Jet Silver

What an absolute joy of a book. I'm very sorry I put off experiencing it for so long.

As a reader, I'm amazed at the skill in crafting such a nuanced story without using any words at all.

As an artist, the skill in composition and rendering, the emotion that leaps from every drawing, is just astounding.

I think I'll be spending a lot of time with this one.

Not worth the slog, to be honest. This book was trying to be excessively clever and like most such attempts, just ended up being boring. I felt very put upon, as a reader, putting up with three hundred pages of a literally lobotomised character who doesn't know or remember herself being narrated in second person by a character whose distinctive voice is missing for no plot relevant reason but comes back when it's narratively convenient, and the mechanism by which this is possible is ALSO canonically disproved as a possibility once the last third of the book starts explaining anything. (I know that was a horrible sentence, but sometimes outrage means not taking a breath.) 

I feel like I've been subjected to someone's writing class exercise, and considering the author thanks her Clarion class I'm not far wrong, I think. 

I really wanted to love this, and the plot stuff that actually happened is good and interesting but Jesus. How was this allowed to be five hundred pages long when it's like this?

I love Araluen's lyric voice and the deft shifting between tones and registers, academic to poetic to the cadences of day to day city/country life. This is a slim volume but it's so dense with meaning and shifts that I read it over a week, in small bursts.

A favourite stanza:

It is hard to unlearn a language:

to unspeak the empire,

to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,

a topographic intonation

I adored this.

Originally written in the Kannada language, this is a selection of short stories about Muslim women in southern India. I started with the Translator's Note chapter and I'm glad I did, because Bhasthi emphasised the oral storytelling cadence of the stories and the choices she'd made around localisation and being true to the stories' origins. I found the writing really immersive and relatable and I got to learn a bit about a community I wasn't familiar with. One of those books whose vocabulary and rhythm gets into your thoughts and stays with you for days.

This is the most "book I wouldn't normally read" of the year, probably. Old school, tradpub, M/F romance. I picked it up because a handful of readers I follow rave about it and it sounded like something I wouldn't hate.

I didn't hate it—it's very well written—but I can't say I liked it either. It's widow/rake slow burn, and the characters are well drawn and fully rounded. The writing style is detailed, immersive and propulsive. I liked spending time in this world. But the author's done such a good job at flawed characters that while I liked the leads as characters, they're both such assholes in an unfun way that I wasn't particularly invested in their relationship. Maybe in an ESH, you all deserve each other kind of way. In fact every character sucks in some way or another. That's not necessarily a criticism but I personally need to like at least one character to love a book.

There's the kind of ugh gender essentialism that's just in the water for a book published in 1991, and I also wasn't a fan of the no-no-yes trope. That said! This is a good book. Turns out I still don't like romance-as-the-A-plot books nor reading about rich people being miserable assholes to each other, though. BUT I also devoured all 500-odd pages of it in two days. This isn't an anti-rec. I was never bored. Just not a book for me.