Month: March 2021

#REVIEW: Requiem Moon, by C.T. Rwizi

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Y’all.

I keep telling y’all to read more African fantasy and science fiction literature. I have been on this for at least a couple of years now. C.T. Rwizi was born in Zimbabwe, raised in Swaziland and currently lives in South Africa, and his phenomenal debut novel Scarlet Odyssey was my favorite book of last year. I have had the sequel, Requiem Moon, pre-ordered for months. It jumped to the top of my queue as soon as it got into the house, and I finished it this morning, and …

… man, this guy is not a fluke. I admit it! I was kind of worried. I’ve read enough sequels to great debut novels that weren’t great, and if I slip and say “trilogy” at any point in this piece, be aware that I have no idea how many books Rwizi plans this series to run. I know that it’s entirely possible for a second book to fall apart, and there’s good reason for that; second books in a series are a fuckton harder to write than first books, and they’re frequently written under time pressure to boot; you had your whole life to get that debut novel ready, and the sequel needs to be out in a year. Look around for the sequel to Skylights. Believe me, I understand second book syndrome.

I am pleased to say that while I don’t love Requiem Moon quite as much as I loved Scarlet Odyssey, and it and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue are battling it out in my head for my favorite book of the month, it is still a phenomenal novel and is absolutely a worthy sequel to the original.

My only regret? I probably should have reread Scarlet Odyssey before I picked this one up. It does a great job of getting you caught up, but there is a lot going on in this book. You lose the coming-of-age narrative of the first book and much of the prejudice that the mystic Musalodi had to put up with in the first novel, and also the travelogue aspect, as the entire book takes place in the capital city of Yonte Saire … or, at least, almost all of it, except the part that doesn’t, and I really want to spoil the place where Salo ends up for a chapter but I feel like it would be mean. What the book does is crank up the political complexity and gets deeper into the worldbuilding, and you find out quite a lot more about the genuinely refreshing and original math- and high tech-based magic system Rwizi has cooked up here. This book, by the way, does not give one single shit about genre conventions; Rwizi’s gonna put some science fiction in his fantasy and some fantasy in his science fiction and everybody loves a Reese’s so you’re not going to whine about it. Salo grows a lot, both in character and in power, over the course of the book, and … shit, I don’t want to spoil any of this, and there’s not really any point into getting too far into the plot anyway since it’s a second book. Just believe that shit, which was perhaps not previously as real as we thought, gets real, and I caught myself thinking at about the halfway point that there hadn’t been nearly as much action in this book as compared to the first and yeah that was just Rwizi teeing up my emotions.

And then like Jesus holy shit the ending. I have no idea where the hell he’s going with this series, and it’s fantastic.

I loved this book, I love this author, and you need to read Scarlet Odyssey, then read this, and then listen to me and start reading African speculative fiction on the regular, because there’s all kinds of good stuff out there and it needs more exposure.

Unread Shelf: March 31, 2021

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading1 Comment

I swear to God, I read books in March, honest.

My goal is to buy no books at all in April. We’ll see if I can pull that off.

Operationalized pedagogical equitability

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching

I’ve talked several times lately about how I’m making a concerted effort to recommit to teaching as a profession I’m going to retire from and increase my profile as a leader in my building. To that end, and among other things, I’ve joined a committee that is going to require some extra work of me throughout the school year– and, amazingly, is actually stipended– and I have a two-hour meeting fifteen minutes from now that’s going to be the first real meeting of that committee. We had a launch event of sorts a couple of weeks ago but that wasn’t much of anything; I’m actually having to do some preparation for this one.

And, Christ, the first meeting hasn’t even started yet and I’m already exhausted. There’s a certain way of talking about teaching that is so infected with bullshit corporate speak that it’s barely comprehensible, and these documents they’ve shared with us for our perusal are so thick with it that I want to wash my hands. Tons of nouns being turned into verbs, unnecessary adverbs, piles and piles of acronyms and simple things being saddled with unnecessarily complicated names, and lots of taking words and phrases and arranging them into shapes that don’t actually carry any useful meaning or promote any particular kind of understanding. Linguistic cruft. I’d copy and paste some examples but I’m pretty sure it’d end up getting me in trouble.

Like, there is absolutely a way to improve failing buildings. Every school can improve. But creating a 26-page report that no one is going to read and which is so overwritten as to be incomprehensible is not one of the ways you do that.

(They’re still not gonna close the honors academy, by the way, and that school is noticeably absent from this process for some reason. This means that the single best method of improving the scores of all our middle schools, simultaneously is off the table before we even begin. And when it gets right down to it, this is about test scores, not learning, and they aren’t the same thing.)

