what i read in November/December 2025

[tabacoychanel]

Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads (2025) (Witch Roads #1) In the past, Elliott’s extensive worldbuilding has put me off her stories, but this one was a joyride and a half. Our protagonist Elen is a lowly imperial courier who becomes embroiled in a haughty Prince’s mysterious mission. How much you enjoy this book will depend on how partial you are to impish trickster shapeshifting types—Elen’s liaison with one of these forms the romantic subplot and supplies the story’s sly humor. But it’s actually very little about capital-R Romance, and quite a lot about the many & varied forms of love that bind us. As the story opens Elen’s primary concern is launching her seventeen-year-old nephew Kem into the world: He has to Declare for an occupation by the end of Declaration week. Fifteen years ago Elen and her sister fled with baby Kem from a bad situation; now her sister is gone and Kem’s all she has left. Elen has a bunch of skeletons in her closet and one of them shows up to BLOW UP HER LIFE during the book’s inciting incident; she fends him off but the aftershocks rupture her relationship with Kem in a way that she must spend the rest of the book repairing. If I’d read this before I had kids I doubt it would have hit me as viscerally. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are anecdotes about the sorts of wild stunts people have done to save their children, culminating in the lights-out gut punch of a long flashback that is the penultimate chapter.

Let’s talk about Spore. This is the defining feature of The Witch Roads’s world. Imagine a fog that blankets whole swathes of the land, mushrooms erupting out of nowhere to mutate the ever-loving shit out of living things. To be contaminated is to be lost. To maintain a civilization against the entropy of this encroachment is constant, neverending vigilance. That’s a big part of Elen’s job as a courier, to do a regular circuit and watch for signs of Spore. The imperial roads (colloquially termed “witch roads”) have this property that they repel Spore. The Tranquil Empire is, as you might expect, a rigidly hierarchal society, yet it paradoxically offers free-spirit Elen a clearly defined role, Deputy Courier, which she inhabits with relish. Elen may have no love for an Emperor she’s never met, but she would lay down her life for her direct superior, the intendant. The protection of a wise and sheltering patriarch does not justify an unjust system, but Elen is a survivor, not a revolutionary.

This book is doing heaps of cool stuff with gender but gender is not its main focus. It’s gesturing at palace intrigue happening in the far-off Capitol but it’s not wading into the weeds of patronage and backstabbing. If you join Elen on her quest, try to hold your burning questions at bay about its actual goals, as the Prince knows where we’re going but Elen does not: this girl is running away from her problems.

Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children (2023) This is an angry book but not a sad one. It’s about child soldiers. Cyborg child soldiers preloaded with cheat codes for the benefit of the AI nuns who managemarshal them! Alas I couldn’t stand the main character and this extinguished my enjoyment, but of course war is a racket and who even qualifies as human is an evergreen, loaded question. Some of the body horror imagery gave me the heebie jeebies. NB the main character isn’t the only POV but she is our introduction to the world.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary (2021) I was braindead and what I needed was a book that held my hand the whole time, that did not leave me to guess or infer anything, and Andy Weir fucking delivered. It’s disarmingly lighthearted for a story whose stakes are the extinction of the human (and at least one other alien) species. The vibe is similar to a picture book I read my four-year-old about a kid whose rocket ship crash-lands on moon. As it happens, an alien friend is also stranded on the moon. They fix each other’s ships and head home (but remain pen pals). This is not actually the plot of Project Hail Mary but throw in a dollop of existential angst and it’s not far off. Ok yes obviously people are reading this for the SCIENCE and the PROBLEM SOLVING and it’s very satisfying on that level. I can’t tell you if the astrophysics is accurate but I can tell you Andy Weir’s zeal for the scientific endeavor hurtles off the page.

I need to get on my critic's soapbox and talk about the flashbacks: they’re clumsy as fuck. Our protagonist has amnesia and the way Weir backfills the blanks is, if some factual question emerges about why our spaceship is equipped with a certain feature, the next scene will feature a flashback disambiguating that factual question. Andy, this is not the point of flashbacks! Flashback scenes are like bowling pins—you set them up carefully for emotional impact. I’m sorry for being a stick in the mud but the reason I’m critiquing his craft is that Weir does gives his main character an arc. I respect that. This could easily have been 450 pages of pure propulsive plot. Instead we have a climax where Ryland “I’m not a real scientist” Grace makes a critical decision with enormous stakes, a decision that hinges on a pivotal flashback that is just not given sufficient runway.

Sidebar: One reason the book feels lighter than its subject matter is that our forty-year-old POV character goes around using weirdly prim fourth-grade hall monitor language like “crud” and “cripe’s sake.” It got to the point I had to google “Is Andy Weir a Mormon.”

