Some Books I Loved

 **While 'updated fairy tales' are having a fantastic Renaissance right now, there are few who do it better than Naomi Novik** The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterwards he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. Then the miller’s despoiled daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels for a dowry, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early.  Because that’s what th...

 **The stories that The Iliad and similar epics left out.  The stories of the women of the war** Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death.  And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we? And so here we are, hearing stories that have gone untold for millennia--the stories of the women of the Trojan War.  This book is, simply put, a masterpiece The framing device for th...

 Black History Month was wonderful reading, let's slide right into Women's History Month for March (with Zora Neale Hurston providing a wonderful bridge).  While specifc in general and science fiction in particular have always been a bit of a boy's club, there have always been women who made their mark on the genre (and let's not forget that more or less the first ever Western science fiction novel was written by a woman . . .) Every year, I enjoy going back to some of the badasses who shaped the genre and the voices saying fantastic things today First, a few books of Feminist Speculative Fiction that I have loved: * * * "Where the Wild Ladies Are" by Aoko Matsuda (short fiction; collected 2020) Absolute perfection, modern feminist retellings of classic Japanese myths.  Finally, the women of these stories that have so often been reduced to either monster or victim get to have their time in the spotlight "The Refrigerator Monologues" by Catherynne M. ...

 **Legitimately one of the most astoundingly brilliant and absolutely brutal works of satire I've ever read** This book is dedicated  to all Caucasians in the great republic  who can trace their ancestry  back ten generations  and confidently assert that there are no  black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on  their family trees. OK SO.  Let's talk about this book.  Written in 1931, but could have been published today as a period piece set in the 1930s.  Hell, with a shockingly small number of changes, could have been *set* today.  That's how good of a book this is Let's start at the beginning.  This book, set in then-modern times of Prohibition-era America, is one of the first ever works of Afrofuturism as it imagines a technology that allows Black (or, presumably, anyone) Americans to undergo a treatment that renders them white.  Completely indistinguishable from someone of European descent, these newly white Americans a...

 **Young adult coming-of-age story!  Time loop! (I love me a good timeloop).  And contemporary black characters.  What's not to love?** So. You know that saying “Time is undefeated”? This is a story about the time that Time lost. I don't read a lot of Young Adult, which is why there aren't very many posts in that genre.  This book is very  young adult, without a doubt, although certainly well-written.  It's about first love, about balancing your friendships against your first real relationship (i.e. something everyone  does poorly), it's about the changing relationship with your parents as you approach college, it's about how to understand yourself and your place in the world.  It's full of teenage angst, although usually in a pretty fun way ("Whoever said silence is deafening must’ve been waiting for Kate to contact him, too.") But you know, it's also a timeloop novel, and man am I just a sucker for a good timeloop novel.  After meeting...

 **A fantastic journey told with a unique voice.  If you don't know Karen Lord, you should** I've always liked the narrative structure I call a "road trip" novel.  There's probably a technical term for it, feel free to let me know.  But it's a narrative structure in which basically the only consistent feature is the main character or characters.  Characters are introduced in one part of the novel and then left behind, never to be seen again.  Chekhov's gun remains comfortably on the wall.  Each scene or episode is a new one, and yet (when this type of structure is done well) the main characters change and grow.  It doesn't necessarily have to be an actual "road trip", but that's certainly the simplest way to accomplish this The classic examples on opposite sides of the world are "The Journey to the West" and "The Odyssey", and to some degree any "road trip" novel written in one of those literary traditions is...