The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt. 7: Holly Wade Matter

 

2021 Reading Pleasures

by Holly Wade Matter 

 

 

In 2020, I read like mad, averaging a novel every couple of days. In contrast, during 2021 I did almost no reading, no watching at all, and very little listening. Instead I knit as if my life depended on it (my sanity certainly did), clocking in at 10 sweaters and over a dozen scarves and shawls. But when I did take a break from the needles, the fiction I read was all top quality. 

 

I rectified a sizeable omission on my part by reading Octavia Butler for the first time. I read Kindred, The Parable of the Sower, and The Parable of the Talents. Regarding the Parable books, I was gobsmacked at how well she anticipated and extrapolated a future which seems more and more plausible every day. 

 

The Silences of Ararat, a short novel by L. Timmel Duchamp, re-imagines Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and places it in a fundamentalist monarchy. Paulina rescues the maligned Hermione and plots a magical revenge on the king. 

 

The Red Man and Others by Angeline B. Adams and Remco van Straten is a collection of interrelated stories about a sell-sword, a scribe, and an angelically beautiful con artist who find each other and forge themselves into a family. 

 

The Adventure of the Golden Woman by Cynthia Ward, the last novella in the Blood-Thirsty Agent series, finds her two dashing heroes in an alternate 1930s Germany. As in the other episodes, the novella features a number of cameos from both historic and fictional characters. 

 

2043...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) by Nisi Shawl finds that American Blacks are finally given the 40 acres their ancestors were promised after the Civil War … except that said 40 acres are under the sea. Even so, white supremacists covet the undersea land and attack its inhabitants. 

 

"Water Striders" by Tom Marcinko, in ParsecInk's Triangulation: Habitats is about an architect who (frozen) travels the stars and comes back again and again, over a span of thousands of years, to the ever-changing time temple that he designed. 

 

Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released just a year ago by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.