copperfyre

This has not been a great year for me reading things, as my concentration has been absolutely shot a lot of the time, and I started feeling really guilty about reading fiction for fun and not academic articles for work or non-fiction to educate myself in about February, but I’m trying to get myself reading again and maybe writing about it will help! So in the past week I’ve read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, and then took a break for something lighthearted before reading the third one with Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen of Attolia (I read The Thief back in July).

The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate are absolutely fantastic. I’ve only read Jemisin’s short story collection How Long ‘til Black Future Month? before, but boy does she nail the novel as well as the short story. I feel like a lot of intelligent things have been said about The Broken Earth trilogy, and I’m mostly here going ‘okay this is mindblowingly good and cool, I want to wrap myself up in this world building and roll around in it, and oh god the characters and their interactions absolutely kill me in the best possible way’. They are really dark, so I definitely wouldn’t say they’re a ‘read no matter what mood of book you’re looking for’ because the setting is harsh and a shit-Tom of horrifying things happen to the main characters, and Jemisin doesn’t shy away from the trauma of all that. You want some inter-generational trauma? Well this will deliver in spades! The friend who recommended them to me keeps getting updates that are just ‘this interaction/conversation/scene/reveal/event broke me, holy shit’.

She’s also making me love second person perspective, which is not a perspective I was wild about before but is so good here! She does some super cool things with perspective and character voice, particularly in the first one, that I really am enjoying. Also casual queerness! One character is explicitly trans, and there’s one central poly relationship, among others, and they're just part of the world, which I love. And the characters are so complicated. They all do some terrible things, for varying reasons and to varying degrees, and while there's a few character where I'm just "I hope you die on screen because I want to see your demise, you fucker", mostly they're complex and confused and trying and acting from where their previous experiences have put them and it's so, so good.

So, yes, I would wholeheartedly recommend them. I'm really looking forward to reading the third one, and then going back and rereading the whole series, to see how differently it reads when you know the reveals.

I hadn’t actually been the biggest fan of The Thief. I enjoyed reading it, but I found the ‘big twist’ in it mostly annoying, because it did feel like the POV character was just gratuitously keeping things from the reader. (Actually reading The Fifth Season, where Jemisin does something vaguely similar in terms of obscuring who your POV characters are, exactly, made me realise what it was about The Thief that underwhelmed me, because The Fifth Season does it so satisfyingly.) I also hadn't been wild about the 'oh no, evil feminine queen vs good tomboy queen' that it seemed to be setting up, but actually The Queen of Attolia is very different, and I really enjoyed it. It's all about the politics, and also the gods being inscrutable assholes, the latter of which was my favourite bit about the first one! There's a central relationship in there that I don't get, which I guess is kind of a problem because it's sort of central to a lot of the book, but oddly the book worked for me anyway. I really like a lot of the secondary characters, and Attolia absolutely is my favourite now, and all the political and godly shenanigans were great. 

I also enjoy the vaguely Mediterranish setting, partly because I've been listening to first The History of Rome and now The History of Byzantium podcasts, so I'm currently into this period of history and geography. So I'm probably going to read the sequels, and not wait several months like I did between the first book and The Queen of Attolia. It's also a really fast read, so it was a good 'okay, I need a lighthearted break from the really good but also tough Broken Earth'. (My friend who recommended these to me, when I told them this, went 'oh, so you haven't reached that bit where - ' Me: 'oh no, I have, this is still lighthearted in comparison!')

So, in conclusion: yay, reading!

 The two books I've finished recently inspired very different reactions in me. 

The first is The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, which inspired a lot of anger. So much so, in fact, that I remembered I could go be grumpy here about it a good six months after I last made an entry (so far I have also raged about this to my parents, my partner, and three friends, and I am probably not done yet).

The book is an investigative journalism/true crime look at the theft of 299 birds (including a whole bunch of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace when he was wandering around ruminating about natural selection) from The Natural History Museum at Tring, stolen by Edwin Rist, a flautist, who steals them to a) make stupid salmon flies out of (not to actually fish for salmon with, oh no! This book reveals this whole world of people tying Victorian Salmon Flies, which are idiotic salmon flies made with feathers from incredibly rare birds, basically for the aesthetic, because there sure isn't any actual advantage to making your fishing flies out of Bird of Paradise feathers as opposed to chicken feathers, and also none of these people are actually fishing with these flies anyway, they're just making them and showing them off), and b) to sell them to other people so they can make these stupid flies and so he can buy a gold flute.

( Spoilers and also anger and capslockiness )
And the second book I read was - luckily - not about true crime, fly tying, or people gutting natural history collections, but it did involve crime! Murder, in fact. What Angels Fear by CS Harris is a Regency England murder mystery that gleefully embraces all tropes of the Regency England murder mystery genre (this is a very specific genre, I grant, and admittedly I have only read three series in it, but so far all of them have hit most of these tropes, so I'm reasonably confident calling them tropes). I also spent the entire book trying to work out if it was going to do a genre switch from 'historical murder mystery' to 'fantasy historical murder mystery' by introducing vampires. 

( Spoilers on the vampire front follow )

 I went to see this film with a couple of friends yesterday, and, wow, I was not expecting to be as emotionally affected by it as I ended up being! 'Let's go see an interesting documentary about a giraffe scientist!' we thought, and then we got a much better documentary about a giraffe scientist losing to a sexist system but still managing to inspire a field.

It's a documentary about Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian biologist that I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of, though watching this documentary went some way towards explaining why I hadn't. She went to study giraffes in South Africa in the 1950s - on her own, causing great consternation among everyone - and conducted possibly the first, and definitely among the earliest, detailed observations of an animal in their natural habitat, spending almost two years (I think, I lost track of the timeline a little) watching a giraffe population near Hoedspruit and taking notes on their behaviour. She then went back to Canada, published a heap of papers on this research, earned her PhD, taught at Guelph University, and then she ran up hard against the Old Boy's Club of academia, and was consistently refused tenure and ended up out of a job for being a woman. She then spent the next thirty odd years fighting the system, publishing more of her research, writing the book - literally - on giraffes, and writing a lot about women in academia, as well as about Canadian wildlife, her citizen science research, all sorts of things.

( The rest of this is going under a cut because I got very longwinded apparently )

I have seen a bunch of people doing Reading Wednesday, so on that note I am going to test out using Dreamwidth to help my goldfish brain remember what media I am consuming! Also I like to think this might help me read more, which is a goal I have decided I am going to achieve this year.

( So: )