February 2017

As I said in my last post, I spent the first couple of days of February down in Florida. I was there with my family for a week, visiting relatives, biking, walking along the beach, basically just hanging out. It was fun. And if the weather back in New York wasn’t the rudest of rude awakenings, it was still a lot colder when my plane home landed than when it took off.

Anyway, otherwise it was a pretty uneventful month for me personally. A holiday, a snow day, and the usual assortment of stories, books, movies, and music.

The stories

I read some I liked, some not so much. I’m also busy reading submissions for Kaleidotrope. Anyway, the 2017 originals I particularly liked:

  • “Later, Let’s Tear Up The Inner Sanctum” by A. Merc Rustad (Lightspeed)
  • “Probably Still the Chosen One” by Kelly Barnhill (Lightspeed)
  • “Run” by C.R. Hodges (Escape Pod)
  • “Some Cupids Kill With Arrows” by Tansy Rayner Roberts (Uncanny)
  • “To Budapest With Love” by Theodora Goss (Uncanny)
  • “Milla” by Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini (trans. Rich Larson) (Clarkesworld)
  • “The Dark Birds” by Ursula Vernon (Apex)
  • “The Lily Rose” by Emily B. Cataneo (The Dark)

And the reprints:

  • “We Are Not These Bodies, Strung Between The Stars” by A.C. Wise (Pseudopod)
  • “Nilda” by Junot Diaz (This Is How You Lose Her)

The books

I’m including three books here, even though one of them I read most of in January, and another I finished reading on March 1.

I think my favorite was easily Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, which I read for my monthly book club meetup. The easy tagline for the book is “a Chinese-inspired Game of Thrones,” but I think it does a lot of other really interesting things with its characters and the way it develops them. It’s also full of a lot of really nice moments–including, but not limited to:

“Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes,” Jia said. “When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”

“I refuse to believe in the futility of change, because I have seen how the lowly dandelion, with time and patience, can crack the strongest paving stone.”

The second of the three was Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll, which was interesting but not exactly my favorite Carroll novel. It includes this nice line, however:

The keys that unlock the heart are made of funny materials: a disarming phrase that comes out of the blue, nowhere, a certain sexy walk that sends you reeling, the way someone hums when she is alone.

I like Carroll’s work, and one of the things I like is that I don’t always know what to make of it. But one problem there is that I don’t always know what to make of it.

The third and final book I read (mostly) in February was Uprooted Naomi Novik, which I also read for my monthly book group. Like most of the group, I found a lot to really like about the book, and a lot that was worthy of discussion, but I didn’t necessarily love the book, or expect to find myself re-visiting it ever again.

There weren’t any particular quotes that spring to mind here, but I did like this little exchange:

“He lived for forty years in a monastery illuminating manuscripts before anyone noticed he wasn’t growing older. He was always a little surprised to find himself a wizard, I think.”

The movies

I watched 11 of ’em. Too many of them were Resident Evil movies. Moonlight and The Edge of Seventeen were my favorites, and the ones my thoughts keep returning to, but John Wick 2 was also a lot of fun.

  • Interview With the Vampire:

  • Underworld: Rise of the Lycans:

  • Resident Evil: Afterlife:

  • Resident Evil: Retribution:

  • Underworld: Awakening:

  • Finding Dory:

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:

  • The Edge of Seventeen:

  • Moonlight:

  • Self/less:

  • John Wick: Chapter 2:

The music

I listened to some of it.