sunn_bleach's Reviews (249)

Wow. What an asshole. I'm glad I read this classic now rather than high school - I see what Wilde is doing in the grotesque descriptions of food, drink, and conversation. The twist here is part of the anglophone zeitgeist, but how we get there is not, and Wilde takes his sweet time in classic Wildeian plotlessness. You don't read about Gray's Jekyll & Hyde-esque philandering, but you sure sense its effects, and the damaging of "reputation" is as damning as Victorian England could get. Intensely homoerotic as to be expected, and I'm very glad I finally read it during a cold camping weekend over Thanksgiving. 

I'm on track for finishing Earthsea this year! After the "eh" of The Farthest Shore, I was very profoundly moved by Tehanu while also understanding why fans of the first series think this is a slap in the face. Many die, many are basically dead. The world is both moving on and deeply ossified in tradition that was simply a backdrop to the first three books. Yes, witches' magic is weak (as told in the first book) - so why do we need to dive into that? Well, I'm glad Le Guin did.

Tehanu might be super on-the-nose in terms of its "feminist" readings (something Le Guin disagreed with, finding that term only useful by its enemies), but everything there is appropriate both for Earthsea and the state of fantasy itself. Yes, what does it mean when Tenar - a woman of unimaginable skill and courage - is simply sidelined to marriage after The Tombs of Atuan? This book wasn't what fantasy deserved, but it's what Earthsea needed. 

I was left cold by Annihilation and had mostly written off the series before reading a comment on the sub about how Authority is more like a bureaucratic nightmare zone. Hell yeah!

I'm glad I gave the series another shot; Authority is when you watch the disaster from the other side of the glass, and it's impossible to know how bad things get when you aren't part of the response yourself. While some of the obfuscation felt goofy (really? your childhood nickname is Control?), I happily read this book in two days. If anything, I would have preferred even more office politics; I started skimming when we were back to nature. 

I'm on a mission to read all of VanderMeer's works; no matter what, each book is different while idiosyncratic to him. Unfortunately, this is the worst I've read yet of him. Barely speculative fiction given climate disasters are no longer speculative, Hummingbird Salamander follows an unnamed woman as she becomes obsessed with and deeply involved in an ecoterrorist's (from whose perspective?) life, death, and ultimate mission.

For being a thriller, there's not many thrills, and throughout the entire 368 pages I felt this book failed at telling me why I should care or why things were happening. It felt a bit like the environmentalist (read: responsible, well-informed person) response to Michael Crichton's State of Fear, including in-universe snippets from the ecoterrorist's diaries that basically said "you did bad to the earth". Lots of promise, but I was cold.

Short stories collection that I read in two days that focuses on the mundane horror of being Texas lower-middle class. Parsons is one of those literary fiction-adjacent authors whose stories are occasionally a bit too subtle for their own good, though I'm still glad I picked this up based on the Gabriela Garcia Marquez recommendation alone. Plus, amazing cover art. More of that, less of cut-outs on single-color backgrounds.