tabacoychanel

Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education (2020) (Scholomance #1) metericula was kind enough to lend me an ARC of this; I stayed up till 4am reading it and blasted her with a million messages as I went. Every time I pick up a Naomi Novik book I forget that the beginning never hooks me, that the ending is fantastic but the middle is the reason I lover her. It’s so good!!!! The accidental fake dating!! The female friendships!!! The trademark snark!! Naomi Novik really said “capitalism has no rights” and came out swinging. Galadriel, our protagonist, attends a magical boarding school that is literally trying to kill her. It’s nothing personal—the school is infested by malevolent inferni who are trying to gobble up all the students—but El is the most marginalized of them. She’s got no allies to watch her back; she doesn’t belong to a magical “enclave” whose protection is one’s best shot at survival; it’s frankly a miracle she’s still alive after three years. It’s not, like, a super deep book but I do think about this line a lot: “You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to live” and yeah actually you can??? This line smacks of “You can’t blame people for wanting their own property values not to plummet” or “You can’t blame people for wanting their own kids to attend good schools” which is factually correct but also??? If you ain’t doing anything to even out these appalling disparities then you are part of the problem. The thing I love about El is that she’s sitting at the bottom of the totem pole and yet she never shirks her share of the responsibility for the problem. All of Naomi Novik’s protagonists have this unshakeable moral core that’s usually concealed by a spiky wrapper of a personality (well, not Laurence maybe but her female protags are all spiky). And then she goes and builds the LABOR THEORY OF VALUE right into her magic system: “Mana’s annoying that way. The physical labor isn’t what counts. What turns it into mana is how much effort it costs me.” Omg my stomach hurts from laughing this book was so funny.

“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.”

 George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (2000) (A Song of Ice and Fire #2) (reread) Thank you for my life grrm. This has never been my favorite book, mostly because the Blackwater has never been my favorite climax. Dany also doesn’t have a whole lot to do. On the plus side there was plenty of Arya (ten chapters! more than anyone except Tyrion). While I haven’t done a cover-to-cover reread in ages, I have been dipping in and out of these books for 17 years. The insight that struck me on this go-around was how GRRM comes out of the horror genre. You can see it most clearly in the Sansa chapters, because horror is about anxiety and loss of control and Sansa is in a hostage situation. But I also reread the Battle of the Blackwater for the first time in—oh, probably 17 years. I mean the Davos chapter where the wildfire actually explodes. I’ve reread the Sansa chapter that precedes it and the Tyrion chapter that follows; I just always skip the Davos because battles are not my thing. There’s a multitude of niggling details that strike Davos—a lifelong sailor and native of King’s Landing—as troubling, and set off alarm bells in his head; but Davos can’t get his warnings heeded because Stannis has appointed some random Florent admiral of the fleet. I hate highborn people. The thing I wanted to talk about was the buildup to the wall of wildfire that ends the chapter: it’s quintessentially a horror story buildup-and-release-of-tension via violence. Anyway I can’t stand Jon’s arc in this book, and I’m never sure how much I’m supposed to be in Tyrion’s corner? Like, when he leads that sortie after the Hound goes awol is that supposed to be a heroic moment? What I do appreciate about this book is we have both a window on the smallfolk (Arya) and a tolerable bird’s-eye view of political strategy (Tyrion). This is not true of the next book, ASOS, because in that one our King’s Landing POVs, Tyrion and Sansa, and not in positions of relative power so we’re shut out of the sausage-making.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) (reread) This is a tale of extremely extra people who, not satisfied with making each other miserable their entire lives, insist on tormenting each other from beyond the grave. Every one of them has outbursts and breakdowns 24/7 because they’ve never learned to regulate their emotions. It’s not fun but the raw anti-establishment power of the text is something to behold. The main thing I noticed on this reread is that it’s structured entirely as an Outsider POV—we open with new-to-the-neighborhood Mr. Lockwood, and most of the story is told secondhand by the family’s longtime servant Nelly Dean. What this means is the first time we meet the hero (antihero?) Heathcliff, we take an instant dislike to him because he’s absolutely beastly to Lockwood (he’s rude to Nelly, too—but by then we realize he’s not intentionally hostile, he just doesn’t give a fuck about people who aren’t Catherine). Now, Lockwood is an entitled dudebro without an iota of self-awareness, so this is a classic POV trap, and you have to wonder what purpose it serves. Maybe if we’d had a more sympathetic introduction to Heathcliff, we would have been inflamed by the injustice he was subject to as a child? It’s an immense systemic injustice. I’m not saying the reader would have found Heathcliff likable or even admirable; merely that it would have been clear he was morally in the right, and Catherine was right to stick up for him, and Hindley was a bully who abused his authority. Instead our first glimpse of Heathcliff is as a bitter, broken adult, long since Catherine’s death has hollowed him out: he’s a haunted house pretending to be a man. This is the key passage: “I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven … I love Heathcliff because he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as moonbeam from lightning, or fire from frost.” Of course she does marry Edgar, for reasons having much to do with class and gender, and also pride, and getting back at Heathcliff for deserting her. These people have taken to heart that old aphorism, “love is torture,” and decided the best way to show their love is to engage in emotional blackmail. Near the end, when Heathcliff is enacting his elaborate revenge scheme upon the next generation—screwing these kids over the same way he was screwed over as a kid—we get a really telling admission. Cathy 2.0 says you can’t hurt me and Heathcliff is like bitch I don’t like you well enough to hurt you. The unstated premise is you only torment the people you love. The opposite of love is, as they say, not hate but indifference. Anyway I maintain if I’d been dropped straight into Heathcliff & Catherine’s lonely, abusive childhood there is absolutely no way you could have peeled me out of their corner sooooo smart move on Emily Brontë’s part interposing all these Outsider POVs I guess.

