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Belated Reading Wednesday
Sep. 5th, 2024 09:41 pmRead Shit Cassandra Saw, a short story collection by Gwen E. Kirby. Really good! There was a running thread of flash fiction with a "well-behaved women seldom make history" vibe— exploring figures like Boudicca, 16th century Welsh witch hunt victim Gwen ferch Ellis, cross-dressing pirate Mary Read, 19th century samurai Nakano Takeko— but overall, the stories were an interesting mix of surreal and mundane and funny and serious... not mutually exclusive! Kirby is particularly good at writing a. teenage girls and b. multiple and/or collective POVs, which is why my two favorite stories were "Mt. Adams at Mar Vista" (a high school softball team hovers awkwardly on the edge of a rival school's tragedy) and "Casper" (a taxidermied wallaby is an apple of discord between three teenage co-workers at a second-hand store). Honorable mention goes to "Here Preached His Last", a weirdly lovely story about a woman having an affair while haunted by the judgmental ghost of 18th century preacher George Whitefield.
Read Lake of Souls, a collection of short fiction by Ann Leckie. Both of my overall favorites— "Lake of Souls" and "Another Word for World"— were stand-alone sci-fi on the theme of alliances across communication barriers, in different ways, but the collection also includes stories set in the respective worlds of her Imperial Radch books and The Raven Tower. I hadn't been as wowed by The Raven Tower as I was by the original Imperial Radch trilogy, so I was surprised by how much I ended up liking those stories, which explore a world where the underlying principle of magic is that gods must speak the truth: they can shape reality with their words if they're powerful enough, and need to be very careful about what they say if they aren't. Of these, I particularly liked "Marsh Gods", which felt the most like some forgotten trickster folk tale of the bunch, and "Saving Bacon," a P.G. Wodehouse pastiche.
Read A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, a novella translated from Korean by Anton Hur: a depressed, unemployed 29-year-old learns that she's a magical girl, and not just a magical girl but the best and most special magical girl, the key to the Trade Union of Magical Girls' plan to stop climate change— ( spoilers! ) Quick, fun read, and probably even better if you're actually familiar with the magical girl genre.
Read Lake of Souls, a collection of short fiction by Ann Leckie. Both of my overall favorites— "Lake of Souls" and "Another Word for World"— were stand-alone sci-fi on the theme of alliances across communication barriers, in different ways, but the collection also includes stories set in the respective worlds of her Imperial Radch books and The Raven Tower. I hadn't been as wowed by The Raven Tower as I was by the original Imperial Radch trilogy, so I was surprised by how much I ended up liking those stories, which explore a world where the underlying principle of magic is that gods must speak the truth: they can shape reality with their words if they're powerful enough, and need to be very careful about what they say if they aren't. Of these, I particularly liked "Marsh Gods", which felt the most like some forgotten trickster folk tale of the bunch, and "Saving Bacon," a P.G. Wodehouse pastiche.
Read A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, a novella translated from Korean by Anton Hur: a depressed, unemployed 29-year-old learns that she's a magical girl, and not just a magical girl but the best and most special magical girl, the key to the Trade Union of Magical Girls' plan to stop climate change— ( spoilers! ) Quick, fun read, and probably even better if you're actually familiar with the magical girl genre.
