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Books #amreading
https://comicskingdom.com/macanudo/2025-06-13

Macanudo Comic Strip 2025-06-13 | Comics Kingdom
Read the Macanudo comic strip from June 13, 2025, and check out other Macanudo comics by Liniers.

Just finished "As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow" by Zoulfa Katouh. It puts to shame every other book I've ever thought was gripping, but it still took me two days to read because I also had to put it down to process. A hurricane of a book that's left behind sorrow, anger, wisdom, and joy.
Read it.
#AmReading

Enjoyed "We, the Fleet" by Alex T. Singer in this month's Clarkesworld
A cyborg, self-replicating probes, family and friendship
#amreading #scifi

Isles of the Emberdark 10/10 so far. #BrandonSanderson #Cosmere #bookstodon #amreading

Just finished "To a Darker Shore" by Leanne Schwartz. It's a blend of fantasy (a genre I enjoyed a lot when younger but which I now feel is hit-or-miss depending on the politics of the author) and romance (a genre I'm currently a bit obsessed with) and I enjoyed it very much. The element of an #OwnVoices autistic perspective was interesting, and the mythology was pretty cool. Even though I felt as though monstrousness could have been explored from an even better angle, the complexity in this book was comfortable, and it to my mind successfully-enough avoided the veneer of racism that runs through the mainstream fantasy tradition.
#AmReading

Just finished "Statistically Speaking" by Debbie Johnson. It's coincidentally the second book dealing with adoption that I've just finished, though I suspect in both cases not #OwnVoices, which I also suspect matters somewhat. I was well-absorbed and enjoyed it immensely, but was left again with the reservation that I'm sure it may reflect only that small facet of real life which is pleasing and/or tolerable to a wide audience, and may thus in its own way make things more difficult for those whose realities it does not reflect. I find myself very glad to have also recently read Mama by Nikkya Hargrove, which is autobiographical and which as a result of having more real-world complexity drives its similar point about found family home with more force, to me (to be fair, Johnson's work has a decent amount of real life complexity, for a novel).
#AmReading

Finished "Far from the Tree" by Robin Benway last night. For me, it was a gripping and absolutely delightful read. I can recognize that I'm absolutely unequipped to judge whether it authentically reflects the experiences of many or few of the people whose situations are similar to the protagonists', but I find myself fervently hopeful for the former, even as I recognize such hopes in the part of people like me can be part of ultimately harmful publishing selection feedback loops. (If anyone reading this happens to have read the book and found it distasteful, I'd love to hear that.) Notwithstanding my probably overcautious uncertainty, I'll definitely be seeking out more books by Benway. At the very least, I really enjoyed her little joining and framing metaphors, and the pacing and plot construction were good, with lots of nicely interwoven implications arising through the buildup, and an ending that left me satisfied (albeit, I'm an inveterate optimist, YMMV).
#AmReading

Just finished "Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know" by Samira Ahmed. It's a good book, although it took until past the middle for me to really get sucked in. Fascinating mix of romance history mystery, and with an ending that nicely fits the theme. Honestly, as much as I'm enjoying uncomplicated romance novels with the expectable ending at this point in my life, I'm even more excited by things like this that bend or break genre conventions, and this one does it in beautiful service to a theme.
#AmReading

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

Just finished Weirdo by Tony Weaver Jr. Jes and Cin Wibowo. It's a good graphic novel semi-memoir about bullying and depression. I suspect it won't be true to the experiences of people with chronic depression (In Limbo by Deb JJ Lee is another graphic novel memoir I read recently that does involve chronic depression).
#AmReading

Finished Hollow Fires by Samira Ahmed last night. It's gripping, sad, and fierce all at the same time. Explores themes of racism, Islamophobia, white supremacist terrorism, and police malcompetence in an extremely timely manner. It's a good book, which I'm extra happy about since I also liked Ahmed's This Book Won't Burn, so now I have another author whose work I'll be reading through.
Including Sabaa Tahir, Sabina Khan, and Adiba Jaigirdar, I've been reading a ton of great YA books by south Asian muslim authors recently, all discovered via the "grab something off the YA shelf by a probably-not-white author" method that has yet to fail me. Turns out the racism in publishing that puts a higher bar in front of authors of color at least makes it easy to find good books in one way >:(
#AmReading

Reading LeGuin's "Four Ways to Forgiveness" and she's excellent as usual; this is my first time reading anything set on Hain, which is kind of exciting. I love this line, which happens while describing Havzhiva's education among the Historians and his initial reaction to seeing these gulf in belief systems and knowledge scope between his upbringing and there Historians' perspective:
"They are childish, irrational beliefs! he said. They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational."
Definitely jives with my position as an agnostic :)
#AmReading

I've never written a novel or any other intensely-plotted work of fiction, but anyone who has read or watched it played a lot of stories can probably also recognize that some authors just aren't good at endings. They're great at setting things in motion, at keeping the twists and turns coming, at the soap opera style of drama. But they just don't have the craft necessary to tie things together into a satisfying conclusion. I imagine it's much harder than the process of getting things going out keeping them moving, since you both have to wind down all the various threads you've spun up and balance satisfaction with believability.
I just finished Girl Gone Viral by Arvin Ahmadi, and it has a bad ending. The beginning is fine, the middle has plenty of drama to keep you wanting to see what happens, but the ending is murky, unsatisfying, and manages neither veracity nor satisfaction (even discounting the biggest next step that might reasonably have been left there to make room for a sequel).
Given the other issues with the book, from poor politics, to inauthentic characters, to a techno-optimism that feels as bitter in this moment as it is far from the mark in its predictions, I can't recommended it, despite having read through to the end.
#AmReading

Just read Fat Girls Dance by Cathleen Meredith, yet another semi-random venture into the currently-popular novels section of my library, rather than my recent YA staples. It's excellent. Fascinating and well-written just as fiction, but also empowering and perspective-upgrading (and I'm a married white cis man who is only beer-belly fat, plus already well into #BodyPositive thinking).
It bridges really well with Mama by Nikkya Hargrove, and with Does My Body Offend You by Mayra Cuevas and Marie Marquardt, both of which I went through recently. Yet another home fucking run for #OwnVoices, which felt extra good to read after Dream State was so disappointing. It really digs into and helps the reader explore body positivity just like Does My Body Offend You does with feminism.
#AmReading