Wants to read The Z Word
book
Rated The Elements of Style 10/10
Not my first read, and my copy is so old that the bookmark in it is a Blockbuster Video rent-6-get-one-free card. Some of the advice here is dated and all of it is opinionated in a charming-but-cranky way but it’s a delight to read and a good reminder that writing is communication. In an age when so much of the the “written” “content” you come across was not written but “generated,” a stern but encouraging voice telling you to structure, write, to rewrite, and to think about the reader’s experience is refreshing.
Rated Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care 10/10
Thought-provoking and important. Deliberately and smartly doesn’t grind your face in the problems activists are working to solve or the badness of their enemies; this is taken as a given. Instead, it’s about how organizers and activists can live their values in the work they do and how that actually improves the work.
Rated The Spiritual Poems of Rumi 4/10
This was a gift and it’s more decorative than anything else; the layout is beautiful but the “nonliteral” translations are so hippy-dippy and loose that they could be hanging on the wall of an AirBnB.
Rated Player's Handbook 8/10
I think they did a really good job with this edition - putting the detailed instructions on how the game is actually played up front, for instance. The art is nice and I mostly like the minor changes they’ve made to the game mechanics and how those mechanics are explained.
Rated Crying in H Mart 8/10
A really lovely memoir of the author’s fraught relationship with her Korean-immigrant mother and the Korean food that bonded them. I went in expecting this to be very sad and it is - the subject is very much loss and grief, and the ravages of both cancer and cancer treatment come up in detail. But it’s also very warm and thoughtful, with much of the book focused on how Zauner uses cooking, music, writing, and travel to keep her mother with her. Brief and really well written.
Rated Epidemia ultra 10/10
Edited 31d ago
Rated The Island of Missing Trees 8/10
A very sweet, lyrical and sad story about an expatriate family from Cyprus living in London and the past that brought them there.
Wants to read The Lions of Al-Rassan
Finished reading Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror
Rated A Closed and Common Orbit 10/10
Brilliant plotting. I think I was three quarters of the way through it, maybe farther before the great big penny dropped. Not a surprise coming from Becky Chambers: this is a wonderful space opera about friendship, family and love.
Rated Automatic Noodle 8/10
Very SF SF, and fun. I had a problem keeping the cast of robots in my head (which one is the octopus and how does that work again?) but that might just be because my head is really old.
Wants to read Parable of the Talents
Rated Corvus 10/10
So great to get back to this series and what a terrific character Kloos has given us in Alex Archer. White knuckles indeed, as she ends up in a serious pickle.
Rated The Interestings 8/10
the third book I’ve read this year in the “intense friends formed in childhood between sensitive creative people, played out over decades” genre, and a solid example - well done shifts in perspective, decisions and their impacts seen from different angles, conflicts planted early and revealing themselves over time. A very quick read.
Wants to read Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Wants to read X-Men: Days of Future Past