Monthly Recap September 2017

Hello everyone! September’s been a pretty good month for reading and reviewing, and October’s shaping up to be a good one as well.

Interesting Links:

• “Teaching White Students Showed Me the Difference Between Power and Privilege.” A black professor at Vassar university discusses race.
• “Home Buying While Black.” The author of this piece avoided inflated prices, but she still encountered subtle discrimination from neighbors.
• “Red Pickup.” This article is one of the first I worked on as an editor for my college’s Her Campus chapter. One of my fellow students writes about her personal reaction to the current political climate in the US.
• “What to Do When Nazis Are Obsessed with Your Field.” A medievalist on his field’s “Nazi problem.” I’ve heard from my Latin prof that there’s a similar dynamic happening with Classics, fueled by Hollywood and their horrendous treatment of diversity.
• “Meet John Smelcer, Native American Literature’s ‘Living Con Job.” Wow, this story is so wild! I’ve heard about authors behaving badly before, but making up an entire fake agent and blurbs from dead authors? This is a whole new level.
• “Writing Women: Thoughts.” Foz Meadows is one of my favorite pop culture critics. Here she talks about how women and beauty are presented in fiction.
• “Sleeps with Monsters: Why Can’t More Books Pander to Me?” This piece really got me — I legit started tearing up at one point, which I wouldn’t have expected at all. But everything Liz Bourke says her really resonates with me.
• “Culture Chat: The Fifth Season Is Coming to Television!” Renay, KJ, and Bridget from Lady Business and SF Bluestocking have a discussion about their hopes and fears for the adaptation of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
• “Excerpts from the All-Girl Remake of Lord of the Flies.” When I heard about this project (an all female Lord of the Flies movie written by men), I rolled my eyes. The New Yorker has a satirical view of what this remake would consist of.
• “Something Something Lord of the Flies: When an All Female Reboot Just Doesn’t Work.”  A more serious take on the subject, this piece from Lady Geek Girl discusses the difference between incidental and intentional gendering and how some stories are reliant on the genders of their protagonists.

---

I read the first third of The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso, a debut YA fantasy novel. I don’t find this book particularly bad, but there’s nothing new or interesting about it. I struggled with boredom. I also requested it from Netgalley partly because the blurb mentioned two girls as being the most significant character, and I’m always looking for books about female friendship. While I have no doubt the characters will become friends, I didn’t perceive their relationship as getting a lot of narrative focus. Basically, this book is a competent recycling of some common YA tropes and cliches, but it fails to bring something new to the table.

---

In October, I already have these posts scheduled:

• A review of Tremontaine: Season Two
• A review of Weaver’s Lament by Emma Newman
• A review of An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
• A review of The Gate of Gods by Martha Wells
• A review of The Last Namsara by Kristin Ciccarelli
• A review of The Riven Shield by Michelle West
• A review of Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• A review of The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear
• An interview with Tade Thompson
• A list of SFF releases in the rest of the year

And I’m working on these posts:

• A review of A Long Day in Lychford by Paul Cornell
• A review of City of Betrayal by Claudie Arsenaeult
• A review of The Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang
• A review of Jade City by Fonda Lee

I’ve been pretty focused on ARCs lately, and there’s a couple more I’ve got to read for October or November reviews. A Spoonful of Magic, City of Brass, and Artemis are all on the docket. Otherwise, I’ll try to catch up with a few new releases (Kat Howard’s An Unkindness of Magicians!) and read some sci-fi books for November’s Sci-Fi Month blogging event. I’ll also be continuing to participate in The Expanse Read Along, which looks set to head straight into October, and will be continuing to review new episodes of Bookburners. Once Bookburners ends, I’ll be switching over to reviewing Tremontaine!

---

Reviews from September

4 1/2 stars

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

4 stars

Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone

Taste of Marrow by Sarah Gailey

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

3 1/2 stars

An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

Not Your Villain by C.B. Lee

Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey

3 stars

The Bloodprint by Ausma Zehanat Khan

2 1/2 stars

Nyxia by Scott Reintgen

On The Illustrated Page, my non-review posts include:

• A guest post by Linsey Miller on character creation.
• A guest post by Jeannette Ng on the inspiration behind her debut novel.
• An interview with Max Gladstone.
• An interview with Kat Howard.
• An interview with JY Yang.
• A list of SFF releases in the first half of October.
• Short story round ups: part one, part two, and part three.
• Bookburners season three reviews: episodes eight, nine, ten, and eleven.
• Cibola Burn read along posts: week one, two, three, and four.

Over on Her Campus, my posts include:

• A piece about why saying Houston should have been evacuated is nonsense. Complete with a photo of our neighbor kayaking down the street!
• An interview with an English major and fellow writing tutor.

And my posts over on Queership include:

• A list of eight science fiction short stories by nonbinary and genderqueer authors.
• A fan cast of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. 

---

On a final note, I’m going to have to be reorganizing some bookshelves in the near future. I’m a student who still spends summers and holidays at home with her parents… who live in Houston, Texas. Yep, we got hit by floodwaters. Our house will be fine (fingers crossed we get renovations done by Christmas), but all of the books are currently sitting in plastic bins in storage. Including most of my physical TBR pile. Oh well.

I’m probably just going to be boring and sort them alphabetically by author, although maybe I’ll make an attempt to break fiction up by genre. I always admire shelves sorted by color, but I wouldn’t be able to find anything! How do you organize your shelves?