We may have missed Readercon, but we can still babble about books

[kestrell]

So we missed Readercon this year
I organized a virtual Readercon with some friends so we could discuss what books we had been reading lately. Here's the list, with some additional comments by me. Note: ssorry I only began mentioning Bookshare/NLS availability starting around halfway through the list.

A Song for a New Day by Pinsker, Sarah
Available on Bookshare.org, and on NLS as an audiobook

Fritz Lieber "Coming Attraction", Our Lady of Darkness
Story about a man who gets caught up with occultists in San Francisco? and has a scene which explains why we no longer sleep with piles of books in our beds.
Available on Bookshare.org (Kes recommends geting the ebook which also includes "conjure Wife"), also available on NLS as an audiobook

Podcast "Our Opinions are Correct"

Audiobook Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi Audiobook

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
"dashing geneticist vampire" [it says so on the book jacket]
Enthusiastically panned by Kestrell, who had to review it when it first came out

The Magnus Archives
Enthusiastically recommended by three of us. The narrator has a *great* voice. This is like the old-school M. R. James/Algernon Blackwood kind of horror, with no violence toward women and only a few passing references to sex. Kes loves the evil books.
All sorts of ways to listen, including asking Alexa to play it for you, or listen to it online at
http://rustyquill.com/the-magnus-archives/

Does the dog die.com
doesthedogdie.com
Because we all hate stories where the dog dies.

Darcie Little Badger
Along with Rebecca Roanhorse, Little Badger writes great speculative fiction that integrates Native American myth and culture. Highly recommended by Kes.
You can read both of the following short stories on Darcy Little Badger's short fiction page at
http://darcielittlebadger.com/published-fiction/

"Skinwalker, Fast Talker" Coyote story in _No Shit, There I Was_ (available on Bookshare.org)
"Owl versus the Neighborhood Watch"
The latter short story is also available in _Mythic Journeys_ edited by Paula Guran (available on Bookshare.org and NLS as an audiobook)
_Mythic Journeys: Retold Myths and Legends_ anthology, ed. Paula Guran (available on NLS)
Recommended by Kes, who also mentioned the following stories:

"How to Survive an Epic Journey" - the tale of the Argonauts told by Atalanta, by Tansy Rayner Roberts
and
"A Wolf in Iceland is the Child of a Lie" - a woman meets one of Loki's children, by Sonya Taaffe
You can read this story online at
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/a-wolf-in-iceland-is-the-child-of-a-lie/

Rebecca Roanhorse
This is Kes's favorite new (to her) author: she recommends a duology:
_Trail of Lightning_ and _Storm of Locusts_, and the commercial audiobook versions are wonderful (available on NLS, and ebook versions are on Bookshare.org)
Check out her GoodReads page
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15862877.Rebecca_Roanhorse
for a list of her books, including her upcoming _Black Sun_, and a link to Levar Burton reading one of her stories.

The Years of Rice and Salt_ by Kim Stanley Robinson (available on Bookshare.org and NLS)
a world in which Buddhism and Islam are the dominant religions and New World settlers sail from China, as envisioned by the reincarnation of the central characters. 2002.
Kes also recommends: The Memory of Whiteness_ (1985), available on Bookshore because she scanned it
This story features a musician-physicist who is visually impaired and gets involved in traveling to new worlds.

_The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses_ by Noel Annan
Kes is currently proofreading her scan of this book, which describes famous Oxford and Cambridge dons from the Victorian period to the 1960s or so, including commentary on homosexuality at Oxbridge.
Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers
Followed mention of _The Dons_, a number of us have read and recommend this book, mention of lesbianism at Oxford in the 1920s/30s?


_Decline and Fall_ by Evelyn Waugh
1928 satire about Waugh's university days at Oxford and his time as a teacher at a public school in Wales.

