Cyberpunk: Malaysia

Zen Cho (ed), 2015

(August 2015)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons.

Bookmark Four

Year Four. Who’d a thunk it etc etc. Anyway, it’s Contrarily Early Annual Reading Round-Up Time!

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Hiromi Kawakami, 2001 [Allison Markin Powell, 2013]

(November 2015)

Look, I’m as hacked off as the next man by the tendency for every Japanese author translated into English to get compared to Haruki Murakami, as if he’s the only author from the 10^th most populous country in the world. Here, however, I think it might actually be justified.

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy, 1993

(November 2015)

  

The obvious thing to do here would be to pastiche McCarthy's style, but other people have done it more convincingly and more amusingly, so rather than just strip out all the punctuation and occasionally write very long sentences I'll actually try to talk about the book. Or at least my reactions to it.

10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights

Ryu Mitsuse, 1973 [Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander, 2011]

(August 2015)

  

I invite you to marvel dumbfounded at the depth of my ignorance and the height of my hubris, as I attempt to mix it with people far, far smarter than me over at the Strange Horizons Book Club.

Sorcerer to the Crown

Zen Cho, 2015

(October 2015)

  

Delightful. As with her short stories, Cho has a rare and unerring ability to do charming without tripping over into twee, and witty without falling into smug.

Very Short Introductions

Postcolonialism

Robert J.C. Young, 2003

Game Theory

Ken Binmore, 2007

(October 2015)

A pairing prompted by absolutely no good reason whatsoever, but one which did at least serve to emphasise that I'm better with the big ideas than the tedious business of actually backing them up with numbers and evidence. But then we knew that already, didn't we?

Archivist Wasp

Nicole Kornher-Stace, 2015

(September 2015)

Brought this without realizing it was YA. Heart sank a bit when I realized it was YA. Heart sank even further when I realized the protagonist was a teenage girl caught in a dystopian society and which compels her to fight her peers in an annual match to the death.

The Book of Phoenix

Nnedi Okorafor, 2015

(September 2015)

Never let anyone tell you that twitter is worthless. In addition to the massive box of books I scored a couple of years back based on nothing more than a cheap seasonal pun, I'm now in possession of a gorgeous hardback copy of The Book of Pheonix, thanks to the fact that the good people at Hodderscape (or at least their social media managers) have a surprisingly similar taste to me for dubious mid-90's RnB poetry mash-ups.

The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin, 2015

(August 2015)

  

Fantasy like I remember it when I first discovered it. Fantasy that keeps you turning the pages until the small hours of the morning. Fantasy with wit and grace and grime and agony. Fantasy with characters that matter, and relationships that matter, and stories that matter.

Fuck me but this is good.