Wednesday reading

I've started reading Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, and it's got the same finely realized scene setting that I loved in A Stranger in Olondria, but unfortunately the first of the four sections in it focuses on a soldier, and the first part of the soldier's narrative is bloody and depressing in a way that I'm not really in the mood for. But I'm going to push on, because there's more to this section than the war part, and it's only one of four sections in the novel.

Here's what I mean by finely realized scene setting:

The chair was wrote with curious forms of dragons, dogs and rabbits and stranger creatures, goat-headed lions and winged dolphins. It stood alone beneath the trees, a little away from the house, covered with dust and dried leaves. Siski cleaned it off with the hem of her skirt.

--It's that last line: dusting it off with the hem of the skirt. Thinking to mention it, how vivid and present it makes the scene.

I also impulsively purchased the anthology sovay mentioned, Consolations Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic, which features writing by several people on my friends list, and I promised a good friend of mine I'd read N.K. Jemison's The City We Became, which is his new favorite book of all time. Since he also really loved Ann Leckie's books and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time/Ruin, I feel like chances are good I'll like it. I also have some other things humming in the background that I keep meaning to get to--what's springing to mind as I type is Sue Burke's Interference, sequel to Semiosis, but there are many others.