boxofdelights

• What are you reading?

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson. I fell in love with Baru Cormorant immediately: a brilliant little girl, who "cared mostly for arithmetic and birds and her parents, who could show her the stars.... Baru loved her mother and her fathers dearly, but she loved to know things just a small measure more." A great and powerful empire is going to take over her country, destroy her culture, and harm her people, so she decides to join the empire and rise to a position of such power that she can protect everything she loves. Naturally. I know from reviews that it ends so painfully that I probably wouldn't read it if it weren't for SF book group.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. I do not get what makes this book so great. Life is sad, painful, and futile, but you can always make it worse by longing for something else?

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, for Tawanda book group Sunday.

I also have 26 items checked out of the library, which is way too many. 16 fiction, 9 nonfiction, 1 movie.

• What are you reading?

Who Do You Love, by Jennifer Weiner. Not recommended. There's a bullying scene. The thin rich pretty doted-on girl who does the bullying is our protagonist. The victim is described with such detailed, thorough loathing that I am reconsidering everything I ever enjoyed about Jennifer Weiner novels.

• What did you recently finish reading?

A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullen. Recommended. Read for library book group. Nobody said the word, but we talked about fanfiction, which is hard not to do when you're talking about Sherlock Holmes. One guy didn't mind all the AU versions of Sherlock, but was indignant about this one because it pretended to be the real Sherlock, but it was taking away everything that made him Sherlock (i.e., his great brain). I thought Cullen created a believable person, who was believably the same person as ACD's Sherlock Holmes, but seen through two very different writers' styles. I loved the detail that Cullen's Holmes is aware of the fanwork being created about him, and very offended by the ones that depict his dear companion as Jam Watson.

The person who picked the book began by apologizing for it: she hadn't read it, only seen the movie, at book-choosing time. Apparently the movie has a happy ending pasted on? I can't see how that would work. The book is all about the fact that we all lose things we can't bear to lose; that not even the great detective can turn back time and bring them back to us; that we mostly go on living anyway.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

I've got to finish my bowl of misery soup, that is, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, for book group Sunday.

Wiscon is coming! What books do you anticipate talking about there?

I read some books. I reread Redemption in Indigo for book group. It doesn't really stand up to rereading, but I was looking for ideas for foods to serve. It was my turn to host, so I picked the book and provided the food, but Jo let me host it at her house because my house is kind of broken. I keep coming to the realization that I shouldn't foist speculative fiction on this group, but time passes, and I forget, and someone else picks something that has magic or weird science in it, and my turn comes around again, and I think, Redemption in Indigo! It's got food, and family, and it's from a different culture, and it's short! Everyone will like it! And then book group starts with someone saying, "I hope you can explain this book to us because I didn't get it." And I realize again that I cannot pick speculative fiction that people who don't read speculative fiction will like.

They liked the food though! Peanut dip and hummus with veggies and rice crackers to start. Then chickpea salad, red lentil curry and rice, and futari. Ginger cookies and chocolate for dessert. Everything was gluten-free except the ginger cookies.

I'm in the middle of The Circle, which is saying interesting things about pressure to give up all privacy. It's hard for me to believe how little pushback there is against the idea of total surveillance even at the beginning of the book: when one of the founders explains that he worries about his mom, so he has installed cameras inside her house without her knowledge, and then displays the feed from those cameras to everyone who works for him, his audience doesn't respond with anything stronger than titters. But now, 3/5 of the way through, I do believe in Mae's (our viewpoint character's) acceptance of the camera. I said to myself "She loved Big Brother" even before Bailey put

SECRETS ARE LIES
SHARING IS CARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT

up on the screen.

But I have to pause The Circle to read Jack Glass, for SF bookfroup tomorrow, and then The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, for the next Tawanda bookgroup.

• What are you reading?

Alif the Unseen, for SF book group. Which is tomorrow.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Iodine, by Haven Kimmel. This is a strange book. It is not a good book, I would not recommend it, but I am very interested in reading anything else she writes. It is the iddiest thing I've read between hard covers in a long time. And I can't tell whether she is handling her material, manipulating it, like an artist, or just... trapped in it. Floundering. Wallowing. That's why I want to read something else.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, for Tawanda book group. Which is not for a couple of weeks, but I had to read it fast and pass it on. Such a cool, dry, careful, detached contrast to the hot wet messy wallow of Iodine. I wonder why the person who chose it chose it. The last book she chose was Sometimes A Great Notion.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

No idea.