Reading Wednesday
Jan. 15th, 2025 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Just finished: Wolf's Path by Joyce Chng. This one was really good; you should read it when it comes out. It's divided into three parts—the author's early work, their work wrestling with imposter syndrome and early career bullshit, and then a number of things they wrote during lockdown—so you can really see their voice grow more confident. It's mostly short genre stories, from historical fiction about pirates to future worlds, with some poetry and one particularly affecting autobiographical section. There's a lot here about queerness and the body, disability, the monstrous, and above all else, the deep history and cultures of Singapore.
Currently reading: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Your boy is back with another story about gifted kid burnout symptom, this one set in Arthurian Britain. You know, Arthurian legend has been done to death so I was a little surprised that Grossman wrote a hefty chonker of a book about it, but as with magic boarding schools, he does in fact have something new to say on the subject. It follows Collum, who is a skilled fighter if somewhat of an imposter, from a remote town, determined to win his place at the Round Table. What he doesn't realize, because word travels slowly without mass communications, is that it's a few weeks after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur, along with most of Camelot, is dead.
Grossman does a bunch of things well, but two things in particular: 1) He's just a very good writer and when I'm reading one of his books, I don't want to be doing other things like going to work, and 2) narratives where the protagonist has worked very hard for a thing that they want very much, only to find that it's too late and/or the thing sucks, actually. This is what he did in the Magicians trilogy and this is what he's doing here, along with a meticulously researched (I would assume) picture of a post-apocalyptic Britain amid ruins abandoned by the departing Romans. It's very compelling so far.
Currently reading: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Your boy is back with another story about gifted kid burnout symptom, this one set in Arthurian Britain. You know, Arthurian legend has been done to death so I was a little surprised that Grossman wrote a hefty chonker of a book about it, but as with magic boarding schools, he does in fact have something new to say on the subject. It follows Collum, who is a skilled fighter if somewhat of an imposter, from a remote town, determined to win his place at the Round Table. What he doesn't realize, because word travels slowly without mass communications, is that it's a few weeks after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur, along with most of Camelot, is dead.
Grossman does a bunch of things well, but two things in particular: 1) He's just a very good writer and when I'm reading one of his books, I don't want to be doing other things like going to work, and 2) narratives where the protagonist has worked very hard for a thing that they want very much, only to find that it's too late and/or the thing sucks, actually. This is what he did in the Magicians trilogy and this is what he's doing here, along with a meticulously researched (I would assume) picture of a post-apocalyptic Britain amid ruins abandoned by the departing Romans. It's very compelling so far.
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