imajica. I'm very tempted to read the sequel to The Shambling Guide to New York City, Ghost train to New Orleans which ghoti helpfully also lent me. I kind of want to spend more time in that setting!

Conclusion: Wednesday reading posts are definitely not quicker to write than my usual style of book reviews. But never mind!

Comments

[seekingferret]

all these people who are doing author diversity challenges, I am mystified by how they know whether a given author is male and white, let alone straight and cis.

It was sometimes hard, when I was more deliberately doing 50books_poc. I generally try to go by self-identification, but not every author has explicit self-identification. I once spent twenty minutes on KM Ruiz's blog until I found a post where she identified as mixed race.

I heard Pinsker read "A stretch of highway two lines wide" back in January. She's a great performer, and I think I enjoyed the story more hearing it than I would have just reading it. But yeah, definitely a cute, thought-provoking story about the relationship between disability and transhumanism.

[naath]

all these people who are doing author diversity challenges, I am mystified by how they know whether a given author is male and white, let alone straight and cis.

Gender is usually evident from author bios (they usually have pronouns in), race might be somewhat guessable from photographs or bios. Reading the author's blog is of course a better way to find out how they identify themselves.

The cheaty way, though, is to find lists that *other people have compiled* and then read authors from them ;-p Since I wouldn't tend to pick up a book by an author I hadn't read anything by before without a recommendation of some sort this is my usual way of finding new things to read.

[liv]

Yes, I think people do quite often talk about their racial identity, at least if they are hyphenated Americans. So I can chase that information down. Though authors with public-facing blogs pretty rarely talk about whether they're trans and usually only talk about being non-straight if they're directly mentioning a partner who isn't opposite sex.

It's cool you've heard Pinsker reading her story, and yes, I bet it would work well read aloud. I sort of wish the conversation about prosthetics wasn't quite so focused on obviously medical disability aids, though, cos lots of abled people are using smartphones and self-quantification and reality overlay stuff like Google Glass, and driving cars with increasing amounts of near-AI tech, all of which are potentially extensions of self.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm really really reluctant to guess people's race by looking at photos! And there are genderqueer people who use binary pronouns, but I suppose if someone uses she they're pretty definitely not a cisgendered man. Relying on other people's lists is probably a good compromise, isn't it?

[naath]

Race is super hard to guess right from photographs; although some people are very clearly not-white (that doesn't mean I know what they do identify as). Other people's lists hopefully involve more research than "looked at picture" and reading a list means at least somewhere to start.

[kerrypolka]

Yeah, I found this a really difficult part of mine because it started steering towards gender and racial policing, which in my opinion is a very bad thing. My qualification is 'would this person be treated as a white man by people who don't know them very well?', like a bank manager giving them a loan, or someone making conversation at a party. The group this excludes is people who use only male pronouns, have names that read as white and don't look unambiguously non-white, which isn't perfect, but, hmm, both gender and whiteness are constructions so it's not really possible to define them for writers who haven't explicitly said how they identify.