tabacoychanel

Monica Byrne, The Actual Star (2021) DNF at 50%: High concept and impeccably structured but I had trouble connecting with the characters. For me personally the effort/reward ratio was not worth it (I read 300 out of 600 pages to be sure). There are three parallel timelines three thousand years apart; there’s bushel of big ideas wrt utopia and gender; there is copious, very graphic sex. This latter was a striking choice, since it clearly wasn’t meant to be titillating but it also wasn’t meant to make the characters look pathetic, the way in literary novels the sad sack-of-shit protagonist is always having unsatisfactory sex. The sex in this book reads like a medieval mystic recounting the ecstasy of divine visitation— makes you a bit wistful that modern folks are too inhibited to behave like this anymore.

Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business (2015) Chronicles one year as the owner of a small woodworking shop that specializes in custom conference tables. As much as I hate to give credence to the myth of the entrepreneur who creates jobs and is the backbone of the country, this book was fucking riveting. Downs is a craftsman who reluctantly dons a salesman’s suit, and while he struggles to turn a profit despite doing fine work, it sounds like he’s found success in his second career as a writer. He deserves it. Things I was utterly engrossed by: 1) The “why we can’t hire a decent janitor” saga 2) the Google AdSense saga. Wdym this man is paying Google six hundred dollars a day to run ads and he can’t even get a human on the line to tell him why a glitch in aforementioned ads is causing him to hemorrhage business??!

It helps that Downs is a man with an unimpeachable private life: drives a beat-up 15-year-old wagon; one son with severe autism and another accepted to MIT. Meanwhile, Downs goes to Germany and tours a traditional furniture factory and the view of German management is “….Ads? Huh. Why would you sell to people you have no prior relationship with?” Lol. Being exposed to other ways of doing things really makes you reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the American business model. Here is Downs touring a a Saudi Arabian factory and describing their shockingly labor-intensive business model:

Another thing his model has over ours: lots and lots of jobs. His factory gives two hundred workers a place to go every morning, a way to feed their family, and the pride of making good work. I would guess that the Stand-Around Guys are his B- and C-level performers, who wait for the moment the factory needs a large number of workers, irrespective of their skills. What does the future hold for B- and C-level workers in America? I don’t have any on my shop floor. And the next generation of robots may take out my A- guys, too. The end point of our trajectory is the elimination of people in factories. My biggest marketing struggle is convincing people that our product, which incorporates a lot of hand labor, is worth the extra money.

Being a boss sounds awfully lonely. His proximate problem is his sales are not covering his overhead but the bigger problem problem is he has no one to bounce ideas off of; no one else who can see the entire picture of his business and all the moving parts. In due course Downs joins a business group and discovers peer criticism. Wonderful! Why didn’t his artist wife suggest this ten years ago??

I did have a personal angle in choosing to pick up this book at this time. I (stay at home mom who occasionally bartends) and my husband (insane Italian chef who smokes an entire pig for our kid’s birthday party) are buying a catering business. It’s exciting and scary and one of my coping mechanisms is cruising Libby for business books when I have insomnia at 2am.

S.A. Crosby, Razorblade Tears (2021) Unfolds with the cinematic sweep of a geriatric buddycop flick. It features two ex-felon fathers—one black, one white—seeking vengeance for their murdered sons. I swerved out of my usual lane to read a thriller and it was the best thing I read this month. The barrier to entry is so low! By the first sentence you know exactly what kind of story you’re getting. This is the story of Ike, who since doing time has kept his nose clean and owns a landscaping business, and Buddy Lee, who lives in a trailer and is drinking himself into an early grave. Ike finds Buddy Lee grating and so do I, as he is the very caricature of a hillbilly redneck. Neither Buddy Lee nor Ike were particularly good fathers to their boys, and they were both homophobic as all get out. Now they have custody of a three-year-old granddaughter and the police have no leads on the murderer. Top-notch work, unqualified recommendation.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (2025) If you read the cover copy you’d think it was a divorce memoir, or a climate catastrophe story, or a chronicle of monastic life. It’s not not any of those things but what it is is weirder than I can convey. It’s mostly about a mouse infestation. This is the most Buddhist of Catholic books. Don’t pick it up if you’re after anything resembling a plot!

