Today's #WaferThinBook: Faustine by Emma Tennant (1992, 140p.)
A retelling of the Faust legend, set in 1990s London with a female cast. Doormat Muriel becomes rich, sexy, envied Lisa through the machinations of a Satanic Gran. "An entertaining tract for the times," said the TLS.
If it sounds like the kind of thing you might enjoy, you can get it as a paperback and ebook from most of the usual places. Links here! https://sarah-i-jackson.ghost.io/writing/
Two books I loved, part 1: Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda, which is about four entrants in a classical piano competition in Tokyo, and the characters are all interesting and charming but best of all it just has wonderful writing about music -- like the title itself as a description of how a particular player makes a particular piece sound. It's beautiful, and unlike many books with multiple POVs, I loved all the protagonists equally and was never annoyed by a switch at the wrong time. Just beautiful stuff.
Was out today and had unexpected free time but no book!
I opened my @omnivore app on my tablet and read the short story "The Mausoleum's Children" by @aliettedb in @UncannyMagazine. It was so good!! I'm so glad I discovered both the story and the magazine here. Moral of the story - do your best to always have something good to read!
Parallelen in den #Dystopien von #MargaretAtwood und #SibylleBerg: Beide sind so nahe an der Gegenwart, dass man nicht sicher ist, ob es nicht ohnehin schon so weit ist, es zur Katastrophe nur mehr einen minimen sozialen Kippunkt benötigt:
"Das Jahr der Flut ist Fiktion: doch die allgemeine Richtung und viele Details sind beunruhigend nahe an der Gegenwart." (M.A.)
Der grosse Unterschied: die Eine schreibt mit Wut, die andere mit Humor.
The books I’m sharing are free as of today in Canada and usually the United States of America, too. If you do not live in those countries or are reading this after April 4, 2024, I do not know if they are free or available for you.
Please tag me if you want a boost for your lists of free speculative fiction books from other parts of the world. 💜
What's everyone reading coming up on this long weekend? I've got two books on the go as I often do! I'm enjoying both of these very much. Premee Mohamed's THE SIEGE OF BURNING GRASS just came out two weeks ago, and Sydney Hegele's debut novel BIRD SUIT comes in in May. Thanks to Invisible Publishing for the advance copy!
This week's Sapphic Book Bingo post features sapphic speculative fiction, which is a broad and diverse category, so I included 20 instead of 15 recommended books.
Most of them are sapphic paranormal romances, fantasy, or romantasy novels, but there are also some sci-fi romances, dark fantasy, and horror in the mix.
This Is How You Lose the Time War
by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I found this book recommended somewhere, possibly reddit.com, and reserved it at my local library, but the reservation came through while I'm in the middle of slogging through a long non-fiction book about pirates. But it was due back soon, so I decided I better get my A into G and read it. Can I say how glad I am that I did so? It was a great palate cleanser from the dry (yet not unentertaining) historical work, and I smashed through it in a couple of days.
The format lends itself to a quick read, and it's not an overly-long work. Two time-travelling warriors from opposing sides of a sprawling temporal war draw the attention of each other and begin to spar through deed and plot over centuries, trading missives encoded in reality that begin as mental sparring but soon progress to something else. It's a war story, it's a love story, it's a tangled tale of time travel that turns out to be not so complex as to overshadow the complex interplay between the pair known only as Red and Blue.
The writing is poetic and multi-layered and filled with subtlety, humour and wonder. Concepts that could provide an adequate spine for a whole novel are presented in mere sentences, but you don't mind because the complexity of the ideas washes over you in delicate prose, and a new concept has already been delivered, and it's just as thought-provoking as the first! It's LGBT-affirming, it's surprising and heartfelt and inspiring, and I'll be looking out for works from both of the authors as the year progresses!
I have just finished reading How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, bought on a whim after reading the bookseller's recommendation card in the shop. It is an amazing debut novel. A sweeping arc that rivals David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, it contains a series of episodes that follow an archaeological-sourced pandemic. Through each of these, threads of relationship, connection and love are woven to create an extraordinary chain of stories. A great read.