Asakiyume mita

I actually have some paid work in, so my reading time has slipped. I made some progress on the stories in Consolation Stories, though, and also on The Souls of Black Folks.

The Souls of Black Folks,
In chapter 4, WEB Dubois talks about the first school where he taught, in Tennessee. He went looking for a school to teach at by foot as he couldn't afford a horse:

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over the hill; that but once since the war had a teacher been there; that she herself longed to learn,—and thus she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much earnestness and energy.

I was so taken by Josie; I could imagine her so clearly from what DuBois said--I've met people exactly like her:

She seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for her and hers.

I loved that so much: a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism. Beautiful.

Then DuBois recalls returning ten years after his teaching stint, and some people are better off, but many are not, and in particular, Josie has died. I thought my heart would break--such loss.

Consolation Songs
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Low Energy Economy" portrayed the bleak-and-getting-bleaker life of a solitary asteroid miner whom I liked because he was so resourceful and just wouldn't give up. The story pulled off a consoling ending that's in keeping with Tchaikovsky's optimism in the Children of Time books, but which I couldn't help seeing through the lens of the ending of Lois Lowry's The Giver, which left me with Doubts.

I enjoyed the story "Four," by Freya Marske very much. It had some lovely lines:

The 1 and the 3 proclaiming this 13 Bamberg Place are set awkwardly apart, like exes at a party.

and

the cupcake does, indeed, taste like the cake equivalent of a watercolour painting.

It appears to be just a slice-of-life story, though the viewpoint character, Molly, has an unsettling psychic ability to kill plants (and, we presume, other things) when she gets angry. We meet the neighbors, who are a fun group, and a troubling case of abuse is revealed, and ... well eventually the meaning of the title comes clear and things threaten to take an apocalyptic turn. But then they don't. I'm for avoiding apocalypses, but I'm not sure what I make of what's offered as an alternative. Still: I enjoyed the particulars of the story so much that I don't mind if I'm not entirely sure about how it treats its theme.

St. Anselm-by-the-Riverside, by Iona Datt Sharma, had a LOT going on. It's set in an alternative universe where we got global chilling instead of warming; there's a fifty-year-old nurse supervisor, Audrey, who has an opportunity for love for perhaps the first time in her life; there are patients who've been in comas for decades due to a mysterious illness; there are visitors from the next universe over, which, like ours, has global warming. There are connections between all these elements, but I had to reread a couple of times to understand them all. I think people who read lots of alternative-universe stories will get there more quickly. In any case, I enjoyed the characters a lot, and the romance was sweet.

I've started reading Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories, and it's got the same finely realized scene setting that I loved in A Stranger in Olondria, but unfortunately the first of the four sections in it focuses on a soldier, and the first part of the soldier's narrative is bloody and depressing in a way that I'm not really in the mood for. But I'm going to push on, because there's more to this section than the war part, and it's only one of four sections in the novel.

Here's what I mean by finely realized scene setting:

The chair was wrote with curious forms of dragons, dogs and rabbits and stranger creatures, goat-headed lions and winged dolphins. It stood alone beneath the trees, a little away from the house, covered with dust and dried leaves. Siski cleaned it off with the hem of her skirt.

--It's that last line: dusting it off with the hem of the skirt. Thinking to mention it, how vivid and present it makes the scene.

I also impulsively purchased the anthology sovay mentioned, Consolations Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction for a Time of Pandemic, which features writing by several people on my friends list, and I promised a good friend of mine I'd read N.K. Jemison's The City We Became, which is his new favorite book of all time. Since he also really loved Ann Leckie's books and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time/Ruin, I feel like chances are good I'll like it. I also have some other things humming in the background that I keep meaning to get to--what's springing to mind as I type is Sue Burke's Interference, sequel to Semiosis, but there are many others.

Wakanomori and I went for a walk in a place where water was bubbling up everywhere. I didn't have a camera, so he obliged me by taking this. You can hardly see that it's water, but it is--you can tell by the ripples (click through to see the photo bigger):



I loved the little pools of smooth stones, set in frames of leaves, all underwater.

The sound was beautiful too--he took recordings.

In other non-pandemic news, I finished reading Children of Ruin! Loved the ending; I'll try to share more on Wednesday. And I've been reading fun short things online, plus doing an excellent beta read.

Plus the marvelous CSE Cooney is doing an audio version of The Gown of Harmonies! She's created a home studio to do it in, just marvelous. So if we can get that out in the world, maybe we can reach a new audience and raise more money for the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. I'm thrilled and honored that she's doing this--it's a real donation of effort.

Love to one and all.

I finished this and was deeply satisfied by it. I was in tears at the end! What a creative, compassionate well-constructed story.

What I really want to do is gloat about figuring out how the story would end, but I can't do that without spoiling it for people who are reading it or who might want to read it, and I have to say, I really enjoyed figuring things out on my own, and I want other people to have that pleasure too. So here's a link to my Goodreads review, which hides talk about the outcome under a spoiler cut.

It's really all that science fiction can be--this is why I like science fiction!

... And from a craft perspective, I really liked how Tchaikovsky seeded the story so that what bore fruit made sense: nothing happened that wasn't set up. Lots of webs of connection ;-)

I had quibbles about some things--at times some of the human characters' behavior was a bit bewildering to me--but those just fade away before my pleasure in the overall book.