misc Hugo reading

Paper Girls 3. Iiiii dunno, I was super into this series when I started it and now I just... don't care?? Various Things keep Happening but is it going anywhere, do they add up to anything? And, I don't know, the character voices and reactions just didn't seem quite... convincing somehow. Possibly this series needs actual women/people who were once 12yo girls involved with it somewhere?

Packet excerpt from Sleeping With Monsters, Liz Bourke. So... I don't really "get" related works? Like, what am I supposed to be getting from this? Maybe that's ironic because I do a certain amount of book reviewing myself, hi, but I when I write stuff up here, it's a) for myself, so that I can remember later what I thought, b) for friends who know me and might sometimes find me a useful source of tips about books (or an amusing source of snark about books), c) for anyone who wants to read my blather who's bothered to figure out how my tastes calibrate against theirs and can thus extract something useful from my opinions. Bourke and I, from this excerpt, have some overlap but not solid overlap, she's not saying anything that gives me any particular new or interesting insight into the things I have read... basically I don't get this.

Likewise I'm about a third of the way into Luminescent Threads and I don't get it either. What everyone is writing is obviously deeply meaningful to them but why am I reading it? I read my notes about last years Relateds and I apparently got a lot out of the Gaiman book and something out of the LeGuin, so this category isn't a total lost cause for me. Four more to try I guess.

Meanwhile, though, Tropic of Serpents and Voyage of the Basilisk! (Numbers 2 and 3 of Marie Brennan's nominated series.) Yes I know I said I wasn't going to read more Series books until I made more progress on Graphics and Relateds but these were so conveniently in the packet in phone-friendly format and they just seem to be getting better as they go and now I reaaaally want to read 4 and 5. (Spoilers) ( Read more... )

Anyways, I also may have reread/reskimmed the first three Raksura books, to remind myself who everyone was (I have a harder time getting the noun-names to stick somehow), so I'm clearly not not working on serieses.

more relateds

A Lit Fuse - do I actually have to care about Harlan Ellison in 2018? I mean, sure, he wrote some memorable and/or important stories (I was just talking about "I Have No Mouth" the other day, right?), I'm not saying we need to erase his place in sff history, but given that he himself is a dick (and, it would seem from this excerpt, a liar - I ended up reading more than I intended to, and his version of his mother's death vs reality jumped out at me), why do I want his perspective on his own life? If I actually wanted to understand his career arc, I would want to read something written by someone with some distance, not a sycophantic take where I can't tell what's real and what's lies and self-aggrandizement. The part about Ellison dealing with old age and decline was sort of interesting from a general grappling-with-that-stuff angle, but mostly I just don't caaaare.

Crash Override - in one sense I care more about Zoe Quinn than about Harlan Ellison, and yet as it turns out I don't really care about the exact details of her harassment by GamerGate? The "how we can win the fight" parts might have been more interesting but that's not the excerpt we got. I am very sympathetic to Quinn and I think her experience is important and possibly I'll want my kids to read this or something like it when they're older to understand the ugliness of that side of internet culture but I don't feel like I got anything out of this personally.

I am exempting myself from reading about Iain M. Banks on the grounds that I've never read any of his books but would still like to someday and would rather approach them without whatever background or interpretation might be in this book about him.