Alan Smale, Clash of Eagles (2015) (Clash of Eagles #1) Don’t read it for the characters; read it as a fictionalized historical survey of pre-Colombian civilizations. Does the world need another tale of a white savior who’s adopted by an indigenous tribe & goes up against the empire for which he soldiered? Probably not. The saving grace of this book is it really gives a rat’s ass about the Roman Empire; we have no idea how Rome survived in this alternate universe, and no clue about political developments in Europe. What we care about is one specific mound-building society on the Mississippi River—and the amount of detail we get about it is mind-numbing. Dances with Wolves, by contrast, was always more interested in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, and the disappearance of the western frontier, than in the Sioux as a people (I love Dances with Wolves btw I’ve watched it like five times but facts are facts). Gaius Publius Marcellinus is the commander of an expeditionary legion sent to the Americas to find its fabled cities of gold, rumors of which have percolated westward via Norse traders. We’re in the 11th century here. There’s no gold, obviously, but Marcellinus sees himself taken captive and his entire legion slaughtered. His captors, the Cahokia, are engaged in a centuries-long blood feud with the Iroquois League to the north, and Marcellinus comes to respect, befriend, and eventually transfer his loyalty to Cahokia. He knows that Rome will send other legions to North America, and he’s clear-eyed about his long-term objective which is to make Cahokia formidable enough that Rome will have to negotiate with her as a client state rather than bulldoze right over her barbarian wilderness. To this end he spends a lot of time teaching them to cast steel and make wheels and drill military formations. I did get a good chuckle out of Marcellinus teaching Latin to the local urchins: he’s like “these kids’ brains are like sponges but Latin conjugations are beyond even their capacity” and I’m like nonono bro you got it backwards. Children love inflecting nouns and conjugating the hell out of every verb they get ahold of. Changing the endings of words is fun, because it’s about patterns, and the human brain is literally hardwired to seek linguistic patterns. It’s vocabulary children have trouble with, because that part involves rote memorization. Adult learners are the opposite: great at vocab, terrible at grammar. You can see the evidence in the shape of languages that have historically had an influx of adult L2 learners—English has no gender or cases and Mandarin doesn’t even have tenses or plurals. Otoh if you look at the morphology of languages that are mainly acquired naturally as L1, by children, they are complicated af.

