[books] Earthseed, Octavia E. Butler

I have just finished this series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, and goodness but it does a lot of things with change and motion and theology that speak to me on a very deep level.

I find it very difficult to believe in the writing style -- I... have yet to knowingly meet a teenage girl who writes like that in her diary, okay -- but provided I ignore the conceit of diaries (and my exasperation with implausible world-building -- if food's so hard to come by where in hell are they getting enough cotton to make new jeans from) I am incredibly invested, and I want more, because of course I do, and perhaps I'm going to go and find a bunch of fic (I feel a little ashamed that the fic I want in the first instance is fix-it fic, as though that somehow erodes or elides nuance and complexity; in fact, as we perfectly well know your blue-eyed boys [MCU] is fix-it fic and in no way overlooks struggle and sacrifice and heartbreak).

And it is also sociologically fascinating to have read these books for the first time now, in 2017, when they were written in the 1990s and set in a near-future 2020s-2030s dystopia, in the context of current US politics and racism. ( Mild spoilers? )

Recommended, I think, but with the caveat that it has every single content note, to first approximation. If you'd like more details, please ask.

fun Turkish fact of the day

I had been remembering the Turkish for red, kırmızı, by associating it with "crimson". Today I finally got around to looking up whether that's a false cognate, and nope, it isn't: they're both from the Arabic qirmiz (i.e. Coccus ilicis, as in the red dye cochineal, i.e. the insect family from which it is prepared), ultimately from Sanskrit.

(Today I have learned a thing about entomology! "But Alex, don't you mean etym--" "No. It's a bug."*)

* If you can remember which web comic it was that I read this joke in recently I'd be very grateful.