Another journal

One of the things I want to do for this year is do monthly bookposts. I read apparently 91 books in 2025, a number which normally would indicate I am having ~problems~ but I haven’t, and my time management has been good, so! I think a bit of that volume was me tearing through some series like Nero Wolfe. Anyway, I do keep short little reviews on Storygraph but I thought it would be nice to integrate the fun little visuals they provide for each month and share those here.

Also, a friend has reached 20 years of bookposts and wow! Throwing my hat in the ring. Though I must note: I am not a reviewer, I do not have the mind for it. I can write you a tasty little paragraph max.

All that said, I’m not properly counting my monthly bookposting until I am doing it about January’s reads, but a quick warmup into the concept with December, why not.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott

Deeeeeeelightful. Tore through this and now impatiently await the second book’s release from library hold. Love the worldbuilding, love the intrigue, the characters, the food descriptions, but oooh boy love me a yearn and the one hear is all slow burn.

Somebody recommended this to me or to folks in general and I don’t know who! But it’s a duology and it’s very fun. Mmm, flavours of The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri and Magebike Courier duology by Hana Lee, so if you like one or the other then the other two might also hit for you.

Night of the Living Cat Vol. 1 by Hawkman with Mecha-Roots (Illustrator), Nan Rymer (Translator)

What a delight! I had seen the anime and wanted to check out the manga, which is even more full of horror references (down to its own dense, darks-heavy style). What an utter delight this is, especially for the horror nerd. It’s a celebration of genre and trope, but also: cats.

I’d actually bought Night of the Living Cat–we watched the first season of the anime and loved it utterly. There are so many treats in there for the horror or sci-fi fan. And all the while the story very aggressively avoids violence (at most, loud noises or water to scare cats, which make everyone feel sad) while blackout-bingoing horror tropes. So I used a gift certificate I earned through insurance points (what a world) and bought myself some treats at a bookstore. I don’t need nor have space for the full run of this right now, though I super want to have them at some point. The art looks like a horror manga, but its just: cats.

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

This was a delight! The same things that make Schar so fun in his Wayside and other middle reader books translate enjoyably to a grown up book. The framing was fun, the characters were a delight, and the story was a joyful romp with a smidge of darkness.

I couldn’t remember why I’d put this book in my Libby hold but as I was flipping through the front matter, a title caught my eye and I paged back: Oh. Wayside!!! This was the second book I’d read recently from someone who mostly wrote YA or middle grade and where the other made me mad, this one was a grade-A romp. It’s fun to have fun!!

Okay and here’s just a pretty gradient of all the books read for December. I’ll pull out Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei as two more faves and note that if you are interested in historical burial practises and/or vampires, Killing The Dead by John Blair is a tasty non-fiction.

Okay, that’s it for December reads! I think this is how I’ll approach it for the upcoming year.

Recently I asked on Twitter (with a typo, yay) if anyone knew any west coast-centric latinx authors of sci-fi or fantasy books I should check out.

This is maybe a dumb ask but I’d like to read some fantasy or sci-do by latinx folks from the west coast/with west coast perspective. Any y’all know some?

— B. Zedan (@BZedan) May 7, 2018

I’ve been holding off buying books and too stressed/busy to read lately but those are excuses and I miss reading and need to be reading contemporary stuff. I wanted some ebooks I can read on the trip to our new home in a new state.

There’s more and more easily findable out there by latinx authors with latinx characters.  This awesome list from Andrea Corbin has a whole mess of ’em. This is great! But it’s also completely east coast authors. I’m mad amped on books like the Brooklyn Brujas series and Shadowshaper, but the samples I read didn’t grab me as hard as when I read a little of Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (and not only because: vampires). She was born in Baja California and currently lives in Vancouver, Canada but is Mexican and writes about Mexico. It may not the West Coast, USA, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to me than Brooklyn.

As I explained to a white person who questioned how I said “latinx” after asking me how I pronounced latinx, there’s a big ol’ cultural and language gap between the coasts. First, folks and their families tend to be from totally different countries, and second, they’ve grown up in and reflect on totally different cultures. I mean, there is a lot of space between Brooklyn and Portland, let alone a Cuban family in New York and folks who came up to California through Mexico.

I’m not like, expecting to find something that perfectly resonates with my experience—I may be getting greedy for something more familiar, finally seeing more latinx faces in my media—but I know I’m never going to see something exactly like what I know as a non-binary mixed Salvadoran raised by a white mom in the rural PNW. I’m no white man who expects to see themself reflected in all mirrors. But I know folks who aren’t on or about the east coast also write books! And yay the Twitter hive mind did send some my way so here’s the list of what I’ve been recommended so far, of west coast latinx authors.

• Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets, etc. Absolutely something I should be reading anyway.
• Aaron Duran with La Brujeria and The Forgotten Tyrs, comics and middle-reader books, respectively.
• Ernest Hogan, with High Aztech and several more sci fi books, here he is on Amazon
• Latino/a Rising, an anthology with a bunch of folks from different places so I’m guessing some gotta be west coast-adjacent.
• Slivia Moreno-Garcia, who writes fantasy, vampires and magic,even if she feels she doesn’t qualify because to me she does, so there.

And you know what, fuck it:

• B. Zedan, The Audacity Gambit. Because I’m a latinx author, dammit. And that informs what I do.

 

THIS IS SO FEW, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. Specifically, I want things like sci fi and fantasy. Please give me genre. Romance novels, second world fantasy, uneasy ghosts in the corner of your eye, hard sci-fi, speculative fiction, high fantasy with high elf drama, post apocalyptic, whatever.

Shouldn’t have to note, but: please also do not give me white folks who write about not white folks unless it’s a real banger and they don’t seem like dicks.

Mirrored from B.Zedan.