M.J. McGrath, White Heat (2011) (Edie Kiglatuk #1) “The condoms were wrapped in cute packets made to look like seal or musk ox or walrus, some well-meaning but patronizing southern initiative to encourage Inuit in the eastern Arctic to have safe sex, as though everyone didn’t already know that the only way to make sex safe in the region would be to decommission the air-force bases.” Sometimes I buy books at the dollar store ‘cause the covers are pretty and they’re $1. I doubt I’ll continue with this series but I was bowled over by how suited the mystery genre is to conveying a sense of place—in this case we’re in the inhospitable tundra above the 70th parallel in Canada’s northernmost territory, Nunavit. McGrath’s plot sagged badly in the middle but I powered through because I wanted to know how the clash between these forces would play out: tradition and modernity, insular communities and distant bureaucracies, unvarnished truth and going-along-to-get-along. “Have you forgotten who we are? Inuttigut. We are Inuit. We live in a place littered with bones, with spirits, with reminders of the past. Nothing dies here and nothing rots: not bones, not plastic, not memories … Unlike the rest of the world, we can’t escape our stories, Derek.”

Jo Spurrier, Winter Be My Shield (2012) (Children of the Black Sun #1) The thing about setting your story in the Land of Always Winter is individuals don’t survive in the cold—communities do. Even if those individuals include the most powerful mage the world has seen in generations. I was not crazy about the X-Men trope where people with a gift for magic are persecuted and/or enslaved for representing a clear and present Danger to Society. I also thought the worldbuilding was uneven, in that we know a shitton about the mechanics of magic and we know nothing about wider social or economic conditions—our heroes are drawn from a pretty elite stratum of society. I didn’t even like the heroes lol I was rooting for Sierra to team up with the villain. Rasten is not even a halfway redeemable villain but he was 10x more interesting than the usurped prince-in-exile (Cam) and his blood brother (Isidro) that Sierra has shacked up with (swearing a blood oath to be brothers is a thing that happens in Western media too? i thought it was a Chinese thing). Girl, you’ve known these fellows for a week, get a grip. So Sierra is a Sympath, which is a kind of superpower I’ve only seen depicted in fanfic, and Spurrier clearly gave a lot of thought to the knock-on consequences of drawing your power from the emotions emitted by other people. I also credit her compassionate portrait of Isidro, a warrior who is learning to live with a disability in a world that places a paramount value on able-bodiedness and independence. Finally, PTSD. Sierra and Raster are both the Chief Antagonist’s apprentices/victims, only Rasten’s been doing it for a lot longer (i was YIKES that Chief Antagonist a homosexual pedophile) so he’s committed a lot more evil in the name of survival. Sierra and Raster share a bond forged of trauma, and it’s complicated but no one else understands. I also liked Sierra & Mara, which is enemies-to-reluctant-allies; it starts with Mara sending assassins after Sierra and ends with Mara doing a complete 180 and reevaluating the marginalization of mages. I know I opened with a giant broadside of criticism against this book but this is a series I’m going to continue with bc I actually do want to know how they’re gonna bring down two empires and instate Mutant Rights.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1602) “Anything that’s mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.” Yo I always thought this was a play about cross-dressing but IN FACT it is a play about mimesis and concealing one’s authentic self and faking inauthentic feelings and the instability of identity—which derives directly from the instability of language and meaning. There is pining. Tons and tons of pining. This is Billy Shakes, so all the romantic knots are untangled by Act 5 but he is brutally unsentimental about it lol. If the man has written a queerer play I haven’t read it yet—I mean aside from Antonio being clearly gay for Sebastian, and Viola and Olivia making flowery speeches at each other, the whole country of Ilyria is full-on anarchy and the plot is driven by pirate attacks!

