Hugo reading.
The interesting thing about Hurley is that you can FEEL her getting better as a writer because her books get weirder and more intricate as she goes along and, at the same time, they also get easier to follow.
What she does here with milsf and the war story is terrifyingly amazing and the visceral (and, well, it’s Hurley so viscera) descriptions sell you on the...not precisely reality of war, but the dissolution of the illusion of war built in other novels.
It’s a story about resistance, sorely needed when it was written and needed even more now.

The Sedgwicks remain adorable and this series remains delightful. I feel like Sebastian did a reasonably good job turning a "this plot relies ENTIRELY on everyone not having a conversation ever" story into a "look, we can talk, but sometimes that isn't enough...for now" story, which is much better.

Today's episode of "what did I just read?" but in a good way.
Bold of Gidney to write a book about the imaginative use of color among a centuries-spanning collection of artists where all you're ever doing is trying to imagine what's going on. (Granted, that's also the point and the impossibility of the color is not just its place on the spectrum - in the sense that magenta doesn't exist and that's it's just your brain trying to cope with two wave-lengths that ought to add up to green but are definitely not green and I'm quite sure Gidney knows that - but that the whole speculative element of the story relies on what can and can't be seen. So of course it's a book.)
The whole thing is unnerving like that, although Gidney is extremely careful to keep the story within the realm of the narratively comfortable even as the premise and the scenery gets more uncomfortable. But art about art is just...like that and this is, for all its incisive observations about what constitutes art rather than craft and knowledge (and its production) and queerness as it intersects with race, is art about art. And it's just like that.

Hugo reading.
Okay, so I’m torn with this book. As a book and as a story that is another entry in the Seanan McGuire thinks about portal fantasy and children, it’s a really interesting story. And her character and narrative voice carry the story so well and the book itself gestures towards some crunchy - the role of children in fantasy novels and the emotional effects of being in a narrative and making visible/real the effects of magic (in like so many ways), but the gestures themselves are vague.
Which is where I get into the literary critic “I read this to vote on it” territory. As a book, it’s not about anything, at least not in the way I wanted it to be about something. Contrasting this to the wayward children books, which is what it’s closest to by far, there’s an absence of...something here, whereas those books are so strongly interested in the questions that I said this book only gestures to. And, on the one hand, the purpose of the story is to tell the story of the people in it isn’t a fault. And/but I wanted it to say something and I’m not entirely sure it did.

Sofia Samatar is one of those writers who gets called gorgeous and lyrical, for good reason. Her Olondrian books almost get lost, in terms of plot, under the language itself and the way she develops the story as a sensory/poetic experience that is happening to her characters.
I found this book easier to read than her first, some of which may simply come from more exposure to her style and also the focus of this story and the four women whose interwoven lives create the narrative of what is, in so many ways, presumed to be men’s stories.
I’m so glad I finally got around to reading it.

There's a reason that, from academia's perspective, there's a certain amount of question about what Boyarin IS, in terms of discipline, because he's somehow always exceeding the boundaries of what one would think a field is.
It's not a critique, by any means, but it is an invitation to think about his writing as straddling the Talmudic, historical, literary, and confessional.
Which is appealing (you mean you can DO that? Yeah, when you're Daniel Boyarin.)
In terms of content - his reading of edelkayt is deeply compelling, his overall project of constructing historical complexity and archeology of viewpoints is hard not to appreciate even as his consistent pulling back of what the project CAN be often ends up - inevitably and paradoxically - increasing its power.
But it's Boyarin as the figure at the center of the text - responding to his own history and conclusions and the part of Judaism that have shaped him - that pull the whole thing together and create a narrative whole.

I'm a sucker for a good Sherlock Holmes retelling and, for all that Addison does not necessarily feel beholden to recreating all aspects of Holmes and Watson's personalities (although you can see she's invested in going back to the actual source material rather than the overly mercurial and frankly obnoxious Holmeses of recent media fame...) and is definitely interested more in bringing in the shape of the stories rather than the exact people, I rather think that's part of what makes this book work.

Hugo reading.
I do love Becky Chambers when she’s being thoughtful and gorgeous. Her stories are always somehow best served when they’re living in the space between narrative, travelogue, and description.
I really liked this and also really see what it’s doing on the best novella nominees.
(Ugh, voting for best novella is going to be awful this year.)

Hugo reading.
This time for best series, which I don't usually read for because I've either tried the series and loved it or decided it was not for me and never got into it so there's no point. I've been meaning to read Thompson's Wormwood Trilogy for a while so this (1 week before voting closes, oy) seemed like a good time to start.
Rosewater sits in the interstices between my thing and not my thing, which I have a hard time explaining. It's a book I want to understand, but from the perspective of "what is Thompson saying about the world" rather than "these are characters I care deeply for". (This is also known as the "When the pov character is a dude being a jerk, I have a harder time getting into the story".) Especially if the focus widens, which Thompson says it does, I imagine I'll read the rest of the series at some point.

This was one of those stories (well, like Stevermer’s other books) where the universe she creates and the system she drops you into is really fascinating and also not fully explained beyond the needs of the plot. It’s not that one goes around feeling wrong-footed precisely, but that one is waiting to find out how much one can find out.
That part was fun.
The male supporting actor (for lack of a better term) was extremely annoying and did not at all deserve the thing resembling a redemption arc that he got. Which didn’t really help my enjoyment of the book.