tabacoychanel

Jo Walton, Lent (2019) At the midway point of this historical novel about Girolamo Savonarola, aka the mad monk of Florence—you know the one who burnt all those books in a bonfire—it transpires that this is actually a speculative fiction novel with the most sff of sff conceits buried at the heart of it: SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS a fucking time loop! He’s in a time loop! The way she marries a plot revelation to a characterization moment here is +100 chefs kisses. Savonarola is a demon and when he’s not being reincarnated into a new loop he’s roasting in hell, beyond every hope of salvation. Savonarola, who spent his whole life railing against the Church’s corruption. Savonarola, who thought if he was pious enough he could by sheer force of will preach Florence into a purer city. I’ve read 6 or 7 of Walton’s novels but this is the first one where I stopped and thought: Goddamn, I can see why she’s Ada Palmer’s best friend.

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (2017) (Murderbot #1) It was cute and I liked it, although I’m not sure it hit the spot for me the way it seems to have grabbed a lot of other people.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The Ones Who Don’t Say I Love You (2021) The first story slapped so hard! It was basically a perfect story. The others oscillated between middling and kind of shoddy; they all center on New Orleans and race and class.

Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (2005) Lamott is really good at what she does! i haven’t read Bird by Bird but now i think i should—personal essay collections are not a genre i generally gravitate toward but i could not but these down.

Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible (2021) (Dreamer Trilogy #2) Did Maggie just write a book with a plot or am I tripping on acid? It provoked in me a lot of thoughts about art and artists. Declan and Jordan take a backseat to Ronan and Hennessy in this one (the way Maggie picked apart Hennessy’s Deep Dark Trauma was more compelling than the way she approached Ronan’s—the climax hinges on both their traumas so it was imperative she get them both right). Matthew my beloved gets his own pov and he is—wow, i had forgotten how hard it is to be a teenager, even when you’re the most easygoing teenager alive. Jordan sort of sets him straight; ofc it sucks that he is literally a supernatural entity dreamed into existence by his brother, but otoh does it suck that much more than the day-to-day trial of existing in the world as a teenager?

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden (2020) My first outing with Tchaikovsky and I like him! I like the scope of his ideas. There’s a tendency in contemporary SFF to elevate the social sciences above the “harder” sciences but Tchaikovsky is cut from a different cloth, right out the gate he’s like bro lemme tell you about the Permian Extinction. I will say that once we had unraveled the mystery of how these parallel universes function there wasn’t much substance, character- or relationship-wise, to hold my interest. There was a trans character but she just wasn’t that interesting; what was interesting was what other characters’ reactions to her told us about them, which imo speaks to something lacking on the writer’s part.

Jessamine Chen, The School for Good Mothers (2021) Harrowing, as entirely expected, and as other reviewers have noted the middle section dragged—this is the “remedial” school where she has to parent a robot to “prove” she’s a fit mother—and the social commentary was anvil-blunt. By contrast when she goes to court for the custody hearing her lawyer’s entire strategy is “let’s hope the judge sees you as white.” Which does not work in Frida’s case but you can see why it is often a winning strategy!! So much model minority toxicity to unpack. The whole time she’s waiting to appear before the judge there’s an ITV home renovation show running in the background on TV—somebody is replacing their jacuzzi—and meanwhile Frida becomes more and more conscious that she is the only person in the room wearing business casual who’s not an attorney. Everyone else is either 1) lower-class 2) nonwhite or 3) both. That was when the novel was sharpest, the implicit contrast there. Also when she would engage in self-destructive behaviors like sleeping with her ex’s best friend just because she needed to know she was still desirable?? Will is a tool—every man in this book is a tool—but I can’t blame her. She didn’t have any good choices, she’s being asked to perform motherhood to an ever-shifting unattainable standard, she’s being set up for failure at every step. I was initially wary because this is the zeitgeistiest of debuts but it was quite good.

