Mosley, Rowland, Ted Chiang

[shimizu-hitomi.livejournal.com]

First post here, though I've been lurking for a while. I write rambly reviews, so be warned.

- Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others (link to my journal)

("Story of Your Life" is without a question the best thing I've read all year. The other stories in the anthology were bonus.)

- Laura Joh Rowland's The Snow Empress

- Walter Mosley's Fear Itself and Fear of the Dark

(I love mysteries, so it's been great discovering PoC mystery authors. Next on my list is Qiu Xiaolong.)

I also read Yxta Maya Murray's The Conquest and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. I intended to write something more in depth for both books, but never got around to it, and not sure I can or will at this point, so I'll just c/p what I originally wrote in my journal:

( remarks, with brief mention of Cynthia Kadohata's In the Heart of the Valley of Love )

More on tagging

[oyceter]

Hi all!

After mod discussion and comments here and here, we've decided on the following:

1. We will be moving author tags completely off of LJ and onto our Delicious. We will also be creating poster tags and keeping those solely on Delicious as well. All other tags will be on both LJ and Delicious, and we apologize for the inconvenience of having some tags only on Delicious. Our rationale behind it was that the number of author tags is the largest (630 out of 1000, which does not include white author/illustrator/editor tags, the editor tags, or the illustrator tags) and is the category likely to grow the most. We also anticipate poster tags taking up a fair amount of space, ergo, they are Delicious-only as well.


2. I'll be redoing the tag system on both LJ and Delicious so we have more consistent tags, as opposed to "sff," "fantasy," sci-fi/fantasy" and etc. Going forward, only mods will be able to create new tags on LJ (everyone can still decide what tags to put on their own posts). We'll have a "needs new tag" tag (exact wording TBD) for posts that need new tags.


3. The new tag system will be documented to make volunteer work easier! Thank you to the people who volunteered to help; I'll probably be getting in touch with people once there's a system in place.

ETA: Apologies for the confusion! No one needs to know Delicious for this; the mods will be tagging all posts for Delicious. So all posters here will need to do is tag their posts as normal (albeit without author or poster tags), and the mods will import the posts into Delicious.

I have not yet decided (suggestions very welcome!):

1. What categories to use for tags. Right now, the categories I have in mind are author/illustrator/editor (Delicious only), poster (Delicious only), country, race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, religion, topic, genre, original language. None of the tags are mandatory, so as to avoid situations in which we are policing identity.


2. What to do with overlapping categories, such as "Chinese American" or overlaps within categories, such as "Chinese/Japanese." For Delicious, you can narrow down searches within tags, so if you're specifically looking for Black Caribbean writers, you can first click "Black" then add "Caribbean" to narrow down results. LJ doesn't allow this functionality, so we can either a) not include it or b) create tags for it.


3. If it matters if author info and book info don't match. For example, if I am looking for books set in China vs. books by people from China. Currently we have tags like "women writers" or "Black writers" on LJ; do people find this useful?


4. More that will undoubtedly come up as I try to figure things out!

I also wanted to say that I know the act of categorizing in and of itself is political, and that hopefully the tradeoffs being made for ease of use are worth putting things in buckets. But I am not certain it is overall or in specific cases, so comments re: that are particularly welcome.

Awards news

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

50books_poc favourite (the statistics that rachelmanija posted a while ago proved it) Shaun Tan has been awarded the Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers 2009 for Tales from Outer Suburbia.

I haven't read it yet, but I will read it soon. (It *does* contain both text and pictures by Tan.) I'm thrilled by his win (his second - The Arrival was Picture Book of the Year at some point, and I'm almost certain The Red Tree and The Lost Thing were Honour Books in their respective years of publication) and thought that the comm would want to know.