I have faith that once we’re past this initial phase and actually talking about our building we’ll be able to make strides toward accomplishing things; don’t get me wrong. I’m just made extremely tired by the way we’re getting into the process.

In which I exist outside time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching

This was one of those days where I was perpetually being surprised by what time it was; the boy has started Spring Break, which means I can sleep in a little bit because I don’t have to get up early to get him ready for school (he starts 45 minutes before I do) and as a result I was sitting in a chair and enjoying my coffee this morning when it hit me that I actually did have to go to work today and I had about twelve minutes to be showered, dressed, and in front of my computer– an achievement I somehow managed.

This is all just to say that I sat down to play Oblivion for “a little bit” after dinner and it is now somehow 8:25 PM and I have not blogged today. Luckily, tomorrow’s assignment is done already … or at least I think it is.

In lieu of an actual post, allow me to present you with this email, which I received during dinner:

Not “When is Spring Break?,” a question I’d have answered without a second thought. This person is asking are they out for Spring Break right now.

This does explain her kid’s grade somewhat.

#Readaroundtheworld: March update

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

You want me to nerd out about my little reading project, right? Sure you do. We’re roughly 1/4 of the way through 2021 already somehow, and I’ve read books from 15 US states and 17 countries so far, putting me on track to successfully read books from all 50 states and 68 different countries over the course of the year. Now, realistically, this first three months has been pursuing low-hanging fruit, and I’ve already read multiple books from several different states as well as the UK, and I have at least one other book by a Nigerian on my shelf waiting for me, so as the year goes on it’s going to get more and more difficult to find books that “count” for the series. I’m sure I’ll be able to get the US done one way or another, but the fact is books from Canada and Russia and Australia and the UK weren’t exactly hard to find, and I’m at the point already where I’m picking a country and Googling “Authors from XXX” to find books. There’s several easy ones left (and I have several books on my unread shelf that will fill in some spaces) but these first few months were definitely going to be the fastest ones.

I have been keeping track of the square mileage this has covered, because of course I am, and thus far, excluding the water, 21,418,356 square miles are filled in, which is 37.24% of the world’s surface. This will also be increasing much more slowly, as I’ve got Australia, Canada, Brazil and Russia done already. I’ll be filling in Antarctica and China next month, which are the biggest two chunks left, and after that it’s all smaller countries. Russia was 11.5% of the world’s surface all by itself, so I’m not going to be getting any more big jumps like that.

(How do I plan to fill in Antarctica’s 5.483 million square miles when no one lives there? I’ve decided Ernest Shackleton counts. My game, my rules.)

This has been a fun project so far, although for the most part my international “discovery” authors haven’t really set my world on fire yet, and a lot of the books I’ve really enjoyed this year from authors outside the US have been people I’m already familiar with. There’s also been a touch of strategic rereading going on; I filled in Italy by picking up The Name of the Rose for the first time in forever, and I’ll probably reread A Confederacy of Dunces at some point this year to take care of Louisiana. I might go back to Dumas to get France filled in. But for the most part it’s going to be authors I’m not familiar with, since that’s sort of the point of the entire exercise.

Remember, if you look at the top of the sidebar on the right there, you can follow along with me as I’m doing this if you’re so inclined. I should be done with Requiem Moon in a couple of days, and my next book after that will be another Rachel Caine, so I figured this was a good time to do an update.

Oh come the hell on, ctd.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

… I know I just did a post a couple of weeks ago where I explained that I understand that what makes sense for a nationwide network of distribution points doesn’t always make sense for individual packages, but this one has to have been put on the wrong goddamn truck at some point, right?

Anecdata

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Teaching

If I’m being honest, I was oddly hoping to spend the day sick. Covid vaccine side effects, on an asynchronous Friday where I’ve already given the kids the day off and cancelled my most important meeting of the day? Staying in bed occasionally moaning, taking naps, and sick from something that everybody knows is supposed to make you kinda sick so I don’t have that weird self-gaslighting thing that I do when I’m sick about whether this is Good Enough to justify whatever I’ve chosen to not do? Hell, sign me up.

Turns out I’m fine. I followed some advice that my wife passed on, which was to go into the shot loaded to the gills on Vitamin C and as hydrated as possible. And, like, who the hell knows if that actually ended up mattering at all? But I have Vitamin C dummies on hand and ate a couple of those plus an orange and had a couple of large glasses of water before going in and getting the shot, and I’ve had no side effects at all beyond arm soreness, which is an inconvenience at best. So I figure I’ll pass the advice on: eat an orange and drink a bunch of water before your second shot. It might help, and if it doesn’t, well, you’re hydrated and oranges are tasty.

