Lorelei Kelly

I enjoyed the first Nalo Hopkinson book I read, and my library has a pretty good selection of her work, so I decided to try her next book, Midnight Robber. And now I'm sorry I waited so long...

The Carl Brandon Society presented the winners of their 2008 and 2009 awards last week, and I've added them to my reading list. They give out two awards, the Parallax award, "given to works of speculative fiction created by a self-identified person of color," and the Kindred award, "given to any work of speculative fiction dealing with issues of race and ethnicity; nominees may be of any racial or ethnic group..."

I don't normally consider myself craft-impaired. Within my realm of experience, I think actually I am pretty good. But my realm of experience is mainly in rubber-cementing decorative papers and doodads to greeting cards and a very on-again-off-again relationship with knitting. A long time ago I played around with polymer clay and a little bit of wire-wrapped jewelry. I was never that great with the jewelry -- the necklace I made was mainly about finding the right pieces to put together in the right way. Sewing is another thing I am on-again-off-again about, and I've never really enjoyed it, perhaps because I never did enough to be comfortable. And of course for the last six years, I didn't often have access to a nice sewing machine...

It's winter gift-giving season, and so everyone has been posting gift guides and I've been browsing Etsy looking for gifts for my friends and family. And naturally while I'm there, I spend some time looking at things I like too. I mean, why not? And I don't know if it's just that everyone is filling their shops with their best stuff in preparation for Christmas or what, but I found a whole lot more excellent sciency goodness than the last time I went looking, some months ago. Clearly this means it's time for another post about my quest for nerdy-and-attractive jewelry...

I was sick last week, which meant a lot of time in bed reading my favorite literary comfort food, young adult novels. Mostly I was revisiting old favorites, but at one point I did feel well enough to walk down to the library (best thing about my apartment is being 4 blocks from a library branch) and pick up some books I'd put on hold earlier, including, conveniently, a YA fantasy book - The Blood Stone.

Friends, I am a woman of simple literary tastes. I read books because they are fun and they make me feel good. Well, sometimes I really like to read books that make me cry, but in a satisfying way, you know? I don't know how to explain this, but the existence of an entire genre of movies known as "tear-jerkers" assures me that I am not alone. Basically, I am not good at reading Important books, especially ones that take Work to appreciate. I read some now and then, because some important writers are easier for me to engage with and can actually feel like entertainment, but mostly I don't bother. I don't need to torture myself with boring books in order to foster my sense of intellectual superiority; being smarter than most people does that for me just fine...

I feel sort of silly writing about Octavia Butler, because for years she and Delany were basically The Two Black People who Write Science Fiction and surely everyone already knows about them. But then, I've known about Delany for years but didn't actually read any of his books until a couple of months ago, so maybe there are people out there who have heard of Octavia Butler but have yet to pick up her work. So, I reread the Lilith's Brood trilogy (originally published as Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, with the series name Xenogenesis) recently, and now I want to write about how good it is...

I confess that, even though I've known of Delany for years, this is the first book of his I've actually read, and it was just a few weeks ago. I felt the need to justify why this is the first book of his I picked up, so if you just want the summary, skip down a couple paragraphs...

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the names I saw during the Racefail ugliness, and then forgot about until I went looking again this summer, when her name just kept coming up. Probably because she's awesome. This was her first novel, and it won a bunch of first-novel and new-writer awards. It's the only one of hers I've read so far, but I've just checked Midnight Robber out of the library.

Acacia is the first fantasy book written by David Anthony Durham, who started with historical fiction. It has many of the elements of epic fantasy - the characters are kings and princes and princesses, the plot involves quests for revenge and redemption that will determine the fate of an empire, etc. But it also completely ignores the most common epic fantasy conventions. There's no hero's journey here, no clear-cut evil bent on destruction that must be defeated. There's mostly people, with a range of flaws and motivations...