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lizbeeHonestly, I need to start doing these posts by book.
ANYWAY, the other weekend I had another 22-hour work trip to Sydney. As usual, I wildly over-estimated the amount of time I'd have and books I'd need to take, and loaded my Libby app with a bunch. Which I am, of course, still working through to this day.
(This time I did get a chance to visit Kinokuniya, where I bought one book and took note of a bunch more, and also eavesdropped on some teens who were wondering if Famous Local YA Author A and Famous Local YA Author B were really friends or just doing it for the 'gram. I didn't want to be a creep and interrupt them, but Authors A and B were delighted when I told them about it later. If you are one of those teens and happen to stumble across this: they are really friends.)
Books read in Sydney:
Class Act by Jerry Craft
A sequel to the earlier graphic novel The New Kid, this follows Jordan and his friends for another term, and this time delves into their relationship with their rich, white friend. I thought it successfully avoided a tedious "RICH WHITE KIDS HAVE PROBLEMS TOO, YOU KNOW" moral in favour of a more nuanced "everyone has stuff going on in their lives that we don't see on the outside" message. I loved it, I cannot wait for the library to provide me with the third book in the trilogy.
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
I'm always behind on Murderbot on account of having to wait for Macmillan to release their ebooks to libraries. This novella came out in 2021, and here I am reading it now.
It had exactly what I needed (bots, murder), following Murderbot as it adapts to life on Preservation Station and investigates a murder, mainly using skills it picked up watching media. If you've read Murderbot, you know the deal -- but I will note that I often have trouble following the action in this series, and I did not have that problem at all here.
I found the paperbacks at Kinokuniya and thought about buying at least one, but paying $27 for a novella just feels ... wrong.
Leviathan by John Birmingham
When I was a first-year uni student in 2000, it was the done thing among us older millennials to read Birmingham's sharehouse books. I guess we all wanted to pick up tips on How To Be Students? Mainly what we learned was that Gen Xers had it way better than us, with unlimited Austudy, cheap rent and no need to get a part-time job to pay for textbooks.
At the same time, Birmingham was bringing out Leviathan, his first 'serious' book. It's a history of Sydney in the style of New Journalism, which mostly means a lot of jumping between topics and nothing about women. I'm not joking -- he says in the afterword that he got to the end and realised he had forgotten to write about women and gay people, two demographics who loom fairly large in Sydney's history. But apparently there was no opportunity to fix that?
A lot of the stuff in Leviathan was already familiar to me -- you're going to cover one woman and it's Caroline "little children study her in primary school" Chisolm? -- but I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the anti-landlord demonstrations in the Depression and the union-led green bans in the '70s. I kind of feel like Australians don't know enough about our history of anti-authoritarian protest. But also, a whole chapter on the green bans, and the murder of Juanita Nielsen only gets a passing mention? Birmo. Do better.
Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker (current read)
FIRST OF ALL, go look up Terry J. Benton-Walker and bask for a moment in the glory of his face. Writers are meant to be puffy indoor pets, squinting at the screen or into the sun, and yet here is Benton-Walker with his flawless bone structure and perfectly sculpted beard and eyebrows.
SECOND, this is a contemp YA fantasy set in New Orleans, in an America where Republicans seek to repress magic, white people want to appropriate the uniquely Black generational magic, and Democrats are having it both ways. The protagonists, twin brother and sister, investigate the attempted murder of their mother and the 1989 lynching of their grandparents after accusations they had used magic to murder the white mayor's daughter.
There is a LOT happening in this book (there is also Mean Girl Drama, a sweet gay romance, and all the adults have their own stories and agendas) so it's a bit more involved than the average YA novel. I'm enjoying it immensely and hope it sticks the landing.
ANYWAY, the other weekend I had another 22-hour work trip to Sydney. As usual, I wildly over-estimated the amount of time I'd have and books I'd need to take, and loaded my Libby app with a bunch. Which I am, of course, still working through to this day.
(This time I did get a chance to visit Kinokuniya, where I bought one book and took note of a bunch more, and also eavesdropped on some teens who were wondering if Famous Local YA Author A and Famous Local YA Author B were really friends or just doing it for the 'gram. I didn't want to be a creep and interrupt them, but Authors A and B were delighted when I told them about it later. If you are one of those teens and happen to stumble across this: they are really friends.)
Books read in Sydney:
Class Act by Jerry Craft
A sequel to the earlier graphic novel The New Kid, this follows Jordan and his friends for another term, and this time delves into their relationship with their rich, white friend. I thought it successfully avoided a tedious "RICH WHITE KIDS HAVE PROBLEMS TOO, YOU KNOW" moral in favour of a more nuanced "everyone has stuff going on in their lives that we don't see on the outside" message. I loved it, I cannot wait for the library to provide me with the third book in the trilogy.
