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Reading Wednesday
Nov. 17th, 2021 06:29 pmJust finished: Voices Under One Sky: Contemporary Native Literature, edited by Trish Fox Roman. This was overall very good, with my usual caveat about anthologies applying. I was crushed to hear, the day after I read Lee Maracle's story in it, that she's died. What a massive loss to literature.
Hammers On Bone by Cassandra Khaw. This is one of my free Tor novellas, a Lovecraft/hardboiled detective novel where a boy hires a detective named Persons to kill his abusive father. Who's also a monster. The detective is not so much a person as an eldritch entity and possibly several ghosts inhabited a walking corpse. It's a lot of fun, though the two genres don't mash as well in this as one would think—the relatively modern-but-with-steampunk setting and 1940s narration sometimes drew me out of the story to figure out what time and place we were in. But I enjoyed it.
Currently reading: An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, edited by Terry Goldie, Daniel David Moses, and Armand Garnet Ruffo. Another anthology! This one is so big that I actually struggle to hold it up when I'm reading in bed at night, and stretches back a few hundred years. There's some really excellent and new-to-me work in here, as well as historical documents, traditional songs and poetry, and various ephemera. Among the more interesting pieces are some traditional Inuit poems that are just fun as hell that I'm excited to share with my class. There's a fair bit by E. Pauline Johnson, who has the distinction of being the one Indigenous writer I ever got to read during my own schooling, and they don't ever give you the good stuff. This does include the good stuff, a.k.a. her political poems, as well as a short story that absolutely broke me. There are some very weird letters that illustrate the contradictions inherent in survival during colonization and relocation, where Indigenous writers tried to negotiate with Christianity and imperialism. Oh, and there's some absolutely bonkers Duke Redbird stuff that I don't care for at all but is interesting in contrast to what he's doing now.
Hammers On Bone by Cassandra Khaw. This is one of my free Tor novellas, a Lovecraft/hardboiled detective novel where a boy hires a detective named Persons to kill his abusive father. Who's also a monster. The detective is not so much a person as an eldritch entity and possibly several ghosts inhabited a walking corpse. It's a lot of fun, though the two genres don't mash as well in this as one would think—the relatively modern-but-with-steampunk setting and 1940s narration sometimes drew me out of the story to figure out what time and place we were in. But I enjoyed it.
Currently reading: An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, edited by Terry Goldie, Daniel David Moses, and Armand Garnet Ruffo. Another anthology! This one is so big that I actually struggle to hold it up when I'm reading in bed at night, and stretches back a few hundred years. There's some really excellent and new-to-me work in here, as well as historical documents, traditional songs and poetry, and various ephemera. Among the more interesting pieces are some traditional Inuit poems that are just fun as hell that I'm excited to share with my class. There's a fair bit by E. Pauline Johnson, who has the distinction of being the one Indigenous writer I ever got to read during my own schooling, and they don't ever give you the good stuff. This does include the good stuff, a.k.a. her political poems, as well as a short story that absolutely broke me. There are some very weird letters that illustrate the contradictions inherent in survival during colonization and relocation, where Indigenous writers tried to negotiate with Christianity and imperialism. Oh, and there's some absolutely bonkers Duke Redbird stuff that I don't care for at all but is interesting in contrast to what he's doing now.
