Linkage!

• The first PoC in SF/F carnival is up! willow_dot_com has some great links in there, along with really good commentary about POC in SF/F books, games, TV and movies. Also, she starts the post with a nice summation of why the carnival is necessary.



• Nominate books for the Carl Brandon Awards! Deadline is Tuesday, July 31. SF/F works by POC are eligible, as are any SF/F works about race and/or ethnicity. I am now grumpy at myself because I could only think of one thing to nominate, and I don't think I've read anything eligible for the 2006 Parallax. Must try to read more for 2007.

And because I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I've also been hesitating because I didn't want to make people feel excluded... I wanted to put together a list reccing LJs and blogs that I've found useful lately, just because sometimes, I forget that not everyone is reading the same things I read. I generally assume that people who are reading my LJ are doing so because they're interested in anime and manga, books, and race. I blog about other things too, but these three seem to be the big ones lately.

I also generally assume that most people reading me for the above topics are also reading coffeeandink, rilina, rachelmanija, and yhlee, all of whom offer intelligent commentary on all of the above.

So here are some possibly less well-known people and places:

• yeloson's del.icio.us account has a ton of links on race and racism, both in the blogosphere and in the news. I can't even begin to say how useful I've found it for keeping up with things and for educating myself.



• I sort of assume most people here know about deadbrowalking, the comm for fannish POC and allies, right?



• jinian, gwyneira, minnow1212, buymeaclue, and keilexandra all blog about books fairly regularly, and even better, they have organized tags and/or LJ memories! This makes the obsessive-compulsive tagger in me happy. Here are buymeaclue's LJ memories, keilexandra's tags, jinian's tags, gwyneira's tags, and minnow1212's LJ memories. tenemet's LJ is all books, all the time!



• shewhohashope has been blogging both about books and about race and racism in the UK.



• And I've gotten sucked into GoodReads. I'm afraid my own account is probably terribly boring for people already reading my LJ, since all I do is post links to entries here, but I've been having lots of fun mass-importing my book lists and reading people's write ups.

De la Cruz, Melissa - Fresh Off the Boat

I went on a bit of a spree at the library yesterday and basically grabbed any random YA book that looked like it had girls of color in it. Thankfully, I liked the first one I read!

Vicenza (called "V") just moved to South San Francisco from Manila. Her family has to shop at the Salvation Army instead of Chanel like they used to, she misses her old friends, and, worst of all, she's going to a fancy all-girls school on a scholarship -- i.e. no boys!

V, as you can tell, is a bit shallow at times. She thinks mostly about clothes and boys and wishes the popular girls at school would magically befriend her. But honestly, that's a large part of why I loved this so much. It's YA chicklit, and it would be completely unremarkable, except V is a Filipino immigrant. I loved finding a YA book with a POC heroine that wasn't all about identity crises and learning to accept your own culture; I think those books are good and necessary, but personally, been there, done that, have the t-shirt.

V desperately wants to fit in, she hates not having money, and she's horribly embarrassed by her parents, but she's not ashamed of being Filipino. She's ashamed of a lot of the results of being Filipino and being an immigrant, but the sense that I got was that it was just another bit of embarrassment in the general land of "You're embarrassing me! Woe!" that is a fourteen-year-old's life.

It's hard to explain, but it just didn't feel like the "I wish I were white" shame in a lot of Asian-American YA lit (again, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that, because hi! I could have been the poster child for that). And OMG people! It sounds like such a small thing, but it made me so, so happy.

I think part of it is because she did grow up rich in Manila, which is very different from growing up Filipino-American, but still. Also, I have class issues like woah with the book, and by the end (and by reading the author's website), I am fairly convinced that while de la Cruz deals a little with them by the end, she doesn't find them quite as questionable as I do.

But in the end, I had a lot of fun reading the book. I laughed a lot because V is such an emo fourteen-year-old ("I'll be in a BUTT BOW! I hate my dress!! I hate it!! AGGHHH. I'M SO MISERABLE!!!!!"), but I say that with the greatest affection. V's voice is fun and silly, I loved seeing bits of Filipino culture without having it be "Look! We are Filipino!" in giant flashing lights, I loved the little Bay Area details, and even though her concerns are fairly small in the large scale, I was rooting for her the entire way.

Links:
- sanguinity's review
- furyofvissarion's review

GoodReads is evil

Why don't I have an "I am a total dork" icon?

Um. I have been obsessive-compulsively going through my GoodReads shelves and having tons of fun with tags. Because, really, why just stop with genre? So I am putting in all the insane Cool Bits or "things I like in books" or something, like "female-assassin-kink" and "historical-turn-of-century-romance" and "fairy-tale-takes" and "older-women."

I realized possibly I was a little obsessed when I created a tag for "anthropomorphic-death-kink."

It took a lot of thought to come up with that! I figured "death-kink" would freak out everyone; also, it makes it sound like I have a death wish or something, which is so not true. No no, I am talking instead about Gaiman's Death, and Pratchett's Death and Death of Rats, and Gaiman and Pratchett's Death in Good Omens and I feel I should have more not written by Gaiman or Pratchett or both, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

That, together with the recent unconvering of Sekrit LJ Smith Fans (check comments) and my current list of tags that contain "female-assassin-kink," "thief-kink," "spy kink," "dysfunctional-romance-kink," and "gothic-shoujo," has me laughing hysterically.

I'm sure it will now come to no surprise to any of you that I have a black medieval witchy dress hanging in my closet, along with fishnet armlet things, and one of those black lacy loligoth headcap things.