The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, by the same author

_Mexican Gothic_, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Fiction, on Kes's to be read list and recommended by another reader

_The Road of Ice and Salt_ by José Luis Zárate
Originally in Spanish, but an English translation has just been completed and will be released late this year or early next,
Read about it here
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-road-of-ice-and-salt#/

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom, Changeling, Big Machine
All of his books are available on Bookshare.org, most are available on NLS in audiobook format.
LaValle Will be participating in the virtual con, Reconvene, which Kes mentioned, and then babbled on about what a great voice he has, and how during his acceptance speech for a Shirley Jackson Award, he spoke about horror in nonfiction, and read from
Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages, Raising Demons
Both of the above-mentioned books are available on Bookshare.org, and _Life Among the Savages_ is available in web braille on NLS
You can read about the most recent Shirley Jackson Awards, announced just this past weekend, here
https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/
For the benefit of my blind friends, the Shirley Jackson Award is an inscribed rock, a reference to Jackson's most famous short story, "The Lottery."

Sarah Pinsker "Two Truths and a Lie"
You can read it on tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2020/06/17/two-truths-and-a-lie-sarah-pinsker/

Naomi Kritzer
tor.com "Little Free Library",
https://www.tor.com/2020/04/08/little-free-library-naomi-kritzer/

_Catfishing on Catnet_,
Kes *loves* this book, even though she doesn't have a cat, or cat pictures, but she does love AIs who are not evil.
Available on Bookshare.org, and available as an audiobook on NLS
_Cat Pictures, Please_
You can read it on the Clarke's World site at, which also has an audio version
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/

Martha Wells, Murderbot series
_Network Error_ just came out earlier this summer. Martha Wells will also be participating in ReConvene. The Murderbot series is available on both Bookshare.org and NLS, but NLS doesn't have _Network Error_ yet.

Questionable Content webcomic

Comments

[ambyr]

You probably already know this, but LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom is available from NLS as part of Tor.com collection: Season 2 DB85375. (I mention because if you search BARD for The Ballad of Black Tom, it won't show up. But it's there, it's just hidden.)

There's also a biography of Shirley Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life DB87504, that you might like.

[kestrell]

Thanks for adding this! I did see those, but by then I had been writing and adding links to this entry for about two hours, and it was getting pretty long. I'm impressed how many NLS audiobooks there are for Jackson, and NLS has most of the LaValle except _Big Machine_, which is my favorite (creepy archives are a thing of mine...).

[jesse_the_k]

Glad to hear the good news about Roanhorse's audiobooks. Whenever I'm reading in a culture that's new to me I prefer hearing it from a good narrator to snagging my brain on unfamiliar words.

Sarah Pinsker's short story collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is also excellent!

I pre-ordered Network Error and inhaled it like fine spring rain. (I was also quite confused at the end, and thanks to answers from my readers it will make sense when I comfort re-read it during 20° below days in a few months.) Like all Tor books, it has no DRM so no problem reading it via any app.

I wish I could enjoy horror! There's certainly lots of it around. I'd heard a bunch of squee about Magnus from rydra_wong, who hosts copious discussion on that topic

[kestrell]

Earlier this year I began listening to more audiobooks of science fiction and fantasy, and anything with lots of names, words, and cultural references in other languages.

Text-to-speech really detracts from any story which uses unusual words, including SFF's made-up words.

I also listen to a lot less horror than I used to, because I refuse to handle anything that features violence and/or sexual abuse toward women and children. Even though I am a complete fangirl for Liz Hand's writing, I haven't been able to read her latest book, which just won a Shirley Jackson award, even though I know the violence is a ncessary part of the story.

[negothick]

Kes, thank you so much for archiving your booklist!
It's appropriate that you would begin the list with Song for a New Day, the book most suited to our current moment.
One correction:
Liz Hand didn't win the Jackson for Curious Toys, though she was nominated.The winner for Best Novel was a book and an author I had never heard of: Sarah Rose Etter for The Book of X.
I plan to read it. This review makes it sound like something you would devour:
"The book trafficks in a sort of magic realist body horror, and the results are remarkable. This is a world in which meat can be mined from the ground and in quarries, and Cassie's own depressive imaginings—of rivers of thighs and fields of throats—are as unsettling as her environment. It's no light read, filled as it is with tales of trauma and abuse, of bodily self-hatred and self-doubt, but Cassie's memorable voice and Etter's terrific turns of phrase deftly deliver this novel's brutal beauty."

[kestrell]

Thank you for the correction, and the recommendation!