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (1988) (The Culture #2) This book got so intense I had to pick up a romance novel to read on the side. Thank god for my BFF Flere-Imsaho, the galaxy’s most dramatic little shit of a protocol droid. Our mc Gurgeh takes himself unbearably seriously; the narrative is noticeably leavened every time Flere-Imsaho flounces out of the room because his official duties are interfering with his all-important birdwatching hobby.

This is my second stab at Banks’s Culture series, and it was a rousing success. The first time around I didn’t have friends to warn me “Nooooo don’t start with Book 1, it’s not a good entry point.” In fact what happened was my book club was supposed to read Book 3 and I tripped and fell over Book 2 instead. Shoutout to my past self for scooping up an armful of Culture books at a library sale—I mean, even when I was DNF’ing Book 1 I could see the concept of the Culture was the thing Banks was jonesing to tell me more about. What is the Culture, you ask? Someone in my book club called it “Fully automated luxury gay communism,” and that’s about right.

SPOILER SPOILERS SPOILERS

The Culture is an eleven-millennia old spacefearing gene-splicing humanoid race shepherded by benevolent supercomputers (“Minds”). In this book they’re doing a classic foreign policy intervention. Ever heard of “surgical strikes”? The Culture aims to topple an empire by dispatching a guy to play a game.

The guy in question, Gurgeh, is a pretenernturally gifted games-player at the top of his field. He’s won everything in sight and he’s suffering from a crippling miasma of ennui. The Culture’s equivalent of the Foreign Service approaches him with a job offer. I relished the slow start because in the first section we get to spend time inside the Culture. Gurgeh is a genius but he is also a gobshite: He has a competitive streak a mile wide that he has trouble satisfying under present circumstances. Gurgeh has never changed gender, a highly unusual choice in a society where biologically the barrier to transition is very low and socially it’s assumed everyone flits between genders willy-nilly. This one detail about Gurgeh’s gender is doing tons of work: it tells us that 1) this man seeks the intellectual stimulation of zero-sum games and 2) even in a post-scarcity society, men are socialized for competition and women for cooperation. The problem is that Gurgeh has never played with stakes before. Things that have never been on the line for Gurgeh: food, shelter, bodily autonomy, dignity. That all changes when he signs up to travel to the Azadian Empire and play the game of Azad—and experiences the thrilling possibility of losing his dick! Woot woot let’s roll…

The game proceeds in multiple elaborate stages; the winner reigns as Emperor. Talk about a pressure cooker environment. It’s a “clash of cultures” setup where on the one hand you have the Culture, which wears its egalitarian ideology quite lightly, and on the other hand the brutally hierarchical Empire which aggressively pushes its ideological wares at you. The Empire relies heavily on pomp and ritual to ratify its legitimacy. There’s a scene where Gurgeh is invited to march in a parade but he has no ceremonial attire, no badge or sigil or even the chords of an anthem to accompany him because the Culture doesn’t go in for these symbolic goods. To give you an idea of the Culture’s vibe, here are some representative names they’ve christened their AI spacecraft, ie. the backbone of their society: Kiss My Ass, Just Read the Instructions, What Are the Civilian Applications?, Credibility Problem, Very Little Gravitas Indeed.

Some Azadian bigwig to Gurgeh, incredulous: ”Your ships think they’re sentient!” Gurgeh, drily: ”A common delusion shared by some of our human citizens.”

After I finished Player of Games I stumbled on a review from some rando who pointed to it as an example of why regime change is necessary and important. I was flabbergasted. I think the book does come down on the side of pro-interventionism: the Culture accomplishes its goals but we are locked into Gurgeh’s POV and to him victory tastes like ashes. However, how bad do you have to be at reading comprehension to not see that in this scenario the USA is decidedly not the galaxy’s peacekeeper—that we are much more closely aligned to the evil empire that needs toppling?

Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land (2025) (The Witch Roads #2) Okay okay I did not expect this duology to take a hard romantasy turn. In Book 1 Elen’s eldritch love interest was amusing but not integral to the plot. In Book 2 it’s actually the other way around, in that the plot feels underbaked but the doomed romance carries the story. When I say the R-word I don’t mean to attach a value judgment but I do mean that your enjoyment of the work as a whole will hinge on how hard you’re rooting for the romantic pairing. Closer up, all the palace intrigues hinted at in Book 1 feel like Potemkin houses built for set dressing. Ditto the tantalizing history of the sorcerous wars of a bygone age. So, our merry band of questers ventures beyond the boundaries of the known world. Elen tries to save a kid. The thematic resonance of Elen trying her damndest to save yet another kid was like nailing my heart to the cross. This is the story’s real triumph, the character work. Elen’s traveling companions get fleshed out and I’m Team Xilsi all the way—“I like sausage not pie” ought to be the tagline when they make it into a TV miniseries. Even the nonspeaking part of the golem bodyguard who’s fueled by starlight (!) gets fleshed out. But the character development crown goes to the Prince, an arrogant dipshit but not a stupid or heartless one. Not to spoil anything but the Prince gets exactly what he deserves.

