Reviews and Comments

David Weir

davidjamesweir@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 10 months ago

I'm David, a queer Fennoscottish physicist who never has enough time to read.

Find me also at @davidjamesweir@mementomori.social.

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Lee Schofield: Wild Fell (2023, Penguin Books, Limited)

Most enjoyable book. I particularly enjoyed the chapter about re-wiggling Swindale Beck and how immediate the results were in terms of salmon redds and other features. Furthermore, in that chapter, the author quotes from the book How to Read Water by Tristan Gooley – which I decided to read next as it sounds both interesting and relaxing...

(To paraphrase the idea: if one notices a river is straight for a length ten or more times its width, one can infer that the river has been artificially straightened.)

finished reading All Systems Red by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)

Martha Wells: All Systems Red (EBook, 2017, Tordotcom)

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, …

I had wanted to read some of the Murderbot Diaries series for a long time, but the upcoming TV show (and discussions about the casting) made me want to read it for myself. The setting and themes to me feel very camp, and I think it might be the first camp sci-fi I've knowingly read. It also feels queer-coded.

I'm a bit confused, just like Murderbot: I can't quite separate whether it's more camp or queer-coded.

In any case I really enjoyed it and hope to read subsequent books.

reviewed Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin: Tehanu (2008, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)

A healthy dose of gender

For me this is the most interesting of the Earthsea books so far. There’s a deep exploration of the roles of both women and men; it’s sometimes frustrating to read, and maybe if it were written today some things would be expressed differently, but I think it’s pretty much perfect as it is. I very much enjoyed it; it felt like a reward for patiently reading the earlier books with more traditional gender roles.

Le Guin writes beautiful descriptive prose, of both people and places. The oft-quoted speeches (e.g. from Moss) in this book were not so memorable in isolation for me as for some other readers; rather, it is the totality of the book that I loved.

Jack Holland, Tea Uglow, Peter Tatchell: Great LGBTQ+ Speeches (2022, Quarto Publishing Group UK) No rating

I got about a third of the way through this. It's a great concept but doesn't work for me in this format.

It's a collection of (highly) abridged speeches with an (admitted, but still present) US and anglosphere bias. It was an impulse pick-up from the library's rainbow shelf – the cover is very nice. But it didn't hold my attention (each speech being edited down to one page) and wasn't sufficiently interesting to revisit regularly enough before the library demanded it back...

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Tombs of Atuan (2012, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)

Content warning allusion to the plot

reviewed A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (The Earthsea Cycle, #1)

Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea (EBook, 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the …

Very enjoyable but of its time

I did really enjoy reading this, and will almost certainly go on to read the other Earthsea books.

I came to Earthsea after reading several of Le Guin's Hainish cycle books and short stories, including some of the earliest ones like Rocannon's World. I can see similarities with the earliest Hainish cycle works, from around the same time - an emphasis on male characters, for example - which I am sure would have been handled differently by the same author had she written them later on. But there are still a lot of great ideas here, and it is far more open-minded than most fantasy literature of its era.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (EBook, 2000, Penguin Publishing Group)

**50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION—WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY CHARLIE …

First novel I have read in a while, mostly because I borrowed this on my e-reader to read next to a sleeping kid.

I wish it was easier to borrow good ebooks or buy DRM-free copies. I’d do this much more often.

Also a bit melancholy that I only discovered Ursula K Le Guin’s works in my thirties; I like to think they’d have meant a lot to me if I had read them as a teenager.