Keep at it.

The Etched City - K.J. Bishop
This book is mad, and maddening. This book is dark and meandering and meaningless. This book makes Perdido Street Station seem coherent and simple. This book is about....cities, and people. Good and evil. Transformation. Rumination. Death and killing. Life and rebirth. It is important that you understand my lack of hyperbole when I say I looked up, on average, one word every three pages for the majority of this book. Dense. Verbose. Dialectical. Baroque, massive, incredibly ostentatiously well educated. This book made me feel inadequate for several reasons. It conveyed the concept of weight and gravity and immense meaning out of my reach. I refuse to believe this was someone's first novel. This was written by a malevolent Oscar Wilde fan-cum-member of the Unseelie Court.
Talk about dreams. This book was an opium haze clouded Mieville-esque, classically trained Naked Lunch ass steampunk fuckin' Heart of Darkness ass fuckin Park Chan-wook Shakespeare tragedy hallucination. This book fucked me up and will fuck you up. Fuck this book. I've looked forward to doing this post-book writeup since the second half of this thing just so I could spit it out and thus loosen the hold this book has on me. Vague and violent. Calmly unpleasant. Disgustingly ornate. Unconcerned with whether you'll read it or not. Unconcerned with arriving at any goal. Ugh.

Alif the Unseen - G. Willow Wilson
This book reminded me of the Three Body Problem in that it was unknowingly foreign for my أجنبي-ass brain at parts. I did a lot of looking up research for this book as well. Books that involve Islamic mythology and/or are set in predominantly Muslim countries are inherently religious, more so than I think other ethno-religo-culturo whatevers. It's more deeply ingrained in....every part of life. So this book, set in speculative near-future (what I have to assume is) Dubai, was simultaneously a somewhat simplistic (almost Artemis Fowlian?) YA about a hacker fucking his life up with jinn but also a complex and mystifying insight into how goddamn far removed my own personal experiences are compared to life the Middle East in every goddamn way. This book concerns growing up, a Mr-Robot level okay depiction of Computer Skills, djinn being real as hell, the comparative insanities of the complicated socio-economic strata of the Arabian peninsula, the inextricable nature of Islam from all aspects of life. I am unsure how to describe YA fiction without sounding patronizing to teens. The actual plot of it was fine. Unsurprising but done well, depicted well in a living world. It is hard to say something is written for a younger audience, I don't know. It isn't like people don't fuck and/or die in this book. They also pray? Where do we draw the Teen Line.

Redemption in Indigo - Karen Lord
This book is an expansion on an old Senegalese folk story, written by someone disgustingly clever and well traveled and with a PhD in sociology of religion. It follows the enjoyable folktale-telling prosody of stuff like Rudyard Kipling - kindly grandparents filling the kids brains up with stories, deftly skipping over any questioning of the impossibilities contained therein and thus avoiding unpleasant mundanities. Plus it uses the nice storyteller-esque thing of having chapter titles be descriptive sentences of the upcoming events. The story concerns humans and immortals and trickster spirits and the principles of chaos and choice and change. It's quite short but well told, and unfolds beautifully. Folk stories are nice because you don't have to bother with explaining anything. If the storyteller says djombi are real, and the spider plays tricks on mankind, it is so! Bringing old stories forward is important, and in reading you can see that this book understands this and does it right.