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(AKA I've gradually started reading again, and even more slowly am getting my shit together to make notes about it again. Actually, the push has been that I want to get some of my thoughts out about Stay and fight before I finish it. Also I wanted to be pissed about Orson Scott Card in multiple venues. Motivation is motivation, whatever its form, I guess?)
DNF
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card. I know we all hate the bigot, but I was weak; it was a library copy, and I was craving a phat fantasy/sci-fi to fall into and this had so many things that I love: generation ships! Post-apoca! TIME TRAVEL!
But in the first 15 pages the MC's dad is killed (fine), and the death scene is one of the most strangely non-described, distantly written things I've read. Father (who is an established pompous ass) is trapped under a fallen tree, apparently impaled by branches, and asks his son not to look…but we have no idea what his son looks at instead, and father keeps talking in exactly the same lengthy uninterrupted sentences with no sign of pain. Also the son is a trapper of animals, and would know exactly what punctured intestines would smell like. There were So Many missed opportunities to ground the scene that I'm like "do you even care what you're writing?". I put the book down in cranky and googled "is the dad actually dead?" because there's no freaking body. (Spoiler: he's intended to be dead). I'm so sad that I won't get to the neat time travel and generation ships, but wow is it not worth the grinding frustration of "this could have been good, dammit."
Finished reading!
The witness for the dead by Katherine Addison. Reading the goblin emperor world such a weird experience for me. I can mostly catch up with how the world and its structures work, but people's names and titles are so unfamiliar to me that they don't stick. I'm not reading for the plot, I'm just such a profound sucker for 'emotional intimacy within formal structures' (“We thank you for that which the Serenity does not do” lives rent-free in my brain, forever), that I'm willing to read an entire novel with the literary equivalent of intense faceblindness, just for those moments. I'm buying the sequel, grim topic and everything.
Currently reading:
Stay and fight by Madeline Ffitch. This was…entirely as pitched by this Tiktok: https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/holden/cruze/suv-bodystyle/, but that doesn’t make it a comfortable read. It's a realistically grim look at what off-the-grid subsistence living is like, but also none of the main characters seem to like each other, which, again, grimly realistic, but it makes for an uncomfortable read. I actually paused reading for a long time when the external conflict looked like it was about to turn up, because I didn't want to see things get even *worse*.
I picked it back up, eventually, and when the external forces arrived, it was both a surprise to me that the author went there and also entirely real-world realistic and an important point to make, that I was genuinely impressed.
I've got less than 100 pages to go, and I'm legit transfixed. The last hundred pages also includes a C-plot relationship section that has me "THAT, I wanna learn how to write that love" (two similar-aged, non-related men, father and middle-aged-son dynamic, ‘son’ desperately loving the grouchy older man and wanting to make things good for him, and neither of them able to articulate a fucking word, and that’s fine). She’s also doing amazingly, in retrospect, in constructing brutally human, warts-and-all relationships. I very want to know how she's going to finish this novel, given she's pulled zero punches so far, and I can't see how this is going to end well, but but I want it to. Goodreads reviews suggests she doesn't pull off whatever she's aiming for, but the writing is so good on a sentence level, still.
Up next:
Take two of the giant fantasy, due in a few weeks:
Babel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57945316-babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence -- gonna try the excerpt of this, at least.
The grief of stones by Katherine Addison. Sequel to Witness. Bundled up in my order with the two below books, waiting for all three to arrive.
Psalm to the wild-built by Becky Chambers. I have a bounce-around relationship with Chambers’ works, but this one hit alllll of my comfort buttons in a row. (a re-read, I’m purchasing my own expensive copy after doing a library loan read) Entirely character-driven utopia. Nothing happens for an entire novella and I love it so, so much. $50 for a hardback novella much.
A prayer for the crown-shy, the sequel to the above.
Ten steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby. Nanette the show destroyed me in the best way. I’m equal keen/scared to read this probably as an ebook, and as I’m waiting for the other three above to arrive as a job lot, this will probably be first off the rank.
Oh, oh, and poetry books, incoming from Dymocks sometime maybe even this week. Ada Limon’s Dead bright things and The carrying: poems.
