Engraved on the Eye is a collection of 8 short stories told in various settings of Fantasy Middle East, drawing on Islamic and Middle Eastern folklore. It’s an extremely quick read. The stories are entertaining and the characters are lively, jovial, and diverse. Every story has some sort of supernatural creatures; ghuls feature prominently, along with ghul-hunters, martial artists, gunslingers, supervillains, rogues, dervishes,bounty hunters, and shaykhs. As with many short story books, there’s a range in subject matter and quality. I particularly enjoyed Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride (about a gun-slinging Muslim wizard in […]
Not the best of all possible books.
After thoroughly enjoying Redemption in Indigo, I picked up Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds with high hopes. Unfortunately, my hopes were not met. The Sadiri are a proud, reserved race — positively Vulcan. Their home planet is destroyed suddenly and thoroughly. The survivors reach out to the indigenous humanoids of Cygnus Beta, many of whom have Sadiri ancestry and therefore would make suitable mates. Our heroine, biotechnician Grace Delarua, is assigned to work with Dllenahkh, a Sadiri councilor, on a mission to find […]
Finally read past the famous first line
Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman in post-World War I England, walks through London on a fine June morning after the famous first line–“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” We follow Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for that evening’s party and although the plot takes place over the course of only one day, the thoughts, dreams, emotions, and memories of the characters cover a lifetime of choices and experiences. Clarissa is the main character, of course, but the narration weaves in and out of her story, spending […]
Ode to the Mundane
The Mezzanine is 100 pages of highly articulate stream-of-consciousness: the thoughts of our narrator as he takes a ride up the escalator during his lunch break to his office on the mezzanine. That’s it; that’s the plot. But that’s, of course, not the point: the point, or one of them, is following ordinary trains of thought to their conclusions in detail-oriented and precise prose, following the trail of a curious and engaged mind as it explores the minutiae of everyday (modern, office) life. You know […]
More Fairyland, Please!
After reading the first of Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland series on sort of a whim, I immediately bought the rest of the series, hoping that the sequels would live up to the first. And book #2 did not disappoint! In fact, I think I enjoyed it even more than the first. It’s a bit darker, and a bit richer, and a bit more profound. Our protagonist, September, has been out of Fairyland for a year, living in Nebraska with her mother while her father is off at […]
Aren’t we all a little monstrous?
This is an odd, original, remarkable book. I didn’t know anything about it when I picked it up–let’s be real, I was just looking for a short book so I can finish my Cannonball in time! And it was unlike anything I’ve read this year. This short (160 pages!) novel in verse is Anne Carson’s modern re-telling of a Greek myth that was originally told by Stesichoros, a Sicilian Greek of the early classical era. In the original, Heracles murders the red-winged monster Geryon and steals his […]
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