Such a disquieting book. It made me so uncomfortable I had trouble finishing it, even though there were multiple moments of genuine revelation. I’ve never read anything so visceral about schoolyard bullying, for instance. Yet the structure in which she presented these revelations wasn’t the traditional three-act structure we’re used to. For the first fifty pages I wondered, “Is this narrator just doing free association??” because the logic of her flashbacks defeated me. After a hundred pages of what seemed like random anecdotes that did not answer the central question ie. “why did she quit her nonprofit job and leave her husband to become a nun,” I began to see that in these small but telling incidents the narrator is almost never to be found on the side of moral righteousness. The narrator is implicated, just as we all are, in this fallen world. Can’t say I had a good time but I do think Wood is doing something meaningful and interesting.

David Weber, Field of Dishonor (1994)(Honor Harrington #4) Turns out it’s not socialism that sucks, it’s civilian oversight of the military. Probably we’d be better off under martial law. Representative democracy results in gridlock, ergo put the military in charge since at least they’re competent. If this is a misreading of the text I am BEGGING to be schooled. PLEASE. A month ago my global superhegemon of a country launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran and this has colored my reading. I wish I could talk about Honor more, because this is a real hinge point of a book for her character. Reminds me of other big pivotal books that send the series careening off in new directions like the Vorkosigan Saga’s Memory or Murderbot’s Network Effect or Dragaera’s Phoenix. I think I’m going to have to step away from the Honorverse, and this is not on David Weber, who’s always been forthright about what kind of story he’s telling, this is just me processing current events.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore is on the brink of war with the Peeps but the cowardly peaceniks in the legislature refuse to authorize a formal declaration. Oh noes, the war machine might be starved of funds!! Here in the real world, we rarely ask our elected reps to vote on anything; the Chief Executive merely points to somewhere on a map and commences “operations.” Every year when the Pentagon submits its budget, Congress invariably approves it and is in fact apt to give them more than they asked for. As a treat. Never mind that the Pentagon has never, ever passed an audit, so we don’t even know where all that money is going! Naturally, in the present conflict the Peeps are the aggressor, and Manticore is merely defending itself and its allies. This is absolutely fantastical, given that the last time the USA fought a just war was World War II. And then there is the way the Fourth Estate is held in such disdain, depicted as “threatening the Kingdom’s very survival just to increase their viewership”. Look, I’m not a fan of our existing media ecosystem but even I can see that the ideal of journalism that holds power to account is a worthy one.

TL;DR not enough space battles too much politicking

MsKingBean89, All the Young Dudes (Remus/Sirius, 526k) Took me a while to clock what this fic was doing...and by “a while” I mean until Year Four of our seven-year stint at Hogwarts lol. It’s a queer coming-out story! And a very fine one, but how they are going to reskin this thing for tradpub is a real head-scratcher, since what makes it tick is 100% Hogwarts. Purportedly it got a seven-figure publishing deal. That’s the only reason I heard about it, given my own Marauders era was twenty years ago. It’s entirely third-person limited Remus POV, and while Remus is my favorite character even I got pretty fed up with him. The author chose to lean into the tragic, not the goofy side of Remus and Sirius. I’ve seen this fic comped to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, another story that is also very long and very sad.

Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (2024) Worth the price of admission strictly for the author’s wide-ranging recommendations when it comes to modern Austen adaptations. Who knew I needed Mormon Pride & Prejudice or tech-startup Persuasion in my life?! On a more sober note this is the most enjoyable nonfiction I’ve read in a looooong time; the pages flew by. I would not however recommend it unless you have all six Austen novels under your belt. Brodey writes unusually lucidly for an academic but I notice the book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which probably means the Big Five wouldn’t touch it for being overly dry. Speaking for me personally it was the EXACT sweet spot between entertaining and edifying. Brodey’s project is straightforward: She breaks down the subversive aspects of the ending of each Austen novel, going in the order in which Austen wrote them. Her conclusion:

The real power of Austen’s endings comes from her unusual juxtaposition of romantic happiness and individual fulfillment, tradition and innovation, comedy and tragedy, fantasy and realism, desire for and suspicion of happy endings … To consider such happiness as a common or natural outcome, rather than the product of effort and superlatively good fortune, is to fall into the rom-com trap.

One thing Brodey does superlatively is selecting the right lens to examine a given text. For Northanger Abbey she selects Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’m fond of but it would never have occurred to me to draw a straight line between the meddlesome narrators of the two works. For Persuasion she brings King Lear, specifically the version of Lear that was most often performed in the Regency era, in which Cordelia lives(!). For Sense & Sensibility she brings Disney’s Frozen. It floored me when Brodey noted that Austen was not seen by her contemporaries as a romantically inclined writer, or as writing primarily for an audience of women—both things we take completely for granted nowadays. It’s just that by accepting the hegemony of the marriage plot, Austen was paradoxically able to win the space to delve into the neglected realms of women’s agency and interiority. I’ll be thinking about this one for awhile.

