Beyond the Roundels

Hugo homework continues. I'm posting about it real time on the sync read post, but also posting here as I finish things I consider stand-alone books (novellas and longer) and complete categories:

8. Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots – I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, and I’m still not entirely sure what I think. There is some lovely prose, some of which I found self-indulgent, and some of which I found overly poetic – not in a purple prose way, but in a way where I thought it would’ve genuinely worked better for me in a poem than a novella – but some of it was just good, too, and I think the prose was a positive for me on the whole. The grammar puns – or, not puns, but whatever you’d call it when it’s played straight – grammar word games, I guess? – were mostly a miss for me, though. Like, they’re clever, but they punctured my suspension of disbelief rather than enhancing my reading experience, and felt kind of superfluous and, IDK, smug?

I like the bones of the story, though. ( Spoilers )

Of the two sibling-centric, dealing with the fey novellas that are on the ballot this year, I definitely prefer The Summer War – it’s more relevant to my interests and also has more going on – The River Has Roots is a short novella (which I did not realize, because the ebook in the voter packet is padded out with an excerpt and long acknowledgements – and some lovely woodcut-type art, which I did enjoy – and the story itself (including the illustrations) is only 90 of the 130 pages), but it feels slight even for its real length – a fair bit of it is songs and repetition. But I reasonably enjoyed this one, too, even though I did have to force myself not to skim some of the more self-indulgently descriptive sections.

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OK, so, I’m going to take the fact that I’ve read 4 different novellas since starting the T.Kingfisher one as a sign that I should maybe try reading other things in other categories rather than trying to force myself through that one. And I thought the easiest way to… well, ease myself into full-length novels would be to start with the C.B.Lee Lodestar nominee.

9. C.B.Lee, Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe – Hm. My experience of this book was a fairly monotonic downward trend over its 450 pages (too many pages! It did not need so many pages), which is pretty disappointing but not entirely surprising. My history with C.B.Lee is that I read Not Your Sidekick and found it really cute, despite not finding it any sort of great literature, so those were the expectations I went into this book with, and I was on board with it when it was doing cute teenage hangouts (both romantic and platonic) and everyday family/community stuff – it’s still a bit twee and very Tumblr-earnest, but it is talking about things it knows about, and so it’s charming even when it is, you know, very average modern YA. But then it attempts to have a grand plot, which left me increasingly bored throughout the middle section, and then I got to the last quarter or so and found myself actively annoyed, because now the book was trying to be about world-shaping events and Big Themes and clever plans, and it’s just… not good at conveying any of those things, sorry XD ( More, with spoilers )

Anyway, overall, this started out cute but ended being quite disappointing. I’m not mad I read it, but I think I would be mad if it wins the Hugo… Ah well.

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Taskmaster s21e08 – this series is going so fast! ( Spoilers )

This week’s podcast guest was Jason Mantzoukas, whom I think I enjoy less as the podcast guest than a lot of people, but who was nevertheless a breath of fresh air after John Kearns. He shared that ( spoilers! )

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Taskmaster Oz s5e04 -- don't have much to say about Anisa's dress this time around, but I do love her glittery lipstick which looks like the ruby slippers. ( Spoilers )