Wednesday reading and life roundup

And it’s reading Wednesday again.

I’ve been feeling a bit down this week, and in a lot of pain, which as usual has had an affect on my reading. I’ve spent a lot of time mindlessly playing one of my favourite games, called Rebuild. It’s after the Zombie apocalypse, and your responsibility is to clear out the town you find yourself in, collect survivors, feed them. It’s not as complex as a full-fledged RPG, it’s more of a turn-based simple combat strategy game, but it requires little thought, no manual dexterity, and it’s fun killing vampires. I don’t play the big RPG games because every time I’ve ever tried one, they’ve been dependent on manual dexterity. You have to be able to get past the guards at high speed, or jump precisely from the ledge to the rock in the middle of the chasm, or press the buttons in the right order, or something that involves complex manipulation of motion controls, and I have never been able to achieve that kind of accuracy, so I never get anywhere, and eventually I stopped trying to play them. Which is a pity, because some of them appear to be interesting, but I have no wish to get involved in a game and then get permanently blocked because I simply cannot execute a series of moves quickly or accurately enough. But enough about games.

I did get some reading done this week. Finished off a few things that I’d been slowly working through.

Books (and novellas)completed this week:

Shadowhouse Fall, Daniel José Older
Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe
Strangers from a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki
Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization, Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus (eds.)
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, Jill Twiss
Hammers on Bone, Cassandra Khaw
Bearly a Lady, Cassandra Khaw


Books in progress:

Food of the Gods, Cassandra Khaw
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Samuel R. Delany
Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal (eds.)


What’s next:

I’m in a mood of completion right now, so I’m thinking I’m going to go through my TBR list and read the sequels to all those first volumes in a series that I enjoyed but somehow didn’t get around to reading the next volume when it came out. There’s actually a fair bit of that on my list.

And there’s always new books coming out, and this year I want to get a head start on books that might be potential Hugo nominees fir next year.

And there’s the rereads of Heinlein and Le Guin that are on my back burner at the moment, to which list I’m now wanting to add Octavia Butler, because reading Luminescent Threads has put me in that mood.

And I have some specific ideas about the “social justice” reading I want to do this year. My priorities include: reading more about Indigenous history and experience and the processes of decolonisation; more books about the history and experiences of people of colour in Canada; writings both theoretical and personal by black and Indigenous women; and experiences of transgender, non-binary and intersex people. Some of these are not going to be easy to source on a zero budget - libraries don’t have a lot of this material available on ebooks, and other sources go by popularity, but I’m going to try. I’ve already got several books in all of these subjects to start on, so we’ll see what I can find to add to that.