…I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying bender, I guess. Just a very slow, none-of-them-are-published yet bender.
DNF
Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card. I know we all hate the bigot, but I was weak; it was a library copy, and I was craving a phat fantasy/sci-fi to fall into and this had so many things that I love: generation ships! Post-apoca! TIME TRAVEL!
But in the first 15 pages the MC's dad is killed (fine), and the death scene is one of the most strangely non-described, distantly written things I've read. Father (who is an established pompous ass) is trapped under a fallen tree, apparently impaled by branches, and asks his son not to look…but we have no idea what his son looks at instead, and father keeps talking in exactly the same lengthy uninterrupted sentences with no sign of pain. Also the son is a trapper of animals, and would know exactly what punctured intestines would smell like. There were So Many missed opportunities to ground the scene that I'm like "do you even care what you're writing?". I put the book down in cranky and googled "is the dad actually dead?" because there's no freaking body. (Spoiler: he's intended to be dead). I'm so sad that I won't get to the neat time travel and generation ships, but wow is it not worth the grinding frustration of "this could have been good, dammit."
Finished reading!
The witness for the dead by Katherine Addison. Reading the goblin emperor world such a weird experience for me. I can mostly catch up with how the world and its structures work, but people's names and titles are so unfamiliar to me that they don't stick. I'm not reading for the plot, I'm just such a profound sucker for 'emotional intimacy within formal structures' (“We thank you for that which the Serenity does not do” lives rent-free in my brain, forever), that I'm willing to read an entire novel with the literary equivalent of intense faceblindness, just for those moments. I'm buying the sequel, grim topic and everything.
Currently reading:
Stay and fight by Madeline Ffitch. This was…entirely as pitched by this Tiktok: https://www.carsales.com.au/cars/holden/cruze/suv-bodystyle/, but that doesn’t make it a comfortable read. It's a realistically grim look at what off-the-grid subsistence living is like, but also none of the main characters seem to like each other, which, again, grimly realistic, but it makes for an uncomfortable read. I actually paused reading for a long time when the external conflict looked like it was about to turn up, because I didn't want to see things get even *worse*.
I picked it back up, eventually, and when the external forces arrived, it was both a surprise to me that the author went there and also entirely real-world realistic and an important point to make, that I was genuinely impressed.
I've got less than 100 pages to go, and I'm legit transfixed. The last hundred pages also includes a C-plot relationship section that has me "THAT, I wanna learn how to write that love" (two similar-aged, non-related men, father and middle-aged-son dynamic, ‘son’ desperately loving the grouchy older man and wanting to make things good for him, and neither of them able to articulate a fucking word, and that’s fine). She’s also doing amazingly, in retrospect, in constructing brutally human, warts-and-all relationships. I very want to know how she's going to finish this novel, given she's pulled zero punches so far, and I can't see how this is going to end well, but but I want it to. Goodreads reviews suggests she doesn't pull off whatever she's aiming for, but the writing is so good on a sentence level, still.
Up next:
Take two of the giant fantasy, due in a few weeks:
Babel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57945316-babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence -- gonna try the excerpt of this, at least.
The grief of stones by Katherine Addison. Sequel to Witness. Bundled up in my order with the two below books, waiting for all three to arrive.
Psalm to the wild-built by Becky Chambers. I have a bounce-around relationship with Chambers’ works, but this one hit alllll of my comfort buttons in a row. (a re-read, I’m purchasing my own expensive copy after doing a library loan read) Entirely character-driven utopia. Nothing happens for an entire novella and I love it so, so much. $50 for a hardback novella much.
A prayer for the crown-shy, the sequel to the above.
Ten steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby. Nanette the show destroyed me in the best way. I’m equal keen/scared to read this probably as an ebook, and as I’m waiting for the other three above to arrive as a job lot, this will probably be first off the rank.
Oh, oh, and poetry books, incoming from Dymocks sometime maybe even this week. Ada Limon’s Dead bright things and The carrying: poems.
…I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying bender, I guess. Just a very slow, none-of-them-are-published yet bender.
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i hear you on the pre-order book buying binge. I also have the Chambers, and several others coming in the indefinite future.