Breakin' the bookpost drought

Oops, looks like maybe I haven't posted any of the books I've read this year? Well, here's a batch:

Italo Calvino — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Jan 1

Equal parts exhilarating and frustrating.

I thought the framing story's main romance plot was obnoxious, and a couple of the later first chapter fragments were too choked with Dudely Bullshit to actually enjoy. But wow, the first five or so fragments created such an enchanting effect! That stylistic mimicry must have been tough as shit to do, and the framing device of translation and mistranslation and forgery made my brain fizz, at least until the answers to the mysteries started shaking out.

All told, I think I class this with Cloud Atlas, where I admire it for its technical accomplishments but don't really think it has a lot to say or find it rewarding as a whole. The first half is totally worth a read, but I endorse bailing whenever you feel done.

Kohei Horikoshi — My Hero Academia vols. 8-16 (comics)

Jan 9-10 (vols 8-12), Jan 18 (vols 13-15), Jan 30 (vol 16)

Well, I blazed through the rest of what's available in English at the library, and now I'm probably done with it for a while — a volume goes down so fast that reading them as they come out is kind of a drag.

Anyway, this brought me up to the point where the large-scale outline of the story has finally emerged. And I think I'm still sort of invested, but,

1. There's a sort of fatigue that tends to set in on a long series right around this point, where the real plot finally comes into view and then another episodic complication kicks in and it takes forever for the plot to actually move forward again, and that's often where I fall off a series, so we'll see.
2. The one transgender character so far (a villain) met an ignominious end right around the time I paused, and I'm annoyed about how that shook out.
3. I'm not really enjoying anything about that one blood-themed schoolgirl-sexy shapeshifter villain, and at pause point it looked like she's who the author is most interested in right now, bleh.

Whatever, we'll see! I did enjoy what we got to see of All For One, he was a very impressive Fucker.

Rory Frances and Jae Bearhat — Little Teeth (comics)

Jan 17

Episodic and meandering, but delightful. A series of interwoven vignettes about a group of young queer folks having drama and getting by.

Catherynne M. Valente — Space Opera

Feb 19

IMO the crucial bit about correctly doing a Douglas Adams riff isn't the prose styling or genre trappings; it's all about joking around on the outside while being really pretty desperately torn up about something quite important and incredibly sad.

I enjoyed this.

Maria Capelle Frantz — The Chancellor and the Citadel (comics)

Feb 19

This was really strange and really compelling. It feels like something I dreamed, and I look forward to re-reading it in probably a similar daze.

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower

Feb 27

This book rules. Also, I find it low-key hilarious that Leckie’s god characters are way more traditionally AI-like than her AI characters. The narrator was great, and I loved the little bits that helped cement their oddness and the oddness of their place in the world, like the repetitions of “Here is a story I heard.” I really liked The Myriad, too. (Would I trade a reasonable sacrifice of blood every year for total immunity from mosquitoes? INSTANTLY.)

Anyway, this was a delicious layer cake of revenge stories — a satisfyingly bloody Hamlet riff on top of... I guess Reverse Cask of Amontillado?

Lots to love about the setting, too. Man!

I hope things turned out ok for the hero and his girlfriend. What a wild run of wrong-place-wrong-time, god damn.