August reading
As much as I enjoy reading the Hugo/Nebula finalists and keeping my blackout streak on Seattle Public Library’s summer reading bingo going, I’m a bit glad those are past now and I can just read whatever again. I mean, for values of whatever that reduce my TBR list and/or meet LibraryThing community challenges wherever possible, but still.
Anyway, I read 12 books in August, many of them part of a push to complete that blackout:
The Race to Be Myself by Caster Semenya. SPL Book Bingo, Women's Sports. A memoir of the track star's experiences from childhood through her career as a World and Olympic middle-distance runner. She, of course, became the subject of much controversy because of her appearance and was subjected to invasive and privacy-destroying tests that ultimately showed her to be intersex (though she doesn't particularly like that term--she says she was born a girl and has always been a girl/woman, just a different kind of one). It was interesting to see how she experienced it all, and I was mostly just appalled at how the athletic world treated her as a teenager.
A Sociopath's Guide to a Successful Marriage by MK Oliver. SPL Book Bingo, Hard-to-Love Protagonist. Lalla Rook, the sociopath of the title, knows the way her mind works isn't quite normal, but she's learned to (mostly) mask and move through the world, even as she deals with the fallout from an unplanned dead body in her living room.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher. SPL Book Bingo, Horror. I've read enough horror the past couple of years that I'm not sure I can truthfully say I'm not a horror reader anymore, but let's just say I approach it with a caution that I don't have around, say, romance or fantasy or science fiction. But I'll read T. Kingfisher in any genre, even if I wish she'd write more fantasy and fantasy romance and less body horror that's probably going to give me strange dreams.
Language City by Ross Perlin. SPL Book Bingo, Diaspora. Another one of those books that sits on the border between academic dryness and popular science/history. I admit to finding the sections with deep dives/case studies following specific people trying to keep their languages alive most interesting.
Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett. SPL Book Bingo, Buddy Read. A lovely cozy mystery with a thread of romance, not to mention a delightful assemblage of cats.
We Hereby Refuse by Frank Abe & Tamiko Nimura. SPL Book Bingo, PNW Black, Indigenous, or POC Author. While I was definitely aware of WWII Japanese-American incarceration and knew it to be a stain on our nation's history, before reading this book I didn't know just how horrific their treatment at many camps, and especially Tule Lake, actually was. Unfortunately, it's all too resonant with current events, too.
A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland. SPL Book Bingo, Queer/Trans Voices. Whoever described this as The Goblin Emperor meets Magnificent Century got it right. It's a swoonily romantic fantasy with a self-doubting prince and his bodyguard in a kingdom that has all of the Ottoman Empire's baroque splendor but none of its patriarchy.
Blood on the River by Marjoleine Kars. SPL Book Bingo, Water. An account of a 1763-64 slave uprising in an obscure Dutch colony along the Berbice River in what is now Guyana. The author adheres too scrupulously (though admirably) to the archival material for this to be a gripping page-turner, but it's an interesting look at a part of the world I know little to nothing about, and also an example of how even this small and short-lived revolution followed patterns of fragmentation and strife all too familiar to listeners to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast.
The House With Chicken Legs by Sophie Anderson. SPL Book Bingo, Myth & Legend. A middle grade story where the 12-year-old protagonist is a granddaughter of Baba Yaga rebelling against her assigned destiny of shepherding the spirits of the dead to the Great Beyond.
Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher. Have a mentioned a bajillion times how much I love it when T. Kingfisher writes fantasy romance? Well, that's what this is, and I love it.
The Reluctant Heartthrob by Jackie Lau. After a summer spent reading Hugo and Nebula finalists and books that fit bingo categories, it's nice to just grab something fun on my TBR like this contemporary romance novella.
Judeophobia and the New Testament ed. by Sarah E. Rollens, Eric M. Vanden Eykel, and Meredith J.C. Warren. And of course this was NOT a fun read, though it's a theological and historical topic that has long interested me. It's designed as an undergraduate-level textbook--which I didn't know before I started reading it--but the relatively short, self-contained chapters worked well for reading during the 30-minute breaks between panels and workshops as I attended Worldcon online over the past several days. It got a bit repetitive, since after the first few introductory chapters it pretty much went through the NT book by book. I think it was meant as a sort of companion text to a NT survey course, so you'd read the chapter on John's gospel during the week John was on the syllabus, etc.
I did learn some new things--e.g. one theory for the seemingly contradictory statements about the continuing validity of Mosaic law in Paul's epistles is that there was a thread in Judaism at the time, and not just among the early Jewish Jesus-followers, where the passages in some of the prophets to the effect of "in the latter days all the nations will look to the LORD" meant that Gentiles would turn to the God of Israel without converting to Judaism. They'd still be "the nations," aka the goyim. So to Paul, if new Gentile Jesus-followers went through a full conversion and started keeping kosher, accepting circumcision, etc., it wouldn't fulfill the prophecy anymore because they'd be part of Israel, not "the nations." Which makes a weird kind of sense, really.