fiction

Reading in transit: April 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Queer Literature, Spanish

Un Apartamento en Urano (An Apartment in Urano) by Paul B Preciado

Since last year, it seems that I’ve been on a self-imposed quest to read Preciado’s entire backlist, and what can I say? I’m loving the journey, and I can’t stop talking about how great he is as a writer and philosopher. This book is a special one, as it’s a collection of short articles that Preciado originally published in French in the newspaper Libération from 2013 to 2018. This is, coincidentally, the time when Preciado decided to transition and started using a male name and male pronouns, so many of these articles – which he refers to as ‘crónicas del cruce’ (‘chronics of a crossing’) – document it. But Preciado is not only experiencing a gender transition – as he writes, he goes through an important romantic break-up, he travels from France to Spain to Greece and many other countries in between. He reflects deeply on the idea of belonging to a place (and a gender).

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Futures, the spirit world and bodies: February 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

Any Human Power by Manda Scott

This is, probably, one of the books I enjoyed the most this year because I keep thinking about it even months after finishing it. This is a thrutopia, that is, it imagines ways in which we could navigate an uncertain future (considering how things are going right now in 2025, I think we all know what an ‘uncertain future’ feels like).

The start of the book is interesting: we get introduced to Lan, an old woman on her deathbed. Lan is a queer scientist and an English shaman (in that she uses dreams to travel to the ). As she says goodbye to her family, she promises her grandson that she’ll take care of him.

We move forward, and Lan is the Otherworld, enjoying her existence there but somehow unable to cross to the land of the dead as the promise she made to her grandson is somehow keeping her in a sort of limbo (which seems a chill place where she can enjoy wild nature and even the company of a mysterious dog, but still, she’s on her own). Suddenly, she gets pulled back into the world of the living (as a ghost) because her grandson, now a young man, is asking for her help. And from then on, Lan will need to do everything in her power (as a ghost, so she can’t even communicate with the living unless she uses the dreamworld) to save her family, who is about to undergo a perilous time.

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Mouthwatering food, time-travelling and the craft: January 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Fantasy, French, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Science-Fiction

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

I read this while on holiday and loved every page. Not only is this an engaging thriller, but also an interesting social critique of the relationship many women and femmes have with food and their own bodies. Even though the story is set in Japan, I could still relate to it even from my European experience. The obsession with eating as little as possible to fit into the smallest clothing sizes, for example, rang very true for me, especially as someone born and raised in Spain. (I may be wrong here, but I find the female beauty standards in the UK a tad more relaxed, which I appreciate.)

An interesting thing about this story is that it is based on a real criminal case in Japan where a woman was accused of killing (probably by poisoning them) her much older lovers. Apparently, this was a case that shocked the nation because the woman in question turned out to be ‘not beautiful’ (meaning, she was seen as fat by others) – so everyone wondered, how could she have been desirable for those men who ended up being her victims?

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