Steven Brust, Issola (2001) (Vlad Taltos #9) “It’s useful, for example, to categorize your target as a sorcerer, if he is one; but if you get too attached to your category it’ll leave you embarrassed when he suddenly pulls a knife on you.” Well Anna this has got to be one of your faves right? Vlad, Morrolan and Aliera negotiate —as far as i can tell—against THEMSELVES in this most fraught of hostage situations. The situation is: they are the hostages. It sounds asinine when I put it like that but Brust has the knack of painting Vlad into the absurdest of corners and then springing a solution that is surprisingly inevitable. The real meat of the story lies not in confronting the baddies but in Vlad’s conversations with Lady Teldra, Morrolan’s Executive Assistant. Teldra is an Issola and they have a reputation for being governed quite rigidly by protocol. In the course of being held hostage with her, Vlad learns that the Issola are not as alien as he supposes them to be; that he in fact has internalized a number of Issola instincts. “It is really all a question of taking appropriate action for the circumstances,” explains Teldra. Teldra goes on to drop the paradigm-shifting revelation that Morrolan was raised as an Easterner, which….makes you reframe everything you think you know about Morrolan doesn’t it? Holy guacamole. “Well, I’ll be—he thought he was human? I mean, Easterner?” says Vlad, and that sentence just about says it all. I’m glad we got those scenes of Vlad rescuing Morrolan and Aliera—comedy gold—and them coming back to rescue him, and I’m glad Vlad finally, before it was too late, learned to recognize Lady Teldra’s value. “There is a subtle but important difference, Vlad, between thinking only of yourself and seeing the world as it affects you” is a damn astute observation. This book isn’t one of my favorites but it definitely does that thing you were talking about, Anna, where you’re climbing a hill and you’re climbing and climbing and all of a sudden you reach a certain spot where you look back at the way you came and the light hits different and you’re like oh because you’ve seen this scene before but now you see it from an entirely new angle.

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) Wow I cried. At first I found the omniscient narrator insufferably patronizing—upper-middle-class people have zero self-awareness, all right, we get it!!! Lay off the moral superiority already. It took me 1/3 of the book before I saw a glimmer of Ng’s compassion. I saw that bourgeois individualism makes people mean and small: It broke my heart that Linda McCullough never told Elena Richardson—her supposed bff!—about her serial miscarriages. Mrs McCullough and Mrs Richardson are the villains of the piece! Insofar as a story like this has villains; you’re definitely rooting against them, anyway. But what I mean is, if Mrs McCullough had been able to share her pain with someone, had been able to lean on her friend instead of zipping everything up inside and pretending to be self-sufficient, would she have been less desperate to go to court for custody of somebody else’s baby? If Mrs Richardson had been less invested in “nothing must disturb the status quo,” would Lexie have felt safe enough to go to her own mother when she needed an abortion, instead of Mia? The asymmetry of what Mia did when Mrs Richardson’s daughter came to her needing an abortion (gave her tea and a place to crash), and what Mrs Richardson did when Mia’s daughter did the same (threw Pearl and Mia out on the street), is making me absolutely feral. Anyway this book made me think a great deal about art as labor, and how artists must labor to procure the time and space to create art. Mia literally became a surrogate because she didn’t have the money to attend art school. But then she kept the baby, and that decision, instead of derailing her photography career, wound up jumpstarting it because Pauline took those “Virgin and Baby” photos of Mia and Pearl, and gifted them to Mia, and Mia was able to sell the photos to buy herself time to make art. The Rabbit was Mia’s brother’s car, but before he bought the car he had offered Mia the money to send her to art school. She refused to take it, but after he died she took the car. One way or another it’s an exchange, you see? Money for time or blood for time. Blood for art. The area I felt the book was weakest was the race stuff: Everything about baby Mirabelle, the McCulloughs being white and the baby’s biological mom being Asian all seemed kind of hamfisted. The thing that hurt me most: Moody’s betrayal. “‘I cannot believe you,’ Izzy had never seen her brother act this way. Moody, who had always been the most thoughtful person in her family; Moody, who had always taken her side even if she chose not to take his advice. Moody, the person in her family she’d always trusted to see things more clearly than she could. ‘You realize,’ she said, ‘that Mom is probably going to blame Mia for all this.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘maybe she should have kept a closer eye on her daughter. Maybe she should have raised her to be more responsible.’” To be clear: Moody is so cut up about being friendzoned by Pearl that he gladly throws his BEST FRIEND to the wolves. Fuck this whole society, I’m glad Izzy burned the house down.

Tana French, The Trespasser (2017) (Dublin Murder Squad #6) “Me and Steve, scrabbling so hard to pull the true story out of the tangle, we forgot the false ones come with their own ferocious, double-edged power.” I’m about to go out and read every word Tana French has ever published, she is that good. It’s a page-turner but not the sort that leaves you feeling you ate an entire bag of chips on autopilot because you weren’t paying attention and now you have a tummyache. Antoinette Conway and Steve Moran are the outcast and the rookie, respectively, of the Dublin Murder Squad: they’re assigned a run-of-the-mill domestic assault case that turns out to be more than it seems. Something pings their cop-spidey-sense and it’s not the case itself; it’s how various people—witnesses, suspects, other cops—react to the case. The sense of offness that suffuses the narrative is immediate and frighteningly effective. The way French resolves all the loose threads; even the prat of a journalist who is stalking Conway has his hour in the sun. The open wound of Conway’s dad, whom she never knew, who left her and her ma before she was born—her dad does not overnight become part of her life but his reappearance is key to a breakthrough in the case. It’s so elegant I could cry. That’s her at her lowest ebb, when she confronts her dad. And she swallows her pride and picks up the phone and calls Steve. I was so proud of her when she did that. Her and Steve just had a blowup. Her paranoia and her persecution complex have made her distrust everyone; she’s spun a story in her head where even Steve, her partner, is out to get her; she is allergic to being “rescued” because it means she’s not in control of her own narrative anymore. She calls Steve and he comes, no questions asked. The way that trusting your partner beyond all logic and sense is at the heart of solving this case—at the heart of why this murder was committed. The way that the stories that buttress our identity are more powerful than the most advanced policework or interrogation technique.

