lirazel | (no subject)

I am not an email newsletter person (I mostly find them annoying), but I absolutely love the Tor.com newsletter. They do a great job of covering all speculative fiction interests (mostly books, but also movies and TV and some comics), not just stuff they themselves publish. And in almost every edition, there's at least one thing I want to read. Sometimes it's Jo Walton's list of the books she read that month, sometimes it's a celebration of a Robin McKinley book I haven't read since I was a teenager (there was recently one about The Door in the Hedge that inspired me to reread it, sometimes it's about queer representation or the ways that black characters are always sidekicks and never heroes of their own stories in the specfic world. I originally signed up because they send you out a free ebook link once a month, but I'm so glad I did because it's such a rich resource.

Yesterday's edition just happened to have an article about Martha Wells' Books of the Raksura series, the first book of which, The Cloud Roads, I recently read. That in itself was a serendipitous delight, but I really enjoyed the content of the article! "You Can’t Eat Something That Talks: People and Cultures in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura" is a celebration of the marvelous, exciting world-building in the series and sums up the characters in the book with: None of them are human. All of them are people. Which I think is just perfect.

Also, if you like short fiction (I am not so much a short fiction person, but I know a lot of you are!), there is always at least one piece of short original fiction in the newsletter. If you are into speculative fiction at all, I really recommend going to Tor.com and subscribing!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm subscribed to the Tor.com newsletter, and in general I agree with your opinion on email newsletters.

The only other one I really like is Amal El-Mohtar's weekly newsletter. The free version comes out once a week on Fridays, and it's always a prompt or question. For example, this week she was reminiscing about cocktails and cocktail bars, so she asked people to talk about meaningful/memorable drinks that would be impossible to recreate. I love her newsletter not only because she asks questions of her readers, but also because she has such a way for noticing details of the mundane — tastes, smells, the look and feel of particular trees or skies or rivers — and capturing those details in such a way that anyone reading can visualise and feel similar emotions.

There are a few people out there who are just talented in the right ways to make certain mediums work. That sounds like a lovely use of the newsletter.

That's so cool. I love Jo Walton's compilation of her book columns but never got as far as subscribing even though Tor have been a constant in my life. Subscribing now.