Emma Bull, War For the Oaks (1987) It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a book so thoroughly—not just appreciated the prose or plowed through it to find out what happened, but savored every scene. I’m torn between (1) mad I didn’t read it when I was fifteen and (2) glad I read it for the first time as a grown woman who knows what it feels like to be denied agency in my relationships. War for the Oaks is the story of Eddi McCandry, an ordinary mortal caught up in the machinations of the Seelie Court. Eddi is a musician who’s both going through a bad breakup and out of a job (her ex was the band’s lead singer) at the point she becomes involuntarily embroiled in a Faerie war. I don’t know a lot about music but Eddi does, and her extraordinary competence in a field of her choosing saves this book from the flaw of much urban fantasy, namely plucking out a perfectly normal girl and insisting on her specialness. “She has her own glamor, Willy lad. All poets do, all the bards and artists, all the musicians who truly take the music into their hearts. They all straddle the border of Faerie, and see into both worlds.” So this book is riotously funny. Eddi has a bodyguard foisted upon her, a dog/man shapechanger called a phouka —of course we don’t learn his real name bc this is Faerie and names have power—and their enforced intimacy leads to bickering and chemistry off the CHARTS. They’re both sardonic but in different ways, and Bull has a gift for dialogue that makes the phouka’s lines sound like something an actual eldritch immortal would say. Every time he called her “my primrose” or “my snowdrop” I squealed because he starts out doing it to needle her and eventually winds up meaning it (he really is endlessly inventive with the horticultural terms of endearment). Eddi is less annoyed that Faerie sicced him on her and more annoyed that he does shit just to be provoking. But that’s all trivial stuff. When it comes to the important matters, the phouka respects Eddi’s wishes and gives her the truth, or as much of it as he’s permitted to; he gives her as much control of her destiny as it’s within his power to do. This is a dramatic contrast to the other men in her life: Stuart is abusive and insecure and brooks no challenge to either his authority or his musical talent; Willy casts a glamor on her to compel her infatuation/cooperation. Other men lie to her; the phouka never does. The phouka, in fact, goes to great lengths to procure the ointment that lets Eddi see through glamors; he puts his own ass on the line by weaponizing the rules of hospitality against the Faerie Queen so that she must conduct the Faerie Communion ritual in English instead of a language Eddi doesn’t understand. At every step, he ensures Eddi isn’t tricked into doing anything under false premises—that what she does, she does of her own volition. Plus, he makes her pancakes! His casual domesticness is almost as sexy as as his wicked mischief mode. For her part, Eddi is an unusually quick study—the ways of Faerie may be alien to her, but she knows how to read the phouka, and she reads his reactions like a goddamn map: this girl is sharp. Did I mention the swishy clothes, and the kissing of knuckles, and the other chivalrous touches? There is really nothing to keep me from shelving this under “romance.” There is no particle of this book that I do not adore. The fact that Faerie is built on counterfeiting & illusions, weighing & bargaining, and love is built on—well, the opposite of that, just takes my breath away. And the sex!!! It was surprisingly explicit, for a not-romance-novel. It was also accompanied by bracingly candid conversations about the messiness of human relationships, and believe me (I inject this for the benefit of 15-year-old me) those conversations are much harder to conduct than mere sex. The climax was of course perfection: it pits Eddi’s music against Faerie’s magic, and the stakes could not be higher. I am straight up weeping over how perfect this book was.

Steven Brust, Athyra (1993) (Vlad Taltos #6) It was agonizingly slow. I wish this book would have made up its mind whether it wanted to be a “Vlad reluctantly acquires an apprentice” story or a “small towns breed dangerous mob mentality” story. As it was, not even the jhereg-POV interludes held my interest (seems Rocza is tied very strongly to Loiosh and very weakly to Vlad). It did end with a bang, and Vlad assuming a life-debt, which is thematically intriguing in light of how this series is built on a pile of assorted contradicting debts and obligations (the plot of Jhereg literally revolves around Morrolan being unable to renege on a promise, even one extracted from him in bad faith). And aside from Savn and Master Wag discussing how Easterner physiology is one big question mark, there wasn’t as much humor as I’m used to from Vlad books.