mysticalmuddle

meretricula

coaltide

2020 Fannish Year in Review

mysticalmuddle

mysticalmuddle

Ok but the wildest thing that happened to me this year, that I’m going to write about here because it is Jonrya-related is I got anon hate on tumblr! I was upset at the time but now I am just confused. Because usually anon hate is trying to elicit some kind of reaction from you? For the anon’s amusement? Or if you’re a blog with a lot of followers they just flame you for attention. I am not a blog with a lot of followers, and I did not give amusing answers. For context: in ASOIAF the most popular ship (by tumblr and AO3 stats) is Jon/Sansa. It’s a ship that the rest of the fandom holds in disdain, for reasons that aren’t important. What’s important for our purposes is that it’s very uncommon for someone to multiship Jon/Sansa and Jon/Arya; it's just Not Done. (By contrast nobody bats an eye if you multiship Jon/Arya and Gendry/Arya, or Sansa/Margaery and Dany/Sansa).


To recap what happened here: This anon is not mad because I wrote for the wrong ship. They mad because I 
kudos'd the wrong fic, which is something they could only have known if they went digging for this information by combing through the kudos counter at the bottom of the offending fic.

witcherology

cafemassolit

mysticalmuddle

cafemassolit

mysticalmuddle

meretricula

stultiloquentia

meretricula

witcherology

Dearest Yuletide Author,

I’m so sorry for putting this letter up late! Please consider all my prompts in the way of suggestions to get your creative juices flowing. I want you to write the story you are enthused to write, and as long as it features the characters I requested I promise I will be a happy customer.

DNWs: underage (<14), graphic violence, rape/noncon, nominated major character death, A/B/O, bodyswap, mpreg, scat, watersports

General Likes

As far as shipping preferences go, I’ve used the usual ao3 shorthand “/“ for pairings I ship and “&” for platonic relationships below. I’m not really fussed about whether it’s genfic or shipfic, actually, as long as the story is about their importance in each other’s lives. That’s where the good stuff is at. People who’ve known each other forever, who know each other inside out, figuring out new facets to their relationship, is 100% my jam.

I’m omnivorous when it comes to ratings—please be as explicit or as family-friendly as the story requires.

A grab-bag of top-tier tropes: found family, fluff, angst, fake dating/fake married, mutual pining, UST, bedsharing, amnesia, kidfic

I want to state for the record that I love fusion AUs/crossovers (college, soulmark, HP, daemons, PacRim, Regency, MCU)—if you should feel moved to depart from canon!verse I am here for it.

GEEK HOUSE REPRESENT. I love these ride-or-die platonic life partners and their dynamic a stupid, absurd amount. I read The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex and I cackled the whole way through, because baby!Cam and baby!Pal are beyond precious. I wanted more. I want all the pre-canon casefic with a generous side of worldbuilding, and I want the post-canon Camilla character studies (I mean, unless you want to go with “Palamedes hacks Lyctorhood from beyond the grave, returns to life to pull Harrow and/or Gideon's nuts out of the fire” which I’m also down with). I just cannot get over the absolute bone-deep trust and loyalty between these two coexisting with them roasting each other at all times. Scenes I think about a lot: 1) When Gideon told Camilla that Palamedes’s last words were that he loved her, and Cam was like “What?! No they weren’t.” 2) When Cam came to Harrow with the shard of Palamedes’s painstakingly reconstructed skull and “If he’s not in there I have to go find the others.”

I’ve seen the 2019 film but this movie remains the sine qua non of Jo/Laurie chemistry for me. (Plus Claire Danes’s Beth!! she had so little to work with and she killed it.) I love that they’re braintwins; I love that they’re both chaotic good. I love that Jo’s afraid of subsuming herself into a patriarchal marriage arrangement—that’s why she rejects him: “You’re my dearest friend—I just can’t go and be a wife.” She doesn’t say she can’t be his wife, just a wife. It’s the role itself that’s repugnant to her. I would love anything from a slice-of-life vignette centered on shenanigans from their carefree younger days, to a canon-divergence AU (Jo goes to Europe instead of Amy? Laurie surprises her in New York?). I just love that they’re bros and they’re in love, and one doesn’t negate the other.