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting (2025) I’ve bounced off Harrow in the past as she is a mite too meta for my taste. This book is the correct amount of meta about Arthuriana and WWI and how national mythologies are shaped. I could have taken or left the central romantic relationship but the parental relationships and the competing models of parenthood were what held my interest. I was iffy about the villain for three-quarters of the story but that ending rescued it: what a home run of a villain origin story.

Harrow went on Worldbuilding for Masochists to promote “my new book: big sad lady knight stuck in a time loop.” This is a fair synopsis. There is also the matter of the co-protagonist, aka nebbish historian who keeps lady-knight on-task. Listen, if I wanted a love story between lady-knight and nebbish historian I would simply go hunting in the Palamades/Camilla tag. That is to say I don’t think the love story is the most convincing component. But Harrow has hit on something by harnessing the time loop for her metafictional commentary. Harrow herself proclaims, “The trajectory of my career has been ‘The power of stories: smiley-face’ to ‘The power of stories: frowny-face’“.

Fundamentally this book succeeds at what it’s doing and it deserves its accolades but for me it’s a little too on the nose. Here’s what I mean: There’s a scene where Owen, in his manuscript, leaves a ciphered note for his future self. Harrow then does the authorial equivalent of tapping me on the shoulder to make sure I’m paying attention to Owen’s punctuation errors. It’s minor but if Harrow can’t trust me to make the connection here, it indicates an alarming tendency to handhold on larger thematic issues. Alix, I wish you would trust your readers more.

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me (2016) Psychological suspense set at an elite gymnastics club rocked by MURDER. The tension is wound tauter than a vault spring and it’s dark dark dark. Not dark like they’re cannibals but ugly-petty dark. Abbott is lauded for her insight into the adolescent psyche and she does not disapoint: “That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours but herself.”

John le Carré, A Perfect Spy (1986) It’s a tour de force but is he writing a thriller or a memoir??? After 700 pages the answer is unclear. The question of target audience haunted me so much, I dug around and found out that Le Carré executed a mid-career pivot in which he leaned into characterization and away from plot. Not that he was writing straight potboilers prior to this; his language has always made me green with envy. But A Perfect Spy is as much the story of Magnus Pym’s traumatized childhood as it is his exposure as a Czech double-agent. I don’t think Le Carré quite pulled it off, insofar as I don’t think the two narrative threads of Pym’s past and present hang together to weave a satisfying story. But I was definitely bought into the tragedy of Pym’s penchant to mold himself to his environs until he’s all things to all people—a house of cards whose days were numbered from the start. I was relieved to find that at no point was I led to believe the “real” tragedy was that Pym had betrayed the British Empire or any such hogwash. I think the way the resolution clicked into place was well-earned: you needed someone from both sides of Pym’s double life—his British wife and his Czech handler—to put two key pieces of information together. If you read this be forewarned about the womanizing. It’s not graphic or anything but there is so much of it and it’s so gratuitous, since Pym is not a Casanova I’m like why does he sleep with so many women when he doesn’t even enjoy it!!

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore (2025) A twisty thriller about a woman who washes up on a remote Antarctic research island. The sense of place was so vivid it took me fully half the book to recognize the slow-rolling climate apocalypse in the background, ie. wildfires and hurricanes in other parts of the world. I can report that the one member of our book club who didn’t gulp it down in one sitting had a more negative impression than the rest of us, because when you’re not feverishly turning the pages some of the twists strain credulity. I think it could have used about 30% fewer twists; that is the percentage that felt manipulative rather than earned. Is Dom a good guy? Is Dom a murderer? Must find out!! For this book to work McConaghy needed to walk a very fine line in her characterization of the villain, and I don’t think she managed that, but I appreciated the multitude of perspectives on parenting she furnished us with. Even if I found myself rolling my eyes at the world’s most precocious nine-year-old child.

Christopher couldn’t breathe. He thought of his father, always so afraid, always anxiously holding the world at bay. It seemed in that moment that the had been right to be afraid, and Christopher had been wrong. Nothing in the world was safe.

It could be easy to feel that our brilliant, peacemaking princess’s life and efforts came to naught, since she herself suffered so much, and both the families she was supposed to link were overthrown not long after her death. But we get another sense when we zoom in. Years of peace—even one year of peace—is a precious thing within a lifetime. Ippolita Maria spent twenty-three years in Naples, a substantial diplomatic career, and during that time she did (a bunch of stuff) …. The world does not stay saved, but to save it three times is no small achievement.

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use, even to obey, the weak tool?

hamsterwoman

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.