Steven Brust, Orca (1996) (Vlad Taltos #7) What the fuck just happened. I have groused in the past (not aloud, just in my head) about Kiera the Thief’s penchant for deux ex machina-ing Vlad out of sticky situations. Steven Brust obviously heard me and said “hold my beer.” It’s Brust so I knew he was going to try something clever with the frame story but this is beyond everything. This book is like…you’ve got hold of a corner of a large, heavy tapestry and you tug at it and the whole damn thing unravels. More than once I thought to myself, “this is a lot of trouble to go to just to keep one little old lady from being evicted from her cottage.” In the course of which we literally get a primer on why global finance is crazy interconnected and some banks are Too Big To Fail!! Ok so one stylistic quirk of Brust’s that bothers me is his elliptical way of evading specifics, for instance “the smell of sorcery went away” where any other author would have told us it was either apples or rotten eggs. What’s become clear to me is that Brust doesn’t omit details, he writes around them, and if you pay attention you can see the holes. That’s the premise of this book. It’s framed as a Vlad story within a Kiera story within a Kiera-and-Cawti story, and it turns out none of these people have the whole picture. High points: I love that burglary is a craft just like witchcraft, and Kiera takes professional pride in her abilities just as Vlad takes pride in his. I love that the minute Vlad crosses paths with a random Dragonlord his very first thought is “not fit to shine Morrolan’s shoes.” I love that he misses the days when Kragar would do all the legwork for his cases. I love that Kiera says with a straight face, “I’m not made for a life of deception.” I love that Vlad still talks in “we” about the Jhereg. I was a little concerned about Loiash for a second there but he pulled through. I love that this is a book about how easy it is to snow people by selectively hitting them with part of the truth. THAT BEING SAID, I cannot say I read the first 90% of with any relish. I basically battered my way through until I hit the fireworks: Sethra Lavode you twisty motherfucker. Vlad has a son?!! @Anna I think there was some commentary or insight you were saving for after I’d finished Orca, now’s the time I want all your Thoughtsssss

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (2016) (Terra Ignota #1) Feels like someone removed my head from my shoulders, stuffed it with 2000 years of European intellectual history, and screwed it back on. It’s still recognizably my head, I’m just not the same person I was when I started this book. I feel awed and humbled at the sense of possibility it conveys, and I felt that even before I had any inkling of what was going on (which was for the first 60% of the damn tome). A world in which theology is as taboo and as erotic as sex? Gender-neutral pronouns for all? It’s illegal to discuss religion with your sensayer. It’s also illegal to discuss religion with someone not your sensayer lol. From the beginning I loved that this book centers questions of design in our democracy. Social defaults and infrastructure are so powerful. Plus, people who fall down an etymology rabbithole every few pages are my kind of people! Ok so there’s a kid, a very special kid with a special gift, who may be the Risen Christ or may be the doom of the world we don’t know which, but his existence must be hidden at all costs—and the story isn’t from the kid’s POV it’s from his protector(s). That was the familiar narrative scaffolding I hung onto for dear life as I embarked on the bumpy exposition-laden ride of this novel.

Mycroft is our narrator, and Bridger’s protector. The first question of any emotional valence that occurred to me was, Do I want Mycroft to get away with it? Not that I had any notion what “it” was (I still don’t), but he clearly had A Plan, and did I want it to come to fruition? How does one man keeps that many secrets on behalf of that many powerful people? How does he wear so many hats, juggle so many balls and not drop any of them? What is this carceral apparatus and how did Mycroft get swept up in it? (Later I found out about the Utopian penal code aka “if you killed a Utopian you destroyed their world” and they’ll stop at nothing to solve it, and I had to put the book down.) Mycroft cowers and grovels to literally everyone, he launches frequently into historical asides or philosophical treatises, and every single person he converses with disgorges soliloquies like this is goddamn Shakespeare. It takes some getting used to but reader, it is worth it.

