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krrksch@kirja.casa

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krrksch's books

Currently Reading (View all 8)

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John Wiswell: Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024, DAW)

Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut …

Someone You Can Build a Nest In

This book was fantastic. The setup is that shapeshifting, people-eating, amorphous blob Shesheshen is rescued by overly kind Homily, believing Shesheshen to be a person. Ironically, Homily comes from a monstrously toxic family of wyrm hunters, who are all out to kill Shesheshen specifically, while not realizing that Shesheshen is said monster. (Hijinks ensue.)

It's a story that deals with passing and masking--Shesheshen works really hard at trying to be a person, physically and socially assembled from what she can scavenge. She's got a wry non-human perspective that's especially biology-focused, like how to form legs and have a humanish shape, the tricky mechanics of eating with your mouth closed, and the overwhelmingness of smells and noises.

This book also deals with physically and emotionally abusive family, and how hard it is to struggle through trauma, no matter how much you are being hurt. Also, as you might expect, this …

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Jasmin Schreiber: Im Schatten von Giganten (Hardcover, German language, 2025, Kosmos) No rating

Einige Käferarten gehen sogar noch weiter und produzieren Sekrete, die beispielsweise von Termiten gern aufgenommen werden. Diese "Bestechung" führt zu einer besonderen Beziehung, der sogenannten Trophobiose: Die Käfer werden von den Termiten gefüttert und geben im Gegenzug ein für die Termiten nützliches oder attraktives Sekret ab. Eine Win-win-Situation - zumindest auf den ersten Blick. Denn oft fressen die Käfer heimlich den Termitennachwuchs, was für die Termiten natürlich weniger vorteilhaft ist.

Im Schatten von Giganten by 

(Die Käfer leben im Termitenbau, wurde vorher erklärt)

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Lina Rather: Season of Monstrous Conceptions (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born, with eyes made for the dark and …

Sarah sat next to them and drank her cider until the tankard was empty, and with that warm fuzziness settled in her stomach, the gay atmosphere took hold.

Season of Monstrous Conceptions by 

the temptation to make this joke when writing any sort of historical fiction must be incredibly high

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reviewed In Universes by Emet North

Emet North: In Universes (2024, Cornerstone Publishing)

For fans of Emily St. John Mandel and Kelly Link, a profoundly imaginative debut novel …

In Universes

Incredible.

We've read a number of books for #SFFBookClub that have a short story structure with interconnecting themes and worldbuilding (How High We Go in the Dark, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird) but In Universes is my clear favorite among all of these.

Structurally, this book is a series of short stories with a single point of view. Each story takes place in different adjacent-ish branching multiverses, some of which veer into more magical realism and externalized metaphors while others are more realistic. Thematically, this book is about dealing with internalized homophobia, trauma, depression and grief. But it's also about (queer) possibility and transformation and acceptance.

It's interesting to me just how many things I underlined (virtually) while reading this book. Delicious turns of phrase. Devastating sentences seemingly directly targeted at my feelings. Interconnecting thematic ideas everywhere. I found myself utterly engaged in its …

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Daniel V. Thompson: The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting (Paperback, 1970, Dover Publications, Inc.) No rating

Medieval painters built up a tremendous range of technical resources for obtaining brilliance and permanence. …

Natural pumice was an imported product in England, and English workers often used instead a material which is described as "better than twenty other pumices": a sort of bread largely composed of powdered glass. Powdered glass and flour and brewers' yeast were mixed and allowed to rise like bread, and make into loaves, and baked in the oven.

The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by 

Exciting to have a piece of trivia this interesting mere pages into chapter one

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Daniel V. Thompson: The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting (Paperback, 1970, Dover Publications, Inc.) No rating

Medieval painters built up a tremendous range of technical resources for obtaining brilliance and permanence. …

If a bit of rather poor, lean cheese is soaked in water, and crumbled up and ground with lime and a little water, it makes a sticky, treacly mixture which dries as hard as stone and which, when it is once dry, is not affected by moisture. (Very much the same sort of glue is used now for putting together the wooden parts of aeroplanes.) Among the many troubles which beset medieval paintings in our time, one of the rarest is for the glued joints of the wood to separate; and their strength is largely due to the use of this strange, homely adhesive.

The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by 

Airplanes are made of cheese, you heard it here first.

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reviewed Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh (Foreigner (1))

C.J. Cherryh: Foreigner (1994, DAW)

Humans stranded on an alien world. Accepted by the aliens, until suddenly it was war. …

Foreigner

CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series is one of my favorites, and I feel like it's wildly underappreciated. I'll keep my future reviews shorter I promise, but let me pitch these thirty year old books to you.

