• Slaughterhouse 5 (comic book adaptation) — Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (2020) 
  • Economic Science Fictions — AUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady, James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems (2018) 
  • The Long Earth — Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett (2012) 
  • The Owl Service — Alan Garner (1967) 
  • Girl, Woman, Other — Bernadine Evaristo (2019) 

The Slaughterhouse 5 comic was good, faithful with occasional sparks of originality. Ryan North is a great comics writer, reading Adventure Time with J_ is always a joy but here it feels like he’s perhaps too reverent? I don’t know, it probably takes about the same amount of time to read the novel as it does the adaptation and the original is much deeper and richer and stranger.

Economic Science Fictions had some decent pieces but it mostly didn’t click for me. A lot of it had that academic writing thing where I get to the end of an essay and it feels both like i’ve been reading it for years and like I’ve just read the introduction and haven’t got much out of it. I think this is likely as much a fsailing on my part as on any of the academics.

The Long Earth was exactly what I expected. Inventive world building but not world changing. I expect I’ll read the rest of the series in time but I’m not in a rush.

The Owl Service I read to K_. It is a wierd childrens book, all atmosphere and allusion and it expects quite a lot of a young reader in terms of an understanding of class and cross cultural dynamics (esp. a reader separated from the action by 50 odd years). Not sure I’d recomend it but it leaves an impression.

Girl Woman Other. It’s a shame this had to share the Booker with Margret Atwood (I’ve not read The Testaments but I’ve always been ambivalent towards her stuff and a sequel to The Handmaids Tale coinciding with a  popular HBO adaptaion of same doesn’t fill me with excitement) though I didn’t pay much attention at the time I’m sure there are some ‘takes’ on the internet which i might look up. Also, look, did you see what just happened? I’m all of a sudden not talking about the book. The book is as you’d probably expect from the surrounding chatter very good, Evaristo has a great command of character and achieves an awful lot with not much, so many characters all alive in a brief novel.

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