When I read Knife Children I was struck by how parenting and cultural integration are both works in progress which require a long-term commitment and promise an uncertain payoff. I want to see how Lily adjusts to being seen as an outsider when she visits her farmer family, and I’d love to see her relationship with her siblings and stepdad fleshed out. But she’ll also be seen as an outsider, at least initially, amongst the Lakewalkers. Does Barr take her on a one-on-one father-daughter bonding trip? Does he introduce her to Dag and Fawn, who are the model of what cultural integration looks like? Does he introduce her to Remo, who could tell her some stories about what her dad was like when he was young and dumb? In an AU scenario, does she wind up on Barr’s doorstep as a much younger or older child, with all its attendant difficulties?

I can't wait to read your fic, dear author! Happy Yuletide <333

metericula

“I’ve got quite well-developed willpower when it comes to doing necessary work. I just have very little willpower when it comes to indulging petty resentment.” “Dignity was what I had instead of friends.” “I don’t have a very good idea how people behave with their friends normally, because I’d never had one before, but on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea we just went on being rude to each other.” “…and what right did he have to be a decent person, on top of a monumentally stupid gigantic hero?” “I know you’re just waiting for us to put your statue up, but that’s no reason to carry on like a slab of solid rock.” “I could hear Orion’s combat magic going, which I was starting to be able to recognize just by the rhythm of the spell bursts.” “It’s not that we don’t all know it’s unfair, but nobody says so, because if you say so, enclave kids don’t invite you to join them on the better side of unfair.” “And we all get the illusion of a chance. But the only chance they’re really giving us is the chance to be useful to them.” “I hate this school more than anyplace in the entire world, not least because once in a while, you get forcibly reminded that the place was built by geniuses who were trying to save the lives of their own children, and you’re unspeakably lucky to be here protected by their work.” “When they were offering an alliance, they were offering their lives. They were offering to go all-in, asking me to do the same. Chloe didn’t have a thing on the table in comparison.” “If he was a person, he had as much right as she did to be scared and selfish, and she was supposed to pay back everything he gave her.” “Her total astonishment when she saw us and blurted, ‘Oh god, you’re alive!’ would have been insulting if she hadn’t sounded half glad about it.” “…yelling out that Tom, Dick or Kylo had gone over to the dark side and asking everyone to help take him down.” “Magnus had always blithely operated on the assumption that he could call a tribunal if ever he saw an imminent threat to his life, and naturally everyone would agree: like Chloe and her maintenance requests.” “If we got out that way, over your bodies, that’s malia whether or not we took the hit for it directly. Most of us don’t want that… We know what we have to do, if we don’t want to pay it back with blood. We have to pay it back with work.” “And if Chloe Rasmussen turned out to be an actual decent person and a real friend, that would mean the thing I didn’t have weren’t necessarily incompatible with the things I really cared about.”

Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk (2019) (The Dreamers #1) cafemassolit enticed me into reading this on the understanding it was 0% plot and 100% Lynch brothers memes and she deserves ALL the accolades. I mean, I don’t think I’m in Ronan’s corner as much as she is, mostly because I think Ronan doesn’t give Declan nearly enough credit. Declan Lynch has done absolutely nothing wrong ever and I will die on this hill. Just the way Declan physically flinches when someone (not!Niall, i think, and he’s going to be A Problem isn’t he) threatens to expose Ronan as a dreamer???!! I love these boys sfm. “A dreamer, a dream, and Declan: that was the brothers Lynch.” Yo Maggie calm down you don’t have to come for my feelings right out of the gate. “Ronan’s dreaming wasn’t a secret to Matthew. Declan just liked everything better if it was a secret.” “Ronan didn’t want to talk about it, but he didn’t want to sound like he didn’t want to talk about it.” Matthew, overhearing Ronan speak Latin to Adam on the phone: “Why don’t you just say ‘I love you’?” “Why do you wear your burrito on your shirt instead of in your mouth?” Speaking of Adam, best boyfriend ever!!!! “And like that, the fight was over. It had never been a fight between them, anyway. For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. For Ronan, it was a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality every else experienced.” Anyway SPOILERS: When Ronan asked Jordan “Is your name Ashley” because Declan only dates Ashleys I fell out of my chair laughing. The hardest-hitting emotional beat for me was obviously Matthew’s “because now I know you’re as big a liar as Declan” because Ronan prides himself on never ever lying—Declan seems to have the market cornered on lying—and it hurt so much. Declan’s whole life has been defined by his being the only “normal,” non-dream-affiliated person in his family and naturally the first thing he does given half a chance is….fall in love with Jordan, a literal dream. Don’t sleep on the Henessey/Ronan brotp guys!!! Hennessy and Jordan’s povs were almost as much fun as Ronan and Declan’s. I enjoyed >90% of this book which is an all-time record for a Maggie Stiefvater book.

Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle (2017) (Terra Ignota #3) Two things of import happened in this book: I sorted myself as Utopian, and I came out unironically stanning Felix Faust. All the world leaders be like “You say you’re Achilles reincarnated? pRoVE iT” meanwhile Faust: “Dear boy, I believed you the instant you stepped through the doorway. You walk like a horse, and continued straight three paces as if to let your hind-quarters pass the doorpost before turning toward me. I know no one else who was raised by centaurs.” Faust administering unorthodox personality tests: “I am Headmaster of Brill’s Institute and Steward of Gordian, the First Hive, which birthed the best age this planet has ever known. When I tell you to look at forty-eight pictures of things eating a banana, you do not ask why.” Faust drinking himself into an early grave: “The level of brandy in Faust’s decanter testified that sleep had held me for some time in Hades’s fields.” This man is a gift to humanity.

Obviously I was kidding about those being the only important occurrences! I think Mycroft utters his genuinely most hilarious line ever: “I lost myself in a maze of insane solutions. Have Spain annex the whole of Earth? Replace Jehovah’s bone marrow to purge him of the blood of kings? Travel back in time and murder Charlemagne before he could bear children?” I am SCREAMING. On a more srs bzns note, I continue to be impressed by how each book contains fresh revelations about Mycroft’s past crimes that cast the present political convulsions in a new light. In The Will to Battle we learn he went on a mass-murdering spree at the age of 17 specifically in order not to be Hive-affiliated when they put him on trial. We also see that Jehovah (is he 17? is that an intentional parallel?) can’t possibly continue to be all things to all people, indefinitely: Sooner or later he will have to pick a Hive. This entire book is about picking sides for the impending war. Except at the end Ada sort of tips her hand? See, what’s important isn’t how the battle lines are drawn up; what’s important is that Utopia remains above the fray. Utopia, which holds the future of humanity in its cupped palms. If Utopia is lost everything is lost.

I’m ok with Ada favoring Utopia, and Mycroft favoring Utopia, because I too favor Utopia. Here is what they stand for: “I hereby renounce the right to complacency, and vow lifelong to take only what minimum of leisure is necessary to my productivity, viewing health, happiness, rest, and play as means, not ends, and that, while Utopia provides my needs, I will commit the full produce of my labors to our collective effort to redirect the path of human life away from death and toward the stars.” It doesn’t feel oppressive to have that one end—building that barely-glimpsed better future—dominate the entirety of my intellectual vista; it feels restful, rather. I can read as many trashy romance novels as I want—word of Mycroft confirms it—so long as leisure supplements work rather than distracting from it. This is everything. I found myself mouthing the words of the Utopian vow alongside Cato in that moment when he slashes his Humanist boots??? I love Cato and I have since Book 1, idc if it’s an unpopular opinion. Other things I love: Martin’s maximum-logic braaaaaain ahhhh i loved the Martin chapter. The imperious way Saladin says “I am Mycroft Canner” and it’s actually kind of true?!!! I was talking to hamsterwoman about how it isn’t that Ada doesn’t pick sides—it’s impossible not to pick sides—but she’s always arguing in good faith, never strawmanning her opponents, and that is a rare thing. I can’t render a verdict on this book independent of the others because Ada is painting on such a large canvas—I doubt even four books could encompass her entire vision. Onwards to Book 4, out next year!

