A Jungle of Tales

              The titular Alif of this tale is a young half-Indian computer hacker living in an unnamed City somewhere along the Persian Gulf. He is in love with an upper-class girl named Intisar and has been meeting her in secret. When she tells him she is breaking things off because she is going to have to marry someone else he – instead of either accepting this in a mature manner, or coming up with a practical plan for running off together – decides to write a program that will make him invisible to her. Alif isn’t quite sure how he teaches his computer to recognize Intisar from a single sentence…but the Hand of God – a state security program, or maybe a person, or both – was already looking to squash Alif and his colleagues, and very much wants this tool. It/he also want the book Intisar sends to Alif in the care of his neighbor Dina: ‘The Thousand and One Days’, a book supposedly written by the Djinn and holding the secret to immense power. Alif and Dina have ac

Discworld overview here .              Discworld’s Death is in many respects exactly what one would expect from an anthropormorphic personification of that process: A tall skeleton in a black robe who carries a scythe, rides a white horse, and TALKS LIKE THIS. But he is a great deal more than that, too. You see, Death is a people person. Or, at least, he’s curious about people. He sees a lot of them, even though not for very long, and has an urge to imitate them in order to understand them better. He has a dressing table with combs on it, in a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. He creates a garden, though he hasn’t quite got the hang of colors. His pale horse is named ‘Binky’. He is fond of cats 1 . And then he adopts a daughter…   1. Probably because they can see him while they are alive and aren’t afraid of him. Also, he gets to meet them 9 times (as we see in ‘The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents’).   Death-focused books:   In chron

              This tale follows Noemi Taboada, a 1950s socialite in Mexico City who, despite being considered flighty by many, is considerably brighter and more stubborn than she might appear. Her father has received a disturbing letter from Noemi’s cousin Catalina in which she rants about there being something in the walls of her husband’s house that watches and won’t let her go. He dispatches Noemi to find out what is really going on, promising that, if she does, he will let her get the Master’s degree in Anthropology that she wants. So Noemi heads off to High Place, a decrepit mansion in the mountains inhabited by the Doyles, an English family who used to run a silver mine, though that has long been abandoned. Things seem odd right off the bat. The normally sweet and cheerful Catalina seems languid and depressed and is seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. Her husband Virgil is handsome but clearly controlling, and the aunt, Florence, is openly hostile. T

              A while back I wrote about being pleasantly surprised by ‘The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’   because I had assumed it was going to skirt around the less pleasant aspects of the setting like racism and misogyny, but in fact it was a politically astute thriller that happens to include a vampire. This book is kind of the other way around. A re-telling of the ‘Iliad’ from Patroclus’ point of view that renders it a tragic love story? And everyone seems to be raving about it? Yes, please! Well, I didn’t hate it, but the way the setting of that love story is handled makes me like it less than I otherwise would and makes the book less challenging to our own societal assumptions than it could be. But first, the good stuff…             I like the way Miller takes a story that has been “spoiled” for about 3000 years and makes that work to her advantage. We see Odysseus suggest that – to avoid having the various Greek king