The mystery that kicks off the plot is: Somebody stole something valuable and planted the evidence somewhere for some reason. It took me the entire book to realize that of course it’s not the crime that matters—it’s the coverup. Cato Wakesbooth was always the weakest link, a sniveling paranoid character who was always slinking away from us. But the question I did not ask was, the weakest link of what? What is the importance of the Saneer-Wakesbooth ‘bash? And the answer is: Yes, this is indeed a story about the design of our democracy.

I did not grasp the significance of set-sets until much later; they were just an intriguing worldbuilding flourish, like Lifedolls for sex or smell-tracks for movies. Eureka says, “I can go watch a sunset anytime, I just don’t want to, it’s boring, so slow, so monosensory.” Felix says, “You can make a sculpture of a tree out of metal, or glass, or wood, but using wood doesn’t make your sculpture a tree, it makes it a tree-shaped artificial object made out of the hacked-up pieces of a dead tree. Brain tissue is a very convenient material to make a computer out of.” Of course set-sets are creepy. They’re meant to be alien, they’re meant to make you, the twenty-first century reader, uncomfortable. But if you look at how the narrative presents Felix—he sounds like he’s a witch-hunter about to drag an innocent woman to the stake—and the way it presents Eureka, a kid whose adorable rapport with Mycroft made me smile, you have your answer. Set-sets are people.

The first time we met J.E.D.D. Mason I got shivers. I’m not exaggerating, there were actual goosebumps on my arm. In the words of the greatest philosopher of our fallen age, Varys the Spider, There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.

My god, I remember picking up this book and finding it unbelievably dry. I faulted Palmer for flimsy characterization and absence of tension. Now all I can feel is the depth and breadth of her compassion. It’s like the sky has opened above me and I’ve glimpsed some fleeting truth. Fiction reveals truths to me every day, but usually they’re a particular kind of truth, and what Ada Palmer has given me is an outlook of openness to truth.

“You should at least have granted him Olympus, since he could not join his kin among the stars.” “And so the triremes which defended Greece at Salamis defended Mars, too, and every Hive, and you.” “I believe it is possible to be simultaneously biased and right.” “I think the hardest kind of mourning is when you have to lie.”“It isn’t only the Utopians who become a little more immortal with every blade they take away.” “No one comes to stone the servant when they could watch the execution of the king.” “He who would make Reason a scythe to fell injustices must beware what else the blade might cut.” “A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shape of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.” “No one is raised on Latin. Latin is a choice.” “Animals may hunt by speed, by trap, by disguise, by ambush, but name for me another besides mankind that hunts by trust.” “Do you think you know me better than the child I raised?” “Mycroft says it’s important for me to be a kid, because only a kid can grow up to be a human being. I of all people need to not be a monster.”

The question at the center of this dense, difficult novel is Mycroft’s question to Caesar: “Would you destroy that better world to save this one?” I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows what they’d do. I think about Carlyle’s sensayer session with Bridger, way back in the beginning, about resurrection and the afterlife and the limits of Bridger’s power. I think Carlyle will have some tough choices to make very soon.

Mycroft’s reunion with Saladin features a surprisingly heated sex scene in what had hitherto been a highly cerebral story. It’s only after this scene that we arrive at Madame d’Arouet’s brothel. Eureka calls the brothel a black hole whose gravitational disturbances cause ripples in the transportation grid, and you know what it does the exact same thing to geopolitics! Maybe Saladin and Mycroft and their revenge scheme are fucked up, maybe codependency is unhealthy—this world has stringent mental health standards—but is it as unhealthy as all the world leaders literally being in bed with each other? We are standing on the edge of cataclysm, or revolution. Perhaps they are the same thing. If we ever make it to Mars it won’t be Elon Musk who gets us there, it will be the Utopians.

I have never cried over the author’s acknowledgements but I cried when Ada Palmer said she wanted to “think new things, and make new things from those thoughts, my little contribution to the path which flows from Gilgamesh and Homer to the stars. And that isn’t just for me. Its for you.” I’m crying as I type this now. Thank you for this gift, Ada Palmer.