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Reading Wednesday
Jul. 1st, 2020 07:53 amRecently read
Read Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, a YA sci-fi Arthurian retelling in a which a teenage girl discovers she's the 42nd reincarnation of King Arthur after she and her brother, Kay, crash-land on a now-defunct Earth while escaping from the galaxy's dystopian overlords and she claims Excalibur, waking Merlin (now a teenager, because of the whole "aging backwards" thing) and Morgana (now... a force ghost?). Has both m/m and f/f romantic subplots, one of which is a fake marriage with real feelings. To be honest, I liked the concept more than the actual book, which isn't a criticism so much as a matter of personal taste. Some writing styles you click with and some you just don't, you know?
Finished Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, a collection of first-person accounts about the fall of the Soviet Union and what came after. The core theme was trauma, ranging from the trauma inflicted by torture and imprisonment under the Soviet government, to the trauma of "[having to] adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioural codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight" and conflicts in post-Soviet states. These types of stories were not mutually exclusive; some of the people Alexievich interviewed who had suffered the most under Soviet rule were the ones who had the hardest time adjusting to/coping with its end. It's an emotionally difficult read - major warning for suicide; it comes up a lot - but interesting.
Read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, a deeply adorable fantasy novel in which a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth finds his life turned upside down after he is assigned to investigate an orphanage for magical children, one of whom may or may not be capable of bringing about Armageddon. GoodReads appears divided about how to classify it— to me, it read like juvenile fiction, but some reviewers classified it as YA or even adult fantasy, possibly because the protagonist is an adult rather than a spunky 10- to 12-year-old? (Unfortunately, I suspect it's more likely because of the m/m romance between the caseworker and the orphanage caretaker.) BIG found family vibes.
To read next
My holds on The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh will apparently be "available soon", so hopefully one of those.
Read Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, a YA sci-fi Arthurian retelling in a which a teenage girl discovers she's the 42nd reincarnation of King Arthur after she and her brother, Kay, crash-land on a now-defunct Earth while escaping from the galaxy's dystopian overlords and she claims Excalibur, waking Merlin (now a teenager, because of the whole "aging backwards" thing) and Morgana (now... a force ghost?). Has both m/m and f/f romantic subplots, one of which is a fake marriage with real feelings. To be honest, I liked the concept more than the actual book, which isn't a criticism so much as a matter of personal taste. Some writing styles you click with and some you just don't, you know?
Finished Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, a collection of first-person accounts about the fall of the Soviet Union and what came after. The core theme was trauma, ranging from the trauma inflicted by torture and imprisonment under the Soviet government, to the trauma of "[having to] adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioural codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight" and conflicts in post-Soviet states. These types of stories were not mutually exclusive; some of the people Alexievich interviewed who had suffered the most under Soviet rule were the ones who had the hardest time adjusting to/coping with its end. It's an emotionally difficult read - major warning for suicide; it comes up a lot - but interesting.
Read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, a deeply adorable fantasy novel in which a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth finds his life turned upside down after he is assigned to investigate an orphanage for magical children, one of whom may or may not be capable of bringing about Armageddon. GoodReads appears divided about how to classify it— to me, it read like juvenile fiction, but some reviewers classified it as YA or even adult fantasy, possibly because the protagonist is an adult rather than a spunky 10- to 12-year-old? (Unfortunately, I suspect it's more likely because of the m/m romance between the caseworker and the orphanage caretaker.) BIG found family vibes.
To read next
My holds on The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh will apparently be "available soon", so hopefully one of those.
