Category: Reading Journal
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it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage
My most recent review filed at (but, I think, not yet published at?) the BSFA Review is of The Art of Space Travel, a collection of Nina Allan’s short fiction. It was a somewhat out-of-the-comfort-zone commission, which is exactly why I chose it; in addition to reading outside my home range, I’m also trying to…
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keep your shit straight
Currently reading, and finding assorted resonances within, Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical re-translation of Beowulf. I’ve seen (admittedly few) accusations that its linguistic choices, exemplified by the use—first line, first word, and throughout the piece thereafter—of “bro” as a parsing of the tricky-to-translate “hwæt”, are somehow gimmicky. It certainly marks it at a translation of its…
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repeating falsehoods like incantations
From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud: An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt…
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Books read 2021
This is the first year I’ve actually kept a proper tally of the books I’ve read; as such, I’m not sure how representative (or not) it is of my usual reading habits. (In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not that representative, given I started keeping track when my mishap at the end of January ensured…
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fear is at the root of such things
From The Stone Sky by N K Jemisin, p210.