#sffbookclub

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Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, …

Babel

5 stars

Content warning I don't think I can review this without some vague spoilers

Babel (EBook, 2022, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Content warning First Interlude of Book 5

Babel (EBook, 2022, Harper Voyager) 4 stars

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History …

Edit: This quote was actually from another book I’m reading. See the quote from In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado for proper context. Sorry!

There was an idea somewhere in this book (early on perhaps?) that talked about the etymology of archive or archivist, how it’s an act of policy, governance, power. Even though I can’t recall the quote since I didn’t get a chance to write it down, it’s been a recurring haunting; sometimes insidious, other times ethereal and fascinating. The idea isn’t new, but peering under the hood into the history of the word and then filtering that through real historical context gives it more verisimilitude (more than this even, but words fail me) in my mind. #SFFBookClub

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, …

Content warning ch15 spoiler

Wondrous Journeys In Strange Lands (Paperback, 2020, Interlink) 3 stars

Award-winning historical fantasy and literary folktale. Winner of the presigious Etisalat award.

In a tent …

Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands

3 stars

This is a belated #SFFBookClub read for me, as I finally was able to get my library's only copy of this book.

Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands reads like a set of short stories in a travelogue, where each chapter in this book felt like its own self-contained adventure. Most loose ends for each story get (almost too) neatly tied off before the next, and Qamar felt to me emotionally as almost a different character each time around. All of this together made the book feel a little shallow to me, as most of what I got out of it thematically was just a desire for travel.

The in-world "Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands" book connects both Qamar's parents as well as Qamar with other characters, especially given that we find out that there's only a half-dozen copies of it made, but it felt underused. By the end, it seemed …

How High We Go in the Dark (Hardcover, 2022, William Morrow) 4 stars

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …

How High We Go in the Dark

5 stars

I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.

It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.

It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background …

How High We Go in the Dark (Hardcover, 2022, William Morrow) 4 stars

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …

How High We Go in the Dark

4 stars

A series of bleak, gritty glimpses of what's in store for us over the next few decades.

The tone is lightened a bit here and there with injections of optimism, but I think it works against itself a little when the optimism feels unwarranted.

The way that the characters from the different stories are linked reminds me a bit of Cloud Atlas (although I only saw the movie (sorry)).

#SFFBookClub

Wondrous Journeys In Strange Lands (Paperback, 2020, Interlink) 3 stars

Award-winning historical fantasy and literary folktale. Winner of the presigious Etisalat award.

In a tent …

Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands

3 stars

I enjoyed the setting, and some of the substories were compelling, but as a whole it was too rambling and incohesive for me.

I feel like it would have worked better as a series of stories about different people from the same village or whatever instead of repeatedly being like "despite being in the middle of this incredibly urgent life crisis, the main character decides to spend six months teaching an older woman to fold laundry" or "despite having a very bad outcome two chapters ago, the main character decides to engage in exactly the same dangerous behavior with no additional precautions"

#SFFBookClub

She Who Became the Sun (Paperback, Mantle) 4 stars

An absorbing historical fantasy, She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan reimagines the rise …

She Who Became the Sun

5 stars

She Who Became the Sun is a historical fantasy duology, retelling the rise of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. This is a reread for me before I get to the sequel for a belated #SFFBookClub sequel month.

My favorite part of this first book is the ways that the major characters all uniquely grapple with their own gendered otherness:

Ouyang is an enslaved warrior eunuch working for the Mongol prince of Henan's son, Esen. Ouyang is the most masculine of characters, but copes with his otherness through anger and shame. He so strongly denies the femininity that other people project onto him that he extrudes that rejection into misogyny. His relationship with men is similarly uneasy and hits a classic trans refrain: "he had no idea if it was a yearning for or a yearning to be, and the equal impossibility of each of those hurt …