Skip to main content

Featured

We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Animorphs Book 12: The Reaction by K. A. Applegate

The Reaction uses the premise of an allergic reaction to build a nice twist on the usual mission formula. Alienation and being unable/unwilling to open up is a major theme, and we see an extreme example of Rachel's drive to solve everything herself.

I like how the books show you that conversations have happened which readers are not privy to. We first learned the term "nothlit" when Ax was narrating, and now Rachel knows it because at some point Ax must have explained. The reader has already learned it, so we don't need some extra scene where Ax passes the info along. When the books are so short, you really need world-building and implied events like that to ride the line between storytelling and info-dumping. Also little things like how when Rachel is relaying what someone else said she uses words that convey the emotion of what they said, rather than just quoting what happened a few pages/hours ago. If the quotative like had been a thing when these books were written, Rachel would use it all the time.

Wow, the creatures Visser Three morphs are amazing. It's not great for the Animorphs when he's involved, but it's a chance to get snippets of other alien life in the series even if the implications are terrible for the creatures in question.

A girl (Rachel) turns into a crocodile

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts