A classic work of scholarship. About how dominant ways of knowing what came to be called “the Orient” emerged as part of the Western imperial/colonial project and how they continue to pervade and shape discourse and practices of knowing in the West today. Particularly focuses on the British, French, and US examples in relation to …
The…I guess fourth book (if taken in internal chronological order, which is not the same as publication order but is how Bujold recommends reading them) in the classic space opera series, the Vorkosigan Saga. Originally published in the ’80s. It is the first book to centre the character whom I believe is the protagonist from …
Wuxia fantasy. Novella. Found family. A devoted nun of the order named in the book’s title, who is (for reasons revealed later) waiting tables in a village cafe, falls in with a gang of bandits, in the context of a country quietly seething in the grip of rebellion and civil war. Really, really good. Despite …
Literary fiction. From an author based in Argentina, and translated from Spanish. Short stories. Mostly quite dark. Some drift towards, and some into, the fantastical. Abducted children who mysteriously return, sort of. Teen Ouija board sessions gone awry. A family whose neighbourhood mistreats a homeless man and then becomes terribly unlucky. A tired ghost in …
Science fiction. Short stories. I’ve known Delany’s name since I was a sci-fi-devouring teen, and I read and loved a memoir by him almost a decade ago, but this was my first time picking up any of his fiction. It certainly wasn’t the case in his writing about his own life, but I’d always had …
Literary fiction. Australian. The novel takes place over one evening – a woman getting ready for a party, at the party, and then back home afterwards with a man she met at the party. The main character is autistic (as is the author). The book is a detailed portrayal of her incredibly rich inner life …
Weird sci-fi. An invasion, of sorts, or an infection, or an infestation. An alien life form comes to earth, joins with humanity, and brings about a new world, a utopic world, a vaguely unsettling world, a world without the great harms that define ours, a world of community and met needs and amazing new tech …
YA historical fiction. I don’t read much historical fiction, but I’ve been a fan of this author since her first novel, the Cinderella retelling *Ash*, and I’ve followed her as she has worked her way across a range of genres. This book traces the story of a teen Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco as …
Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the …
Fantastical absurdity and wry amusement at human (and nonhuman) foolishness. I read a scant handful of books from Pratchett’s famous Discworld series when I was a teen and enjoyed them, but they didn’t captivate me sufficiently for me to go out of my way to find more of them at the time. But recently, on …