My brain keeps tossing me a few years into the future where the nanobots in all of the vaccines turn us into zombies in service of whatever company provided the shot, and I will fight for House Pfizer in the irradiated wasteland of 2025. If you end up getting your shot from someone else, I promise that whatever shreds of my mind remain will regret having to destroy you.

I ran into my old boss at the furniture store today, and we talked for a few minutes, and it really hit me during the conversation just how much I’ve re-embraced my identity as a teacher in this past year. I never really thought of the furniture store as a permanent job– this is not something that would come as a surprise to any of my co-workers, I think– but it was far from clear what I’d be doing next, and even throughout last year I was kind of thinking of myself as on probation. This year has solidified things; I’m not going anywhere, and I’m starting to step up for leadership roles in the building again, similar to the types of things I’ve done in previous buildings.

I am putting this in print now mostly so that I can come back and laugh at it in a couple of weeks, when after three days of in-person instruction I am back to wondering what the hell I was ever thinking and checking want ads as a form of recreation again. 🙂

#REVIEW: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

This book sort of danced on and off my radar until a guy I follow on BookTok (which is TikTok but about books, in case you aren’t In the Know) read it and proceeded to wax rhapsodic about it for a solid week, at more than one point calling it his favorite book of all time. This, from someone whose book tastes I am already inclined to trust, is absolutely a phrase that is going to cause me to sit up and take notice, and the book got ordered immediately.

tl;dr: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue isn’t my favorite book of all time, but it’s my favorite book of the year with a damn bullet so far.(*)

The titular Addie LaRue, having sold her soul to the devil in the 1700s, is suffering under a curse: no one remembers her once she’s out of their sight. Any interaction with her is instantly forgotten, and any trace she’s left in the world disappears as well; things she breaks are immediately repaired, her writing vanishes from paper, and she cannot say or write her own name. She is also effectively immortal; she cannot die of thirst or hunger (although she can experience both) and minor wounds, at least, vanish instantly; one presumes she would survive larger injuries as well although the book spares us a scene where she tries to, say, jump off a bridge or anything like that. As the book begins, she is over 300 years old, and the devil, who she calls Luc, has been visiting her on the anniversary of her deal from time to time to see if she is ready to end her curse.

(Let’s address the book’s biggest weakness head-on: if you’re thinking hey, that kind of sounds like Hob Gadling from Sandman #13, you’re absolutely right, and while other than in the broadest strokes the book doesn’t borrow from that story much, the line “Death is a mug’s game. I got so much to live for.” would not sound entirely inappropriate coming out of Addie’s mouth.)

The book jumps around from “now” in 2014 to various points in time throughout Addie’s life, as she evolves from a terrified, orphaned young girl to someone who is effectively a master thief, who more or less survives solely through stealing everything she needs. You can imagine life for someone who cannot be remembered can be terribly difficult; you can’t rent a room, because your reservation disappears; you can’t hold down a job, because the second your new boss wanders into the back room he’ll forget you exist, you can’t even have a meal at a restaurant because your waitress will forget about you immediately. Relationships and friendships are effectively impossible, although Addie has a reasonably active sex life– she’s just grown unfortunately used to the men not remembering her when they wake up the next morning. But as it turns out, it’s not hard to charm people when they forget who you are every time you disappear from their view– you can just try again with a different approach the next day, or the day after that, and as the book starts she’s effectively been living with the same guy for several weeks.

There’s a lot more to it than that; I’m making it sound like a thriller and it’s absolutely not; it’s both richer and more character-driven than one would typically expect from that kind of book; this is not quite a Litratcher, as it’s a bit more story-heavy than I typically see in my Smart Person Books, but it’s still smart as hell and I need to check out more of Schwab’s work. Eventually, Addie meets someone who actually can remember her, and from there the story really takes off.

This book does a phenomenal job of dealing with an exceptionally old character, which is a really damned difficult thing to write about, and Addie herself is a marvel of a character, and her relationships with both Luc and Henry (who are the only people she can actually have relationships with) are well-drawn and hugely interesting. Henry starts off as a little bit of a cypher but once you find out why he can remember Addie when no one else can … *chef’s kiss*

Oh, and there’s an element of art history that I liked a hell of a lot, too. More books need art history.

I loved the hell out of this book, guys, and it’s another one that’s going to be ending up very high on the list at the end of the year. Go snap it up and set aside a weekend for it.

(*) The next book I’m reading is Requiem Moon, by C.T. Rwizi, the sequel to Scarlet Odyssey, which was my favorite book of last year, and which I have enormously high hopes for.