Sorta want to get back to posting these individually, nonetheleast between grouping them in threes keeps them languishing in OneNote until I forget to post them until I have a backlog which is all pretty silly. Also to make my tags more useful. I am in that effort almost caught up on backlog.
Title: Sisters
Author: Daisy Johnson
Published: Penguin, 2020
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 225
Total Page Count: 335,185
Text Number: 1182
Read Because: reviewed by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tamaranth, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Two sisters with an unusual, perhaps unhealthy, but fracturing intimacy move out of the city with their mother after an unspecified incident at school. This is a heap of enjoyable gothic/horror tropes, creepy not-twins, a haunted house, (in)convenient traumatic amnesia, and I like it a lot—including things I didn't think I'd appreciate, like stylistic repetition and dips into an external PoV, which ultimately help sell the idealized-but-unsettling obsessive premise. But I wish I liked it more; wish specifically that certain elements were stronger and more intentional: the haunted house as metaphor of the haunted body/mind isn't grounded in a meaningful (or, for that matter, evocative) setting; the ending manages not to be convincing psychological or fantastical, and thus feels only like a predictable horror trope.(I wonder if I'd've liked this more if I hadn't recently read Tryon's The Other.)
Title: Carmilla
Author: Sheridan Le Fanu
Published: 1872
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 335,285
Text Number: 1183
Read Because: originally recommended bychthonic_cassandra but I've read it a couple of times since then, read through Global Grey Ebooks/Project Gutenberg
Review: Imagine that it's the 1870s and you're a queer woman reading "'I have been in love with no one, and never shall,' she whispered, 'unless it should be with you,'" reading
perhaps aloud! perhaps to a particular woman! This is profoundly, explicitly queer; also delightfully gothic, a love entwining violence, "a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust"—problematic, certainly, and inseparable from the predatory lesbian trope. I love it all: I love that it pushes beyond the bounds of its coding to be romantic and erotic; I love that it revels in the obligatory evil of the non-normative, love the misty early-autumn setting, love the gothic excess. The heavy delivery of the ending is probably the most dated element, and honestly I love it too—right down to the corny anagrams. This delights me more with each reread.
Title: Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: The Women's Press, 1985 (1962)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 160
Total Page Count: 335,445
Text Number: 1184
Read Because: can't remember where I first heard of this! it was its appearance in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials that finally prompted me to dig up a copy; borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: A woman reflects on episodes of her life as an communications specialist on various first-contact missions. I loved this, although perhaps not for the reason it's best loved: like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, the elements which were progressive then feel dated now, so there's a regressive, unproductive gender essentialism in the idea that women are naturally better at communication and that the beats in their life are tied to childbirth. It's interesting that this has aged more poorly than Travel Light; that the same feminist lens feels progressive when looking back at myth and fairytales, but dated when looking forward to science fiction.
But the emphasis on communication and internalization has a delightful effect. Each alien people is a high-concept puzzle with inventive worldbuilding and thorny ethical/social conundrums, and the protagonist's engagement is professional but also personal, emotional, romantic, sexual, dynamic, lived. It reminds me, unexpectedly, of what I want Star Trek spinoff novels to be: the zany, high-concept creativity of golden age SF rooted in the individual and the way that identity, thought, and social role are informed—transformed—by experience; and these are uniquely transformative experiences. It makes for superbly satisfying little book; this has been on my TBR for an absolute age, and it lives up to all that anticipation.
Title: Sisters
Author: Daisy Johnson
Published: Penguin, 2020
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 225
Total Page Count: 335,185
Text Number: 1182
Read Because: reviewed by
tamaranth, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County LibraryReview: Two sisters with an unusual, perhaps unhealthy, but fracturing intimacy move out of the city with their mother after an unspecified incident at school. This is a heap of enjoyable gothic/horror tropes, creepy not-twins, a haunted house, (in)convenient traumatic amnesia, and I like it a lot—including things I didn't think I'd appreciate, like stylistic repetition and dips into an external PoV, which ultimately help sell the idealized-but-unsettling obsessive premise. But I wish I liked it more; wish specifically that certain elements were stronger and more intentional: the haunted house as metaphor of the haunted body/mind isn't grounded in a meaningful (or, for that matter, evocative) setting; the ending manages not to be convincing psychological or fantastical, and thus feels only like a predictable horror trope.
Title: Carmilla
Author: Sheridan Le Fanu
Published: 1872
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 335,285
Text Number: 1183
Read Because: originally recommended by
chthonic_cassandra but I've read it a couple of times since then, read through Global Grey Ebooks/Project GutenbergReview: Imagine that it's the 1870s and you're a queer woman reading "'I have been in love with no one, and never shall,' she whispered, 'unless it should be with you,'" reading
"You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature."
perhaps aloud! perhaps to a particular woman! This is profoundly, explicitly queer; also delightfully gothic, a love entwining violence, "a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust"—problematic, certainly, and inseparable from the predatory lesbian trope. I love it all: I love that it pushes beyond the bounds of its coding to be romantic and erotic; I love that it revels in the obligatory evil of the non-normative, love the misty early-autumn setting, love the gothic excess. The heavy delivery of the ending is probably the most dated element, and honestly I love it too—right down to the corny anagrams. This delights me more with each reread.
Title: Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: The Women's Press, 1985 (1962)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 160
Total Page Count: 335,445
Text Number: 1184
Read Because: can't remember where I first heard of this! it was its appearance in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials that finally prompted me to dig up a copy; borrowed from OpenLibrary
Review: A woman reflects on episodes of her life as an communications specialist on various first-contact missions. I loved this, although perhaps not for the reason it's best loved: like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, the elements which were progressive then feel dated now, so there's a regressive, unproductive gender essentialism in the idea that women are naturally better at communication and that the beats in their life are tied to childbirth. It's interesting that this has aged more poorly than Travel Light; that the same feminist lens feels progressive when looking back at myth and fairytales, but dated when looking forward to science fiction.
But the emphasis on communication and internalization has a delightful effect. Each alien people is a high-concept puzzle with inventive worldbuilding and thorny ethical/social conundrums, and the protagonist's engagement is professional but also personal, emotional, romantic, sexual, dynamic, lived. It reminds me, unexpectedly, of what I want Star Trek spinoff novels to be: the zany, high-concept creativity of golden age SF rooted in the individual and the way that identity, thought, and social role are informed—transformed—by experience; and these are uniquely transformative experiences. It makes for superbly satisfying little book; this has been on my TBR for an absolute age, and it lives up to all that anticipation.
