October 2018

RHC 2018: Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: Read a one-sitting book.

I knew what I was going to read for this task as soon as I saw it. I waited for a day when I went into work late and my daughter was at daycare, giving me a delicious stretch of time to eat ice cream and savor this one entirely at my leisure.

Full disclosure: I’m not particularly objective when it comes to this particular writer. Here’s why. In 2015 or so, I’d attended a free workshop at the Fayetteville Public Library by Toni Jensen, a professor in the University of Arkansas’ creative writing department. Her presentation was about mashing up genre and literary technique. It was a really good one, too.

A million years ago, I’d thought I was going to apply to this particular MFA program but had been put off by its crystal clear statement regarding genre – no, and get offa my lawn, I think was roughly what the department website said at the time. So I was pleasantly surprised by Toni Jensen’s approach, which didn’t assign any moral value to the terms “genre” and “literary.” Instead, she had a very practical explanation of what fell under each column and how and when it made sense to mix things up. She asked us all what we wrote, and I shyly copped to horror. She suggested I read Stephen Graham Jones.

RHC 2018: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: Read a book of genre fiction in translation.

My husband Chris and I lived in China for a couple of years (Chris was actually there two years before I arrived on the scene – it’s a long story). China is a huge, complicated, wonderful, horrifying, contradictory place that I’ll always have an odd, incomplete but entirely fascinated connection with. Two years felt like enough time to imperceptibly scratch the surface of the country.

But it was enough time to watch Spring Festival fireworks from a hotel rooftop, to drink way too much baijiu in a sleeper train car, to see pictures of my shy landlord’s brand new twins, to spend a lazy afternoon rambling around a city park full of plum blossoms, to go to weddings, to have cashiers and vendors greet me with a big smile of recognition in spite of the language barrier, to make some friends. I feel like there is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little scrap of China that I know, understand, and love, and it’s not enough to make me feel like I’m any kind of an authority on anything Chinese, but it is enough to make my ears perk up when I hear the word “China” and to give me some powerful nostalgia tinged with a little bit of sadness. The pace of change there is so fast that I know the place I left doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s probably better now, I know, but it’s almost definitely unrecognizable. 

RHC 2018: Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan

This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2018 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge. 

Task: Read a mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author.

Long Black Veil is probably technically more of a thriller than a murder mystery, and it’s a fast, fun read (aside from a few gripes). I’m not sure if it counts as a mystery if you find out who the killer is at the 50% mark, but it’s already October, so I’m counting it.

**Some spoilers ahead, though they do happen fairly early on.**

I’ll start with what I liked. The protagonist is Judith, who was named Quentin in the 1980s timeline in which Quentin and half her liberal arts school (hyperbole) break into an abandoned prison. The escapade ends with their recently married friend Wailer missing and presumed dead. After the prison incident, Quentin pushes her car into the ocean, essentially and successfully faking her own death so that she can transition and live publicly as Judith.