Media Round Up: At The End of the Year
Dec. 22nd, 2022 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forestofgloryMeida round ups are where I write short thoughts about things I've been reading and watching recently. Though I think writing Suiban Reads has made me a little bit more wordy this time. Not sure if that trend will continue. Anyways here are my thoughts on various media I've seen and read since last time.
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia—
I decided to go look through the Hugo Sheet to see what novellas I was missing out on. This one looked interesting and my library had a copy. The novella tells the story of Firuz, a refugee with some training in healing, who gets a job working at a clinic. I liked the worldbuilding and wanted to eat all the food (even the eggplant that the younger brother dislikes). I also loved that Firuz is nonbinary and aroace and the narrative focused on their relationships with their mentor, their student, and their brother. I found bits of this rather grim. I managed to guess a key plot point well before Firuz and found waiting for them to get it a bit frustrating (sometimes its not fun to be genre savvy). This was a good short read and I'm glad I read it (Content warning: plague, child death)
Interior Chinatow by Charles Yu— This book was really surreal. I had heard of this but it sounded like lit fic and not SFF so I had not read it but a friend read and loved it recently so I decided to try it. It isn’t really SFF though things that can’t be explained happen. This boo is in conversion with a bunch of stuff I’m not very familiar with, like lit fic and recent american television, So I felt a little bit lost at first. I really liked how this book used the screenplay format. Overall I liked it but reading it felt like coming in the middle of a conversation. (Content note child hunger and mental harm, 20th century Tawainese politics, racism in American)
Laid Back Camp (ep 1-10)— This is what my mostly doungha group watch is watching at the moment. It's an anime about high school girls camping and making friends. It's very low stakes and cozy. There's lots of discussion of camping gear, yummy food, and views of Mt Fuji. It's very soothing and I'm enjoying it very much!
Golden Terrace by by Cang Wu Bin Bai, trans E. Danglars— I mostly enjoyed this danmei novel which featured an arranged marriage and court politics. I liked the relationship between the main characters a lot!
Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs by Jane Jacobs ed Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring— Jane Jacobs is well known by people interested in urban planning but maybe not so much outside of that. She was an activist who advocated against urban renewal and for what we would now call walkability and urbanism generally. Some of these essays are great and some of them made me go "Oh Jane Jacobs no!" The way she overgeneralized history really annoyed me, and some of the economic ideas she espoused made me winch. But she really did have a lot of insight into how cities work. It was great to talk about it with the book club which contains people who are experts about some of these ideas and learn how thinking about those concepts has changed.
Also this has excellent footnotes, that help contextualize the writing and explain the issues being addressed. For example they explain who all the various people Jacobs mentioned are, which was very helpful because I'd only heard of a few of them.
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo— I was highly anticipating this new entry in the Singing Hills Cycle which features cultivators! And it lived up to my expectations! Like all the Singing Hills novelas it features multi layered retellings of events which is great. Also the fight scenes in this are excellent. The swooshy fight scenes that I love in wuxia dramas can be hard to capture in text form, but the fight scenes in this novella feel like the best drama scenes.
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia—
I decided to go look through the Hugo Sheet to see what novellas I was missing out on. This one looked interesting and my library had a copy. The novella tells the story of Firuz, a refugee with some training in healing, who gets a job working at a clinic. I liked the worldbuilding and wanted to eat all the food (even the eggplant that the younger brother dislikes). I also loved that Firuz is nonbinary and aroace and the narrative focused on their relationships with their mentor, their student, and their brother. I found bits of this rather grim. I managed to guess a key plot point well before Firuz and found waiting for them to get it a bit frustrating (sometimes its not fun to be genre savvy). This was a good short read and I'm glad I read it (Content warning: plague, child death)
Interior Chinatow by Charles Yu— This book was really surreal. I had heard of this but it sounded like lit fic and not SFF so I had not read it but a friend read and loved it recently so I decided to try it. It isn’t really SFF though things that can’t be explained happen. This boo is in conversion with a bunch of stuff I’m not very familiar with, like lit fic and recent american television, So I felt a little bit lost at first. I really liked how this book used the screenplay format. Overall I liked it but reading it felt like coming in the middle of a conversation. (Content note child hunger and mental harm, 20th century Tawainese politics, racism in American)
Laid Back Camp (ep 1-10)— This is what my mostly doungha group watch is watching at the moment. It's an anime about high school girls camping and making friends. It's very low stakes and cozy. There's lots of discussion of camping gear, yummy food, and views of Mt Fuji. It's very soothing and I'm enjoying it very much!
Golden Terrace by by Cang Wu Bin Bai, trans E. Danglars— I mostly enjoyed this danmei novel which featured an arranged marriage and court politics. I liked the relationship between the main characters a lot!
spoilers
some of the things that the novel asked me to suspend my moral disbelief about made me uncomfortable, especially the main characters torturing people. But this novel did something that I haven't seen before in c-ent! It had the characters acknowledge that the imperial system wasn't working and then change the system!None of this if we replace the emperor that will fix everything nonsense that's so common. I was so happy to see that! I may have squealed out loud!Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs by Jane Jacobs ed Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring— Jane Jacobs is well known by people interested in urban planning but maybe not so much outside of that. She was an activist who advocated against urban renewal and for what we would now call walkability and urbanism generally. Some of these essays are great and some of them made me go "Oh Jane Jacobs no!" The way she overgeneralized history really annoyed me, and some of the economic ideas she espoused made me winch. But she really did have a lot of insight into how cities work. It was great to talk about it with the book club which contains people who are experts about some of these ideas and learn how thinking about those concepts has changed.
Also this has excellent footnotes, that help contextualize the writing and explain the issues being addressed. For example they explain who all the various people Jacobs mentioned are, which was very helpful because I'd only heard of a few of them.
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo— I was highly anticipating this new entry in the Singing Hills Cycle which features cultivators! And it lived up to my expectations! Like all the Singing Hills novelas it features multi layered retellings of events which is great. Also the fight scenes in this are excellent. The swooshy fight scenes that I love in wuxia dramas can be hard to capture in text form, but the fight scenes in this novella feel like the best drama scenes.
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Date: 2022-12-24 12:05 pm (UTC)