50books_poc | Entries tagged with caribbean

stakebait.livejournal.com

This doesn't count toward my 50 because I read it already, but I highly recommend The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust, for those who like science fiction.

esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com

I really liked Crystal Rain. I read it on my own after I was assigned to review Ragamuffin for the SFRA Review. I'm in the process of reviewing Ragamuffin.

The reviews I usually write are meant to be balanced, and very heavy on context. That’s my philosophical position on the purpose of most reviews, so it works for me. Context is everything. But since I’m not writing for any particular publication at the moment, I don’t have to be balanced unless it pleases me to be so, and it does not.

I’ve been looking for some good SF to take up the slack left by the lack of new Heinlein novels. Heinlein surprised me by posthumously producing For Us, The Living, but I don’t think there are any more. I think that Buckell’s kick-ass characters have some resonance with Heinlein’s characters, and I like that. One good thing about having written a review of Ragamuffin is that I can quote it:

…one or two solitary, quasi-immortal characters who are technologically enhanced, augmented human beings hundreds of years old—very much like the characters in Wil McCarthy’s To Crush the Moon, or Heinlein’s Friday. Sometimes the action highlights the separateness of these superhuman people, each of whom is capable of taking out entire squadrons of trained soldiers alone. But the two we meet, Nashara and Pepper, are both part of something larger.

Some of the specific things I liked about Crystal Rain were the vividness of the main characters’ culture, the combat, and the sustained tension of the siege situations.

( Mild spoilers. )
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Current Location: Ohio

sanguinity

31. Tobias S. Buckell, Sly Mongoose

More space-opera-y Buckell goodness! This one is Azteca-centric and set on Chilo, the planet of the dense, poisonous, stormy atmosphere with the floating cities that showed up at the end of Ragamuffin. (Mm! I like stories where the environment has the force of a character.) This one is male-centric again, but didn't feel as men-all-the-time-men as Crystal Rain did -- the main character is a thirteen year-old-boy, his two foil characters are Pepper and a teenage girl from a wealthier city. (For the life of me, I cannot figure out what scene is portrayed on the cover -- is there a point where Pepper and Katerina are fighting together, outside the city, during the final battle? I can't remember it, if there is.)

Sly Mongoose is again a thematic shift from the first two -- I like that Buckell doesn't write the same book over and over -- with lots of thematic undercurrents about community-wide (nation-wide?) poverty, and trying to survive in an environment controlled by wealthy, powerful communities that don't much care if yours lives or dies (well, except that if the crisis gets too bad, they'd have to do something, and as much as they might resent that, their choices might well be intolerable to you). There are also discussions of how the privilege of wealth plays out on an interpersonal level, and women finding ways to get what they want despite the patriarchy they have to work around, past, and through. Buckell also continues a bit of the cyber-punkness of the previous novel, with thematic discussions of open-source democracy and consensus. (I kept expecting a stronger exploration/critique of that than I ever got; that's probably me projecting the book I want to read, rather than the books that Buckell has tended to write. There's chewiness in these books, but he generally goes heavy on the rollicking and light on the toothiness.)

And true to prediction, the story has telescoped out again from the previous books: again, there is more going on past the margins of the story than any of the characters can get a good look at. And because they can't get a good look at it, I can't get a good look at it. I crave book four.

badgerbag.livejournal.com

This week I read Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson; it's a collection of sort of mythical or magical-fantastic short stories, Caribbean-Canadian with lots of fantastic or ghostly elements from Trinidad and Jamaica. There were a couple that were more science fictiony including the future where body switching is possible but expensive, and the future where the air is saturated with glass dust so it kills you to be outside unprotected. I liked the stories very much, especially the last story with the incredibly creepy sex toy body suits that were also duppys. (Duppies?) It was creepy but not too scary, and really great in how it showed the tensions in a sexual relationship, in the subtleties of how people think about each other & communicate.

The story about Tan-Tan and Dry Bone reminded me a little of Amos Tuotola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts though I haven't read it in a long time.

Also? Fisting story! Butch woman! Non U.S. context for trans characters! That made me happy.

