Currently reading
Madame Bovary
Siddhartha
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
The Children Star
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Radiant Days
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Footnotes in Gaza
Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking)
I'm glad to hear Viola's voice as well as Todd's in this second volume. This one reminds me of Starhawk's Fifth Sacred Thing in some small part, maybe the exploration of masculinity and violence. I kind of can't believe this series exists.
Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking) (bk. 1)
How strange to read a YA novel so seemingly influenced by feminist utopian & dystopian fiction (Gate to Women's Country, anyone?) and Jonathan Lethem's Girl With Landscape. Wow! Awesome! Plus talking animals. I literally stayed up all night reading this and the sequel.
Deliver Us from Evie
Told from the POV of a younger brother, it's the story of Evie, a small-town farmboy butch who falls in love with the femme daughter of the richest man in town. A butch-femme love story for young adults, with a discussion of class? Why is this book out of print?
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, Book 2)
Still solid but a bit too romancey for my taste. At least the sexual politics are somewhat nuanced, hinting at power relations within heterosexuality under near-future post-capitalism.
PopCo
Thanks to Megan Milks for turning me on to Scarlett Thomas, who's so great. Maybe I enjoyed this so much because I worked at an evil neo-liberal web development agency at the turn of the century, but I think anyone who's critical of advertising and likes cryptography (and mysteries) will love this book. Fun!!!!
Not the End of the World
I'd never thought about exactly how creepy the Noah's Ark story really was until I read this excellent feminist (anti-patriarchal) retelling.
Generation Dead (Generation Dead Novels)
I guess zombies are the new vampires. There's a strange phenomenon at UMass involving zombies, and there's a zombie Jane Austen book apparently, and so on. I've never been a horror fan and have never actually been interested in zombies but this book was strangely compelling and had a few new ideas. It's doing that Sookie Stackhouse style Civil Rights for Monsters extended metaphor (for what, I'm not exactly sure in either case... maybe LGBT movements, maybe immigrants, maybe people with disabilities). I'm both tired of all these sloppy attempts at monsters as extended metaphors and also successfully hailed by the attempts. I dunno. It's obviously going to be a series, and I imagine I'll read the next one. I don't know Daniel Waters but he seems like a smart guy taking a payday with an almost-real idea. Is it me or is the trace of capitalism particularly obvious in the YA section of any given bookstore? So many series, so many Harry Potter or Twilight ripoffs (aka ripoffs of ripoffs)... How many stories really NEED to be a series of books? And yet also there's so much good stuff coming out under the sign of YA...
Trans-Sister Radio
Well, this is one of those terrible and yet for me compulsively readable novels. How do normal people see/deal with gender variance? And by normal people I mean to include aspiring normal people. I always want to know, so I read their (incredibly popular, published by mainstream presses, gigantic advance bearing, totally exploitative) books.Obviously heavily researched, and written by an obviously gender-conforming, heterosexual, Extremely Liberal dude. Not quite as offensive to my sensibilities as Middlesex (the gold standard), but gross and recuperating of the gender binary, heteronormativity, and liberalism. Yuck yuck yuck! I think I need a bath.
The Bruise
I nicely bought this as a gift and then began to read it on the plane home and I'll say this, it's really good. I was just at the AWP and having the feeling that a person can have sometimes which is where are the interesting and smart queer fiction writers, and okay so she's a poet, but still. More TK.
Mind Over Ship
How psyched am I that this is the second in what seems obviously to be a trilogy? I can't say how much I loved COUNTING HEADS so so much, and MIND OVER SHIP more than held up. Honestly, Marusek is for my money the most interesting voice in science fiction today. (Wasn't that a grand pronouncement?)My one beef is with what seems to be the author's bonkers social darwinist worldview (that biological men evolved to be attracted to children and that nature just hasn't caught up with culture yet. Or something.). This is a fairly minor plot point that comes almost 300 pages in, with a few little fake forshadowings earlier. Still, not recommended for people who are understandably traumatized by that sort of wrong-headed justification of abuse.
The Time Traveler's Wife
What I learned from this book is that if you went to Iowa you can write the crappiest piece of fake science fiction/cheesy romance/weird class fantasy and have a giant bestseller. I want my three hours back.
The Manual of Detection
Okay, so this guy can write. I'm not really a mystery-head, but I love how he's playing with the genre and I love how he writes sentences. Go UMass!
East Coast Rising Volume 1 (v. 1)
I like the idea: post-apocalypse, multi-racial, strong women characters, punk rock pirates in New Jersey/NYC waters, suitable for YA audience. I like that it's written & drawn by a woman. But the story's just not there. Then again, I have a hard time getting into the style of manga, and this is definitely heavily influenced. A good solid comic to give a kid who likes manga, but not enough there for adults.
The Vampire Lestat (Vampire Chronicles)
Just re-read this one too. Lots more about mythology than I remembered. And so gay! Just really really gay. How funny that at the time I first read it I thought I was reading between the lines. Nope. Is it me or does the book collide into itself and fall apart about 3/4 of the way through? I was racing, all addict-y, toward the end and at the same time fairly dissatisfied. Too many stories-within-stories, and a weak and boring present day plot (battle of the vampires? yawn). But still really good. If I remember correctly, they fall off after this one. Scratch til it bleeds.
Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls
The first half of this book is kind of genius, then it falls apart into a roiling mass of cliche, as if Lindskold got bored with the story she was telling and just rushed to get the whole thing over with. It's a shame, because the premise is smart--dystopian future, first person narrator who can only speak out loud in found text but can speak to/hear inanimate objects. I'm actually mad about the lost opportunity of this book.
