Thursday, January 2, 2020

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2019, pt. 26: Kristin King

The Pleasures of 2019: A Short List 
by Kristin King 






 
If I could just pick out four works this year to recommend, they would be:


In the Quiet Spaces by C. E. Young. This book is pocket-sized and goes with me 'most everywhere, and it always tells me something I need to hear. I’d explain it, but God is not in the explanations.


Talk Like a Man by Nisi Shawl. The story “Women of the Doll” takes an unforgettable superhero through her paces, and the essay “Ifa: Reverence, Science, and Social Technology” has given me hefty food for thought about how people make community.


The Expanse (novel series) by James S.A. Corey went through our family like the flu, one by one succumbing and losing hours, maybe days, at a time. I’ll never feel the same way about gravity again.


Exhalation by Ted Chiang gave me solace when I needed it most. Chiang had me at the story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which mixes the fairy-tale setting of the Arabian Nights together with time travel to create philosophical breakthroughs. One way or another, all his stories are that way.





Kristin King (http://kristinking.wordpress.com) is a writer, parent, and activist who lives in Seattle. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Calyx, The Pushcart Prize XXII (1998), and other places. Two of her stories appeared in an Aqueduct Press anthology, Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries Lost, Suppressed, or Misplaced in Time. A selection of her short fiction has been collected in Misfits from the Beehive State.

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