The stories inter-related beautifully at times. The glass in the air story, for example, led into another story where glass was important - which was echoed later in the duppy sex toy story where there was broken glass. Same with eggs, and pregnancy - and of course, skin. All those echoes built up and left a big impression on me by the end of the book.

If I have any criticism it is that occasionally from like, sentence three, I could tell "And here is a story about a child molester" before I had any time to build up investment in the character, or "And in this story the guy is going to be an abusive jerk" when maybe that should not have been obvious! A couple of the stories squicked me out too much - especially the one from the point of view of the child molester. I think actually that people who like horror and dark fantasy and super gothy things would *really* like this book! I don't usually like that, but I enjoyed the book very much. It gave me uneasy dreams, and made my day feel a little more unreal in its normality.

were-duck.livejournal.com

This has been on my reading list for quite a while, and I finally got around to it yesterday. I read it in one morning and loved it.
( Cut for spoilers and review )

kate_nepveu

My first two books for the challenge. Unlike some, I am going to count books I "was going to read anyway," partly because the challenge might prompt me to pick books up sooner—and given my to-be-read bookcase, that's no small thing—and partly because I want to see what the overall distribution looks like at the end of the calendar year. All of these are crossposted from my booklog, with links to the original posts at the end of the review.

First, John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, a non-fiction popular-level linguistics work:

( review )

Second, Tobias S. Buckell, Sly Mongoose, an SF novel:

( review )

mizchalmers.livejournal.com

Hiya, new to the community, please fire if I say anything pantsless, delighted to be here. All links to Powells because Amazon donates to the GOP :)

1. Shaun Tan, The Arrival

I'm going to cheat and count this as my first read for the poc challenge, even though it was actually part of an earlier catch-up-on-what's-happening-in-graphic-novels lovefest. I'm counting it because, even though I read it in January of 2009, I'll be amazed if I read anything better this year.

People recommend Australian books to me all the time, and I plow through 'em, often merely out of a sense of duty. With The Arrival, I didn't even realize Tan was Australian until I was half way through. This wordless novel is a delight and a masterpiece. The experience of moving to a foreign land and trying to remake your life there, missing your family like part of your body, misunderstanding everything in horribly embarrassing ways: nailed.

2. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life

I'd read "Hell is the Absence of God" elsewhere and liked it, so it was a pleasure to spend more time with Chiang. He seems to have two main schticks, closely related. The first group, including "Hell" and "Tower of Babylon", explore with utmost rigour the formal implications of a given system: Babylonian cosmology in the second case and Christian theology in the first. The end of "Hell", which I won't spoil, made me as a recovering Sydney Anglican laugh until tears ran down my face.

"Seventy-two Letters" is arguably one of these tease-out-the-system stories, its system being how golems might work, but it's twisted around a great example of Chiang's other schtick, which is the system, typically linguistic, that he comes up with on his own. In the case of the golems, it's an entirely new mechanism for the transmission of genetic information. In the case of my favourite piece, "Story of Your Life", it's an alien language with a very strange construction of time.

I found the beginning of "Story" very difficult, because part of its premise is the death of a child. I have two daughters and they have changed forever the way I feel about child peril as a plot device. Done poorly it destroys, for me, the suspension of disbelief. The pain of it is like a black hole sucking everything else in. Maybe this is how rape survivors feel about casual rape in fiction, or people of colour about casual racism? Done well it's something I devour: I loved Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination even though it was about the death of her son. The difference can be subtle - respect, maybe, or the acknowledgement of pain.

I was afraid "Story" would be the other kind of story. In fact it's something weirder and subtler altogether, a brilliant meditation on time and free will and language, mediated through a mother's love for her daughter. If you knew then what you know now, would you still have gone ahead and done it? Well, would you? Imagine a different way of being with that question, in the world. This one will remain with me for a long, long time.

