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Recent reading
Mar. 8th, 2016 03:59 pmAndra vägar: tio nya utopier [Other Ways: Ten New Utopias]
Swedish science fiction short story collection, not available in English. I am annoyed at this book because the stories in it are NOT UTOPIAS. Some are even dystopias, IMO. What is going on that people can't even imagine a better world?
That said, the last story of these (by Andrea Lundberg) was brilliant. Wow. It's a documentary-type story with the log of some sort of cult members who travel through northern Sweden trying to get people to "go online" which means to enter communion with aliens. We don't know the motivations of the aliens, and there are lots of other things we don't know, either. But the cult members convince online people to come offline for a while and give testimonials to convince new people. The testimonials are pretty creepy, especially when it becomes clear that they are edited afterwards. Anyway, the story has great sense of place and use of dialect.
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (original in Spanish)
For book-club-at work, my nomination. This is the story of a woman crossing the border between Mexico and the US to fetch her brother home. Opinions were divided on this book; I was the one who liked it best. There's a fairy tale/mythological vibe to it despite the setting being definitely modern, with cars and cell phones and so on. It's like Inanna's descent to the underworld, or maybe more like a gender-switched Orpheus and Eurydice. There were bits that didn't make that much sense to me, but that's probably because I lack the cultural context. And it's weirdly like the idea of the book was sometimes more compelling to me than the book itself? Anyway, definitely worth reading.
Also, happy International Women's Day!
Swedish science fiction short story collection, not available in English. I am annoyed at this book because the stories in it are NOT UTOPIAS. Some are even dystopias, IMO. What is going on that people can't even imagine a better world?
That said, the last story of these (by Andrea Lundberg) was brilliant. Wow. It's a documentary-type story with the log of some sort of cult members who travel through northern Sweden trying to get people to "go online" which means to enter communion with aliens. We don't know the motivations of the aliens, and there are lots of other things we don't know, either. But the cult members convince online people to come offline for a while and give testimonials to convince new people. The testimonials are pretty creepy, especially when it becomes clear that they are edited afterwards. Anyway, the story has great sense of place and use of dialect.
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (original in Spanish)
For book-club-at work, my nomination. This is the story of a woman crossing the border between Mexico and the US to fetch her brother home. Opinions were divided on this book; I was the one who liked it best. There's a fairy tale/mythological vibe to it despite the setting being definitely modern, with cars and cell phones and so on. It's like Inanna's descent to the underworld, or maybe more like a gender-switched Orpheus and Eurydice. There were bits that didn't make that much sense to me, but that's probably because I lack the cultural context. And it's weirdly like the idea of the book was sometimes more compelling to me than the book itself? Anyway, definitely worth reading.
Also, happy International Women's Day!
