Reviews and Comments

thanks to the digital copy of the English translation (Tevye the Dairyman) at public.gettysburg.edu/~franpe02/files/Readings%20for%20Jewish%20Humor/ , and Refoyl Finkel's digitized/glossed/dictionary-ized Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem at www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/sholemAleykhem/contents.html I'm able to actually read the original Yiddish (very slowly). there's also an audiobook? which is super cool!

A book I should have liked more than I did; so much interesting stuff here that’s right up my alley about the use and genesis of language, linguistic and cultural contact, how species think and how we process the world, alien intelligence, the self, language as a tool for cognition, how colonization changes a community, etc, etc, etc. But for all of its gifts, I wanted it to be more gripping than it was! Excellent worldbuilding and use of terminology both new and old, a detailed setting, and lots of other wonderful things going for it; a worthy read nonetheless.

a book that i should have liked more than i did

not enough like his Mars trilogy to keep my interest :(

the most blatantly for my own tracking purposes thing I've imput into bookwyrm to date. alas it's SO helpful as a linguist-turned-language-learner

As part of the Shelved By Genre podcast / bookclub

In Anna Elena Torres' Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish, she off-hand mentions Chaim Krull, an disabled anarchist writer and literary critic who wrote reviews with a pen in his mouth once he lost use of his hands - as it turns out, there is a compilation of his writing, including I think all of his larger works! I'm slowly working my way through an amateur translation of the introductory biography given by his longtime best friend. I'm especially interested in In Toytn-Hoyz [In the dead-house], a short novel where Krull depicts life in the hospital for the chronically ill where he spent his final years.

(Yiddish novel about a group of Holocaust survivors resettled in a depopulated Palestinian village)

A nice, cozy and comfy read, just like the book before it! Nothing earth-shattering, but a good chance to stop and breathe.

I found the writing…fine, the worldbuilding unsatisfying (none of these kids ever picked up a newspaper?), and the plot slightly contrived. A good book! and still very touching! but one that I had expected more from based on everything I’d heard about it

I’ve heard people call Ruthanna Emrys is an inheritor of Le Guin’s legacy, but Octavia Butler is all over this book; a kinder future than Parable of the Sower, with (usually) kinder aliens than Xenogenesis. Speaks to my anarchist heartstrings. Only 4/5 and not 5 because I found the corporate society immersion-breaking-ly gimmicky, but besides that a beautiful, rich, hopeful picture of the future.

DNF; a book that really wants to be an ideas book but can’t stick the landing