User Profile

radio-appears Locked account

radio_appears@books.theunseen.city

Joined 2 years, 4 months ago

I read light, but broadly. Currently one of my favorite things is to dig up female sci-fi/fantasy authors from the 70s and 80s. I find it difficult to separate my own personal experience of a book from its "objective" good or bad qualities and rate and review it in a way that could be useful for some hypothetical Universal Reader. I just wanna chat, really.

This link opens in a pop-up window

radio-appears's books

Currently Reading (View all 5)

2025 Reading Goal

3% complete! radio-appears has read 1 of 30 books.

China Miéville: Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1) (2003) 4 stars

Perdido Street Station is a novel by British writer China Miéville, published in 2000 by …

I think this is my favourite of Mielville yet! God, the worldbuilding is so vivid and creative, and the plot is tearing along, the politics are uncompromisingly evoking of Marxism in a time of capitalist realism. This is everything I wanted from him, and almost, but didn't quite, get in his other novels. Highly recommended.

avatar for radio_appears radio-appears boosted
Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17 (Paperback, 1969, Sphere Books) 4 stars

During an interstellar war one side develops a language, Babel-17, that can be used as …

I think i could have gotten more out of this book if I'd been in a different mood. As it was, most of the world building went over my head, and I was a bit annoyed by most of the language philosophy.

avatar for radio_appears radio-appears boosted
Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall (2015, Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.) 5 stars

A haunting told through interviews with folkscene legends

No rating

A horror story about a '70s UK folk band, a pretty amazing era and environment for folk and music in general. Hand made the truly inspired choice to tell the entire story in the form of interviews with the band members, decades after the events of the book, which I'm guessing was inspired by her background in music journalism. It also adds to the realism of this being one of those half-apocryphal, half-confirmed fact music legend stories, and I wonder if it was also inspired by one - specifically the mysterious disappearance of Licorice McKechnie, who sang for The Incredible String Band. Not only is this a great update to the epistolary genre, I also feel it should really play into the current true crime/horror podcast genre that often uses similar story telling devices.

Apart from that though, I found the story a bit mediocre. It's a spooky, very slow-burn …

avatar for radio_appears radio-appears boosted
Lev Grossman: The Magicians (Paperback, 2009, Arrow) 3 stars

A thrilling and original coming-of- age novel about a young man practicing magic in the …

Hear Me Out:

No rating

So. Storytime. In my country, children are separated into different high schools at twelve years old, based on academical aptitude. At the highest level, there are two types of school, gymnasium and atheneum, with the only difference being that at a gymnasium they also teach Greek and Latin. That's the one I went to (not bragging, I was a very mediocre student). As you might imagine, the type of twelve-year old that chooses to go to a gymnasium usually isn't just smart, but also very driven to prove themselves academically. Many of us staked a lot of our self-esteem on our intelligence, especially if we didn't have a lot else going on, like also being athletic or socially gifted. We were all kind of used to being the smartest kid in the room, and then suddenly we weren't. Worse, there were always a couple of stand out, near genius level …

avatar for radio_appears radio-appears boosted
Sophie Mackintosh, Jacqueline Harpman: I Who Have Never Known Men (2019, Penguin Random House) 5 stars

‘For a very long time, the days went by, each just like the day before, …

I who have never known mostly anything

No rating

Expect only questions, no answers from this book.

Have you ever read one of those stories where after the apocalypse, or maybe on an uninhabited island, one person is left, seemingly the only person left alive at all? And the whole story arc is about them dealing with loneliness and trying to find another human? Usually they do, usually one of the opposite sex, the implication being that they'll procreate, thereby solving the loneliness problem for at least two generations. Have you ever thought about that second generation? The siblings who will either have to resort to incest or dying out one by one? I often did. I wondered what it would be like for the last sibling, truly the last person on earth now.

I Who Have Never Known Men is about that last person, an account of her life, and it's as bleak as you would expect it …