Cry Your Way Home by Damien Angelica Walters

Title: Cry Your Way Home

Author: Damien Angelica Walters

Date Read: 2.March.2018
On TBR for: 8 days
TBR status after reading: 269 books to read (TBR expected to be cleared in 2036)
Format: Ebook - ePub format
Source: LibraryThing Early Reviewers
Challenges: Pace yourself; Keep things balanced


 This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers

"Once upon a time there was a monster. This is how they tell you the story starts. This is a lie."

So starts Cry Your Way Home, a collection of short stories by Damien Angelica Walters. These stories span from fairy tale-like to science fiction to magical realism, with the common thread of being dark, dealing with loss and grief, dealing with monsters (allegorical or not) and things that go bump in the night.

Most of the 17 stories in this collection were enjoyable - only a few didn't quite work for me. The opening story, Tooth, Tongue, and Claw, had me worried that there wouldn't be a happy ending, that that would be the tone of the entire collection. But while most of the endings are not happy, this one included, they are not grim and dark and full of hopelessness has I had feared. In most of the cases there is some kind of closure to be had.

And still speaking of endings, a few of the stories felt incomplete, like the actual story had just started and then it ended. Two others were a variation of this: they felt as the start of something great, something that I would love to read in a longer format. The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter feels like this, and so does The Floating Girls: A Documentary, but the latter still works very well as a short story and was my favourite of the book.

Although some of the stories weren't totally to my liking, I enjoyed this book. It was well written, and vivid enough to leave me with that pleasant-unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach that something terrible was about to happen.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Quotes I enjoyed:

Is a final word even important if no one hears? Is a final apology meaningful if every preceding action says otherwise?

You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.

It’s the sort of floor on which a girl could dance a pirouette and a woman, a waltz. I do neither, afraid I might trip over my own aspirations.

Autumn, like Alzheimer’s, turns everything strange and unfamiliar, and when you look for the shape of the real hidden within, you find only a promise of the winter to come.

This is the way the world breaks you. It takes everything you know and love and turns it inside out. It leaches the color from your hair, yellows your teeth, and curves your spine, and even though you wish you were the same person you’ve always been on the inside, you go grey and stained and frail there, too.

Other Reviews: Vegan Daemon

This Book on: LibraryThing | GoodReads | BookDepository | Amazon UK

I'm back (?) and 2018 challenges

As mentioned before, I'm trying to get back to book blogging. I thought I was going to make a comeback last year, back to writing reviews (I started writing one, I swear) - but it didn't pan out. But this year, this is it!

So, what has happened in the last 5.5 years?

Well, I'm still at same job that lead me to read less. The job changed location one time (and will do again soon), I changed house twice, both times to be in walking distance to work, so no reading on commutes (this will change when job changes address). This means that my reading rate skydived to almost nothing.

Look at this! Look at 2013. I don't know what happened in 2013. 

So that's what happened in 2013.
55 Hobbits happened

I also (re-)started to read more fanfiction. So my reading kind of shifted from books to fanfic. Maybe it should count as books? There are some really lengthy fics out there.

Tumblr started to take more of my time, because it's easier to just reblog stuff instead of creating new material, right?

Got my eyes fixed (Yay!) and couldn't read for awhile. I tried audiobooks, and while I liked it, I still prefer reading.

Google Reader died (and I'm still not over it), and it meant that keeping tabs with blogs was harder. Question [to the void, maybe]: How do you guys now keep track of new posts?

Another new hobby is podcasts, which some can count as stories, but I don't really track as such. Ditto for the BBC dramatisations.

Knitting is also a new hobby, but I can't multitask it with reading (maybe I can with audiobooks, provided it is not a very complicated pattern)

So the result: A huge TBR list. Huge. Books to last me till 2035, assuming no more books are acquired, which is a very unrealistic assumption (trust me, I did the math. I have a spreadsheet).

Despite not updating the blog, I've participated on the Goodreads reading challenge every year (because you pledge early in the year, when you're motivated, and that's what new year's resolutions are for - stuff you end up not accomplishing).

