brief bookblog & linkblog.

Over the last couple of years I've gone through several very frustrating times—which I like to attribute to schoolwork but which actually have much more to do with ill health—during which I've been more or less unable to read prose at length. I can always read short fiction and listen to audiobooks, and I can generally cope by playing text-adventure games, inasmuch as that counts as reading (watch this space for the long-delayed posts on 80 Days and Open Sorcery), but the inability to sit down with a novel is a painful thing. I seem to be finally coming out of one of those periods now, having this past week finished in the space of two days two awesome new books.

One of them was My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris, which just came out this February. It's a big, weird comic about growing up in Chicago in the late sixties, presented as the spiral-bound notebook/sketchbook/diary of narrator Karen Reyes. Karen wants to be a monster and draws herself as a wolfgirl; I loved the ins and outs of that obsession, and the horror comic covers that signaled the chapter breaks. I loved even more the scenes set in the Art Institute, especially the sequence when Karen's older brother Diego is teaching her how to look. Like a lot of the books I like best, it makes me want to write academic analysis; unfortunately the second volume is yet to be released, and until then there's a lot left unresolved.

The other book isn't only new, it's not even out yet: it comes out this coming week. A few weeks back I won an ARC of Weave a Circle Round, by debut author Kari Maaren, from a Tor.com giveaway, and this weekend I finally managed to read it. It's very, very good. It isn't from Tor's YA line, but it's about teenagers, and (partly because the protagonist, Freddy Duchamp, is only fourteen) it reads less like an adult novel or modern YA than like really good children's fiction. Early reviews have been comparing it to Diana Wynne Jones, which is more or less right (the way Maaren plays with memory reminded me a lot of Fire and Hemlock in particular). It's fun and absorbing, all about stories and time travel and growing up. The thing it's most like is Pamela Dean's novel Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary. That's a frustrating comparison to have to make, because almost nobody's read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, but I can't think of a better pairing. They're both YA-ish fantasy about time travel and strange neighbors and difficult siblings; they're both deeply interested in poetry and folklore, and they both pay a close and careful attention to the mundane worlds of the characters. I think of JGR as a darker and more frightening book, and the central thematic concerns are different, but even so I want to read them side-by-side. I'm glad people are still writing books like this.

At the moment I'm reading A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar, a gorgeous and worldbuilding-dense fantasy novel that reminds me of what I love about Calvino, and I'm also reading Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys. Winter Tide is one of those revisionist takes on Lovecraft that we get so many of now, and although Lovecraft-qua-Lovecraft isn't all that interesting to me it's a genre I tend to enjoy. This one is a continuation of the short story "A Litany of Earth," which I've loved for years, and I think anybody who likes that story will like the novel too. I'd also point the curious to this interview with Emrys, from the podcast Cooking the Books, which interviews sf/f authors about food. The page at the link includes a recipe for honeyed saltcakes, which the characters in Winter Tide eat. I mention it here so as to note that I've already made the recipe twice. They're very good crumbled into oatmeal.

A handful of other links. I hardly ever play games that aren't text-adventures, but after reading this review I immediately bought and played Yorkshire Gubbins, a really good game that I'll probably write about eventually. This video is unaccountably hysterical to me. This article on sandwiches is unaccountably fascinating. This profile of a Japanese roboticist is accountably fascinating, as is a charming short story in Uncanny about a robot writing fanfiction. I'm sure everyone's already read about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, but I haven't stopped being excited about it. And this is a very good essay about one of my favorite comics, which I link as much for my benefit (so I don't lose the link) as for yours.