Reviews and Comments

It seems I simply can't pick up a Discworld book without finishing it within three days or less.

The Tiffany books were my introduction to Discworld, and they, and the witches in general, are really still my favorites. I don't think I've ever experienced that elusive sense of being represented in fiction as strongly as when I read about Tiffany Aching mispronouncing words because she'd only ever saw them written down. More than that, I admire her (and Mistress Weatherwax). She's responsible and practical and decisive, all virtues that, in my opinion, don't get enough attention in fiction. Probably because authors don't naturally tend to be the practical sort.

I'm continually amazed by how well Pratchett writes women, even the clique-y, bizarre internal politics of tween girl friendships ring true. (If you weren't a Petulia or Anagramma, you've met them.)
Warm, insightful, incredibly funny... It's a Pratchett-book, what more do you need?

A confusing mix when it comes to tone, this story reads mostly as a pulpy space opera, except for those moments where it launches into complicated discussions of linguistics and grammar.

Rydra Wong is a poet with such a great knack for learning languages that it borders on telepathy (body language is a language too, after all), and she uses her talent to decode the messages of the Invaders who, as the name suggests, are at war with her society.

I'm not a linguist, but I believe that the scientific theories on which the premise of this book is based have been debunked , which didn't help my suspension of disbelief. Personally, I was much more interested in another idea Delany introduced: discorporate people. Basically, in the future we prove that ghosts do exist, we just haven't yet developed the technology needed to perceive them. Without technological intervention we simply forget our interactions with the discorporate as soon as they happen, leaving us with nothing but the lingering feeling of being haunted. His vision of a future in which the dead are integrated into society is fascinating, and I would have preferred a book that focused on that idea.

Turns out my dad read this book back in the day, and really enjoyed it! He’s normally not a big reader, so it’s always fun when we get to bond a little over books.

This novel centers on two doomed relationships. That of the main narrator, George, and his friend and love interest Sara, and that of George’s friend, Jonas, and a young psychiatric nurse named Marie.

The problem between George and Sara seems to be that she can’t let go of her attachment to the older man who, essentially, abused her when she was a shy, vulnerable teenager. When he, now a famous pianist, comes to perform in Amsterdam, she can’t bring herself to stay away, and even though she knows he treated her badly, she’s unable to let go of their past and open herself up to genuine, healthy love. Despite that she’s never described as conventionally attractive, yes, the narration even calls her straight-up ugly, she’s actively desired by our main character, as well as other men, which I honestly found rather refreshing.

Jonas is chronically ill and unable to work, so, despite a mutual desire for connection, he feels he has to break off his budding courtship with Marie as he believes he can’t offer her a real future. I was about halfway through, when I started to wonder where the gay themes were supposed to hide, as this all felt very heterosexual to me. Ah, me of little faith. It turns out that the illness in his teenage years that Jonas never really recovered from, was immediately preceded by a sudden attraction (yes, crush even) to a male classmate. (In classic gay-novel-yearning, he’s described as looking like a Greek statue). With my very rudimentary literary analysis skills, I wonder if Jonas’ physical illness (of unclear cause) is meant to parallel Sara’s emotional issues, as his too, could be caused by an inability to let go of a past love.

I’ve read that Sara is actually based on a woman Anna Blaman knew and was in love with, which makes me wonder if Jonas is also partly an autobiographical character. Like him, she was also sickly throughout her life (and she died fairly young, she was only 55 years old).

I enjoyed the prose. It was very old-fashioned Dutch, but also rich and at times, beautiful.

I'm a bit apprehensive about this one. I loved the first three books or so as a child, then I grew up before my local library had a chance to acquire the rest of the series, and now I'm trying to make up for it. This is the first book that expands the setting from the English countryside, and I'm just not sure about it. I feel like that's the setting in which these stories work best, but I'll give it a chance. And while I kind of like Grimalkin as a character, I'm also not really enthusiastic about this introduction of "assassin witches". It feels like Delaney is taking this series from a fantasy series fairly grounded in English folklore, to, I don't know, a shounen anime. Not that I think he has watched a lot of those, but it starts to approach about that amount of realism and the same proportions of eerie spookiness to kick-ass fight scenes.

I generally really like Delaney's approach to witches as villains in these books, he managed to strike a great balance between making them genuinely frightening but also sympathetic. Drawing on a lot of older witch lore (if they're malevolent, they make pacts with the devil, are seductresses and grind baby bones for potions), he's aware enough of the misogynist ideas that were the foundation for many of these superstitions to address those too. You will not find many children's books, that clearly primarily target boys, that make realizing your mentor's sexism is ill-founded an ongoing point of character development. And yet, since when is wielding a knife what makes a witch so frightening? It's a very, ugh, dare I say, male way of approaching this. (I just realized that maybe it's relevant too that Grimalkin, the more sympathetic evil witch fights in a "typically male" way (pointy things) versus the other witches who use more feminine coded methods (seduction, manipulation))

Am I giving too much thought to a children's book? Yes. Will I stop? Never.

At least Mam and Alice are back, and they're always great. Plus, Grimalkin does genuinely promise to be a fun character, though not, in my opinion, because of her vast array of knives.

I was only able to read this book because of the Internet Archive. No local libraries carry it, it's out of print and the cheapest secondhand copy is 50 bucks (and that's without factoring in the costs of shipping it across the ocean...). It's so obscure I couldn't even pirate it. And yet, it's also a cult classic by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a great, but underappreciated author and editor of anthologies of SF/F stories by female authors (I got my profile pic from the cover of one of her anthologies!). It's a damn good 90s horror that I had wanted to read for ages.

I'm well aware that not being able to read a mostly forgotten horror novel isn't the end of the world, but I also know that there are many people in countries that don't have as solid a library system as mine does, who rely on the Internet Archive to access textbooks, academic works and all kinds of learning material. So many important, but niche books will become completely inaccessible to anyone but the people lucky enough to live close to a library carrying it. Which will mostly be people in the global North.

I wasn't very optimistic about IA's chances in court. I know they're going to appeal, but I'm not holding my breath. But if they're forced to stop lending books, they'll be sorely missed. Losing their treasure trove of knowledge will be a huge blow globally.

Tiger Eyes: a story of the future

Non-Dutch readers might know Tonke Dragt as the author of "The Letter for the King", a book which has recently been adapted into a Netflix series (...which I haven't watched.) This is probably also her most famous and beloved book over here. It even received a prize for being the best Dutch children's novel of the past fifty years. She also wrote science fiction for a slightly older audience - what we'd now call YA- and this book is one of those novels.

I'll just say a little bit about her life, because it's so interesting; She was born in what at the time was still the Dutch East Indies, and spend her early teens in an internment camp for Dutch women and children during the Japanese invasion of the country. It was during these years that she started writing, on bits of stolen toilet paper according to the bio in one of her books. You can imagine that stuck with me as a child.

Tiger Eyes is sequel to an older novel, which was published before scientists knew that the surface of Venus was a barren wasteland. Maybe it's therefore her youth in the tropics that led her to imagine the planet as home to a lush, gigantic rainforest "of towering heights and miles across". This in contrast to her vision of future Earth; a dense urban sprawl, dotted by the occasional nature reserve. We all have robotic domestic servants, and rain is scheduled to only fall at night. Tigers are extinct, and anything truly wild and dangerous has to be found off-planet.