3. Anita Heiss, I'm Not Racist But...

4. Doris Pilkington, Rabbit Proof Fence

5. Larissa Behrendt, Home

I'll be including lots of Australian Aboriginal writers in my fifty, because I'm a white Australian expat, and as such, I view Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" more or less as documentary. I could reel off a bunch of stats about the effects on Aboriginal Australians of being dispossessed from their land and made the objects of active and passive genocide for 200 years, but why should I appropriate their stories when my people have already appropriated everything else? The only thing I can do at this point, I think, is to listen. And reading Aboriginal authors is how I'm going to try and listen.

Anita Heiss's poems are not highly-wrought artifacts; they're rants written down to be read aloud, and Heiss's plain, urgent, funny voice comes through loud and clear. The poems are most effective, at least to me, when they're addressed to exactly those white Australians who think they're not part of the problem - professors of anthropology and Aboriginal studies, lefty poets and intellectuals. (Or how about white writers living in San Francisco and posting to anti-racist LJ communities. Hi, Anita!)

In one especially sharp piece Heiss outlines exactly the difference between a white poetry reading (wine and cheese, complaints about the Volvo and the mortgage) and a black one (angry, political, mourning). White privilege is precisely being able to think about racism for a bit, castigate oneself and come to all the approved conclusions, and then go away and think about something else. Privileged people are dilettantes by definition.

Rabbit Proof Fence - the source material for the amazing film - and Home have both been difficult for me, in revealing ways. It's not that I flinch from the subject matter, except insofar as everyone with a pulse has to flinch from child abduction, rape, the long vile litany of abuse. It's actually tough for an odd reason, one that has to do with the different uses to which story is put in my culture and in theirs. I'm a nerdy English major with a yen for the Napoleonic wars and great Victorian statesmen. Narrative, to me, is about character; complex recesses of the psyche illuminated by a bit of dialog, painted with a fine brush on ivory.

Aboriginal stories seem to work in different ways, and this is maybe best illustrated by the myths embedded in Behrendt's Home. Here, Wurranah has stolen two of the Seven Sisters to be his wives. He orders them to go and strip bark off some eucalyptus trees so that his fire will burn hotter.

"But we must not cut bark. If we do, you will never see us again."

"Your talking is not making my fire burn. If you run away, I will catch you and I will beat you."

The two sisters obeyed. Each went to a different tree and as they made the first cut into the bark, each felt her tree getting bigger and bigger, lifting them off the ground. They clung tight as the trees, growing bigger and bigger, lifted them up towards the sky.

Wurrannah could not hear the chopping of wood so he went to see what his wives were doing. As he came closer, he saw that the trees were growing larger and larger. He saw his wives, high up in the air, clinging to the trunks. He called to them to come down but they did not answer him. The trees grew so large that they touched the sky, taking the girls further and further away.

As they reached the sky, their five sisters, who had been searching in the sky for them, called out, telling them not to be afraid. The five sisters in the sky stretched their hands out to Wurrannah's two wives and drew them up to live with them in the sky, forever.

Lots to love there - the Miyazaki-esque trees growing and growing with the girls clinging to their trunks, the upper branches knocking on the sky in an echo of Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon. But I am wondering: why did Wurranah's wives warn him? Did they love him in spite of themselves, in spite of the abduction, in spite of his abuse? The stomach rebels at the thought. Or were they issuing the obligatory Sybiline warning, knowing that he would ignore it and meet his fate? Why warn him, though? Why not just leave him to it, and ride the trees to the stars?

I want to know how the wives felt; I want their motives. But here as when I did oral history with my mother and pressed her like this on points of her story, the answer to my badgering is a tolerant smile and a shake of the head. I am asking the wrong question. I have missed the point. Not everyone's insides work the way mine do. My internal narrator is specific, culturally-mediated and quirky, not a universal human truth. I think? Or have I misunderstood the non-answer?

6. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

So much here, so much to love - the dead-accurate and sympathetic portrayal of a fat science fiction fanboy desperately trying to get laid, the catastrophic collision of third-world dictatorship politics and irresistible sex. But for me, exile, the truest part was that yearning, aching undertow familiar to anyone who has lost his or her moorings:

...after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong...

