august reading roundup

[hiddenramen]

I think, in the spirit of using my Dreamwidth more, I'm going to start doing a roundup of everything I've been reading in a month. August was genuinely a little slow for me, just because school just started up and I am scrambling to get my shit together. I'm waiting for the shit to really hit the fan here in a month or so, and then I'm going to be just like... absolutely swamped, with no time to read anything but School Stuff.

I did get some reading in this month, though! 

What I've Been Reading:

The Seep by Chana Porter

Really loved this one, especially since I was in the mood for some really meaty sci-fi earlier this month. It's basically just a sprawling, Jeff Vandermeer-esque horror story about grief, both on an individual lev el and on a societal level, and it follows a fifty-year-old trans lesbian and her wife after an alien invasion supposedly creates a utopia free of pain on Earth.

Definitely not a light read, but a great one. Reminded me a lot of Atsuko Asano's No. 6, in the way so much of Trina's story was about being allowed to hold onto her grief and her pain, and the ways its shaped her, in a world that keeps continuously trying to erase it in the name of peace. That was basically the same core theme at play in No. 6, both in the way the city was constantly trying to bury any trace of suffering, and the way Nezumi refused to take people's pain away with his siren song.

All in all, really great novel. definitely something I'd recommend to others, if you're looking for something chewy and speculative.

Water Ghosts by Shawna Yang Ryan

Really, really enjoyed this one as well. Water Ghosts is basically the story of a small Chinese immigrant town in 1928 called Locke, and it walks you through all of the different ghosts that haunt this town, which ties into to the various things that are haunting its inhabitants. The prose style took a minute to get into, though I recognize that it was absolutely an intentional stylistic choice, but it did take me a minute to settle into it. Once I did though, I had a wonderful time. Really well-crafted.

The King Is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón

I went into this one thinking that I wouldn't be super into it, but it surprised me a lot. I really like Alarcón's voice, just because you can really feel the world-weariness of it, and his pedigree absolutely speaks to that being earned. He struck me as a bit hypermasculine sometimes, which got sort of grating, and some of these stories were just like... so staggeringly bleak that it was genuinely exhausting at times to try and get through it. Definitely don't pick this up if you're already in a funk, or just sort of take it one story at a time, because Jesus.

I do want to pick up one of  Alarcón's other works, though, Lost City Radio, so it wasn't bad enough to put me off him. But it is something to brace for.

On the nonfiction side, I picked up Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong On GMOs, which is a former anti-GMO activist talking about why he's changed his mind on GMOs, and Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, which is some light cultural analysis about the relationship between food, politics, and culture in America. I've been on a bit of a food sciences / food history kick lately, so those both scratched an itch for me.

Also, still working my way through Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine, but that one's been very slow. I had a friend recommend me Yang Jisheng's Tombstone instead, but I think I'm going to try and get through Dikötter first, and then pick up Yang. I want to have some knowledge of both before I wade into the weeds of who interpreted what and how. 

That's pretty much it for this month: far shorter than I would like it to be, but here we are!

In terms of things like articles, I've been working on an MDZS AU that requires me to do some reading in French, and that's been kind of cool. My dialect of French is not standard French, but it's closely related enough that I can manage my way around most articles and things. That's sort of been fun to figure out and stretch my legs in. Now if I could just find somewhere to rent or stream French movies...