Florence Knapp, The Names (2025) I read this in one sitting and it pulverized me. It spins on the knife’s edge of one woman’s decision to name her newborn son Gordon Jr. (after her husband), Julian (her own choice), or Bear (her whimsical nine-year-old daughter’s choice). Here is the thing about abusive relationships: Even in the healthiest version of this family, where Cora’s husband is out of the picture asap, she can’t stomach dating another man. She can’t trust a man, any man. The dislocations of abuse and trauma ripple out to affect grandparents, neighbors, even Cora’s children’s future lovers. You gotta applaud the cajones it takes to keep three parallel timelines going; this is Euclidean geometry and they never intersect. There is one scene where Cora’s daughter says “Oh, Bear, you could never be like (our father)” when in the previous Gordon chapter he was behaving exactly like their father, and Knapp was canny enough not to belabor the point but my synapses lit up like an ambulance was coming through. A triumph of a book, devastating but not bleak.

Corinne Low, Having It All: What data tells us about women’s lives and getting the most out of yours (2025) Why do we optimize our careers but not our partners? Seems downright irresponsible, according to this here economist. I’m going to take my tongue out of my cheek and report that I sincerely got a lot out of this book, which is transparently a self-help book and not a roadmap for structural change. It’s right there in the subtitle, “getting the most our of yours.” It’s blurbed by Eve Rodsky, aka superstar author in the mental load/domestic labor space for working moms. This was a book club pick and I was in the minority with my positive impression (everyone else was like “she’s so out of touch!!!” well duh). As long as you don’t try to enlarge her findings beyond her target audience—partnered upper-middle-class women in demanding careers—I don’t see anything controversial here. You want to be homo economicus about it? Look at your consumption/earning potential over your entire lifespan—“today’s decisions are tomorrow’s constraints” she exhorts us—and remember that there is much more riding on women’s decisions, given our shorter fertility windows. I treated this book as one big fat bibliography of all the juiciest social science studies and my TBR is busting at the seams.

Erin Langston, The Finest Print (2024) A judge’s daughter who secretly writes sensational gothic mysteries and a printshop owner up to his neck in debt enter a partnership to publish penny dreadfuls. Love to see a non-leisure-class leading man in my historical romance! This was cozy but it pulled its punches; I’m particularly mad that Belle’s ex was way underutilized as a villain.

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023) This book filled me with a wistful longing for a place that never was. It’s a noirish alternate history that asks, “What if the Jesuit embrace of indigenous culture resulted in an independent ‘Indian Kingdom’ that survived into the modern age”? The murder happens on page one but the story is less hard-boiled than you’d expect; also less jazzy than you’d expect. Immersive as hell though. Joe Barrow is the passivest of protagonists, a detective and a jazz musician who is not fully committed to either role. He’s allergic to making choices. Meanwhile, somebody is making a concerted effort to destabilize Cahokia by showily murdering white folks in the manner of ancient Aztec blood sacrifice. Barrow is not white but he is not Cahokian either. He’s an outsider here, as the best mystery protagonists usually are. We’re in the 1920’s at the height of Ku Klux Klan activity. There is something so tragic to me that Cahokia, one of the few places left in this country where a brown man can hold his head up high, is barely hanging on. As the Man points out, whenever we play the oppressor’s game “We have to win every time. They only have to win once.” Fyi it definitely wasn’t the type of story that you put it down and you feel galvanized to combat the rising tide of fascism. Elegiac is the overall tone. Be forewarned that the pace is slow and you’re mostly just a tourist in alt-St. Louis catching up on the sights. The worldbuilding is so dense it was the next best thing to a theme park. The dialogue is period pitch-perfect but also slightly stiff owing to Spufford being a Brit. “Why is this Brit so obsessed with America?” I wonder, having read Spufford’s previous offering Golden Hill set in colonial New England. Then I look at our national mythology—ceaseless frontiers ripe for expansion!—and I think, hmmmm.

My favorite passage is an excerpt from Robert E. Lee’s testimony to Congress in the wake of helming the disastrous Cahokia Expedition. He says, essentially, they routed us but we would have managed an orderly retreat… “had it not been for the sudden appearance of the Hiberian regiment, who charged us with cries of Erin Go Bragh.” The Irish are here! Solidarity forever.

In the end I found this book more intellectual exercise than emotionally resonant—maybe if I had been more into the gay poetry salon?? idk—but I’m probably ready to tackle Spufford’s Red Plenty.