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finished reading The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell (The Last Kingdom, #1)

Bernard Cornwell: The Last Kingdom (2015) No rating

The first book in Bernard Cornwell's number one bestselling series The Warrior Chronicles, on the …

Didn't quite fill the Kristin Lavrandsdattir-sized hole in my heart but i binged this audiobook in a day while repainting my room and it was a certain type of fun

reviewed Martyr!: a Novel by Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar: Martyr!: a Novel (2024, Knopf)

Poet Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) explores the allure of martyrdom in this electrifying …

A novel written by a poet

It was good! There was a plot point early on that kind of fucked with my suspension of disbelief and bugged me like a splinter the whole rest of the read, and some neatness in the plot that I wasn't totally buying/in the mood for. But I'm a sucker for expert prose, subtly handled subject matter, and readability so it won me over.

Naomi Klein, TBC Author: Doppelganger (2023, Penguin Books, Limited)

Read this because I wanted to recommend it to a few people (based on some interviews I heard while she was doing press for the book). A surprisingly enjoyable read, even if I don't align with her politically in a lot of ways and find her a bit insufferable, I do think she lays out a lot of stuff about what's weird about the present moment quite well. Would give to my mom

Paul Murray: Bee Sting (2023, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

An unhappy Irish family plumbs the depths of their unhappiness, each in their own way.

Soapy and enjoyable

The small town nuclear family setting made me feel so claustrophobic and a few hundred pages in, right when I was starting to wonder why I was still reading this weird family book, all the characters and the story started blowing open. Really well crafted, nothing revolutionary but a solid book to get wrapped into for a few weeks.

Guadalupe Nettel, Rosalind Harvey: Still Born (2022, Fitzcarraldo Editions)

"Two best friends share an aversion to 'the human shackles' of motherhood, only to discover …

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Really simple prose and a kind of overdone premise made me feel like I knew what I was getting into, but the story sucked me in really quickly and I ended up finishing it in one sitting. Really appreciated the steady, almost omnicient presence of the narrator through lots of turmoil in the lives of the women around her.

Samuel R. Delany: Trouble on Triton (1996, Wesleyan University Press, Published by University Press of New England)

Take me to gay space, maybe

Chip's propensity for unreliable/unlikeable narrators makes his books a bit of a slog sometimes, but he's still one of my favourites cause there's always layers of intent going on under the writing and he's so fucking smart and funny. Love imagining an occupied solar system with queer cooperative living and on-demand informed consent gender- and sexuality-affirming health tech, but! Theres a lot of dodging and ducking in and around the question of utopia here and the almost-campy idealized aspects of the society and tech play into these explorations. Loved it.

Samuel R. Delany: Trouble on Triton (1996, Wesleyan University Press, Published by University Press of New England)

I found this interview/seminar with Chip from 1986 which shed a lot of light on his ideas around this book, specifically around the question of utopia/heterotopia and SciFi and how this book is in dialogue with LeGuin's The Disposessed. www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm

Becky Chambers: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Hardcover, 2022, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) …

Kinda twee but quick escapist read with NB protagonist

Finished this series during a multi-day power outage, and being in resource-management mode def made the cozy solarpunk world these books built feel closer at hand. It was kinda impressively fleshed out for being only 2 short novellas, but i think any more than that and the utopic vibes woulda been totally saccharine. I don't particularly care about solarpunk but I am a total sucker for robot-human friendship exploration stories so definitely enjoyed that aspect.