forestofglory

Well, July is now over so it's time to wrap up Stacking the Stories. I hope everyone who took part had a good time. I’ve enjoyed seeing your posts and tweets about it. It's good to have some more discussion of short SFF. So how did you do at meet your goal? What did you read that stood out?

My original goal was to read 20 stories in July. Then when I was doing quite well in the middle of the month I set myself a stretch goal of 30 stories. In the end I read 25 stories which I’m satisfied with. Some highlights where:
”Boiled Bones and Black Eggs” by Nghi Vo
”The Dragon That Flew Out of the Sun” by Aliette de Bodard
How we know they have faces by Marissa Lingen


So that was a fun challenge. Thank you to everyone else who took part! I hope you had fun too.

Stacking the Stories Reading
I’m so glad I decided to focus on reading short fiction! I’ve mostly been reading The Trans Space Octopus Congregation: Stories by Bogi Takács, since I got an ARC from the author. It comes out July 8 so I will hopefully finish it and write a proper review of it around then. I also have read a couple of online stories. The standout of these is ”Boiled Bones and Black Eggs” by Nghi Vo

Mom fic I read a couple more fics featuring moms. Here are two I’d recommend:
Calling to the wind by Leaf Litter -- An Earthsea fic about Tenar and Apple’s relationship.
#101: "An Inevitable Conclusion; But With Makeouts" by Raven This Murderbot fic features Dr Mensah watching Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon with her daughter and has lots of lovely Mom/Daugher media discussion.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris eps 1-3 This fiction podcast, and the 1st time I’ve listened to such a thing. (I generally go for non-fiction podcasts instead.) It’s like a radio play with different voices for character and sound effects. The characters feel very contemporary like people from the modern day US but in space. Nonetheless I really like then and enjoy their interactions. There's banter. Plus I want to learn more about the mystery.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell YA graphic novel. This was cute but very teen drama which is something I haven’t really been enjoying reading about recently.

Nirvana in Fire eps 10-13 Most of these episodes passed the Bechdel test. We got to see the scheming moms so more -- they are so much fun. And Mu Nihuang had very intense emotional moment which gave me a lot of feelings. There has been much scheming and discussion of morality all of which is excellent. Plus have mentioned how much I enjoy the costuming in this drama? Everyone wears such pretty things.

The 5th gender by G.L. Carriger This is science fiction m/m human alien romance with a mystery. This didn’t quite work for me. The romance went straight to commitment in a way that didn’t leave a lot of room for character development, and the mystery was interesting but didn’t really get started until halfway through the book. And If I think too hard about the biology I have a lot of questions. Also this another science fiction universe that inexplicably does not have artificial wombs. The best bit of this book is at the beginning when our Alien mc is baffled by a cat. I was telling some friends about this and one of them said “Alien baffled by a cat” should be troupe name. So if you would like to use “Alien baffled by cat” for all your non-humans baffled by human culture go right ahead. ( spoilery content notes )

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe Graphic Memoir. This was a mix of things that felt really familiar and things that felt very unfamiliar. The author is a bit younger than I am but we both grew up in Northern California and have some of the same cultural reference points, like Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books and The Last Herald-Mage. And e did high school theater and read a lot as teen. But then e’s experience with eir gender is not like my experience with my gender. And the juxtaposition left me feeling a bit off balance -- in a good way but I need to process my reaction a bit more.

Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter by Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard This is a French comic about Japan translated into English. So very transnational. Anyways it was cute and I liked a lot of the art though some of the people were drawn in a way that looked close to racist caricature to my American eyes. But the landscapes where very nice.

I have a backlog of short SFF that I would like to read. I’ve been consuming other awesome media and gotten very behind -- but there’s awesome sound short SFF I would like to get around to so I’m giving myself a bit of a push to prioritize the short SFF. I’ll be doing a short fiction reading challenge for the month of July and I thought I’d invite everyone else to play along.

If you don’t have short fiction TBR but you’d like to try some short SFF this could be a great way to dip your toes in. If you are looking for recs check my short fiction tag. Most of the stuff I rec is free to read online. If you’d like recs for stuff published this year check out the 2019-2020 Hugo Sheet. There’s also some great advice for finding short SFF you’ll enjoy in this round up of short SFF reading habits I put together last year.

The rules are pretty simple. Pick a number of short works that feels right to you and try to read that many pieces of short SFF in July. My personal goal is 20 works, but you could pick more or less!. As per the Hugo Award categories a short work is anything under 40,000 words. So novellas, novettles, and short stories -- though I plan to focus on the latter two. If you would like to play along you can post about it in your own space or comment here with your goals.

Sometime in the middle of the month I will do a check in post a see how everyone is doing with their goals. At the end of the month we will have rap up post and can talk about how the whole thing went and share some recs.

Happy reading!

ETA: If you would like to talk about this challenge on Twitter I've created a hashtag: #StackingtheStories