Here's what brings me back to these books:

(1) Interesting alien psychology. The alien Atevi do not have a concept of "love" or "trust". They are instinctually and biologically hierarchical, with upward loyalty in their associations. This creates all sorts of translation friction across cultural boundaries. They are also incredibly numerically-minded, with the numerical equivalent of astrology, finding particular numbers innately more felicitous than others. They do truly act in interesting and non-intuitive ways, and it's so fun to read.

(2) Humans aren't particularly privileged. This isn't an uplift story. Although the humans show up with more technology initially, the Atevi have their own inventions, and have very mixed feelings about how they are being …

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Josh Rountree: The Legend of Charlie Fish (Paperback, 2023, Tachyon Publications)

As an unlikely found-family flees toward Galveston, a psychic young girl bonds with Charlie Fish, …

Neo-gothic Western novel

Floyd Betts returns to his hometown Old Cypress to bury his unloved father when his aunt Constance refuses to pay the $10 the preacher charges for digging a grave in the church cemetery. Nellie and Hank Abernathy are the orphaned children of a witch, late of Old Cypress. Betts, not wanting to leave the children to beg in front of the church in Old Cypress, loads them up to take back to Galveston where he boards. Charlie Fish is... well, read the book. But suffice to say he joins Floyd and Nellie and Hank when they return to Galveston. Nellie and Hank and Charlie all have gifts, and they are going to need them as scoundrels pursue them into the face of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston in 1900.

Extremely engaging story. There's danger. Ghosts. Scoundrels. Hell and high water. Rountree has also put effort into defining his characters. …

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A. E. Marling: Missing Mermaid (EBook, A. E. Marling)

A woman gave up her legs to become a mermaid, surgically. Then she goes missing. …

What is Solarpunk?

[...]

To be clear, cryptocurrency is not Solarpunk. Crypto will worsen the current inequalities by centralizing power in the hands of the rich, while wasting energy. You can fuck right off with that world burning Ponzi scheme.

Missing Mermaid by 

The story didn't even start and I already like it. Shoutout to the author @AEMarling@slrpnk.net

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quoted Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics)

Caroline Walker Bynum: Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Hardcover, 1987, University of California Press) No rating

The Decretum of Buchard of Worms, compiled between 1008 and 1012, lists the spells and incantations resorted to by women; most of them involve manipulating food -- for example, increasing or decreasing the sexual ardor of a husband by adding to his food such things as menstrual blood, semen, or dough kneaded with a woman's buttocks.

Holy Feast and Holy Fast by  (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics)

The logistics of kneading dough with ones buttocks raises some questions for me.

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Merlin Sheldrake: Verwobenes Leben (Paperback, German language, 2021, Ullstein Verlag)

"Eines jener seltenen Bücher, die uns verzaubern und den Blick auf unsere Welt verändern." Helen …

Faszinierend

Dieses Buch hat mich sehr fasziniert. Pilze haben so viele spannende Eigenschaften und tun coole Dinge, hab vieles nachgeschlagen und weitergelesen.

Sheldrake beschreibt diese Phänomene anschaulich und schlägt dabei immer wieder Bögen zur weiteren Bedeutung und Interpretation dieser für menschliche Forschung, Technik und Gesellschaft und ordnet dabei gut ein, was zum Beispiel Spekulation bzw mit Vorsicht zu genießen ist, aber trotzdem einen gewissen Einfluss auf vieler Leute Denken hat.

Die Analogien und vor allem Anekdoten fand ich teilweise etwas weit hergeholt und vor allem im letzten längeren Kapitel ziemlich zäh. Ganz nebenbei vergleicht er sich dabei selbst mit Pilzen, während er das halbe Buch mahnt, mit der Vermenschlichung von Naturphänomenen zurückhaltend zu sein.

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Merlin Sheldrake: Verwobenes Leben (Paperback, German language, 2021, Ullstein Verlag)

"Eines jener seltenen Bücher, die uns verzaubern und den Blick auf unsere Welt verändern." Helen …

Brauche ewig weil ich gefühlt auf jeder Seite irgendwas abgefahrenes nachschlagen muss. Hausgroße Pilze (Prototaxiten)? Ameisen die im Ameisenhaufen Pilze züchten und mit Blättern füttern? Geile Scheiße und ich hab gerade erst angefangen

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Ros Schwartz, Jacqueline Harpman: I Who Have Never Known Men (Paperback, 2019, Vintage)

‘For a very long time, the days went by, each just like the day before, …

I Who Have Never Known Men

There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.

Highly recommended from me. This book is sort of a melancholy post-apocalyptic coming-of-age survival story, but with a dreamlike tint. It's uncompromising in not giving any pat answers to any of its questions. Why are these women here? Where has everybody else gone? Is this even earth? I feel like it explores a lot of ideas around trauma and knowledge and purpose, but at its heart I feel like it's really getting …