On the nightstand

[jesse_the_k]

Post WisCon means 1000 new books on the reading list. But I'm still working on the list from previous cons.

This week:

Forced myself up to disk 5 of 11 on Harry Potter number 2. Just couldn't go forward. The narrator surpassed the material: he created vocal personas without drawing attention to it. A touchstone of modern SFF and I just bounced. Ah well.

Vigilant SF by James Alan Gardner. Fun strong heroine, nice alien interactions, little bit too grounded in early 21st century roles & slang, don't know what I make of the "Explorer Corps" staffed solely by disabled people. Short chapters make for perfect bedtime reading. May go back to the earlier works. I wish I could time travel back and exchange these for the Heinleins I inhaled ca 10 - 12. Not quite up to Rite of Passage, but in the same place for a young teen.

We Are On Our Own memoir by Miriam Katin. Holocaust stories--whether Hungary 1944 or Rwanda 1994 -- are better told through fiction, and increasingly better told through comix. The histories I've pored over supplied me with ample nightmares and details, but very little of the experience. The comix enable the reader to zoom in & out between the daily horror and the conflicted now. Katin alternates smudgy charcoal with Disneyesque colorful pencils. Hungarian Jewry was "lucky" as the Final Solution touched them very late; Katin makes clear the minimal difference between Nazi and Soviet invasions. Told principally through the eyes of a small child; an excellent bookend to Fateless, Imre Kertesz's uniquely adolescent viewpoint of the trip from Budapest to the Lager and back.

The other bookend (a triangular bookshelf! Would it hold more?) for Katin is Deogratias, Jean-Philippe Stassen's stunningly beautiful and deeply horrifying tone poem on Rwanda's autogenocide.

Time to leave the written word behind and step forward into the rainy day.