Look at all these failed resolutions

So, this year I'll be participating in even more challenges, now with fancy names, because I really can't help myself. Here they are

• Pace yourself: Read 15 books
• Keep things balanced: 50% of books by female authors
• Polyglot: 1/8 of books read in Portuguese, at least 1 in Spanish, and 1 in Galician
• Orgulho Nacional [National Pride]: 15% of books read from Portuguese speaking authors
• Tame that pile: Reduce the TBR list by at least 1 book
• Out of my comfort zone: Read 1 non-fic book
• Read our own tomes (ROOT, a LibraryThing Challenge): Read 12 books acquired in 2012 or before (with a Fibonacci twist: 1 from 2012, 1 from 2011, 2 from 2010, 3 from 2009 and 5 from before)

Tracking will be semi-live on this page (and live on my spreadsheet).

So, yay to being back. Let's see if I can keep up.

Everything is tied in a neat Excel file that grew in complexity while I was not reading.

Ursula K. le Guin

This was not the way I wanted to get back to book blogging (really, I have a draft on rebirth and challenges and whatnot started, but alas, work happened) but I arrived late at home today/yesterday, no power on my cell for at least a few hours, turned up the computer, hoping to work a bit more (presentations to prepare for a meeting the next day) only to find that Ursula K. le Guin has passed away.

And while this was something that was bound to happen during my lifetime (has happened with other authors, will happen again, certainly), I was not prepared.

The works of Ursula K. le Guin have been with me since my early teen years, and have shaped me and my views of the world in many ways. Discovering Earthsea and loving it, moving on from book to book, until there were no more left - until I decided that if there was no more fantasy, I would go read science fiction (which at that time, silly me, I believed I didn't like, and I hadn't realised that like everything else, fixed categories are mostly artificial, and I gravitate towards the spaces in between).

The Left Hand of Darkness was my choice, and it opened up worlds that I hadn't imagined (even if it is in a very gendered version, but that's the Portuguese version for you). Since then, I've tried to read everything she has written (I'm a completist), and although I've made some headway, there are still more stories, and essays, and poetry that I haven't read yet.

According to LibraryThing I have 39 works by Ursula K. le Guin (3 unread, and 3 part of omnibus edition)

The Left Hand of Darkness was followed by Four Ways to Forgiveness and the Lathe of Heaven, before I discovered that her books had been published in Portugal for ages, and at every book fair I would hunt down the books that I could find. Eventually I started reading in English, and I started acquiring those that had yet to be published here.

And while different books have marked me in different ways, and many of her books and stories are my favourite, one that I often remember is Changing Planes, a collection of short stories that feel more like field reports.

You see, I find myself often waiting at airports (something that didn't happen when I read it, but has been a constant while I did my masters, and now that I'm working), and sometimes I work, sometimes I read, sometimes I rush from one place to the other trying not to miss my flight, but often times I'm bored. And wouldn't it be so much fun if we could just jump to another place, see new peoples, new worlds, while we wait for another flight?

It took me awhile to understand (in fact, it took me the time of waiting a few times at an airport) that we can. We can make up our own stories and travel to that world, or make a quick stop to different ones in between the pages of a book. It can be a story that starts to present itself while you listen to a song, or a podcast, or simply starts as if by spontaneous generation. It can be a place you've been so long ago, and now you remember again, and decide to visit. And it doesn't necessarily need to be on airport. It can be while you walk to work, while you stay in line at the supermarket, waiting for your doctor's appointment,...

And maybe I don't remember the stories in Changing Planes anymore, some of them didn't feel like stories, after all, more like prompts, given by the author: Here's a world, go imagine a story in it. Or a dare: I built this world, now build yours (I've shown you mine, now show me yours).

But I remember that sense of possibilities, of different worlds. Of daring to imagine a world like our own. A world not like our own. People like us. People not like us. And in all these worlds, with all these characters, there being stories.

So the the world may be poorer now that Ursula K. le Guin has left it, but it is also extremely richer that she has lived in it.