Reading roundup

I blog a lot about movies, but rarely about books. Go figure.

On the SF front, I recently read N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and really enjoyed it. The opening? Brilliant! The narrator's fragmented voice? Superb. This is the sort of literary styling that's hard to do, but Jemisin makes it look easy. She probably rides to work on a unicycle juggling fireballs.

Currently I'm working my way through Gaiman and Sarrantonio's Stories: All-New Tales, the premise of which seems to be, "lets get a bunch of literary types and fantasy types together and ask them to write page-turning fiction that's outside their comfort zone." So far the standouts are Roddy Doyle's "Blood," Michaewl Swanwick's "Goblin Lake," and Carolyn Parkhurst's "Unwell."

Speaking of short story collections, I just finished There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby, the World-fantasy-award winning collection of translated tales from Russian author and playwright Petrushevskaya. The stories are weird and unsettling in what I presume is a distinctively Soviet way. I find them hard to describe. I think my favourite was "A Mother's Farewell."