A month of reading black futures
Jun. 29th, 2022 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileWell, so much for reading all the books I’ve borrowed from other people before the move–I had very little time or focus to read, so I’ve only just finished up N.K. Jemisin’s book of short stories How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, which I had borrowed from my housemate and had intended to finish and return before I moved out of the house.
There are a lot of short stories in this anthology, like more than twenty, and some of them are very short and some of them are a bit meatier. I tended to like the longer ones better, and I especially preferred the ones that got turned into novels–”Stone Hunger,” the precursor to the Broken Earth trilogy, and “The Narcomancer,” which takes place in the universe of the Dreamblood duology. I also am pretty sure I liked the stories in the second half of the collection better than the ones in the first half, and I can’t tell if that’s because they put the better stories near the end of the collection (an odd choice, if so) or if I’m maybe in a better mood/easier to please/less stressed and cranky than I was when I was trying to squeeze in bits of reading around packing and all sorts of stressful moving stuff. But I also genuinely bounced off the very first story in the collection pretty hard, a second-person piece taking aim at a centrist worldview I don’t have in an incredibly condescending tone that I can’t imagine would annoy me much less if it were correct about the things “you” (the reader, i.e. I) thought. It’s only uphill from there, though, and there’s a lot of really fun worldbuilding–magical restaurants, a New York where probability has gotten all fucked up, an accidentally all-women’s outpost in space–and I think at a more normal time in my life I would have sailed right through the whole thing in a week or less.
I do not have the brain to really deep dive into what I thought about each of the 22 stories in here. I barely had the brain to read the thing. I am still dealing with a certain amount of moving/homebuying chores to do (I got a library card today, woo) and trying to explore my new hometown in the nice weather and being very slammed at work because the tech editing team is understaffed and I was out of the office for a week. The books I am packing to go to Maine next week are all going to be fluffy and dumb. The girlfriend and I have started watching First Kill on Netflix and that’s about the level of serious appreciation of craft I am currently capable of.
There are a lot of short stories in this anthology, like more than twenty, and some of them are very short and some of them are a bit meatier. I tended to like the longer ones better, and I especially preferred the ones that got turned into novels–”Stone Hunger,” the precursor to the Broken Earth trilogy, and “The Narcomancer,” which takes place in the universe of the Dreamblood duology. I also am pretty sure I liked the stories in the second half of the collection better than the ones in the first half, and I can’t tell if that’s because they put the better stories near the end of the collection (an odd choice, if so) or if I’m maybe in a better mood/easier to please/less stressed and cranky than I was when I was trying to squeeze in bits of reading around packing and all sorts of stressful moving stuff. But I also genuinely bounced off the very first story in the collection pretty hard, a second-person piece taking aim at a centrist worldview I don’t have in an incredibly condescending tone that I can’t imagine would annoy me much less if it were correct about the things “you” (the reader, i.e. I) thought. It’s only uphill from there, though, and there’s a lot of really fun worldbuilding–magical restaurants, a New York where probability has gotten all fucked up, an accidentally all-women’s outpost in space–and I think at a more normal time in my life I would have sailed right through the whole thing in a week or less.
I do not have the brain to really deep dive into what I thought about each of the 22 stories in here. I barely had the brain to read the thing. I am still dealing with a certain amount of moving/homebuying chores to do (I got a library card today, woo) and trying to explore my new hometown in the nice weather and being very slammed at work because the tech editing team is understaffed and I was out of the office for a week. The books I am packing to go to Maine next week are all going to be fluffy and dumb. The girlfriend and I have started watching First Kill on Netflix and that’s about the level of serious appreciation of craft I am currently capable of.