Belated July and August Update

Dearest bibliophiles,

It's been so long! Sincerest apologies for my absence; I've been on the road for most of the last couple of months - traveling, visiting friends and family, and then moving to Japan - on top of that my computer charger got packed into my shipment, so I've been without a keyboard for the whole summer. I prefer to write these posts (and anything longer than a few lines) on a real keyboard, so that's been most of the reason for the delay.

I was able to get quite a bit of reading done over the summer, and I'm attaching the list of things I read at the bottom under the label July along with notes about how they may (or may not) have contributed to my progress with the 2017 Read Harder Challenge.

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin is the third, and final, installment of the Broken Earth trilogy, and just came out a few days ago. I read and enjoyed the first two novels earlier this year and I've been anxiously awaiting the third. The first, The Fifth Season, won the 2016 Hugo Award for best novel and was an April Triple B selection. The world that Jemisin has created is richly constructed with complex characters who are both relatable and endearing. If you've not read a fantasy novel this year, I highly recommend you start with this series.

Ken Liu's award-winning (the first to win the Hugo, Nebula, AND World Fantasy awards) The Paper Menagerie is a moving short story about a biracial child and his struggle to come to terms with his Chinese heritage.

The item I've most been dreading from this reading challenge is the very first - read a book about sports. As most of you know, I'm pretty much the polar opposite of a sports fan - I do yoga and I run, but I cannot be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to organized athletics. When I was younger - maybe 7 or 8 - my father took me to a college football game thinking that I might be won over by the collective excitement of the crowd and the festive nature of it being a live event. Alas, I took two books (Goosebumps by R.L. Stine, if I remember correctly) and read the entire time. I didn't even pay attention to the band's performance during halftime. I've been trying to keep an eye out for something sports-related that would be somewhat palatable, and I think I've found it in Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Over the summer, I read How to be Gay in which David Halperin argues that there's a lot more to being gay than physical attraction by exploring and interpreting gay cultural artifacts before and since Stonewall. He frequently refers to Susan Sontag's essay, On Camp, and therefore I've added the collection of her essays, Against Interpretation and Other Essays in which it is included, to the list for this month.

Alexander Chee's award-winning debut novel, Edinburgh, was featured in our June reading list and has been one of my favorite reads this year. Chee was a delightful guest on Episode 8 of Food4Thot during which he dished about revenge sex and the struggle to get Edinburgh published. I'm including The Poisoning this month as a short read as an introduction for any of you who have yet to read him, or for those that have and are as enamored as I am.

I started to outline Collier Meyerson's article Fighting White Supremacy Means Owning Up to American History, and realized that I have more to say about it than will fit nicely here. I've moved that to another post which I will share soon.

Lastly, I've recently realized that I enjoy reading poetry far more than I thought I did. In Episode 9 of Food4Thot, Tommy Pico performed a segment of his much longer work Nature Poem, and I couldn't wait to read the rest. I quickly moved onto Morgan Parker's There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé in which Parker addresses the difficulty of being a Black woman today. In his collection of poems [insert] boy, winner of both the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, Danez Smith questions what it means to inhabit the queer, Black, male body.

Happy reading!

August

Fiction
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (fantasy novel)
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (short story with central immigration narrative, also written by an immigrant)

Nonfiction
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (book about sports)
Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (The titular essay, for a shorter read)
The Poisoning by Alexander Chee
Fighting White Supremacy Means Owning Up to American History by Collier Meyerson

Poetry
[insert] boy by Danez Smith

July

Fiction
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Dunker
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney
The End of Eddy by Edourd Louis
Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig

Nonfiction
How to be Gay by David M. Halperin
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Poetry
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker

April Update

Dear fellow bibliophiles,

First, apologies for the late post; the last few weeks have been pretty hectic and I'm only just now getting caught up.

Again, there are several selections that will help with the 2017 Read Harder Challenge. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season is an excellent, award-winning fantasy novel (review coming soon), Chang's The Wangs vs. the World is a debut novel that NPR describes as " unrelentingly fun", and Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever discusses the impact of technology on how we consume music.

This month's selections are as follows:

Fiction
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel & NYT Notable for 2015)
The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang
Stone Hunger by N.K. Jemisin (short story w/ optional audio)

Nonfiction
Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty by Ben Ratliff
Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores? by Ben Ratliff (article)

This month's meeting will take place at 12:00 on Saturday, April 29, at Rainbow Sparkly Land. Please RSVP by Wednesday, 26/4 if you'll be able to attend.

Happy reading!
RP