I had just a tiny bit more free time this month than I usually do, but in fragments. This sucks. I miss the sense of peace that comes from the freedom of having spare hours to fill. I miss exploring, relaxing, and meditating. Having too much to do makes one feel like they’re perpetually reacting to the demands others place on them. As nice as it can be to have a full life crowded with friends and family, the crowding is driving me up the wall.
At least I got to read a bit.
Short stories
“There Be Monsters” by Suzan Palumbo
Violet lives the life of a wife and mother, denying the song she can hear from the sea. This story was very well done.
A collection of ten short literary nonfiction pieces. These were lovely. The ones that got to me the most were “The Golden Box” by Daniel Wallace and “Letter to a Half-Life” by C. R. Calabria. Also, midway through reading “So Many Tiny Stories,” I realized that I’ve met the author, Sean Lovelace. I should read this journal more consistently.
“Everybody Is in the Place” by Emma J. Gibbon
A story about two girls doing acid at a fair and going into a mirror maze. One of them disappears from reality. Some of the imagery was pretty cool.
“The Nölmyna” by David Erik Nelson
This one was a heck of a lot of fun. I’m not used to seeing such developed, engaging characters in short fiction. Cousins Sadie and Itzie, veterans of a ‘paranormal home inspector’ type of show, find actual, genuine “woo-woo”: a supernatural Ikea chair. Did I mention this one was fun? It was so much fun.
“The Alice Run” by Nancy Kress
Letitia is comatose after a violent attack. Amy is the technician working to restore her, using a program that stimulates her unconscious mind to latch onto a familiar story—Alice in Wonderland, of course. The Webtoon Finding Wonderland by roousuu and WmW did exactly this, but with a group of students, each playing different character roles in the wonderland-inspired Matrix. In “The Alice Run,” Letitia is Alice, and the narrative bounces back and forth between her amnesiac adventures and the real drama Amy witnesses in the operating room. The bouncing did not always stick the landing; this story repeatedly hits on one of my multi-POV pet peeves, which is when something happens with Character A, and then we hop over to Character B to see their POV too, immediately, over and over. Nuh-uh.
“Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell
I got my hands on a copy of this because my daughter had read it in school. Here, Orwell gives a first-person narration reflecting colonialism, through the eyes of an English police officer in Burma in the 1920s, who’s carried away by the dynamics of the day. His thesis is that imperialism is toxic to the conqueror as well as those they conquer.
“The Tunnel Ahead” by Alice Glasser
One of those ‘fear of overpopulation’ dystopian stories. I read this because I watched Tunnelen, the Norwegian short film based on it, which won the Méliès d’argent back in 2016. Goodreads claims Glasser published this story in 2012, but I knew that wasn’t right, because it’s classic sci-fi from toe to tip. The correct publication year is 1961.
Comics
Opportunities by Sincerely Delgeder and Katie Delgelder
A sci-fi thriller about a group of terrorists pulling off a spectacular attack on a grand hotel hosting alien guests. Book one is finished, book two is being posted on the website. This is a heck of a fun ride. It scratches the same itch as a detective story, but rather than the culprit being a mystery, you’re watching to see what exactly the villainous protagonists are going to do, and how.
One thing I super love about this story is that it’s got cause-and-effect on lock. I have no idea what this is called, but the thing where one character does something, forcing the next character to react, and so on? That. I think of these as Rube Goldberg plots and they’re my favorite.
Light and Shadow by Ryu Hyang and Hwee Won
A comic based on a historical fiction romance novel about a marriage between a maid who used to be a prince and the duke who deposed her corrupt father. It’s a secret identity story and a story about rebuilding after crisis. Both things I enjoy.
“Of Swamp & Sea” by Mia Jay Boulton and Laurel Boulton
Wow, did I really finish reading three whole comics this month? Guess I had more free time than I thought. This is a completed story that features a trope I really like: “Romantic pairing with different competencies support each other through a dangerous quest.” Battle couples/power couples, basically. Mulder & Scully. There’s also an enemies-to-lovers dynamic in here, because the heroine is possessed by a wolf spirit and the hero is someone who hunts monsters, but it’s been a long time since I read the part of the story where they worked that out.