radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
radiantfracture ([personal profile] radiantfracture) wrote2022-08-31 05:19 pm
Entry tags:

Reading Wednesday - Cascade

It's here! I backed Rachel Ash Rosen's Cascade, the first book of the Sleep of Reason series, on Kickstarter, and the publisher turned the project around like that. I am delighted.



I read and admired some of this novel in draft form, but there's something about having it in a proper cover, with blurbs, that gives it a shimmering apocalyptic finality.

I have just begun to re-read, but already its ludic fury entangles me like a, well, it'll have to be a kraken. I don't know if I've made the comparison to Philip K. Dick before, but that's what comes to me now -- that raging surrealism -- and the grief embedded in power -- in particular, the pitfalls of precognition. Everything in Dick is an elegy. Cascade is maybe more a fearfully cogent rant over the casket.

One of the backer perks was some great postcardage:



Impossible to describe how accurate this postcard is unless you already know.

* * * * * *

Recently finished Bernadine Evaristo's Mr. Loverman and Jen Sookfong Lee's Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho. I think I'll use part of the introduction of Gentlemen of the Shade in my creative writing course -- Lee talks about the way a particular work of art, hitting your life at the right moment, can fracture and illuminate it.

* * * * * *

I'm also currently reading Time Shelter, recommended by [personal profile] sabotabby -- I love it. For whatever reason, your cold-war-inflected postmodern novel of the fruitless yet unending search for meaning is my sweet spot. This one is, I think, new, but it has that voice of desolation and formal brilliance that I love and had not realized how much I missed.

{rf}

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
(will be screened if not validated)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

If you are unable to use this captcha for any reason, please contact us by email at support@dreamwidth.org