7. Angela Johnson, The First Part Last

Picked up after I saw it recommended here. A fast, beautiful and shattering read, like a catastrophic blood clot to the brain. So many off-hand character details that slew me: the grandmother refusing to help when the teenage dad was crashing, so he would not learn to depend on her; the warm neighbour who can't save the situation, for much the same reason; the teenage mother's parents, their austere apartment, their quiet hopes for their daughter. The first of three and I can't wait to read the rest.

That's me for now. In my to-read pile: Felicia Pearson's autobiography, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Tobias Buckell, Doreen Baingaina.

sophinisba

Hi everyone, I'm new and my goal is to read 50 books by people of color this calendar year and post reviews once a month. So far I'm a little ahead with reading and a little behind with posting. These are the books I finished in January:

1. Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker, 2004
This is a novel made up of linked short stories about Haitian and Haitian American characters, most of them somehow related to stories of political violence, especially the torture of prisoners. It's not clear until the end how the different parts relate to each other and at times I felt a little lost as far as that goes, but all the characters felt very real and all their stories were interesting and moving, even when I wasn't sure what year I was in, and even though I know very, very little about Haitian history. I liked that there were characters from different social positions and different sides of the conflict but they were all sympathetic, all presented as human beings. I liked that one of the women had an ex-girlfriend and this was part of her character but not the point of it. Mostly I just loved Edwidge Danticat's prose! I hadn't read anything of hers before but I've got the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory out from the library now and I'm also very interested in I will definitely be reading the memoir Brother, I'm Dying, which was reviewed here.

2. Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro, 1899
I had to read this for school, but I enjoyed it anyway. :) Most critics and regular Brazilians consider Machado to be the greatest Brazilian writer of all time, and this is one of his most important books. This is a novel about a friendship, courtship, and marriage in which the husband, Dom Casmurro, is the unreliable narrator. In some ways it's incredibly frustrating that we never get to hear the woman's side of the story, but that's also what's so fascinating about it, that the book is partly about her being silenced, and over a hundred years later readers continue to argue about what actually happened in the story. The writing is also just fun, with lots of crazy asides in which the narrator addresses the reader or talks about the construction of the novel. ( Read more... )

3. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, 1997
I was excited to read this because back in college I'd been blown away by Kincaid's novel Lucy and her essay A Small Place. My Brother is a memoir about the author's younger brother dying of AIDS in Antigua in the 1990s. What I liked about it was one of the things I loved about those other books – the raw honesty of it. Kincaid doesn't hide her anger at her mother for the way she treats her children, at her brother for being careless about his own and others' lives, at Antiguans in general for trying to ignore this disease, and for not taking care of people who are sick and suffering. I liked this book, I got sucked into it and read it quickly and found it very affecting, but it I wouldn't recommend it as readily as I do those other two. (I'm also planning to read her novel Annie John soon.) To me this read like something Kincaid had to write in order to deal with this horrible event in her life, but where she wasn't really thinking that much about the reader, or that's my explanation for why I didn't connect as much with this one.

4. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993
I know a lot of you have read this already and it's been reviewed in the comm before, so I won't summarize here. I had a little trouble getting into this at the first but I loved the second half and I'm looking forward to reading Parable of the Talents. ( Read more... )

5. Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, 1998
I know some Asian American readers have had strong negative reactions to this book and others have loved it. It seems to work for most people as a memoir, as one guy talking about his experience as a Chinese American, deciding (or having his parents decide for him) how much his Chineseness is going to be part of his life and his identity. I really like how honest and thoughtful he is, that he not only acknowledges that his Chinese language skills are not good or that some Asian Americans would call him a "banana" because he "acts white", but that he really talks about different sides of what that means. I also like that he talks about people he knows who've experienced being Asian American in completely different ways, and he talks about how his own attitude has changed throughout his life, or sometimes how it changes in the course of one conversation.