“I must know the terms.” “You cannot know. You must use your knowledge of the Empire itself, and trust that any oath authored by your predecessors is a wise one.”“Gravity does not grant wishes.” “Love and murder are not so antithetical.” “Existence is truth; lies unmake truth and so unmake existence; that is evil.” “I will never call myself a mutt. My blood remains as Greek as Patroclus’s.” “It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.” “I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must!” “‘The fault was not yours.’ ‘The promise was mine. The stain is on my honor.’” “There’s honor in urging the right course, even when the wrong is set.” “But can I be called good if I merely desire their happiness, but do no attempt to achieve it?” “There are certain mistakes you don’t want even enemies to make.” “There is a special cruelty in making the still-living master pass on his instrument when no living student has yet surpassed him.” “A spearman’s joy as he receives praise from Athena’s lips does not depend on how well he understands the goddess’s mastery of one particular technique.” “So all dead blood, from my own parents’ blood to the first Cro-Magnon who sharpened a stone, is on my hands, and well the Furies know it.” “There are more illiteracies than script, reader: Ancelet can read numbers, Headmaster Faust the subtleties of face and phrasing, Madame blushes, Eureka her ten billion balls of light, while others read stones, DNA, star streaks, the flights of birds—all hen scratch to the untrained. I think all humans feel rage at our finitude when we see others read what we cannot.” “If my Saladin is childhood’s fear, the unknowable evil in the closet’s depths, I have become adulthood’s fear, fear of power, law, illustrious contacts, police resources, covert agencies, and sweet judicial murder.” “Even when they made rules, they let each other get away with breaking them all the time, because t hey all wanted to be able to use some extreme means to protect their own.” “Mycroft could talk a fox into skinning itself.” “I won’t have a soldier at my back who isn’t mine by oath. Would you?” “One certain prophecy in wartime is worth a thousand times the treasures haughty Agamemnon laid so long ago at great Achilles’ feet.” “But Papa is Greek, and Greece knows Rome, and the Doria-Pamphili line could not be more Roman had they laid Julia Caesar on the pyre themselves.” “…since to Him ignorance and pain and indistinguishable, so reusing to answer a question is a form of torture.” “Zeus himself would not have recognized his Ganymede.” “Scorn too can be a form of relief, reader. In a world of scum unworthy to raise our eyes, to his, I at least was scum who knew it.” “They have no other parent, but she has only one Son.” “I trust even Providence over Madame.” “Patrimony? I chuckled at Martin, such a Mason, still measuring value in man hours and human lives.” “Land is real…after a million sunsets there will still be acres, dirt, and dawn. The Earth is real, and one who owns a sliver of her owns something eternal.” “I, who woke gradually from boyhood to love, do not know, but if love can come at first sight, as romance claims, and if it can erase the world, leaving nothing but the vision of the beloved, and if love is, as poets claim, a kind of Death, and burns away the past self so the lover’s soul arises like a newborn phoenix to Love’s promise, then I believe that Eros’s arrow slays Dominic anew every single time he lays eyes on the One Who is so absolute his Lord and Master.” “Achilles doesn’t choose sides based on how likely things are to succeed, only whether they’re worth dying for.” “You are nothing to me, Thisbe! You love nothing and you honor nothing!” “Strength deserts a battle line when trust does.” “Have mercy, pray, not on me but on Gagarin, and Galileo, and Odysseus, and Jason and his Argonauts, and on Your Guest, Who will suffer so if He must see them fall! Have mercy, Maker!” “I never chose a Hive for myself, but I chose one for Bridger. I think, readers, that I might be a traitor.” “I still love Apollo’s stars so much I forget Jehovah is bigger. My dreams are still within this universe, so infinite, so small, so near. I want to smell Mars dust. If I can’t then I want somebody to: Apollo, Cato, you.”

Margot Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down" (2006) It’s about family and female relationships and how social mores can be both repressive and life-affirming, and it hurt more than Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Lanagan’s way with words continues to be the unsurpassed eighth marvel of the world.

Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day (2019) sync-read here with hamsterwoman  and cafemassolit. Tl;dr first half rocked, second half let me down, capitalism sucks.

 Sandra Newman, The Heavens (2019) Ben loves Kate. Kate has dreams. The dreams might be realer than her waking world. In fact the dreams seem to affect her waking world. This book is absolutely brilliant. I mined the rec from Abigail Nussbaum, who seems to hate all the things I like, but the flip side of that is she has such niche taste she’s never reading the same books other people in the SF/F community are reading, and this one was a home run for me. On a prose level Newman’s word choice is unfailingly on-point, which is impressive because she’s switching between two vastly different registers—modern millennials in Manhattan and minor nobility in Elizabethan England—and she never once sacrifices legibility for verisimilitude. But even minor characters’ voices still sound distinct. On a plot/structural level I intuited each major twist just ahead of its reveal. On a thematic level it’s about how the worst feeling in the world is when the people you love disbelieve you and treat you like you belong in an insane asylum; Kate is hobbled in her “real” life by her supernatural gifts. People will try to sell you The Heavens as a time-travel romance in the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife but DO NOT FALL FOR IT. The Heavens is the book I’ve been searching for since I finished Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, I just didn’t realize Claire North was not going to be the one to write it. It actually does the thing that I have criticized Song for a New Day for not doing properly, which is marry the author’s personal and political convictions, and give art and society each their due. It’s a little slow to start but please read at least up to the scene where Ben and Kate have a fight and Kate’s like “maybe I should get a cat instead of a job.”

Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring (1936) NGL THEY HAD US IN THE FIRST HALF.JPG Ok I was def raising my eyebrows at the heroine’s vapidity. She was a sweetheart but Heyer’s Regency heroines normally have a bit more bite to them—more Lizzy Bennet than Fanny Price. Turns out she was 1/2 of the B-couple and we don’t meet the actual heroine until later. The hero is your typical his-way-or-the-highway tyrannical Heyer hero, and all the shenanigans are fall-on-your-face funny. The structure isn’t as tight as something like Cotillion (my fave because it features the ANTI-HEYER-HERO) but the set-pieces had me in stitches. That feeling when you have to trust someone you don’t know that well to play along with your charade in order to fool a supremely odious third person, and the whole act of pulling the wool over a third person’s eyes is both Peak Teamwork and Peak Romance? Oof, nobody does it like Heyer.

asoiaf | Like winter we are cruel by lagardère (Jon/Sansa S7 AU, 101k) “This has got to stop. It’s a kiss and then it’s a war, and you know if you spoke long enough and low enough I’d do it.” “She could poison your wine and slit your throat, and still you would choose her.” Holy mother of god this woman can write. This is obviously not my ship butwitcherology recc’d it and she was right, it’s stunning and absolutely savage. I’m a little pained that Littlefinger was the antagonist as I love that twisty motherfucker.

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991) There’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that goes “scratch my heart to find / The roots of last year’s roses in my breast” and that’s it that’s the book. It didn’t plant any new thoughts in my head but it did unzip me and give me access to feelings long submerged or untapped. I’m probably never going to reread King Lear when I can reread this even more brutal retelling instead.

King Lear is the story of a tyrant who divides his kingdom between his two viper-esque older daughters while disinheriting his actually deserving third daughter. It is not immediately obvious that he’s a tyrant, since his name is in the title of the play and all, but you will experience no such confusion with A Thousand Acres, which takes place in the American Midwest in the late seventies. When I say ”takes place” I mean it in the sense that The Departed (2006, dir. Martin Scoresese) takes place in Boston—it couldn’t have been set anywhere else. The fact that the movie it’s adapted from, Infernal Affairs (2002, dir. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak) didn’t really need to be set in Hong Kong doesn’t detract from that other film, it’s just a fact; and say what you will about the Dover Cliffs but I really don’t think King Lear needed to be set in Britain either. A Thousand Acres needs to be set when and where it is because it’s about land. Being a farmer is more than an outlook or a discipline or a vocation, it’s a theological imperative: There is no distinction between being a farmer and being a man, between work and leisure. That Smiley’s Lear is an awful man, a rapist and a pedophile, is inextricable from his being a wildly successful & respected farmer who owns the titular thousand acres. The whole way of life is rotten to its roots. You see the moral emptiness of Lear’s kingdom a lot sooner than you do in Shakespeare’s version, though, because A Thousand Acres is narrated by one of Lear’s unfilial daughters—Goneril, the one whom he canonically cursed with barrenness.

I’d read a quarter of the book before I realized Ginny is actually the eldest—she’s a pushover who gives off some real middle-child vibes, and she’s always taken her cue from belligerent Rose. Rose and Ginny together raised the youngest, Caroline, after their mother’s death. Caroline wound up moving to the city to be a lawyer, while Ginny and Rose stayed on the farm to look after Daddy.

The event that sets the plot in motion is the return of the prodigal son: Their neighbor’s son who dodged the Vietnam draft and spent the past decade-plus smoking weed and learning organic farming techniques in Canada. The difference is, Edmund was the villain of King Lear but Jess Clark is not the villain of this piece, despite dodgy behavior like sleeping with the married Ginny and the married Rose at the same time and then ghosting both of them. Jess is an outsider, and his very presence makes everyone reexamine the assumptions they’ve internalized eg. Ginny says “I was fourteen when Daddy bought this farm” and Jess says, “Stole it from Harold, you mean.” One of the choices I really like about this adaptation is the choice to depict the relationship between Jess’s dad (Harold aka the Earl of Gloucester) and Ginny’s dad (Larry aka Lear) as a friendly rivalry rather than vassal-to-liege. If Harold buys an expensive piece of farm equipment then Larry must have one too. It’s a game of one-upmanship and it leads inexorably to Larry incorporating the farm and giving away shares to his daughters, which is not a legally or financially or personally sound decision but it’s like he feels like he has no choice?? This novel predictably culminates in one of those court scenes where the lawyers twist the testimonies of the witnesses to bend the truth into obscene shapes.

Being a farmer means in essence being a Calvinist: we get what we deserve. Six-year-old Caroline says “I don’t want to be a farmwife I want to be a farmer” because she has grasped that only one of these roles gives you agency. To be a farmer means you are supposed to be stoic, laconic, take every blow the world rains down on you on the chin. Change is on the horizon, however. Family farms fall like dominoes before the gale force of industrial agribusiness. You hear of farmers shooting themselves in the head after running up unpayable debts. Jess Clark is out here quoting communist Rosa Luxembourg lmao I fucking love his pretentious hipster ass; he got Rose to sleep with him by talking about how he was already sleeping with Ginny. I feel like Jess is one of those people, if this was a video game, would have charisma stats off the charts. But he only turns the charisma on when somebody’s watching; he’s such a cold fish it’s impossible to know what he’s really thinking or feeling. The thing about Jess is he fucks Ginny and Rose over, sure, but the way he fucks them is not with the active complicity of the system, and that’s the difference between him and Larry: Larry regularly rapes and abuses his daughters over a period of decades. When Larry loses his mind (and the scene of mad Lear cast out in the storm is showstoppingly executed) who does the town blame for his descent into madness? Ginny and Rose, obviously, for being unfilial daughters. Larry moves in with Caroline, who sues Ginny and Rose for the farm.

