Another journal

I ended up reading a bit less this month (well, in book numbers, not page numbers) thanks to Flash Fiction February. That said I also am trying to be better about having more than one book checked out on Libby at a time. I get nervous is all, what if I don’t finish the first book while I have the second book checked out, ugh, it’s there hovering, waiting. But Libby has changed it’s delay options, so rather than pushing things back to a date a week, two weeks, some months from now you can only suspend a hold and then unsuspend it when you’re ready. I have, ah, several books suspended right now (most of which are non-fiction because I’m slow at reading them and like to pace them between fiction).

Anyway, here’s the roundup and stats for February.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

What a grody, gorgeous, viciously verdant book. The story drips thick and rich through a rotting, sprouting world of opera and overthrown regimes, as the characters twine relentlessly to their fates.

Boy-o, what a delight this was. It’s thick and visceral and lived-in. It just makes me want to use squishy descriptive words about it. It also does some things with structure that I didn’t catch right off, so I don’t want to say too much, but I’d loved Leech and now I guess Ennes is just on my list of To Watch For. This felt like a good companion to Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide, so if you like one or the other, there’s a rec for you.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Whew what a book! So many shadowed layers, thickly and deliciously spread with an inhabited world and the mess of people in it. The plot doesn’t twist so much as turn like a winding snake, a winding ribbon to an ending.

This had been on my to-read and I’d then forgotten but then a pal’s review (and a better review than this) reminded me about it and I dropped it in the hold queue. Weirdly?? Reminds me a little of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler but maybe just parts of it, maybe just the journey of it, the papers and the periods of being lost, the structural play. It’s certainly a better book than IOAWNAT, to me at least.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The layers of this book fold together like beautiful cloth wrapping, from novel-in-a-novel to interviews to the main tale. It kept me turning and unwrapping the story drawn in by lush descriptions of family and food and life. You want to call the ending the bow on it but it was instead the thing hidden by all those layers and I don’t! feel it was quite what I wanted or expected to find.

Notable about this book, I paired it with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward in the latest newsletter reading recommendations and I’ll just copy what I said there:

I recently read two books in a row that had the same thing going on. Not the story or the style or anything, but both were awesome rides the full way through, doing some neat things with how a story is shaped, but then the ending didn’t hit for me as solidly as I needed it to. Which does not! Mean they’re not worth reading. It was actually really interesting to interrogate myself on why the endings didn’t work for me the way I wanted. Maybe (probably) they’ll do better for you.

I can’t hate a book for not sticking the landing, not if they do it the best they can. I don’t know how either of these books should have ended but the endings here work! And I enjoyed the ride, so I can’t complain (well, I can, but you know).

Here’s the pretty gradient of the month’s covers:

There’s Legendary Children again, this time it was as audio, a joy. The other book in this lot was Kate Elliot’s The Nameless Land, the concluding book of the Witch Roads duology. As sometimes happens, the second book didn’t do it for me as the first did. Still glad for it, well-written, good conclusion etc., etc., but I can’t pick out which ingredient (longing? world building? quests?) I found so tasty in the first book that was missing here.

This year I’m trying some things around my reading habits. Chase and I are listening to non-fiction audio books (often ones that one of us have read in text previously) while hanging out in the same room. I have a little bit (a lot bit) of trouble hearing and following audio so it’s partly to help me build that muscle, but it’s also the only way for us to read a book at the same pace, as I read at an unfair speed. Also, Chase’s mom sent me a lovely stack of barely-read mid century mass market paperbacks that I am doling out to myself at the pace of one a month. They’re so pleasant to hold! What a perfect object they are.

Let’s look at what the top-level stats were for me in January.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Lorenzo Marquez, Tom Fitzgerald

I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race right when it came out, trying to get this new streaming thing working on my laptop. This book is such a deftly handled thing, weaving queer history with the show and adding context to all the things that have made Drag Race what it is. Sure, I knew a lot of it but there were bits of queer history new to me, new movies to seek out and people to learn about. And every time T&L touched on a subject or era and I thought “oh, they better mention [x],” they did. Like any history spanning a wide range of time, it can’t go into full depth on any one thing, but the depth they manage to go into is very good. It’s made to read while pausing to look up and learn or watch more, a brilliant jumping-off point for anyone, no matter how much or little they know.

We’re now listening to the audio book of this, which Tom and Lorenzo read, and the east coast “a” of Tom’s light accent delights me constantly. A delight. I made a Letterboxed list of the movies they mention in the book, even in passing. Most are available on Kanopy!

A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn

A tense cold-war thriller that also offers up the science-fictional monstrous. Non-stop pacing with a well done written version of not showing the monster to make it scarier, it’s a neat and tidy book that is like a bit of eldritch horror in a spy novel coating.

This is a snappy, spooky little book that does some very deft things. It has a good aftertaste, if that makes sense, not like you’re thinking of it often after so much as it has a nice little shiver in your memory.

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

Ooh, a good and creepy hungry house story.

Lol, not a lot in that review. But that’s what this book is! It’s one of those books of an era that feels hinged around a specific family dynamic that isn’t as much the norm today. That said, a person having a deep and unexamined hole in her life and self that makes them vulnerable to devil’s bargain trickery is eternal.

Here’s your pretty gradient of all the covers from this month.

Another title of note this month was Non-Stop, which I picked up because the cover I saw in a 70’s Sci Fi Art newsletter intrigued me. It has a banger of a twist. And The Light Eaters, have you heard the good word of Light Eaters? I will get everyone I know to read it at some point. I think it adds a really beautiful dimension to looking at the world and the wealth of growing things in it.

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.