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
I'm always behind on Murderbot on account of having to wait for Macmillan to release their ebooks to libraries. This novella came out in 2021, and here I am reading it now.
It had exactly what I needed (bots, murder), following Murderbot as it adapts to life on Preservation Station and investigates a murder, mainly using skills it picked up watching media. If you've read Murderbot, you know the deal -- but I will note that I often have trouble following the action in this series, and I did not have that problem at all here.
I found the paperbacks at Kinokuniya and thought about buying at least one, but paying $27 for a novella just feels ... wrong.
Leviathan by John Birmingham
When I was a first-year uni student in 2000, it was the done thing among us older millennials to read Birmingham's sharehouse books. I guess we all wanted to pick up tips on How To Be Students? Mainly what we learned was that Gen Xers had it way better than us, with unlimited Austudy, cheap rent and no need to get a part-time job to pay for textbooks.
At the same time, Birmingham was bringing out Leviathan, his first 'serious' book. It's a history of Sydney in the style of New Journalism, which mostly means a lot of jumping between topics and nothing about women. I'm not joking -- he says in the afterword that he got to the end and realised he had forgotten to write about women and gay people, two demographics who loom fairly large in Sydney's history. But apparently there was no opportunity to fix that?
A lot of the stuff in Leviathan was already familiar to me -- you're going to cover one woman and it's Caroline "little children study her in primary school" Chisolm? -- but I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the anti-landlord demonstrations in the Depression and the union-led green bans in the '70s. I kind of feel like Australians don't know enough about our history of anti-authoritarian protest. But also, a whole chapter on the green bans, and the murder of Juanita Nielsen only gets a passing mention? Birmo. Do better.
Blood Debts by Terry J. Benton-Walker (current read)
FIRST OF ALL, go look up Terry J. Benton-Walker and bask for a moment in the glory of his face. Writers are meant to be puffy indoor pets, squinting at the screen or into the sun, and yet here is Benton-Walker with his flawless bone structure and perfectly sculpted beard and eyebrows.
SECOND, this is a contemp YA fantasy set in New Orleans, in an America where Republicans seek to repress magic, white people want to appropriate the uniquely Black generational magic, and Democrats are having it both ways. The protagonists, twin brother and sister, investigate the attempted murder of their mother and the 1989 lynching of their grandparents after accusations they had used magic to murder the white mayor's daughter.
There is a LOT happening in this book (there is also Mean Girl Drama, a sweet gay romance, and all the adults have their own stories and agendas) so it's a bit more involved than the average YA novel. I'm enjoying it immensely and hope it sticks the landing.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 06:51 am (UTC)(Which is, of course, why Macmillan withholds new releases from e-libraries.)
no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 07:33 am (UTC)And re ebooks....I've read big six probooks that had terrible typos, bad formatting, etc, like an intern got charged with just dumping the raw file into a conversion program. And we don't own them, either! Unless you know how to strip the drm and save files and a lot of ppl don't know how to do that. E-readers don't seem to last that long either, not compared to books....anyway.
I'm only delighted Wells gets to make a big prizewinning comeback after toiling for over two decades. That's awesome. I'm happy to pay to help that along, anyway!
no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-24 10:50 pm (UTC)You know, I think that's why I signed up for their newsletter. Did I ... remember to download the novellas? Where on earth did I put them?
If it's any consolation, I read the first one and I don't think you're missing much.
(I found it racist and kind of alarming in its eating disorder ideation, given that it was promoted as YA. I know I'm constantly complaining about YA being didactic, but I think a YA author would have found a more nuanced and responsible depiction than "Hey, starving yourself is ROMANTIC AND SEXY!")
no subject
Date: 2023-05-26 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 03:31 am (UTC)I listened to the second book because many people claimed the second book was better. It wasn't.
*The cynical part of me wonders if part of the appeal the overwhelming sense of "every emotion a teenage girl has ever had is valid and justified."
no subject
Date: 2023-06-10 09:59 am (UTC)Oh, I hear you on this. And I am buying both the Murderbot and the Wayward Children novellas in hardback, but I have multiple family members who are reading them as well, so I'm sharing the cost across multiple people.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-10 10:04 am (UTC)me reading this line
going argh, Birmingham, making shit up wholesale, and slandering people in the process. I have no idea where that 'unlimited Austudy' idea came from (in 1989 I was living on $54 / week Austudy, because that is what they paid high school students; life got better when I got to uni). And I wasn't buying textbooks, I was haunting the special reading room in the library where the high demand textbooks were kept, and then reading what I could in my allocated 2 hours with the book. My part time job was paying for food and clothing.
(the slandering people is a specific person, and while I don't remember the exact details, I remember being incandescent with rage over it. There is only one person in local fandom it could possibly be, given the description that was given.)