CBR10Bingo: Snubbed I first saw Kit de Waal’s name earlier this year on a couple lists of highly-anticipated new books for 2018. Since I rarely buy hardcover books and knew I’d have to wait a bit for The Trick to Time, I added her previous novel, My Name is Leon, to my wishlist and purchased it a few months later having finally found it in an English bookstore in Stockholm, of all places. After reading it, I can understand why people were excited for her […]
For all the brutal women
CBR10Bingo: Listicles When I had my embarrassing epiphany this spring that my CBR reading list and library were unacceptably skewed toward male authors, I spent a number of hours googling female authors, particularly those in genres with which I’m less familiar. One of the best sources I found was a list called “27 Female Authors Who Rule Sci-Fi and Fantasy Right Now”, several of which I’ve purchased already and even more that are high on my wishlist. My most recent read from those recommendations was […]
It’s a thin line
CBR10BINGO: Under Represented This past weekend, I went to a family wedding where my first cousin’s daughter was one of the brides. I have a complicated relationship with most of my family, but the one person with whom I’ve always felt closest is this cousin. I was able to go a day early and got to spend some extra time with just her and her husband. The subject of birthdays came up, with mine just a few days away, and I told her that I’ve […]
Don’t do me like that
CBR10BINGO: And So It Begins My favorite book series is Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Each book offers a self-contained story of its own time and place within the vast universe of the Culture. Sure, it’s helpful to have the incremental, accumulated knowledge of the Culture that comes from reading multiple books, but you don’t have to keep track of characters and timelines. I also appreciate series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach that are really just one long book broken into […]
Aggressively whimsical
CBR10BINGO: Cover Art I read through Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy in a few days, and honestly, not much of it stuck with me. Most of it was just too stream-of-consciousness and aggressively whimsical for my taste, and I found myself tuning out whole chapters, skimming over the parts that felt empty of meaning other than how self-consciously “crazy” someone can act. These parts rang false, much like those reality show contestants who do nothing but mug for the camera and show off for each other, […]
Every time I laugh I know that I am laughing into the darkness
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a remarkable and taut exploration of prejudice, history, and of course, memory. The book’s narrator and namesake, Memory, is an albino woman on death row in a Zimbabwean prison who is encouraged by her new lawyer to write her story for an American journalist who may be able to help win her freedom. Memory writes of the stark everyday life in prison and of the circumstances that have brought her there. But to fully explain, she must begin […]
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