So Rose’s husband’s response to her confession “I’m having an affair with Jess” is “I’m going to kill your dad”??!! And that’s because Larry is the source and the ultimate cause of everything in their lives. There’s no escaping his influence. I feel like I’ve neglected to talk about Ginny’s character in-depth in favor of a high-level overview of what the book’s trying to do, but Ginny is not a sympathetic character. At one point she tries to poison Rose with pickled sauerkraut!!! Rose, her closest confidante and ally! Everybody in this book is terrible, do not read it if you can’t handle terrible people. I cried so much for Ginny ahhh I even cried for her poor clueless husband. I highlighted so many passages it took me like half an hour to type up these quotes beware that SPOILERS ABOUND:

“Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County.” “Compared to our sisterhood, every other relationship was marked by some sort of absence—before Caroline, after our mother, before our husbands, pregnancies, her children.” “However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.” “At the pig roast, Jess Clark and the new machinery were Harold’s twin exhibits.” “In my heart I knew those men were imposters, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories.” “I saw that maybe Caroline had mistaken what we were talking about, and spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter.” “My father was easily offended but normally he was easily mollified, too, if you spoke you prescribed part with a proper appearance of respect.” “Deserving was an interesting concept, applied to my father. His own motto was, what you get is what you deserve.” “Are you going to stop him? No! You’ll just goad him on! He’ll cut you out! If you don’t calm down, it will be like you were never born. Doesn’t that scare you?” “An all-encompassing thrift that blossomed in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned … to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.” “In Canada there’s no undercurrent of shame. You just drink.” I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn’t have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her.” “If Rose had asked me, not what I had the most trouble with, but what my worst habit was, I would have said it was entertaining thoughts of disaster.” “Carter says, ‘What should I do? A president’s got to say ‘What do I want to do? what will make me feel good now that I’m feeling so bad?’ He’s like a farmer, you see only the big pieces of equipment he’s got access to are weapons, that’s the difference.” “He’s rigid like this because we’ve let him be.” “He wasn’t criticizing you. You don’t have to feel criticized.” “This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do no offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone’s consciousness without my having really asked them.” “My job remained what it had always been—to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him.” “With Caroline, it was like she didn’t know there was something to be afraid of.” “The thing is, Harold can’t understand being in a state of flux. I mean, he understands uncertainty. Every farmer understands that, but it’s something that comes from outside, from the price of grain or the weather, not from within. If Harold’s ever been restless, I’d be amazed … The thing is, I can’t decide if being like Loren is a disease I’m too old to get now.” “To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else, on the West Coast, say, was to imagine that we were not ourselves.” “There he stood, the living source of it all, of us all.” “But you’re not really a woman, are you? I don’t know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch.” “There’s only one side here, and you’d better be on it.” “She humors him and sympathizes with him. He doesn’t overwhelm her the way he does us.” “We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops.” “A poor-looking farm diagrams the farmer’s personal failures.” “I understand him perfectly. You’re making it too complicated. It’s as simple as a child’s book. I want, I take, I do.” “Daddy things history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.” “If I don’t find some way to get out from under what Daddy’s done to me before I die—“ “Here, I thought, were too people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality.” “I felt the familiar sensation of storing up virtue for a later date. The days passed.” “As far as I knew then, my hands and my body had never met without an intermediary washcloth.” “But he did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he’s respected.” “I want what was Daddy’s. I want it. I feel like I’ve paid for it, don’t you? You think a breast weighs a pound? That’s my pound of flesh.” “And then our cautious lives had grown intolerable in retrospect, and every possibility of returning to them equally intolerable.” “’The winter was so bad after the trial—‘ ‘The hearing. Nobody was on trial.’ ‘I was.’” “I think people should keep private things private.” “That she was so apart from her body that I had to address the two halves of her separately.” “‘I was on the side of the farm, that was all.’ ‘What does that mean? You talked to her! She saw you as an ally!’” “How can we divide up the stuff without knowing what it means?” “I don’t know what makes them tick. It’s like they seek out bad things. They don’t see what’s there—they see beyond that to something terrible, and it’s like they’re finally happy when they see that!” “Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory.” “Rose left me a riddle I have’t solved, of how we judge those who have hurt us when they have shown no remorse or even understanding.”