Some people don't like the parts of this book that go into bigger generalizations about history and assimilation and the meaning of race and ethnicity in the US. But I really loved these parts too! I figure it's not that you need to agree with him on everything, but he's putting out some really interesting ideas and the writing is elegant; it was a real pleasure for me to read.

gwyneira.livejournal.com

When the ferocious Azteca threaten to overwhelm the world of Nanagada, John deBrun holds the key to its salvation. The problem is that he's been an amnesiac for twenty-seven years, since he washed up on the shores of his adopted country. Now he must race to recover the ancient device which could save his people before the Azteca and their gods destroy everything he's learned to hold dear.

Easily the best thing about Crystal Rain is its excellent, unusual worldbuilding, based on Caribbean culture. Even though he's clearly got a huge amount of background worked out, Buckell is really good about not infodumping, just adding in details as he goes along to create a more and more complex picture of the world he's created. One small issue: like

sanguinity, I did wish he'd explained where the Azteca civilization comes from, as I don't see how a dead culture could have been imported to the world the same way the Caribbean culture was (though I wonder if the Teotl are responsible for it somehow). I hope he'll explain this more in future books.

I have to admit I was never all that invested in the characters, and I really, really wished there were more women. I felt that the prose was a little clunky in spots, but the dialogue was great, with the easy rhythm of the Caribbean-inspired speech and the more formal language used by a few characters. But even with a few nitpicks, the plot moves along at such a pace that I was pulled along with it, and the worldbuilding made me very much want to read more by Buckell. I guess I'd better get my hands on Ragamuffin soon!

sanguinity

23. Tobias S. Buckell, Crystal Rain.

Vibrant adventure quest novel that falls somewhere between Military SF and Space Opera, with a vigorous dash of clash-of-civilizations, war-with-aliens, seafaring adventure, and arctic expedition thrown in. I must say, I was quite tickled by Buckell's ability to so deftly shift tropes and mash seemingly unrelated genre-loves of mine. (Except perhaps these genres are not as unrelated as I imagine? There is more than one author who has successfully put Hornblower in space, after all.)

The most distinctive thing about this novel, of course, is the world-building: the human settlement is Caribbean Diaspora (the planet itself named New Anegada), a blessed departure from North American Generic In Space. I struggled sometimes with the dialect that most characters used -- I don't parse the grammar correctly, and thus often missed emotional nuance -- but I liked seeing a human colony that had a specific heritage that extended beyond a one-note label. Also, as someone who grew up with far too many Erich von Däniken books in the house, I'm endlessly amused that the gods in both of these colonies really are super-advanced aliens. (Also, I feel respected as a reader that the aliens-as-gods element wasn't some big climatic reveal, but part of the up-front worldbuilding.)

Some things about the book bothered me. Even though the role normally cast within the fantasy genre as "POC/non-human hordes" was filled by light-skinned Aztecs (overrunning mostly dark-skinned Nagandans), they still felt like traditional POC hordes. (Also, I'm still not satisfied as to where this ultra-traditional Aztec culture was supposed to have sprung from?) And, as always, I pick at the xenobiology -- where does the energy for repeated, within-hours regeneration come from, especially given (as is revealed in a throwaway line in the sequel) that the aliens' metabolism is incompatible with the world they are trapped on?

But as ever, that is picking at the world-building, a reflexive habit of my brain, and unrelated to whether I enjoyed the book or not. Which I did, very much, because Buckell tells a darn good yarn, and throws in lots of interesting mind-candy for me to play with to boot.

24. Tobias S. Buckell, Ragamuffin.

Sequel to Crystal Rain, and heavier on the Space Opera end of the mix than the previous book, with shadings off into cyberpunk. Whereas Crystal Rain felt very male-centric (despite the presence Dihana, the Prime Minister of Nangada), here we get to follow a kick-ass woman warrior around. A kick-ass woman warrior whom I adore. When we cut away mid-book to find out what was happening on Nanganda, I confess that I threw a brief temper tantrum: I don't WANT John DeBrun; I want more Nashara! (Fortunately, we DO get more Nashara. More and more Nashara!)

