Jet Silver

I love Clark's work. This was inventive and immersive and just so much fun, just like all of Clark's books. Exuberant. This one's about alt-history New Orleans, gods and race and racism and apocalypse and agency. There are airships and pirates and goddesses and our POV character is dynamite. As usual, I wanted it to be longer but also, it's perfect as it is.

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

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.

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.

On the list because: Mentioned in The Lonely City.