What I Read: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

I was really, really angry about this book.

Given the state of science fiction these days, I should clarify what I wasn't angry about:

I wasn't angry about a huge variety of characters and alien species with different ideas about gender (as well as biological sex) or cultures generally. On the contrary: I was angry that all of those cool ideas about different languages and culture and gender were hampered by a writing style that I would describe as "aggressively twee."

I was angry at Kizzy. Just. Everything about her seemed to be the worst kind of pander-y fanservice (but what a time to be alive, that fanservice can be more than just "wank material for straight dudes"...!). Other characters ranged from kind of cool and interesting to inoffensively bland, but Kizzy was The Worst.

I was angry at a romance that developed out of nowhere.

I was angry at how much was "showing and telling" rather than "showing not telling." Around a third of this book could have been taken out and the story would not suffer at all for it.

As one GoodReads review puts it, putting out a negative review of this book feels like "publicly kicking a kitten," but there you have it. Consider this kitten publicly kicked.

Friday 5: Space

Of all the spaces in your residence, which is most powerfully your space?

We don't have a lot of space in our tiny Stockholm apartment, but I've made around a third of our unnecessarily large kitchen my office, including my Art Wall corner.

I also have an entire bookshelf to myself, which is obviously very much me.


What’s the most spacious space in your everyday life?

The outside, I guess?


What’s a good song about space?

What’s under your bed?

The floor.


What are your thoughts on typing one or two spaces after sentences?

Two spaces are no longer necessary as we live in an age of digital typing and typesetting! One of the first things I do with every document I copy edit is find and replace two spaces with one. STOP DOING THIS.

#TBT Yellow and Red Planck Bracelet

I'm categorizing this piece under the Throwback Thursday label because, while the bracelet itself is relatively new, it's a destash attempt to use up some very old stock in the ol' bead box.

Yellow and Red Planck Constant Bracelet by Kokoba

The reds turned out very weird when trying to photograph this one. I don't know if it's the combination of weak, pale daylight (#WinterIsComing) with the overhead "warm white" LED and  fluorescent bulb in my office/the itchen, or if there's something about cherry red that's hard to capture or if I did something funny to my settings, but the first round of pictures of this bracelet came out looking hot pink.

All the beads involved are Czech glass. The yellow ones have a cool stripeyness to them that doesn't show up well in the pictures.

It's the yellow beads that "spell" out h (Planck's constant), as per the latest CODATA value. The red round beads are the spaceholders in between digits.

What I Read: Ancient, Ancient

This was another selection for Austin's feminist science fiction book club. (Maybe I'm an honorary satellite member now?) I went in with high hopes and was mostly....

There were a lot of cool ideas in this book that ended up suffering from overly workshopped, possibly way too abstract writing. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Freshwater, but where Emezi takes that abstraction and works with it until you get it, grounding it with concrete language and imagery and deliberate call backs to specific mythology, Salaam just leaves it all out there, confusing and weird in a world that seems to be entirely of her own creation but without any rules or explanation.

The stories are the strongest when Salaam remains more or less in this world: "Marie," "Rosamojo," and "Ferret" were probably my favorites, as well as a very short piece about ants whose title I can no longer remember and that no one else seems to mention in their reviews so there it is. A trilogy of short stories focus on moth-like aliens who can take a human form and who harvest nectar from humans, most often by seducing them. The premise is unique enough that it really deserved to be its own book rather than a handful of short stories. So as it is, they're just kind of weird.

And unlike almost everyone else, I didn't care much for the first story ("Desire") or the last one ("Pod Rendezvous"). "Desire" is just too distracting, caught up as it is in what is (as far as my Googling can find) a fictional mythology and an unusual-and-completely-unnecessary narrative structure. The same can be said for "K-USH" and "Battle Royale," though people tend to rave less about those two. (I wonder if people pick up the book, read the first and last story, and then declare that they've read the whole book?) "Pod Rendezvous," like the nectar-gathering moth aliens, had so much in there that it should have been a proper novel rather than an overly long short story. A story should be as long as it needs to be, and "Pod Rendezvous" was definitely the wrong length.

Overall, a disappointing collection. It wasn't bad, but I made the mistake of going in with impossibly high expectations.

Friday 5: Functions

What are you holding your breath in anticipation of?

2018 midterms! Can we please do damage control on this administration already? Also, looking forward to WorldCon Dublin and going to Korea for a wedding in 2019!

What most recently gave you goosebumps?

Probably just straight-up being cold, because it's November in Stockholm.


What’s giving you that pain in the neck?

My work setup is less than ideal. I have my beast of a laptop, Regan, to the left and my work notebook (Samwise) in the middle. But since I do all of my blogging from Regan, I have to contort my neck and back to get anything done. Or just scoot my chair over, which I just did.


What’s making your heart ache?

I miss so many people and places, but that's the neo-liberal cosmopolitan life, I guess: nowhere and everywhere feels like home; you're always missing someone.


What are you yawning at?

Just trying to get my ears to pop because my head is full of fluid. Hurray, being sick. =/

#TBT Amber Pi Necklace

This is another Kokoba beta release, so probably from around 2010 or 2011. First it was stuck in storage in the US, then I brought it to Sweden and it languished in different storage for nearly a year before I got around to photographing it. And then it took another month to list it, and a couple extra weeks to finally write up this blog post.

Amber Pi Necklace by Kokoba

Well, better late than never, right?

I like the look of this necklace a lot. I don't usually work with bulk chain, and I don't know why, because every time I do I like how things turn out.

This necklace features glass beads in the bulk chain, and then carnelian, red aventurine, and genuine amber chips in the dangles. Which "spell" out the digits of pi, but you knew that already from the name.

Fall is almost over but you still have time to enjoy these cozy oranges while you sip your PSL (or enjoy the One True Fall Beverage, apple cider). TREAT YO' SELF!

What I Read: Journal of a Solitude

This was a book that I bought at a library sale I don't know how many years ago. After falling in love with Walden in high school, the similar premise of this book (memoirs of living alone in the countryside) intrigued me. Yet somehow I never got around to reading it until I was going through my books to ship across the ocean. Out of all of the books I hadn't read yet but really wanted to, this was at the top of the list. So I tore through it during my last days in Pennsylvania and up the highways to Albany, then ended up re-homing it to my friend and hostess in Maine. Incidentally, this also hits two items on my 101 in 1001 list: it's nonfiction and it's a book I've owned for over three years!

Image courtesy W. W. Norton & Company

I could tell that I had started and stopped this book at least a few times: the first few entries were familiar to me, and I had dog-eared a page or two. Younger Me wanted to like this, or wanted to be the kind of person who liked this, but I guess she needed a few more years to be able to really get into it. Now Me couldn't put this book down.

There isn't much that happens, which is what you can expect from something titled Journal of a Solitude. That might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it was mine, at any rate. There's a directness and simplicity to her writing that pulls you along, and I think it's exactly the kind of cozy book that makes for perfect winter reading.