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Books 2020 and 2021
Dec. 11th, 2020 08:10 pmThis year has been preeeetty bad for book reading. It's gotten worse and worse for me as the years have gone by. I used to read a book almost every week, and then it went to almost once a month, and then less than that, and now I only read a few a year. My attention is kind of fucked for one, and my habits have me in front of the computer at all times, plus after I graduated and got a full time job I no longer had the spare time to really settle with a book.
According to my records I read a grand total of 8 books this year, which is lame. I read parts of a handful of others, but they weren't completed.
Of those 8 I'd say my favorites were Breath of the Sun by Rachel Felman, and T-Zero by Italo Calvino. They are very different books, even though they can broadly be considered books that straddle sci-fi and fantasy. Breath of the Sun was a great "mundane fantasy" focused on a sort of fantasy himalayan region, with a lot of very good worldbuilding. One of my pleasures is nitpicking worldbuilding so usually I find things that are poorly though out or whatever, but this one was pretty solid. It thinks a lot about the nature of language, religion, minority populations and their negotiations with the majority, and its characters are all engrossing and human. There's some mild F/F. The main character kinda falls for a few different women but this isn't a romance at all. It reads like a good adventure story about mountaineering except the setting is in a completely different world. I definitely recommend it.
T-Zero is more of a lit-fic type fantasy. Calvino is very well known and one of my favorite authors. The story, such as it is, is a collection of chapters that plays with concepts about the early history of the planet, and uses a lot of absurdity and surrealism to fuck with the reader's head. If I had to pick one word to describe Calvino it would be playful, and if I got another it would be mischievous. His stuff is the sort of hyper het that you expect from men of a certain era but what can you do. The stories are good regardless.
Pretty soon I am going to plot out what I want to read, as I usually do, and will immediately disregard those plans on Jan. 1, as usual.
According to my records I read a grand total of 8 books this year, which is lame. I read parts of a handful of others, but they weren't completed.
Of those 8 I'd say my favorites were Breath of the Sun by Rachel Felman, and T-Zero by Italo Calvino. They are very different books, even though they can broadly be considered books that straddle sci-fi and fantasy. Breath of the Sun was a great "mundane fantasy" focused on a sort of fantasy himalayan region, with a lot of very good worldbuilding. One of my pleasures is nitpicking worldbuilding so usually I find things that are poorly though out or whatever, but this one was pretty solid. It thinks a lot about the nature of language, religion, minority populations and their negotiations with the majority, and its characters are all engrossing and human. There's some mild F/F. The main character kinda falls for a few different women but this isn't a romance at all. It reads like a good adventure story about mountaineering except the setting is in a completely different world. I definitely recommend it.
T-Zero is more of a lit-fic type fantasy. Calvino is very well known and one of my favorite authors. The story, such as it is, is a collection of chapters that plays with concepts about the early history of the planet, and uses a lot of absurdity and surrealism to fuck with the reader's head. If I had to pick one word to describe Calvino it would be playful, and if I got another it would be mischievous. His stuff is the sort of hyper het that you expect from men of a certain era but what can you do. The stories are good regardless.
Pretty soon I am going to plot out what I want to read, as I usually do, and will immediately disregard those plans on Jan. 1, as usual.
