Some recent reading
May. 9th, 2022 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretMexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
This was a beautiful, multilayered book that I really loved reading. It's creepy, smart, suspenseful, and delightfully metatextual. Also the title is delightfully on the nose- if you like gothics and you'd like one that grapples with English colonialism, you will love this book. So much of the horror is not the horror of the Other, it's the horror of English global ambition inscribed on the bodies of the vulnerable. And so much of the book is intensely Mexican, specifically, in a way that feels joyful and celebratory in spite of the horror.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
This was sort of a step back from Artemis to something closer to the mode of The Martian: Less human emotions, more sciencing the shit out of things. If that's what you want from an Andy Weir novel, the puzzling out how to get past a catastrophic failure, this ought to be a pretty good time for you. But some of the Weir tics irked me. There's an awful lot of work that goes into sidestepping the political complexities of the situation in order to focus on the sciencing. The Kim Stanley Robinson version of this book would be at least twice as long, but it would be four or five times as emotionally demanding, and it would feel a lot more realistic for it.
Saga: Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
I have a lot more to go, but this was a fantastic start. The way it does high interplanetary epic while intermixing it with low humor about bodily functions, the way it tells stories about families and love and also stories about families that let you down, and love that betrays you, there's an extraordinary density.
This was a beautiful, multilayered book that I really loved reading. It's creepy, smart, suspenseful, and delightfully metatextual. Also the title is delightfully on the nose- if you like gothics and you'd like one that grapples with English colonialism, you will love this book. So much of the horror is not the horror of the Other, it's the horror of English global ambition inscribed on the bodies of the vulnerable. And so much of the book is intensely Mexican, specifically, in a way that feels joyful and celebratory in spite of the horror.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
This was sort of a step back from Artemis to something closer to the mode of The Martian: Less human emotions, more sciencing the shit out of things. If that's what you want from an Andy Weir novel, the puzzling out how to get past a catastrophic failure, this ought to be a pretty good time for you. But some of the Weir tics irked me. There's an awful lot of work that goes into sidestepping the political complexities of the situation in order to focus on the sciencing. The Kim Stanley Robinson version of this book would be at least twice as long, but it would be four or five times as emotionally demanding, and it would feel a lot more realistic for it.
Saga: Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples
I have a lot more to go, but this was a fantastic start. The way it does high interplanetary epic while intermixing it with low humor about bodily functions, the way it tells stories about families and love and also stories about families that let you down, and love that betrays you, there's an extraordinary density.
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Date: 2022-05-10 03:04 am (UTC)And I loved The Martian and also its movie. But not this one.
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Date: 2022-05-10 04:11 am (UTC)