Ragamuffin is far more philosophic than its swashbuckling predecessor. The human diaspora has not fared well in space, and in most places is under the "protective" knuckle of powerful non-human societies. Various bodies of humans have developed different responses: some choose the prosperity and mobility of becoming alien bits, some choose the highly-restricted freedoms of reservations, some claim the status of enforcers of alien power structures (self-justifying their actions as being a net benefit to humanity), and there are revolutionaries and personal resistances of many shapes and motivations. Who shares your motivations enough to be trustworthy? Anyone? And in the absence, who shares your motivations enough that they might allow themselves to be used?

The ending begs for a sequel, and I do hope that Buckell will provide it. I want to know if the Teotl survive, and how trustworthy they aren't (fwiw, I don't think they're any less trustworthy than the various human factions in the book). I want to see the next round against the Satrapy, plus maybe a fleshing-out of their background. And I'm dying to know: will the next book pick up where Ragamuffin left off, or will its perspective be another telescoping-out again, similar to the transition from Crystal Rain to Ragamuffin? Is there, once again, far more going on than any of these characters realize?

badgerbag.livejournal.com

I bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on

ethereal_lad's recommendation but was afraid it would be too literary for me, too New Yorker-ish and twee.

No! Not at all!

It's GREAT! I was drawn in immediately. By page 3 I was laughing hysterically and yelping to everyone in the house about the fantastic characters, the jokes, and the footnotes which are half about Dominican history and half quotes from the Silmarillion. Oscar's story, his sister's, his mom's, U.S. pop culture, geek culture, the history of Trujillo and the politics of the D.R. for the rest of the century, everything mixes up together to build an amazing, intense, and deeply nerdy view of the world. If you're a science fiction or comic book or role playing game geek, bump this book up to the top of your reading list.

Don't worry about not getting the Spanish bits, that is what the Internet is for. Look it up if you must. But you can enjoy the book without knowing what "carajo" or "coñazo" means. It's just more fun if you do know.

Note that you can buy it in Spanish if you like.

ALSO

I just noticed Junot Díaz is really, really cute.

gwyneira.livejournal.com

Mer is a plantation slave in the Caribbean, a healer who both hopes for and fears liberation. Jeanne Duval is a Paris entertainer, lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Thais is a prostitute in Alexandria, who journeys to Jerusalem. Weaving their stories together across centuries are their shared experiences of oppression and a mysterious spirit who moves within them, prompting their actions, living their lives, and giving them hope. Hopkinson's style is lyrical, sensual, and full of vitality, and I loved her use of mythology to tie the novel's different threads together.

This was a challenging and thought-provoking book, especially as my first book for this community. The various settings were very new to me, and it was a shock to be plunged abruptly into the book's first scene, of Mer making a physical examination of a pregnant fellow slave. Hopkinson uses lots of words and phrases which I had to figure out from context, and I could feel that my unfamiliarity with the language and the settings made it more of a challenge to engage with the book, though eventually its sheer energy and magic drew me in. By contrast, I had no problems engaging with the book I'd just finished, a historical fantasy set during the Italian Renaissance, much more familiar territory to me. It was really interesting to have such a clear demonstration of what my usual reading boundaries are and why it's valuable to stretch them.

kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com

I finally finished this last night, and while I did have some problems with it, overall I enjoyed it. Amazon has some good, non-spoilery summaries of the plot, so I'll just move on to my own impressions here.

It reminded me somewhat of Middlesex, in that in addition to the main character's story, it also tells the story of the parents and grandparents. Oscar Wao is only a bit over 300 pages, and yet I never felt like it was rushed, even with a story spanning three generations (and giving time to Oscar's sister Lola as well, and later in the book even the narrator becomes a character in the story, though he is still focusing on Oscar and Lola rather than himself). Diaz has a nice, tight style that I really like. Very conversational, but not padded. It felt a little slow at first, and it was easy to put down and walk away from for days at a time, but about a third of the way in, I started finding it really hard to put down.

It almost feels like it's written in three languages. English, of course, with a ton of Spanish words and phrases (which are easy enough to figure out via context if you don't know Spanish (or like me, have forgotten most of what you learned)), but there are also so many geek references thrown in that it feels like that's a third language as well. I really enjoyed the style of it.

