August Wrap-Up 2017

It’s wrap-up time again already! Again, this one is a bit late because I’ve been very busy with work and my spare time has been spent applying for new jobs as my contract ends this month. However, that does mean I’m about to have a lot of free time again so I can focus a lot more on this blog and on catching up on all my review copies!

For those that don’t know, I live in Edinburgh and in August the city literally doubles in size and we have a whole bunch of festivals taking place.  That means I have a lot of fun seeing lots of strange and fun shows (one was literally just a guy playing Mario Maker and it was brilliant) but not so much time for reading or posting. Still, despite all that I managed to read a total of 10 books so I’m rather pleased about that.

So, here are the books!

I’m quite pleased with the books I read last month as I feel I managed to stay quite diverse even with just 10 books and I managed to get several books off my to-read list. I’ve reviewed a couple of these books already, and I plan on reviewing quite a few of the rest soon so those should be up throughout this month.

For those who regularly read my blog, you’ll notice I’ve stopped doing the “Down the TBR hole” tag as I felt that I’d got rid of quite a lot and I was getting too obsessed with getting it to a low number that I wasn’t adding new books to it. So, I’m taking a break from it and increasing my TBR again with all the wonderful books I see other bloggers reviewing and discussing.

So, I hope everybody else had a great August and got more reading done than me! My goal this month is to catch up on all the review copies I have so I shall mostly be focusing on that which means lots of Sci-Fi and Fantasy reviews coming up!

Book Review – Iraq +100 ed. by Hassan Blasim

Goodreads Synopsis:

Iraq + 100 poses a question to ten Iraqi writers: what might your country look like in the year 2103 – a century after the disastrous American- and British-led invasion, and 87 years down the line from its current, nightmarish battle for survival? How might the effects of that one intervention reach across a century of repercussions, and shape the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, or influence its economy, culture, or politics? Might Iraq have finally escaped the cycle of invasion and violence triggered by 2003 and, if so, what would a new, free Iraq look like? 

Covering a range of approaches – from science fiction, to allegory, to magic realism – these stories use the blank canvas of the future to explore the nation’s hopes and fears in equal measure. Along the way a new aesthetic for the ‘Iraqi fantastical’ begins to emerge: thus we meet time-travelling angels, technophobic dictators, talking statues, macabre museum-worlds, even hovering tiger-droids, and all the time buoyed by a dark, inventive humour that, in itself, offers hope.

Review:

First I’d like to thank Macmillan-Tor for the ARC of this book. It had been on my to-read list for a while as it looked perfect for my Read Around the World challenge and so when I saw it was being re-released I jumped at the chance to get an ARC.

This is a collection of short stories all set 100 years in the future and all written by Iraqi authors and translated by a variety of translators. It’s incredibly fascinating to see all the different ideas they have about what Iraq will be like in the future as they are all so different and varied – and I found it amusing that quite a few all ended up with the same ideas for the US.

Because it’s a collection of short stories, it’s naturally hard to discuss too much without spoiling them but I will say that I really enjoyed all the stories in this collection. Some were definitely stronger than others, but they were all excellent and it was very refreshing to read about Iraq from the perspectives of those who live there themselves rather than from a Western perspective.

This book is a perfect choice for those wanting to read more Muslim authors and I’m very pleased to use it as my pick for Iraq on my Around the World challenge. There is also a fantastic introduction to the collection which discusses the literary scene in Iraq which was very interesting.