LHC #40: “The Warmth of other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. Once again I have no clue why I requested this. I so wish the library holds page had a notes field! It’s about blacks fleeing Jim Crow South in the period between 1917 and the 1970’s, and really I had no idea. This book left me feeling dirty. It’s a bit repetitive but more within sections than across them, mostly because it switches between three main stories and spends too much time recapping what’s gone before, kind of a written equivalent of those A&E true-crime shows that recap everything that happened before the station break before progressing a little farther and cutting to another commercial.
Towards the end, I became fascinated by what I imagine of IW’s process writing this. Her three main subject migrants died 6-12 years before the book was published, so she must have spent just a ridiculous amount of time massaging this content into the shape it appears in here. That must have been brutal. But you have to write something that people will be able to read – you can’t use all the content you have, if you wind up with a 10,000 page series.
LHC #41: “The City and the City” by China Mieville. This book shows so much trust in its readers. Police procedural that is so much about language and culture and nationalism. Some books I just want to talk to someone about.
“Orsinian Tales” by Ursula K. LeGuin. Orciny didn’t clue me in, but on p. 207 of “the city and the city” someone finally says “Orcinian” and I ran around the house looking for this. If I read it before, it was at least 20 years ago, so it was totally worth the re-read.
LHC #42: “Icarus Down” by James Bow. I didn’t quite buy the main character as a burn victim, but the worldbuilding was really cool. In a weird bit of synchronicity, the author’s wife blurbed the next book.
LHC #43: “An Inheritance of Ashes” by Leah Bobet. A Toronto writer. I’ve met her a couple of times. I follow her on Twitter. More than halfway through, I remembered that every first-person narrator is an unreliable narrator, and then I understood what LB was doing here, and started hating Marthe a lot less. She’s a writer really in control of her craft.