There are a lot of footnotes, which I both liked and disliked. I liked them, because I did end up learning a lot about the history of the Dominican Republic, which I sadly knew nothing about before (the most I can say is that the name Trujillo rang a bell, though I would not have been able to tell you what country he had ruled). But I do dislike getting interrupted in the middle of reading to have to go read a footnote.

( As for what was actually problematic... (no spoilers) )

Current Music: GLAY - Starless Night

chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com

Lots of people have done reviews of this already, so I won't add another full one, but I liked this very much. It starts out from the POV of someone on the other side of the wormhole, and you really should have read Crystal Rain first before you read this one, although you don't see people from that story until the second half of the book. Lots of action!

I did have a bit of trouble following the many storylines here, so I think overall I liked Crystal Rain a bit better as far as readability. I give this a 4/5.

They really need to make movies out of these books! I can't wait to read Sly Mongoose (the third one, which comes out in August). :D

Current Mood: bouncy

littlebutfierce

Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post-1965 Filipino Americans - Leny Mendoza Strobel. ( Read more... )

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction - Edited by Nalo Hopkinson. ( Read more... )

Of Love and Other Monsters - Vandana Singh. ( Read more... )

Filipino Women in Detroit: 1945-1955: Oral Histories from the Filipino American Oral History Project of Michigan - Joseph A. Galura & Emily P. Lawsin. ( Read more... )

Filter House - Nisi Shawl. ( Read more... )

Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women - Edited by Asian Women United of California. ( Read more... )

Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage: The First Quarter Storm and Related Events - Jose F. Lacaba. ( Read more... )

Topography of War: Asian American Essays - Edited by Andrea Louie & Johnny Lew. ( Read more... )

x-posted to my reading journal,

furyofvissarion

oyceter

De la Cruz, Melissa - Masquerade
I am not quite sure why I read this, as the first book was fairly mediocre, as was this. But I did, and I will probably pick up the others as well, unless something is sporkworthily bad. (more)

Hopkinson, Nalo, and Uppinder Mehan, ed. - So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy
I am a really bad person to write about this book, as I generally suck at reading short stories that focus more on the conceptual than the emotional. I found most of the stories that I "got" were the ones I wanted to argue with ("Native Aliens" and "Lingua Franca" in particular), and the ones with the neatest concepts were the ones I didn't really "get" (a lot). I, uh, largely feel like I fail at reading comprehension. (more)

Narayan, Kirin - Love, Stars, and All That
Gita Das is an Indian grad student at Berkeley, where she's overwhelmed by culture shock and her Aunty Saroj's astrologer's prediction that she will find her true love that March. (more)

Cisneros, Sandra - Caramelo
I found this in the YA section of my library, and I have to say, I am very confused by this classification. Even though the heroine is Celaya, who grows from child to teenager in the book, the book itself is a giant, sprawling family saga of the Reyes, encompassing about three generations and at least ten side stories. (more)

Lee Iksop and S. Robert Ramsey - The Korean Language
As noted in the title, this is a book about the Korean language. It's written mostly for linguists, which is why I skimmed a huge portion, as I have very little knowledge about linguistics and only a tiny bit more about Korean, largely thanks to yhlee. (more)

Thomas, Sherry - Private Arrangements
Gigi Rowland and Camden Saybrook have been married for ten years, but for reasons unbeknownst to anyone but them, they have been living on separate continents since the day after they got married. We, of course, know that something tragic must have happened, and indeed, it was a Really Bad Mistake on Gigi's part that then multiplied like gremlins. (more)

sumofparts.livejournal.com

Not a warning but just a note to say I couldn't really express what I thought about the books in an especially meaningful manner but here you go.

Cut for rambling and pseudo-spoilers.

1. Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler
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2. Goddess for Hire by Sonia Singh
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3. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
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4. Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
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poilass.livejournal.com

I haven't been reading much the last few months, and have been procrastinating on writing up the books I have read, but now that I have begun procrastinating on starting my Yuletide story instead you can expect to see more from me ;/.

