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Reading Wednesday
Jan. 18th, 2023 07:16 amJust finished: Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. I loved this one. Despite all my railing against hopepunk/sweetweird/cozy fantasy I do sometimes like a happy story?? This book is an overly ambitious mess and I'm so here for it. Demons, pacts with Hell, cursed violins, donuts, aliens, immigration, trans rights—it's long and sprawling and overstuffed. There are a million POV characters and sometimes—contra all advice you're given in writing genre fiction—she switches POV from paragraph to paragraph. It switches to stream-of-consciousness poetry-prose whenever the mood calls for it. My God, it's full of stars. It's great. I prefer a wild adventure like this to tightly structured commercial fiction by several orders of magnitude. And, despite some very dark bits, it's fun. At the heart are three broken women becoming slightly less broken through music, food, and community. It's a delight.
Currently reading: The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. Continues to be great.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Instead of describing a guy Ishmael switched it up and described four guys.
The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. I don't remember the conversation that led to someone recommending this to me, but there was one. It's...interesting? It's a family history as told through the objects that the Ephrussi family collected, specifically 200 netsuke including the titular hare. I like making art but the idea of collecting art is something that sits uneasily with me. I mean obviously I know that the Nazis are eventually going to destroy these folks' lives, but it's hard to be engaged early on just because of how obscenely rich they are. That said, there's a lot about the fad of japonisme in 1800s Europe, which makes my art history soul very happy. And the idea of exploring memory and history through objects is very cool. De Waal is a ceramics artist and his love for the art shines through every word.
Currently reading: The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. Continues to be great.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Instead of describing a guy Ishmael switched it up and described four guys.
The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. I don't remember the conversation that led to someone recommending this to me, but there was one. It's...interesting? It's a family history as told through the objects that the Ephrussi family collected, specifically 200 netsuke including the titular hare. I like making art but the idea of collecting art is something that sits uneasily with me. I mean obviously I know that the Nazis are eventually going to destroy these folks' lives, but it's hard to be engaged early on just because of how obscenely rich they are. That said, there's a lot about the fad of japonisme in 1800s Europe, which makes my art history soul very happy. And the idea of exploring memory and history through objects is very cool. De Waal is a ceramics artist and his love for the art shines through every word.
