tabacoychanel

Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows (2015) and Crooked Kingdom (2016) (Six of Crows #1-2) HEIST HEIST BABY HEIST!!! my sister bullied me into reading this duology by her favorite author and with all due humility sis you were right and i was wrong, it was a blast. My sister kvetches about how the second book is not sufficiently heist-centric—it’s more like a series of interconnected heists—but listen homie the first book has a clearly delineated finish line: they’re doing a job for money. It’s an impossible job but the crew pulls it off only to get DOUBLE-CROSSED by THE MAN who instead of paying them decides it’s tidier to end them. They escape; he takes hostages. Now it’s personal, see? The second book is about these six kids saying fuck you to the ENTIRE ESTABLISHMENT and the governments of four countries. The second book also features a more prominent character arc for my fave Jesper. Hey did I mention in this fantastical Amsterdam-analogue people literally worship the god of GREED trololololol

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) "You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life." My man George Orwell is really out here in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and thirty-seven shutting down the BUT THEY HAVE IPHONES fallacy. Absolute legend, read this book and become a socialist.

Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days (2007) Due to personal reasons the princess shall be impersonated by her maid. Both of whom have been locked up in a tower for seven years. The maid falls hard for the princess’s betrothed when he shows up with the gift of a KITTEN to keep down the tower’s mouse population—those mice are really making a dent in the sacks of rice that are supposed to last them seven years. She names the cat My Lord asdfdfdf. This was my first outing with Shannon Hale, and I can see why people rave about her—this book singlehandedly restored my faith in humanity in the space of an afternoon. I mean, the whole princess-maid identity switcheroo trope was really formative for me growing up, when my favorite TV show was My Fair Princess. It’s rad to have a medieval heroine who’s not drawn from the ranks of the nobility, who’s not European (they’re on the Mongolian steppes here), whose magical abilities reflect both her practical temperament and her peasant origins (she sings healing songs at people). The way her magic is a logical expression of her personality reminds me of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, for which this book should certainly count as an antecedent.

Keith Gessen, A Terrible Country (2018) Andrei Kaplan left the USSR for the USA at the age of six. At 33 he returns to Moscow to care for his ailing grandmother. He’s in this liminal place where his career and his personal life are both at an impasse, and while he experiences growth on both fronts, the emotional core of the novel is his relationship with his grandma, who has dementia. You sympathize with Andrei’s exasperation at her limitations, but at the same time, all her friends are dead. How would you fare if you were pushing ninety and everyone you knew had predeceased you? I too left my grandma when I was very young to come to the U.S., and I feel seen. Andrei has a Ph.D. in Russian literature but no luck landing a tenure-track job; meanwhile his archnemesis, a fellow child of Russian-Jewish emigres named Sasha Fisher, has rocketed to academic stardom and consistently rubs his success in Andrei’s face. Now, Andrei may be lazy and morally feeble and devoid of self-awareness but he has one great redeeming virtue and that is sincerity. Unlike the unctuous opportunist Sasha Fisher, he genuinely loves Russia. He loves his grandma. He loves hockey. He even loves his brother, who had to flee the country in a hurry when his shady business dealings ran afoul of the Russian government, and that’s how Andrei wound up as their grandma’s caretaker. It’s “a terrible country,” she keeps reminding Andrei—whyever did he come back?