1. Ted Chiang's "Stories of Your Life" is a book of short stories, all of which are excellent and clever and will make you to think. The impact is somewhat lessened though, by reading all the stories one after another -- better to put it down after each and keep coming back to it. Very Highly Recommended. Even if you don't think you like short stories. Or science fiction!

2. I have the vague idea that "Mind of My Mind" by Octavia E. Butler is part of a series or something, but I haven't read any others. Certainly it stands perfectly well on its own. It concerns a 4000 year old sociopathic superhuman, his human breeding program, and his telepathic daughter/rival. Butler is a master storyteller, which makes this a very unsettling novel as it puts you in the heads of a number of utterly vile people, and even makes you hope for their success. Recommended, though I doubt I will read it again.

3. I am sort of cheating with "Brown Girl In the Ring" by Nalo Hopkinson, which I read shortly before I joined this comm, but I think some of you might be interested, especially since Hopkinson is so often one of the first people mentioned as an sf writer of colour whenever anyone asks for recs. I liked the setting of the book - a future Toronto abandoned by the rest of the country, and inhabited only by those who didn't or couldn't leave -, the day to day stuff at the start, and the down to earth use of an Afro-Caribbean magic system; I was less interested in the villain and the climactic showdown etc. This is not an anti-rec by any means, I admire the scope and originality of the book -- I just don't love it as I'd hoped to. I think there's an excellent chance of Hopkinson writing a book I like better at some point though, and any comments on her other books would be appreciated.

4. "Iron Shadows" by Steven Barnes has so very, very bad a prologue I laughed out loud and almost put it straight back down again. Fortunately he manages to recover quite well from starting off with a heroine who has blue eyes, blonde ringlets, superb legs, martial arts skills and a tragic past (and even makes up for it somewhat by describing the male lead as looking like "a WWF wrestler moonlighting as a librarian"). It is a supernatural thriller, with a sex cult and some detecting type stuff. It reminded me a bit of Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde books, and is somehow very ... 1990's. I mean, even if it wasn't set in the '90's, I would still know that was when it was written, you know? So, hey, if you liked the Tregarde books and have a freakish nostalgia for the 90's, this might just be the airplane novel for you! Personally I found the author's obsession with heterosexuality tiresome, but the plot has some surprises and there are a few moments of humour. All in all, I can't really recommend it, but I'd be willing to give another of his books a try, if the library had one.

In conclusion: Chiang: yay, Butler: yay-ish, Hopkinson: hm, Barnes: eh.

chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com

This is an interesting book.

Three women (a healer slave in what I guess is 17th century Haiti, an actress in 19th century Paris, and a prostitute in 4th century Egypt) are linked by encounters with a goddess. The story is about their lives and how the goddess assists them and their families at various times.

The goddess/narrator gives the story an almost allegorical tone as she philosophizes about the Ginen (African) peoples and how they spread over the world.

Bring a strong stomach and an open mind. There's alternate sexuality of every kind, violence, and very gritty depictions of life. I literally almost lost my lunch at one scene.

What I liked about the book was how down to earth these very different women were, grounded, even as they each had to make difficult decisions as to how they lived (some decisions didn't turn out well, either, which made it more real).

If you like historical or literary fiction, you'll probably like this book.

chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com

I read this recently and am looking forward to reading Ragamuffin, the sequel.

I got excited about this book because it was Caribbean SF with airships (I mean, who wouldn't be excited about that?) but this story just feels real. The cadences of the characters' speech set the scenery as much as the descriptions of the jungle around them (which are excellent). I felt like I was there in the story, something you don't often get with an author's first book. I was impressed. :)

The fact that John LeBrun is ... different ... in color, speech, and in his lack of memory of his past, just adds to the mystery of what is going on. The author uses John's little boy, Jerome, as a way to relate stories of wormholes and other worlds and the alien conflict these people have fallen into without dumping information at us or making the child a placeholder -- he has a story just as real as the adults'.

And Pepper just kicks ass. I love him!

The only thing I didn't like as well was how little mention was made of John's wife. I would have liked to see more of her point of view.