Naomi Noviks’s Empire of Ivory (2007), the fourth novel in the Temeraire series, leads to some reflections on narrative and worldbuilding strategies in alternate history, some concerns about the series's politics (or lack thereof), and prompts the question: when do you give up on a series?
Category: Reading…
Reading “African History for Beginners” by Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners (1991) may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important, illustrative, and eccentrically illustrated example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience.
Reading “Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects” by Marc Olivier
Marc Olivier's Household Horror is a study of the material networks of household objects in the domestic world of more than a dozen horror films, and also an argument for why object-oriented ontology is a terrible and terribly useless theoretical project.
Reading “Linghun” by Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang's Linghun criss-crosses the haunted house genre, subverts expectations about the purpose and mood of the haunted, indexes the suburban hellscape of (post)neoliberalism as the locus of horror, and ruminates nearly constantly on death, dying, grief, and the ties that bind us to the past, to family, to community.
Reading “The Silent War in Tibet” by Lowell Thomas, Jr.
In Lowell Thomas, Jr.'s 1959 book The Silent War in Tibet, Tibet’s turbulent history in the 1950s is told with the pressing excitement of a narrator who wants readers to understand the confluence of local, regional, and global forces at work in the People Republic of China's occupation and annexation of Tibet.
Reading “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence” by Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence is an unparalleled resource for introducing the major issues, figures, and periods of post-independence African history, but is severely marred by its failure to engage the devastating legacies of colonialism on the continent.
Reading “Here Be Dragons” by Sharon Kay Penman (Welsh Princes 1)
Sharon Kay Penman's Here By Dragon is a classic of historical fiction, offering a rich, complex tapestry of medieval Welsh and Anglo-Norman life, with a unique narrative style that decenters the big moments and focuses on domestic life and character psychology, and has a lot to say about medieval women's lives.
Playing “Venba” (2023)
The 2023 narrative cooking game Venba by new studio Visai Games punches above its weight in art, sound, and soundtrack, and tells an endearing story of a Tamil family and foodways.
Reading “India: A Short History” by Andrew Robinson
Andrew Robinson's India: A Short History is a worthwhile and chronologically balance, but critically flawed, abbreviation of 5,000 years of Indian history that raises questions about how best to tell such a complicated story in such a short span.
Reading “The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales” by Nicholas Jubber
Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers steps into the world of fairy tales that are well-known across the West to recover the stories behind those tales’ tellers, but in doing so obscures the scholarship that made this book possible.
Genre Fantasies 